Barack Obama Talking on the Phone with Israeli PM

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Barack Obama Talking on the Phone with Israeli PM

Israeli media noted that the Obama administration has begun an effort to smooth the path of the president for a second time in office, by removing any obstacles the Jewish lobby could place in the way as a result of tensions accumulated during the first term, when Obama had to deal with a cabinet that wasn’t always compliant to the U.S. demands.

Thus, Israeli daily Haaretz documents the fact that the new United States ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, who presented his credentials to the president of the country, Shimon Peres, on Wednesday, has made a series of allegations that show his preoccupation to patch up things between the Obama administration and the Israeli cabinet rather than to find a way to bring the Israelis and the Palestinians back to the negotiation table in order to avoid the self-proclamation of a Palestinian state in September at the United Nations general assembly.

Obama and Netanyahu

Since he arrived to Israel, Shapiro expressed the support of the administration for Benjamin Netanyahu on several occasions: in an interview for Channel 2 he downplayed the idea that there was a lack of trust between the two leaders, and that Obama was upset over the way Netanyahu reacted to his speech delivered in May, in which he spoke about a territorial swap between Palestinians and Israelis, an idea heavily criticized at that moment by Israeli leaders but finally embraced on Thursday, when Netanyahu said that his government was ready to talk about swapping territories from the Israeli side of the 1967 line in exchange for those in the West Bank where the settlements are being built.

Obama had proposed that the Palestinians receive the exact amount of territory as comprised within the borders of 1967, and in order to do that he had advanced the idea of swaps, which would diffuse the tensioned situation created by the continuing of settlement construction in the West Bank, which was the reason for the blocking of negotiations in the first place.

Dan Shapiro maintained that the occasional slams between Obama and Netanyahu are no more than disagreements between friends.

Judging the behavior of the new ambassador, Haaretz‘s columnist Akiva Eldar concludes that the main business Shapiro will have in Israel is not related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but to the Israeli-American relations. In Eldar’s words, Shapiro is here “to dismantle any Israeli land mine” on Obama’s path to a second term.

Ambassador Dan Shapiro

The famous Israeli daily’s assessment of Shapiro’s credentials shows that he was not appointed to this very difficult embassy mission for his knowledge or competence showed at the National Security Council, where he was a director of Middle East and North Africa, because the process at the NSC had been coordinated by Dennis Ross, who is an excellent expert in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

He also accompanied Goerge Mitchell during his mission in Jerusalem and Ramallah last year, and he knows why Mitchell returned the letter of appointment to the American president.

So, Eldar gathers that Shapiro’s merits are his loyalty to the president and the fact that he comes from a traditional Jewish family and speaks Hebrew well. He was very active during the presidential campaign in countering the claim of Jewish and Christian right that Obama was of Arab descent.

Since the process of peace between Israel and Palestinians does not seem to progress well and a third Intifada is easy to predict if the solution to go to the United Nations to make a bid for statehood is still viable for the Palestinians, it is expected that Shapiro may have slight problems in convincing the Israeli public that all is well in the relationship between the U.S. and its ally in the Middle East.

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