Alan Solow
“The political situation inside Israel is stable,” declared Solow, who spoke comfortably in his pronounced Chicago accent for about 15 minutes, from scribbled notes. “There is a better relationship between Obama and Netanyahu—it’s improved from the early days of both the Obama and the Netanyahu Administrations. What we’re seeing is the benefit of the passage of time.” As for Biden, with whom he had met the week before in Washington, Solow added, “I’m not surprised his visit to Israel has been a positive one.”
By the time Solow got back to his office, on the 19th floor of a tower up the street from City Hall, his blue-jacketed BlackBerry was buzzing with news to the contrary, provoking a cluck of exasperation. The vice president had just released a harshly worded statement: “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem,” Biden said. “The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.”
“The screw-up,” as it came to be known—in polite company, at least—threatened to undo a year’s worth of political work by Solow to bring the Obama team closer to the Israelis. Biden was the highest-ranking of the American officials who have traveled to Jerusalem this year in hopes of jump-starting the peace process; the incident virtually guaranteed that Obama would not soon follow. In the short term, it gave the Administration—not to mention the Palestinians—grounds to argue that the Israelis were being either childish, or politically unreliable, or both, in advance of the newly agreed upon “proximity talks,” a modern variant of shuttle diplomacy.
It might have remained one in a series of passing diplomatic contretemps between the Americans and the Israelis—except that, on Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu to deliver a further 45-minute scolding. On Sunday, White House senior adviser David Axelrod went on ABC’s This Week and said he thought the announcement had been calculated to undermine progress toward peace talks. People who had lived through the 1991 fight with the elder President Bush over loan guarantees to Israel started making the analogy. Although both Obama and Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren have since deflected talk of a “crisis,” the situation was widely seen as the thorniest interaction between the two allies in decades.
As the nominal head of American Jewry, Solow found himself in the position of being responsible, on behalf of his members, for figuring out how and when to openly criticize the decisions of a president he sincerely believes has the best interests of Israel, and of Jews, at heart—and the apparently calculated strategy of Administration members to whom he is personally very close. During the campaign, Solow went on tandem road-shows with Dennis Ross, the National Security Council adviser who handles Iran policy; he is also close to Daniel Shapiro, the NSC’s Middle East expert. George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy for peace talks, helped recruit Solow last year from the Chicago law firm where he worked for 25 years into the international powerhouse DLA Piper, where Mitchell was chairman of the board before joining the Administration.