World Watches for U.S. Shift on Mideast/Obama Tells Netanyahu He Has an Iran Timetable

World Watches for U.S. Shift on Mideast
By HELENE COOPER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/politics/17prexy.html?_r=1&th&emc=th


WASHINGTON — Five weeks ago, President Obama stood before the Turkish legislature in Ankara and said many Americans had Muslims in their families or had lived in a Muslim-majority country. “I know,” he said, “because I am one of them.”

But will that exposure lead Mr. Obama to take a different tack from his predecessors in his dealings with Israel?

That question, which has captivated a wide spectrum of people, from America’s Israel lobby to Palestinian-Americans to the Muslim world, will take center stage on Monday, when Israel’s hawkish prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has his first face-to-face meeting with Mr. Obama since he became president.

In an interview broadcast Saturday on Israeli television, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said he believed that in the meeting, Mr. Netanyahu would signal a significant policy shift for his new government and endorse the creation of a Palestinian state — perhaps reflecting uncertainty about whether Mr. Obama would accept an Israeli hard line.

“This is a piece of the cloud that’s hovering over this meeting: is this man different?” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator at the State Department and the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” “The fact that he’s African-American. The fact that his middle name is Hussein. The fact that the world for him is not black or white, that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is not black and white, there is gray, and in that gray lies the ability of this president to understand the needs and requirements of Palestinians. Is that on Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind? There’s no question that that’s there.”

Mr. Obama’s past suggests why, four months into his presidency, the answer to the question remains elusive. His first book, “Dreams From My Father,” delves deeply into matters of race and nationality and the need to belong somewhere, issues that permeate the Arab-Israeli conflict. But in the book Mr. Obama does not address specifically how he views Israel and the plight of the Palestinians.

As a state senator in Chicago, Mr. Obama cultivated friendships with Arab-Americans, including Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American scholar and a critic of Israel. Mr. Obama and Mr. Khalidi had many dinners together, friends said, in which they discussed Palestinian issues.

During the 1990s, Mr. Obama also attended tributes to Arab-Americans, where he often seemed “empathetic” to the cause of Palestinians, said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American journalist in Chicago.

This contrasts with the more “tabula rasa” image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that many of Mr. Obama’s predecessors brought to their presidencies — a blank slate that was then shaped by the strong alliance with Israel that is a fixture of politics in the United States, many Middle East experts say.

“I think this president gets it, in terms of the suffering of the Palestinians,” said Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “He gets it, which is already light years ahead of the average elected American politician.”

Mr. Obama’s predecessors, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, came of age politically with the American-Israeli viewpoint of the Middle East conflict as their primary tutor, said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator. While each often expressed concern and empathy for the Palestinians — with Mr. Clinton, in particular, pushing hard for Middle East peace during the last months of his presidency — their early perspectives were shaped more by Israelis and American Jews than by Muslims, Mr. Levy said.

“I think that Barack Obama, on this issue as well as many other issues, brings a fresh approach and a fresh background,” Mr. Levy said. “He’s certainly familiar with Israel’s concerns and with the closeness of the Israel-America relationship and with that narrative. But what I think might be different is a familiarity that I think President Obama almost certainly has with where the Palestinian grievance narrative is coming from.”

None of this necessarily means that Mr. Obama will chart a course that is different from his predecessors’. During the campaign he struck a position on Israel that was indistinguishable from those of his rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain, going so far as to say in 2008 that he supported Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. (He later attributed that statement to “poor phrasing in the speech,” telling Fareed Zakaria of CNN that he meant to say he did not want barbed wire running through Jerusalem.)

Still, many Palestinian-Americans who hoped that Mr. Obama would come into office and quickly seek to press the Israeli government on Palestinian issues have been disappointed.

“In practice, despite the hype, there is much more continuity with previous administrations,” Mr. Abunimah said. “People get carried away with the atmospheric change, but the substance of the U.S. policy towards Israel has been the same policy.”

Last year, for instance, Mr. Obama was quick to distance himself from Robert Malley, an informal adviser to his campaign, when reports arose that Mr. Malley, a special adviser to Mr. Clinton, had had direct contacts with Hamas, the militant Islamist organization that won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and that controls Gaza. Similarly, he distanced himself from Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser who was often critical of Israel, after complaints from some pro-Israel groups.

And Mr. Obama offered no public support for the appointment of Mr. Freeman to a top intelligence post in March after several congressional representatives and lobbyists complained that Mr. Freeman had an irrational hatred of Israel. Mr. Freeman angrily withdrew from consideration for the post.

But Mr. Freeman, in a telephone interview last week, said he still believed that Mr. Obama would go where his predecessors did not on Israel. Mr. Obama’s appointment of Gen. James L. Jones as his national security adviser — a man who has worked with Palestinians and Israelis to try to open up movement for Palestinians on the ground and who has sometimes irritated Israeli military officials — could foreshadow friction between the Obama administration and the Israeli government, several Middle East experts said.

The same is true for the appointment of George J. Mitchell as Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the region; Mr. Mitchell, who helped negotiate peace in Northern Ireland, has already hinted privately that the administration may have to look for ways to include Hamas, in some fashion, in a unity Palestinian government.

Mr. Obama’s meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, while crucial, may only preview the beginning of the path the president will take, Mr. Freeman said.

“You can’t really tell anything by what happened to me and the fact that he didn’t step forward to take on the skunks,” he said, referring to his own appointment controversy and Mr. Obama’s silence amid critics’ attacks. “The first nine months, Nixon was absolutely horrible on China. In retrospect, it was clear that he had every intention to charge ahead, but he was picking his moment. He didn’t want to have the fight before he had to have the fight.”

“I sense that Obama is picking his moment,” Mr. Freeman said.

Ben Werschkul contributed reporting.




Obama Tells Netanyahu He Has an Iran Timetable
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/world/middleeast/19prexy.html?th&emc=th


WASHINGTON — President Obama said Monday that he expected to know by the end of the year whether Iran was making “a good-faith effort to resolve differences” in talks aimed at ending its nuclear program, signaling to Israel as well as Iran that his willingness to engage in diplomacy over the issue has its limits.

Saeb Erakat, chief Palestinian negotiator, welcomed Mr. Obama’s remarks on Monday.

“We’re not going to have talks forever,” Mr. Obama told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after a two-hour session in the Oval Office.

The president added that he did not intend to foreclose “a range of steps” if Iran did not cooperate.

Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, told Mr. Obama that he was ready to resume peace talks with the Palestinians immediately, but they would only succeed if the Palestinians recognized Israel as a Jewish state.

After their private meeting, the two leaders spoke to a small group of reporters and answered questions.

The meeting between the leaders, both new to their jobs but with very different political styles and outlooks, comes at a delicate time in the relationship between their countries, especially over the issue of Iran.

Mr. Obama wants time for his diplomatic overtures to work. Israel is rattled by those overtures and concerned that the president will not be as unwavering a supporter of Israel as was his predecessor, George W. Bush.

On Monday, Mr. Obama seemed to be trying to address that concern.

Speaking of the development and deployment of a nuclear weapon, he said, “We’re not going to create a situation in which talks become an excuse for inaction while Iran proceeds.”

Mr. Obama added that he intended to “gauge and do a reassessment by the end of the year” on whether the diplomatic approach was producing results.

The exchange was the first time Mr. Obama had seemed willing to set even a general timetable for progress in talks with Iran, a country that has not had diplomatic relations with the United States in three decades.

He said he expected international talks with Iran, involving six nations including the United States, to begin shortly after the Iranian elections in June, with the possibility of “direct talks” between the United States and Iran after that.

The meeting between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Obama was their first face-to-face session since each assumed office, and it went on far longer than the hour initially planned — so long, in fact, that the president rearranged his schedule for the rest of the day, postponing a meeting with a candidate to run NASA.

Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Obama came to the meeting with competing goals: Mr. Obama wanted Mr. Netanyahu to embrace a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and Mr. Netanyahu wanted Mr. Obama to take a strong stand on the threat to Israel’s security posed by Iran. Some independent experts said afterward that Mr. Netanyahu appeared to have succeeded.

“The logic of Netanyahu’s argument is, ‘What do you do if your power of diplomacy and toughened sanctions doesn’t work?’ ” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator in both Democratic and Republican administrations. “Anyone who was expecting a major rift in the U.S.-Israeli relationship is going to be disappointed.”

Still, some differences were apparent. The more hawkish Mr. Netanyahu thanked Mr. Obama for keeping “all options on the table” with respect to Iran. This is language that Mr. Obama rarely uses, but that was invoked frequently by Mr. Bush, typically to imply that the United States might use military force against Iran if its nuclear program progressed too far.

And Mr. Netanyahu did not explicitly embrace a two-state solution, as Mr. Obama had hoped. Rather, he said, “I want to make it clear that we don’t want to govern the Palestinians; we want to live in peace with them.”

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, pressed Mr. Netanyahu to freeze the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

“Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that. But it’s an important one, and it has to be addressed.”

The chief negotiator for the Palestinians, Saeb Erakat, said afterward that the Palestinians welcomed Mr. Obama’s remarks as a sign of “the active re-engagement of the United States” in the Middle East peace effort.

Mr. Erakat criticized Mr. Netanyahu for failing to endorse the two-state solution, saying he had “missed another opportunity to show himself to be a genuine partner for peace.”

In addition to meeting with Mr. Obama, Mr. Netanyahu was to have dinner with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday evening, an official at the Israeli Embassy said. He is also scheduled to meet with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates as well as Congressional leaders on Tuesday.

In a sense, Monday’s meeting in the Oval Office was as much about the two leaders’ efforts to develop a relationship as it was about the substance of the issues between the nations.

Mr. Miller, the former Middle East negotiator, characterized the session as “President ‘Yes We Can’ sitting down with Prime Minister ‘No You Won’t.’ ”

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it was impossible to discern what bonds, if any, the two men had forged.

“These are two political pros who are trying to assess whether they can work with the other, will have to work around the other, or will have to run over the other to get what they need,” Mr. Alterman said, “and each one is too good a politician to signal what his conclusion was.”

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.