President Obama and Israel; Historic Opportunity
JOHN KING, HOST: Thanks Wolf and good evening everyone. Tonight Israel reacts icily to President Obama's big speech on the Middle East using remarkably blunt language to reject the White House framework for new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The crackling tensions overshadowed what the president had hoped would be a lofty inspirational speech about U.S. goals in the fast-changing Middle East.</s>BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The status quo is not sustainable. Society is held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time. But they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder.</s>KING: Tonight we'll tap CNN's unrivaled global reach to analyze the president's speech and its impact or lack of an impact on key hot spots in the Middle East and North Africa. There's also other big news tonight, the French financier Dominique Strauss-Kahn is free on bail and also out of a job and under indictment now on charges he tried to rape a New York hotel maid. Up first though, the simmering feud between President Obama and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The relationship, well, frosty to begin with and the president struck a new nerve it seems with this assessment near the end of his big Middle East speech.</s>OBAMA: We believe the borders of Israel and Palestinian should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps (ph) so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.</s>KING: Mr. Netanyahu quickly called that a bad idea. In and of itself perhaps not a surprise, but his blunt language was. Quote, "The viability of a Palestinian state cannot come at the expense of the viability of the one and only Jewish state", a statement from the prime minister's office read and it went on to say, "that is why Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation of from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004. Among other things, those commitments related to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines." It is a remarkable public airing of a disagreement among friends and it immediately rippled through our domestic politics as well. Let's dig deeper with two veterans of U.S.-Israeli relations, my colleagues Wolf Blitzer and Gloria Borger. Wolf, I don't remember a time in covering this issue, there are tensions from time to time between American presidents and Israeli prime ministers. But for the prime minister to say essentially, I expect you, Mr. President to take it back.</s>WOLF BLITZER, HOST, "THE SITUATION ROOM": Yes, it's tough talk and it's going to be icy tomorrow when they meet over at the White House. And then they have a joint photo opportunity. I'm sure they are going to try to patch things over on the surface, although under the surface, the relationship as you know, certainly as Gloria knows over the past two years has not been good ever since almost day one when the president urged the Israelis to free settlement activity in the West Bank.</s>KING: And on the one hand it's not a surprise what the president said. Everybody knows that's the general framework, you go back to that map and I'm going to show you the map in a minute. And then you tinker with it. But that he said it publicly was new for a United States president, essentially to go there.</s>KING: But that the Israelis pushed back so quickly and publicly on the eve of this meeting was astounding.</s>GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well because I think they believed that what the president said means an equal exchange of territories in a final deal. When you talk about mutually agreed swaps, they're saying OK, we give x, they have to give x. And so they are saying you know this can't be an equal game here and so they are looking at this as not just any kind of a restatement of what Bill Clinton was talking about. But they are looking at a violation of what they say George W. Bush promised them in a letter explicitly in 2004.</s>KING: That letter was to the former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.</s>BORGER: Right.</s>KING: The Obama administration has said we're not bound exactly any way.</s>BLITZER: Well it was a very even handed statement. The president was very tough on the Palestinians and he said, you know unless Hamas accepts Israel's right to exist, you can't blame the Israelis for refusing to negotiate with them. So he was pretty tough on that and he was forceful in reasserting the U.S. commitment to Israel. There's no doubt about that as well. But you know this -- the words are so sensitive.</s>BLITZER: And even though all of us who covered Bill Clinton's final months in office when he tried to negotiate a deal with then prime minister Ehud Barak they wanted to have that kind of swap as part of a pre-'67 line, but even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her final months when she was negotiating with the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, they had that swap but to formally state it, it's an irritant for the Israelis. I suspect the</s>BORGER: Well he's a tough negotiator, right. I was talking to a senior White House adviser after the speech. He was kind of frustrated by this reaction that Netanyahu had, also the reaction of Republican presidential candidates. I mean Mitt Romney said that the president had thrown Israel under the bus. And this adviser said to me that's absolutely ridiculous. The president specifically stated that he would do nothing to jeopardize Israel's security.</s>KING: He did but they also understand number one, the context. We're heading into a re-election cycle.</s>BORGER: Right.</s>KING: The president wants the Jewish vote. Both parties are trying to raise money off the Jewish community. Florida a very important state with the Jewish vote -- could be if it's competitive swing vote. Let's go through some of that. I want to go to the map and since you brought up the politics, Lindsay Graham, conservative senator from South Carolina, very disappointed in the president singling out one issue. He didn't single out one issue, but that's what Lindsey Graham decides to say. Eric Cantor statement by keeping the burden and thus the spotlight on Israel, the president is giving the Palestinian authority more incentive. Well the president kept the spotlight on both, but again in politics you pick what you want to see. You mentioned Governor Romney says under the bus. Governor Pawlenty, dangerous demand, another Republican presidential candidate.</s>BORGER: Yes.</s>KING: Jon Huntsman, the president's former ambassador to China, more politely saying tonight in New Hampshire, you should have asked Israel first what they think, so Wolf, it is inevitable that this will become part of our politics and perhaps Prime Minister Netanyahu who has so much experience here in the United States knows that.</s>BLITZER: Yes, he's going to be delivering a major speech too in the next few days. Then he's invited to address a joint session of Congress on Monday. My whole suspicion of why did the president of the United States decide now to deliver this speech, what was the timing of it, I think it was designed to sort of preempt Netanyahu because he was coming to Congress on Monday.</s>BORGER: You know here's my -- here's my other question and I hesitate to ask a question to which I don't know the answer. I'm trying to find out -- is when did the prime minister learn about this? You know very often and you guys have both covered the White House, when you do a speech that is this delicate, you show it to the Israelis, say in advance. And we know the president was very late in coming out there today. We don't know why, but you know my question is, when did Netanyahu see this speech? Did he react in advance to the White House and say, whoa, you know I don't want you to do it and did the White House do it any way?</s>BLITZER: My own sense is that the president really believes this. He studied this issue. He knows the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there were some advisers, some of the more political advisers who didn't want him to be specific on these sensitive issues but some others including I think the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wanted him to be specific. I don't know where George Mitchell who resigned abruptly the other day --</s>KING: He wanted even a more detailed plan --</s>BLITZER: Yes.</s>BORGER: Right.</s>KING: He wanted an Obama plan like the Clinton plan --</s>BLITZER: But this was the president's decision in the end and he decided this was the right thing to do for the United States, the right thing to do for the Israelis and the Palestinians.</s>BORGER: But they don't think it's a departure.</s>KING: They don't think it's a departure, but they certainly now have a little bit of a kerfuffle, I'll call it. I just want to show people what we have. This is the pre-1967 map the president was talking about. If you look at where we are today, you see here you have the Palestinian territories here in the West Bank. You have the Israeli settlements up here in the Golan Heights. There are some Israeli settlements out in West Bank; the Gaza Strip is over here. One of the plans all along has been if you have a continuous Palestinian state, would Israel give up a strip of land say somewhere across here to connect the West Bank to the Gaza Strip? And if so, what will they get back then from the Palestinians. That has been the negotiations going back to the Clinton administration. Just to have it said so publicly today by the president appears to have pierced a nerve in the Israeli government. And a bit earlier I spoke with the president's deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough, and I began by asking him about this, this extraordinary Israeli statement that Prime Minister Netanyahu expects President Obama to back away from what the president said just today in his speech.</s>DENIS MCDONOUGH, DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Well John, the president looks very much forward to the meeting tomorrow with Prime Minister Netanyahu. It will be their seventh meeting and an opportunity to discuss this matter, but also their ongoing -- our ongoing cooperation with the Israelis across a range of issues, to include our effort, historic in fact to fight back against</s>KING: That's a very diplomatic statement. Forgive me for interrupting. I understand the difficulty here. This is one of the most sensitive relationships for the president of the United States. But within moments of the president's speech, for the prime minister of Israel to say, no, no the central thing you outlined when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unacceptable it speaks volumes, doesn't it?</s>MCDONOUGH: Well I didn't hear you read the word unacceptable or hear you read the word unacceptable, but we will continue obviously to work very closely with our Israeli partners as it relates to this issue. This is not an issue that's totally unprecedented, of course, John. You've heard presidents in the past work on this as it relates to borders and efforts in the past. You also obviously heard former prime ministers and governments in Israel raise similar types of proposals. But here's the commitment. You highlighted one -- one principle, which is the 67 borders with mutually agreed swaps. What you didn't highlight is the commitments the president made in the speech to Israel's security. This is an effort that frankly we've been working very aggressively with our Israeli partners including military to military, as well as at the political level. The president has directed us to do that. The American taxpayers have made unprecedented investments in Israeli security including with very successful programs like the Iron Dome Program, which is stopping rockets launched from the Gaza Strip. So we'll continue to make those resource allocations, those investments. We'll continue our very important work as it relates to threat mitigation and threat reduction. And then at the end of the day, we're going to have disagreements with our good friends. That happens with our allies. But this is the kind of relationship that can withstand that. And that's exactly the kind of issues the president will discuss with the Prime Minister tomorrow.</s>KING: It's a foreign policy speech, global challenges the president addressing, but you understand the timing, Denis McDonough. We're heading into a political cycle here in the United States and a number of conservatives have already criticized the president for what he said about Israel. Here's one just from Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, a Republican candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He said the president violated the first rule of American foreign policy and had thrown Israel under the bus.</s>MCDONOUGH: Well, John, I think the first rule of American foreign policy is to protect the United States and our interests. That's exactly what this president has done and will continue to do, to include in our efforts to make unprecedented investments in Israel's security, to work jointly against our concerns related to Iran's illicit nuclear program. We'll continue to do just that. But we're not going to get into the politics of this, John. We'll leave that to somebody else. Our job isn't to worry about the politics or the polls or the season that you just referenced. Our job is to worry day in and day out about securing the American people, securing the United States, and working very closely to secure our critical allies like the Israelis. That's something that should be frankly above politics.</s>KING: Let's talk about some of the other challenges the president addressed in the speech. Earlier it took a bit of time but the president did come out and say Mubarak needed to go in Egypt. He did come out pretty quickly and say Gadhafi must go in Libya. But listen here to the president addressing the situation right now in the middle of a violent crackdown in Syria.</s>OBAMA: The Syrian people have shown their courage in demanding a transition to democracy. And President Assad now has a choice. He can leave that transition or get out of the way.</s>KING: Why does President Assad get a longer leash, if you will, than Presidents Mubarak or Gadhafi?</s>MCDONOUGH: Oh, I don't think he gets a longer leash. I think what you've seen is the United States coordinating very closely with our European friends, with our allies, with the Turks to make very clear what we expect of leadership in Damascus. Yesterday we rolled out a series of sanctions that targeted directly President Assad and some of his closest advisers for the steps that they've taken. As it relates to his future in that position he has now worked himself into a position of much deeper isolation by killing his own people, by refusing to allow human rights investigators into Syria to ascertain exactly what's happened there and until he works himself back out of that isolation, he's not going to be able to continue to effectively lead his country. That's a fact, John, and that ultimately is the most concerning fact for the Syrian people.</s>KING: Denis McDonough is the president's deputy national security adviser. Mr. McDonough, thank you.</s>MCDONOUGH: Thanks, John. I appreciate being with you.</s>KING: Ahead tonight freedom for the prominent French political figure accused of trying to rape his hotel maid, but freedom at a price. We'll break down the new charges against Dominique Strauss- Kahn. And how did the president's speech play in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab world? We'll take you there next.