Last week the Council on Foreign Relations held a media conference call to discuss the upcoming meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu scheduled for tomorrow. The call featured CFR senior fellow Robert Danin, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2005-2008 and headed the Office of Quartet Representative Tony Blair in Jerusalem from 2008-2010.
In the Q&A session that followed Danin’s presentation, there was this exchange with Eli Lake of the Washington Times regarding the letter given to Israel in exchange for the Gaza disengagement:
LAKE: I have a specific question here: does the Obama administration still recognize the 2004 Bush letter to Prime Minister Sharon? What is the status of that understanding between Israel and the United States?
DANIN: Well, that’s a very good question. I would hate to mischaracterize it, so I think that’s one you’re going to have to direct to the administration. I have spent the last period out of Jerusalem working for Tony Blair, and so I would hate to mischaracterize how the Obama administration would formulate its relationship to that letter. …
It has been a very good question for more than a year, since it was first asked at the June 9, 2009 State Department press conference, where it produced the following response from spokesman Ian Kelly:
QUESTION: Does the Obama Administration regard itself as bound by the contents of the letter that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon received from President Bush in 2004?
MR. KELLY: That’s an excellent question, James, and I’ll get you the information on that.
The information was never provided, and the State Department has repeatedly ducked the question ever since. In the joint press conference that Obama and Netanyahu will hold tomorrow, someone should ask the president.
The heart of the Bush letter was its explicit U.S. commitment to “secure, defensible borders” and Israel’s ability to “defend itself, by itself.” After the Six Day War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared a memorandum (summarized here) showing the areas in the West Bank necessary to provide defensible borders.
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has an excellent discussion of the issue on its site, and a new video that dramatically demonstrates that parameters of the necessary borders. .