Biden Visit Eclipsed by Artificial Crisis over Jerusalem Building Permits
By Alan Schneider
Director of the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem

On Thursday afternoon, following United States Vice President Joe Biden’s address at Tel Aviv University, I sat down to write an analysis of his visit to Israel—the highest-level trip here since President Barack Obama took office.

The address capped Biden’s visit and was billed by many commentators as the administration’s answer to criticism that it had not reached out in a conciliatory tone to skeptical Israelis as it had to the Muslim world.

I was going to write how the Biden visit had started out with so much good chemistry with his old friend of 33 years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I was going to write how the trip had gotten tripped-up on Wednesday with the ill-timed approval of building plans in contested Eastern Jerusalem while the vice president was visiting the Palestinian Authority. I was going to write how Biden had adroitly minimized the issue in his university address. I was going to comment that Biden’s address was unabashedly Zionist from start nearly to finish, summed up in the far-reaching statement that “the United States has no better friend in the community of nations than Israel.”

After all, since announcing the ten-month settlement building freeze in November, Netanyahu had made it clear repeatedly that the measure did not include Jerusalem—which Israel views as a united city under full Israeli sovereignty. He has subsequently indicated that building would not stop in Jerusalem. This did not stop Secretary of State Hilary Clinton from praising the freeze as an “unprecedented” Israeli concession that should pave the way to renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Biden, too, made it clear that after Netanyahu's apologies and clarifications, the planned proximity talks—the beginning of which he announced during his first hours in the country—should not be delayed because of the announced construction plan in an area that is already heavy populated by Jews.

Before my article was finished, though, its major premise—that the U.S. and Israel were on the way to overcoming the Jerusalem building flap (a premise that was being promoted by various ‘official Israeli sources’)—took a tail spin. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, was called to the State Department on Friday for a dressing down by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg. Clinton followed up on this rebuke with a demand that the Israeli government formally respond to four ultimata that she gave Netanyahu in a 40-minute phone call. It was a dressing down that prompted some foreign policy experts to conclude that the Israel-U.S. crisis was the worst since 1975—when President Gerald Ford announced a reassessment of his administration’s Middle East policy that heralded in one of the worst periods in U.S.-Israel relations and led to a suspension of U.S. aid to Israel.

Perhaps most worrisome, Israel is reportedly being accused by some quarters in the administration of endangering U.S. troops fighting in the Middle East. According to a foreign policy report filed on Saturday, CENTCOM briefers told Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen in January of a "growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region."

Relying on this report, Biden reportedly warned Netanyahu that the Israeli actions undermined the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that those actions endanger regional peace. Biden is reported to have told Netanyahu that since many people in the Muslim world perceived a connection between Israel's actions and U.S policy, any decision about construction could undermine Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem and have an impact on the personal safety of American troops fighting against Islamic terrorism. According to Yedioth Aharonoth, the overstated message could not have been plainer: "Israel's intransigence could cost American lives."

Three days later, observers are hard pressed to explain how an unfortunate but innocent glitch in the timing of the announced building permits (with actual construction at least three years away), could deteriorate into such acrimony between the two governments. Even stranger, this came just one day after the vice president paid tribute to “[the] legacy of age-old ties between a people and a land” and to “Israel’s unique relationship with the United States…our nation’s unbreakable bond borne of common values, interwoven cultures and mutual interests…impervious to any shifts in either country and either country’s partisan politics.”

It is now clear that the construction announced during the Biden visit was not even in (pre ’67) “Eastern” Jerusalem, but in the demilitarized no-man’s land.

This has led some analysts to conclude that the Obama administration is seeking much more than Netanyahu's apologies or promised changes in the Israeli government bureaucracy that would prevent the announcement of building plans without the approval of the prime minister. Rather, the disproportionate criticism is seen as a contrived attempt by the United States to force Netanyahu to announce an extension of the building freeze in scope and in time. For example, new provisions could include Jerusalem and run beyond the 10-month period Netanyahu has set, after which he on the record as being committed to allowing unfettered building to resume in the West Bank and Gaza. They could force Netanyahu to make unilateral concessions to the Palestinians, such as a mass prisoner release prior to U.S. Mideast Envoy George Mitchell's planned arrival in Israel later this week—a visit that has now been indefinitely postponed—to launch the proximity talks. Provisions could even force Netanyahu to bring down his government by forcing him to further alienate his right wing.

More likely, this fracas between the U.S. and Israel will hurt the prospect of peace even more than the announced building plan itself as happened previously, when Clinton and other Administration officials tried and failed to impose a total construction ban on Netanyahu as a precondition to talks.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas—supported by the Arab League—is likely to wait for the Obama administration to make good on its aggressive posture and delivering unilateral concessions from Israel.

The crisis has provided fodder to those in Israel who question Obama’s true support for the Jewish state—a population which, according to polls, composes the vast majority of Israelis—and has strengthened Netanyahu’s right-wing flank that warned him against adopting the settlement building freeze in the first place. The sense that united Jewish Jerusalem is under attack was reinforced by condemnations in the Arab and Palestinians quarters in reaction to the rededication of the Hurva Synagogue on March 14. The Hurva Synagogue is a landmark in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter that was destroyed along with more than 40 other synagogues by the Jordanians when they captured the Old City in 1948 and took its Jewish residents hostage to Jordan.

Additionally alarming are the unfounded Palestinian warnings that Israel is scheming to destroy the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount with the intention of rebuilding the Temple there. Indeed, after an outbreak of violence at various locations around Jerusalem, some observers worry that this could be the beginning of a third intifada. Some say that this “Day of Rage” proclaimed by the Palestinians is a direct outgrowth of the U.S. administration’s actions.

The new crisis facing Israel-U.S. relations and its progeny will have to be carefully observed and managed in the coming hours and days.