The importance of this type of preparation should not be underestimated. Hulata and Meir are expected to meet US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and the US NSC’s top Mideast hand, Brett McGurk.
No date has yet been given for a meeting between Bennett and US President Joe Biden, but it is expected either in late August or during the last two weeks of September, when the premier would be able to couple a meeting with Biden with an address to the United Nations General Assembly and meetings with other world leaders there.
Like football players carefully going over the tapes of the games their upcoming opponent played in recent weeks, Hulata and Meir would do well to carefully review tapes of previous first meetings between US presidents and Israeli prime ministers. And the most important tape to watch would be that of the May 18, 2017, meeting between then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and president Barack Obama in the White House.
Though on paper the two men were starkly different – Obama with a pronounced left-wing worldview and Netanyahu with one very much to the Right – most believed that at least the first meeting would go smoothly, as both leaders would want to start their relationship on the right foot.
Most people were wrong.
The meeting was a disaster from Netanyahu’s point of view, as Obama called for a complete settlement freeze during public comments in the Oval Office, and privately went even further and demanded an end of construction in east Jerusalem as well.
And why should Hulata and Meir pay attention to this meeting? Because, as an Israeli official intimately involved in that meeting told The Jerusalem Post at the time, Netanyahu “felt ambushed” by those demands, and his team had received no prior warning that this would be the tenor of the conversation.
Furthermore, Israel was caught off guard and unprepared for what eventually turned out to be a strategic decision made by Obama to publicly place daylight between the US and the Jewish state. Dennis Ross, who a month after this meeting became one of Obama’s top Mideast advisers, wrote later that Obama was hoping that by distancing himself from Israel he could improve ties with the Muslim world.
In other words, Netanyahu went into that meeting without the proper intelligence about what was about to come down. That first meeting set a negative tone for what would become a very rocky relationship.
Obama’s springing a settlement freeze on Netanyahu broke an important rule that has long been a tenet of Israel-US relations: No surprises.
Ironically, Netanyahu took Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to task last month for stressing, during a telephone conversation with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, that the US and Israel would employ a “no surprises” policy with each other. Netanyahu disingenuously said that this implies that Lapid had somehow forfeited Israel’s freedom of action against Iran, though this was by no means Lapid’s intention.
It is to avoid surprises that meetings like those Hulata and Meir will have with their American counterparts before Bennett’s visit are so important.
Even before their arrival, however, Jerusalem and Washington have been preparing for the trip by removing potential pitfalls that could cloud it. And Biden knows about clouded visits, such as the 2010 announcement by the Jerusalem Planning Committee of plans to build 1,600 housing units in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo beyond the Green Line just as he was visiting the country, a move that nearly ruined his visit here as vice president.
How are both sides now removing potential pitfalls?
On Tuesday the Post’s Lahav Harkov reported that a source close to Bennett said that even if the High Court of Justice rules that four Palestinian families can be evicted from homes in Sheikh Jarrah, the government does not plan to do so. A High Court hearing on the matter is scheduled for Monday. The eviction of these families close to or during a Bennett trip to Washington would completely overshadow the visit.
And on the other side of the fence, the US has reportedly decided to push off plans to open a consulate in Jerusalem to serve the Palestinians until after the November budget vote in the Knesset, a budget the government must pass to survive. A decision today by the US to ask Jerusalem for permission to reopen the consulate closed by president Donald Trump would complicate matters politically for Bennett, as some parties in his coalition are in favor of such a move, and others are opposed. Pushing that decision off until after the critical budget vote in November is proof that the US is mindful of Bennett’s precarious political situation, and does not want to complicate matters for him.
Not all disagreements between the two countries, however, will be as easy to paper over, and the biggest elephant in the room is clearly Iran.
THE US has made it unmistakably clear that it is keen on reentering the nuclear deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The US lead negotiator on the matter, Rob Malley, said in a television interview this week that the US would be willing to lift all sanctions on Iran if the Islamic Republic returned to the 2015 deal, which Trump walked away from.
Despite the offer, Iran has indicated no willingness to return to the deal, is looking for better conditions, and has said it will not resume indirect talks until the new hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, is inaugurated on August 5. Israel is concerned that during the lull in the negotiations, Iran is inching precariously close to a nuclear bomb.
It is clear that Bennett will want his meeting with Biden to go well to get relations off on the right foot and show him and the Democrats that he is not Netanyahu. But it is equally clear that he will use the visit to inform the president and the American public that entering the deal and allowing the Iranians to remain as close as they are now to a nuclear weapon is completely unacceptable to Israel.
One factor that may help him explain Israel’s position to the American public is the election of Raisi, a man who strikes a much different posture than the previous president Hassan Rouhani, whose smiling visage presented a deceptively soft image of the Iranian regime to the American public.
Raisi is cut of much different cloth, and his involvement in the late 1980s in the execution of thousands of political prisoners at the end of the Iran-Iraq war will undoubtedly feature prominently in Bennett’s arguing against reentering the JCPOA.
What he said at a cabinet meeting last month after Raisi’s victory gives an indication of the line he will present against the Iranian leader in the US.
“Of all the people that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei could have chosen, he chose the ‘Hangman of Tehran,’” Bennett said, referring to Raisi, “the man infamous among Iranians and across the world for leading the Death Committees, which executed thousands of innocent Iranian citizens throughout the years.
“Raisi’s election is the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement, and to understand who they are doing business with. These guys are murderers, mass murderers. A regime of brutal hangmen must never be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction that will enable it to not kill thousands, but millions. Israel’s position will not change on this.”
Bennett’s challenge will be to present this argument to Biden, his administration and the American people without appearing to be as confrontational and combative as Netanyahu did when he challenged Obama’s policy. The message – that Israel will do what it must to prevent an Iranian bomb – will be the same, but the way it will be delivered will be markedly different.
THE PALESTINIAN issue looms as another area of disagreement, though, unlike during that first Obama-Netanyahu meeting, the US and Israel are not at opposite ends of the spectrum regarding what needs to be done.
Obama came into power trying to swing for the fences and hit the equivalent of a diplomatic home run with a comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli deal, and Netanyahu was not even in the ballpark.
This time, both sides share an appreciation that nothing dramatic is about to happen. For starters, the makeup of the current Israeli government – made up of a Right and Left bloc where each has veto power over the other – ensures there will be no dramatic push for Israeli concessions by the Left, nor a move toward annexation by the Right. Rather, the composition of this government pushes toward a middle ground: stabilizing the situation and improving the economic situation for the Palestinians.
And that does not collide with where the Biden administration stands on the issue. Blinken has said repeatedly that though the US is in favor of a two-state solution, it is not lurking just around the corner. And when the low-profile US Mideast negotiator Hady Amr wrapped up a visit to the region last month, the US Embassy issued a statement saying, “The current focus of the United States is on improving the situation on the ground and relations between Israelis and Palestinians, which together are important in their own right, and are also important as a means ultimately to advance towards a comprehensive peace.”
In other words, no John Kerry-like pie-in-the-sky expectations of a comprehensive solution within months, nor a Trump “deal of the century.” Rather, stabilizing the situation in the hopes that, down the line, conditions will be more conducive to renewing negotiations.
With that type of meeting of the minds, a meeting of the minds Meir and Haluta can be expected to try to solidify during their meetings next week in Washington, a first Bennett-Biden meeting should go much smoother than the first Netanyahu-Obama one.