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Are Bushies behind the understandings misunderstanding?

By Ron Kampeas · July 6, 2009

Shmuel Rosner, who never met an inconvenient truth he didn't like (and that's a big part of the reason I find Shmuel so likeable), writes here that the Bush administration is at least partly to blame for the current disagreement to disagree between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations over Bush-era understandings on settlements.

The outgoing Bush administration didn't inform the incoming Obama administration about the understandings with Israel regarding settlement construction -- but not because it was forgotten. It could not have been forgotten. Israel reminded. Officials in Jerusalem reminded officials in Washington -- reminded and asked -- that the "understandings" will be transmitted to the new administration in writing. However, the Bush administration has decided not to do such thing. It was a deliberate decision.

The story isn't going away: Benny Begin is the latest Israeli minister to go on the record demanding American compliance with the understandings.

Rosner's Jerusalem Post blog links to a much longer (and juicier) Hebrew story he penned at Ma'ariv, citing anonymous sources in Israel and Washington. Here are some of the points:

• Steve Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, was behind the adamant refusal to convey to the Obama administration the understanding that Israel could continue some "natural growth" in the settlements;
• The argument from within the former Bush administration has until now seemed to be one between Elliott Abrams, the former deputy national security adviser, who says the understandings should still hold, and Daniel Kurtzer, the former U.S. ambassador to Tel Aviv, who says the understandings are moot because the parameters of "natural growth" were never defined. (According to a key 2004 letter by Dov Weisglass, then the top adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the understandings hinged on defining the settlement borders and what constituted "natural growth." This never came about.) But, according to Shmuel, the Obama administration has consulted a number of Bush officials on the matter -- and Abrams pretty much stands alone.  "Aside from Abrams, until now, not a single voice has been heard backing Israel's version," he writes.
• This does not mean Abrams is necessarily wrong, Rosner writes, but that "there are enough senior Bush administration officials who were not comfortable with how Israel functioned while Bush was in power." Rosner does not immediately explain what discomfited these officials, but further down, he says Bush and Sharon discussed the understandings in detail in 2003 (which would suggest that Kurtzer is at least partly mistaken -- i.e., that there were parameters) -- and then adds that it was Bush's subsequent impression that Israel was going well beyond the parameters. "What does Sharon think, that I'm stupid, that I don't understand the meaning of 'natural growth'?" Bush is said to have told an adviser.
  A key cog in the Obama administration's adamant position that the understandings do not hold is Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who is among those who believe Benjamin Netanyahu "is trying to pull a fast one." "Paranoids also are not lacking on the Israeli side," Shmuel drily notes. "It's a process that feeds itself."
• Hillary Rodham Clinton's uncompromising posture, in particular, was the result of her frustration with the leaks campaign from the Israeli side, Rosner says.