As tensions rose between Israel and the Obama administration over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s early March visit to Washington to address Congress and AIPAC, and President Barack Obama’s refusal to meet with him, the White House tossed out a justification Thursday for its apparent snub. The president, the White House said, was not boycotting the prime minister because he had set up the Congressional address behind the White House’s back, but because “as a matter of long-standing practice and principle, we do not see heads of state or candidates in close proximity to their elections, so as to avoid the appearance of influencing a democratic election in a foreign country. A check of over 50 meetings with world leaders at the White House during the Obama administration reveals that none of those meetings was conducted two weeks before any of the visitors’ elections. The closest such session was a 2009 meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel, who sat with Obama in Washington just over two months before German federal elections, which she won. French president Nicolas Sarkozy spoke with Obama in 2012 less than a month before his defeat by the Socialist Francois Hollande, but that was a video teleconference, not a face-to-face at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Further back, however, there is a precedent for election-proximate White House meetings, it involves Israel, and Netanyahu was the intended victim. In 1996, prime minister Shimon Peres, fighting a close campaign against challenger Netanyahu, visited the Clinton White House on April 30, just less than a month ahead of the May 29 elections. Peres’s substantial lead, in the aftermath of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, was crumbling due to a series of suicide bombings in early spring. In town for the AIPAC annual conference, as Netanyahu will be, Peres met with Clinton in ostensible preparation for additional work on peace agreements with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In the wake of the March 1996 bombing spree that killed 62 Israelis, Peres and Clinton signed an anti-terrorism agreement at a ceremony – one of three separate meetings that Peres held with Clinton that week amid myriad photo-ops. Despite Clinton’s attempts to shore-up Peres’s claim that he could offer Israelis security as well as peace, Netanyahu – who ran promising exactly that – narrowly defeated Peres. Still, Clinton’s first move after the elections was to reach out to Netanyahu and invite him to the White House. A previous US president had also helped Labor, in the previous election year, 1992. Likud prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was forced to defend himself domestically against allegations that he had damaged US-Israel ties through intransigence, particularly over his administration’s settlement policy. The George HW Bush administration – and particularly secretary of state James Baker – delayed providing Israel with vital loan guarantees, with Baker placing conditions on the financial support that Shamir could not accept without alienating his right-wing base. When Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin defeated Shamir, the loan guarantees showed up within two months. “Baker’s intention was clear: He would not give Shamir the loan guarantees if it would help him politically in what was to become an election battle that year with Rabin,” wrote Aaron David Miller, a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in a December 2014 column in The Daily Beast. Shamir, like Netanyahu, had a history of tense stand-offs with the White House. In October 1989, Shamir announced a “private” visit to Washington, but was hoping for an audience at the White House to discuss his ideas for a peace plan with the Palestinians. The Bush administration had presented its own proposal in March, and Shamir was still reticent. By late October, the White House refused to say whether or not Shamir would score a top-level meeting. When asked about the possibility, Baker laconically replied that “I’m not familiar with what the President’s schedule is three to four weeks in advance.” Shamir’s trip would have marked the first time that an Israeli prime minister came to Washington without receiving a White House invite, but the crisis was avoided two weeks before the visit when Shamir’s cabinet voted to accept the Baker plan. Three days after the cabinet vote – and two days after Bush said that he wasn’t even sure Shamir was coming to Washington – the White House finally extended an invitation and the two met. Source: Times of Israel
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 23:40:36 +0000
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