US keeps pressure on Abbas after Netanyahu visit

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's low-profile White House visit, widely portrayed as frosty, in fact broke the ice in his relations with President Barack Obama, a senior Israeli official said yesterday.

And since the meeting on Monday, Washington has been keeping the pressure on Palestinians to resume peace talks without an Israeli settlement freeze first.

Mr Netanyahu, who has withstood US pressure to halt settlement construction, was ushered into the Oval Office after nightfall for a session at which, contrary to normal practice with a visiting Israeli leader, reporters were not allowed in.

Back home in Israel, newspapers seized on the low-profile White House visit as a snub, a sign of strained relations between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu, who had rejected his calls for a halt to settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.

"It was actually an ice-breaker," said a senior Israeli official, who accompanied Mr Netanyahu on his US visit and to France, where the Prime Minister met French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

"At the meeting, Netanyahu and Obama established a real rapport," the official said, noting the two men spoke alone for more than hour. Another Israeli official added: "They spoke about concrete moves on the Palestinian track in the near future." He did not elaborate.

The low-key nature of the Oval Office visit, Israeli officials said, was partly aimed at not upsetting the Palestinians already angry over what they see as US backsliding on the settlement issue or undermining Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Echoing Mr Netanyahu's re-marks in Washington the day before, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told US Jewish leaders on Tuesday that Israeli-Palestinian talks, suspended for nearly a year, should get under way "without preconditions."

"No one should allow the issue of settlements to distract from the goal of a lasting peace between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world," Mr Emanuel said.

Mr Abbas has rejected Mr Netanyahu's proposal, praised last week by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to limit temporarily construction in West Bank enclaves to 3,000 homes.

Judging by Mr Abbas's remarks in a speech yesterday, he is making at least a show of not listening. Settlement expansion must come to a complete stop, he said, before talks can resume.