Oval Office summit reaching across the age gap
ISRAEL
AS I WRITE THIS column, Naftali Bennett is preparing for his summit with Joe Biden on Thursday evening in Washington. By the time you read these words, the two leaders will have held their first meeting and we may have learned at least something of what was said between them behind the closed doors of the Oval Office. I’m going to hazard a guess, though, and say that as encounters between the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the United States go, this will be one of the rather less consequential ones.
Mr Biden is in the worst week of his first eight months in the White House, with the chaotic scenes at Kabul airport damaging his standing on the international stage while the rise in cases of Covid-19 saps confidence in his leadership at home.
Mr Bennett is facing a similar crisis over the newly resurgent coronavirus pandemic in Israel, but while the American president should — at least in theory — have a four-year term in office, his Israeli counterpart is barely the first among equals in an unwieldy coalition. In less than two years, he is scheduled to hand power over to Yair Lapid.
In political terms, he is the weakest Israeli prime minister ever to enter the Oval Office. Mr Biden wants to help him, lest his government fall and his predecessor returns.
Both men need a friendly photoopportunity which will project an image of a secure and stable strategic partnership, when so many other American alliances are being shaken. Yet on the policy front, there is little chance of them bridging their differences on the two main areas of disagreement. Mr Bennett made it clear in his first interview in office, given this week to the New York Times, that his government, with all of its political contradictions, cannot make any moves on the Palestinian issue. There won’t be a Palestinian state and neither will Israel annex parts of the West Bank. It won’t remove settlements, but the building in them will be limited to “natural growth.”
The president knows there’s little point in even trying to get Mr Bennett to budge on this. He won’t have a coalition if he would. Likewise, it’s clear that the prime minister won’t get Mr Biden to give up his aspiration to rejoin the nuclear agreement with Iran that Donald Trump withdrew from three years ago. If anything, it will be the new hardline Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi who will kibosh the talks on renewing the nuclear deal.
With little point in highlighting their disagreements, the two leaders are likely to sing paeans to the unshakeable alliance between their countries in public and in private congratulate each other on the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu will be jealously watching the proceedings from afar, in his hotel room in an exclusive resort on a private island in Hawaii. This is the closest he can get to the White House. For now.
BIDEN’S SHORT TO-DO LIST
● The last time a new Israeli prime minister and a new American president met was more than 12 years ago, when Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington to meet Barack Obama (the two had met once before when Mr Netanyahu was leader of the opposition and Mr Obama a presidential candidate). Just like this week’s meeting, the Israeli PM wanted to discuss Iran’s nuclear ambitions and avoid any pressure on the Palestinian front. But though Mr Obama smiled at his counterpart in their photo-op, he was hostile and harsh in private. He would deal with Iran, he promised curtly; meanwhile, he demanded Israel freeze all settlement building. No previous Israeli prime minister had ever agreed to such a step, but Mr Netanyahu was forced to do so for 10 months. Under the Trump administration, America ceased to see the settlements as illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace. That stance is no longer US policy now that Mr Biden is in power, but it’s highly unlikely he will spring a similar surprise on Mr Bennett to the one his old boss landed on Bibi. Obama came into office with blithe predictions that the conflict could be resolved and a Palestinian state founded within a year, but Mr Biden is only too aware of how attempts to resolve the conflict once and for all have swallowed up the time, resources and precious political capital of previous presidents. And he hasn’t got any time to waste. At the top of his agenda are the three Cs: Covid, Climate and China, not to mention the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan. I-P is not on his to-do list.
There’s lttle for the two men to agree on behind closed doors
WHEN JFK MET B-G
● Here’s a fun fact about another
historic meeting in Washington: Joe Biden is 29 years older than Naftali Bennett. The last (and only) time an Israeli prime minister sat down with an American president with a wider age gap was when David Ben-Gurion and John Fitzgerald Kennedy met, just over 60 years ago in Washington. B-G was thirty years older than JFK. It was one of the most important meetings between an Israeli and an American leader.
Israel’s founding father, by then in the twilight of his career, laid the foundations to two key elements of Israel’s security in the Oval Office on May 30, 1961. The US silently acquiesced to Israel’s nuclear programme, in the shape of the Dimona reactor, and agreed for the first time to sell a modern weapons system to Israel: the Hawk anti-aircraft missiles.
President Kennedy had already met Prime Minister Ben-Gurion once in the past, when he had visited Israel in the 1950s as a young congressman, and had deep respect for him. He was eager to impress and became committed to Israel’s security early on. Perhaps in part he was anxious to banish any memory of the welldocumented antisemitism of his father Joe Kennedy, America’s ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930s. Sixty years later, a US president who remembers where he was when Kennedy was assassinated and an Israeli prime minister who wasn’t even born at the time are in the same
Oval Office to discuss very similar issues: Iran’s nuclear programme and the weapons Israel is seeking to counter it.
The age-gap is reversed this time, but Mr Biden is no less committed to Israel’s security than JFK. In the half-a-century since his election to the Senate, the president has prided himself on having met every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir. Mr Bennett is his tenth, but the first he’s meeting as President. Mr Netanyahu’s entreaties for a meeting earlier this year were rebuffed. One hopes that the elder statesman will have some sage advice for the relative novice. Probably something along the lines that little ever changes in politics.
Ultimately, the main point of satisfaction for the Biden administration in this meeting is that the visiting Israeli prime minister is not the one who was the closest foreign leader by far to Donald Trump. They can swallow the fact that Mr Bennett is arguably even more right-wing on settlements than his predecessor. As long as he isn’t Bibi.
This is the tenth Israeli PM Biden’s met, the first as president