Photograph by Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

President Barack Obama waves as he leaves the stage after speaking at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem, on March 21, 2013.

”All options are on the table.”

President George W. Bush said so in 2006.

President Barack Obama, who has said it repeatedly, said it again today.

They were, and are, talking about Iran’s suspected ambitions of building a nuclear weapon.

Iran has long claimed that its nuclear program is peaceful, that it is enriching material to a level that will produce electrical power, not a weapon. The Israelis, who see a bomb in the making, maintain that the “window” for attacking the bomb-factory will soon close as it goes underground. Obama says Iran is a year away from the capacity to build that bomb. He is asking for patience, to let economic sanctions against Iran change Tehran’s mind.

Yet the consistent drumbeat of both the U.S. and Israeli approach to the problem has been an explicit threat of military intervention.

“All options are on the table,” Bush said in the Rose Garden of the White House in April 2006, when asked if the U.S. was considering military action. He said it in Europe. He reiterated it many times.

“I have made the position of the United States of America clear: Iran must not get a nuclear weapon,” Obama said today, in a televised address to the Israeli people during his tour of Jerusalem. “This is not a danger that can be contained. As president, I have said to the world that all options are on the table for achieving our objectives. America will do what we must to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.”

“For young Israelis, I know that these issues of security are rooted in an experience that is even more fundamental than the pressing threat of the day,” Obama said. “You live in a neighborhood where many of your neighbors have rejected your right to exist. Your grandparents had to risk their lives and all they had to make a place for themselves in this world. Your parents lived through war after war to ensure the survival of the Jewish state. Your children grow up knowing that people they have never met hate them because of who they are, in a region that is changing underneath your feet.”

At the same time, Obama spoke today about the urgency of peace.

“Peace is necessary,” he said. “Indeed, it is the only path to true security… Second, peace is just,” and he said, “peace is possible.”

And, with that, he had turned to another front: The Israeli and Palestinian conflict.

“Given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine,” he said today. “Given the frustration in the international community, Israel must reverse an undertow of isolation. And given the march of technology, the only way to truly protect the Israeli people is through the absence of war – because no wall is high enough, and no Iron Dome is strong enough, to stop every enemy from inflicting harm.”

“Negotiations will be necessary,” he said, “but there is little secret about where they must lead – two states for two peoples.”

Bush spent a certain amount of time in Israel, and at a summit in Annapolis, talking about that two-state solution, as well.

Yet, for all the promise of peace on one front, two presidents how have asserted, the option of war on another remains squarely “on the table.”

Original post is Obama: Peace ‘Necessary, Just, Possible’ — yet ‘All Options on Table’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP Photo

A Palestinian activist wearing a mask of President Barack Obama, holds a Rosa Parks’ mug shot, in the West Bank town of Hebron, on March 20, 2013.

Many Palestinians may not be as overjoyed about President Barack Obama’s arrival in the Middle East today as the Palestinian rappers in a video prepared by the American Consulate General in Israel suggests.

“We welcome you to Palestine,” the rappers say, in a video prepared for YouTube as Obama prepares for a stop in Ramallah during his three-day tour through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan.

“Our hands are reaching for peace,” they rap.

Were it so simple.

Original post is Obama’s Welcome: Palestinian Rappers by Political Capital.

Photograph by Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images

Palestinian militants of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades stand guard on the roof of a building in the West Bank village of Saair on February 25, 2013 during the funeral of Arafat Jaradat, an inmate who died in an Israeli prison.

That’s the percentage of Americans who favor putting more pressure on Palestinians than the Israelis amid the stalled Middle East peace process, according to Gallup.

That compared with 25 percent who said the U.S. should put more pressure on the Israelis, according to the survey, which was conducted Feb. 7-10.

President Barack Obama left last night for Israel in his first trip there since taking office. Obama also plans to visit the West Bank and Jordan.

About one-third of Israelis described Obama’s attitude toward Israel as favorable, compared with 38 percent who said he’s hostile to the nation, according to a survey mentioned in this story by Bloomberg’s Margaret Talev and Jonathan Ferziger.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 48 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

An Israeli woman and her children stay in a large concrete pipe used as a bomb shelter after a rocket was launched from the Gaza Strip on November 12, 2012 in Netivot, Israel.

That’s the percentage of Americans who say they’re more sympathetic to the Israelis than to the Palestinians amid stalled Middle East peace talks, according to Gallup.

The 64 percent figure ties a 25-year high set in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War, according to Gallup. Twelve percent said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, according to interviews conducted last month.

“Consistent with prior years, Republicans are substantially more likely than Democrats to favor the Israelis, 78% vs. 55%, with the preferences of independents — currently 63% — more closely matching those of Democrats,” Gallup’s Lydia Saad said in a written analysis.

President Barack Obama visits Israel this week, his first trip to the nation as president. Obama said that “all options are on the table” in trying to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons capability, Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman and Jonathan Ferziger reported.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 64 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Saif Sahlah/AFP via Getty Images

Palestinians wave national flags during a gathering in the West Bank city of Jenin on Nov. 29, 2012 to support Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas who is heading to the United Nations General Assembly today with huge backing for his bid for UN recognition of statehood.

Just because a United Nations name plate calls you a state, that doesn’t make you one.

Still, at the world body, any entity, state or non-state can name itself.

Following a largely symbolic vote in the UN’s 193-member General Assembly, the Palestinians changed their name to “State of Palestine” on all their stationery and asked UN protocol to go along with that. The UN’s etiquette office agreed on Dec. 17: “Pursuant to your request, the designation of `State of Palestine’ shall be used by the Secretariat in all official United Nations documents.”

The Americans were not pleased. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice today took exception to the rebranding, even if it’s confined to the 17 acres occupied by the world body in New York’s Midtown:

“Any reference to the `State of Palestine’ in the United Nations, including the use of the term `State of Palestine’ on the placard in the Security Council or the use of the term `State of Palestine’ in the invitation to this meeting or other arrangements for participation in this meeting, do not reflect acquiescence that `Palestine’ is a state.”

The Palestinians were quick to respond.

“It doesn’t matter if any country voted against” the designation,’ said Riad Malki, introduced at a Security Council meeting on the Palestinian question as foreign minister to the State of Palestine. `We expect all member states of the United Nations to respect, to adhere, the decision that was taken by the General Assembly of the United Nations on the 29th of November of 2012.”

Nine nations voted against this: the U.S., Israel, Canada, Czech Republic, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Panama.

Original post is Rice Riled by Palestine Placard by Political Capital.

Photograph by Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli soldiers keep watch as Palestinian youths demonstrate next to the security fence on the Gaza border east of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

That’s the percentage of Americans who say they sympathize with the Israelis over the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict, according to the Pew Research Center.

Ten percent said they sympathize with the Palestinians, while 13 percent said neither. The remainder of respondents said they aligned with both sides or didn’t know, according to the survey conducted Dec. 5-9, 2012.

There’s a wide partisan gap on this question, with 70 percent of Republicans saying they align more with Israel, compared with 47 percent of independents and 41 percent of Democrats.

The U.S.-Israel relationship probably will be discussed during confirmation hearings for former Sen. Chuck Hagel, nominated by the president for Secretary of Defense.

“Hagel emerged as the most disputed pick for Obama’s second-term national security team because of positions such as his opposition to the U.S. troop surge during the Iraq war and his comments on the influence of the ‘Jewish lobby,’” Bloomberg News reporter David Lerman wrote yesterday.

Critics have “completely distorted” a record that shows “unequivocal, total support for Israel,” Hagel said in an interview with the Lincoln Journal Star newspaper in Nebraska that was published Jan. 7. Hagel represented Nebraska in the Senate from 1997 to 2009.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 50 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie addresses the 2012 Republican National Convention.

Republican Mitt Romney has been forced to take a more aggressive tack after blow-back from his “47 percent” comments on a secretly recorded video released last week. Polls show him losing ground to President Barack Obama in some battleground states.

But those “reset” efforts may not be in vain, one of his top campaigners said.

“We had a bad week — if the election were going to be held tomorrow that would be a problem, but there’s a lot of ground to cover in the next 42 days,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’s been in-demand as a fundraiser and campaign surrogate, told reporters today after breaking ground on an elementary school in Long Branch. “I don’t think we need to overreact on this.”

Christie, 50, turned down entreaties by Republican politicians and some business executives last year to make his own run for the White House. He was also the first sitting governor to line up behind Romney at the time. He said he spoke to Romney by phone yesterday but declined to elaborate on the discussion.

Romney is trying to regain momentum and assure the Republican establishment that the election isn’t turning against him, as he promised to spend more time with voters and less raising cash. Last week proved to be an especially rough one for the former Massachusetts governor, when Mother Jones magazine posted the video from a May 17 fundraiser on its Web site showing Romney  saying 47 percent of Americans are government-dependent “victims.”  He also dismissed hope a peace accord between Israel and Palestinians.

Original post is Christie on Romney: If Election Were Tomorrow `That Would Be a Problem’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

Mitt Romney is seen through a television camera's viewfinder as he speaks at a campaign fundraising event in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Sept. 18, 2012.

Mitt Romney, given some time on Fox News this afternoon to explain his comment about 47 percent of the electorate being politically out of reach to him, downplayed it as a remark about the state of his contest with President Barack Obama.

“We were of course talking about a campaign and about how he’s going to get half the vote and I’m going to get half the vote,” Romney said, adding he hopes it will be 50 percent-plus in his case. In his talk about the dependency of that 47 percent, he said he had been speaking about “a government-centered nation” and called it “the wrong course for America.”

Asked if he has “kissed half the electorate goodbye” in calling them “moochers,” Romney said he was speaking of people who don’t pay income taxes and aren’t likely to support him. “I’m not going to get them.”

At the same time, he said, “we go after every group we can to get votes.”’

Romney was appearing from Salt Lake City on Neil Cavuto’s “Your World” on Fox News Channel.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney said at a private fundraising dinner in May — a portion of  a video recording of that talk released only yesterday and the full tape published today. “There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them,” he said, adding that they “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it.”

“These are people who pay no income taxes — 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. Our message of lower taxes doesn’t connect,” Romney said. “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them.”

The Republican presidential nominee also said at that $50,000-per-plate May 17 fundraising dinner at a private equity executive’s home in Boca Raton, Florida, that the prospect of peace in the Middle East is “almost unthinkable.”

“I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and I say there’s just no way,” Romney is heard saying in the secretly recorded video of the talk published by Mother Jones magazine. “What you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

Cavuto asked if the 47 percent not paying income taxes is too high.

“There are a number of retirees, members of the military and so forth who aren’t paying taxes, and that’s as it should be,” Romney replied.

“But I do believe we should have enough jobs and take-home pay such that people have the privilege of higher incomes that allow hem to be paying taxes. I think people would like to be paying taxes. The good news is if you’re doing well enough financially that you can pay a tax. And the problem right now is you see in this country so many people have fallen into poverty that they’re not paying taxes they have to rely on government and the right course to help them is not just to have government handing out but instead government helping people to get back to good jobs.”

Cavuto asked Romney what he knows about the source of the tape.

“I’m not too concerned about the source,” Romney said. “This is a meessage I am carrying day in and day out. We’ve seen the president’s policies play out over the last four years, and if people feel they are better off, I would say, `Look at the numbers… Look what’s happened to the number of people on food stamps.”’

Original post is Romney’s Fox Talk: It’s `A Campaign’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by David Buimovitch/AFP/Getty Images

An Israeli border policeman watches as a man surveys the damage caused by a rocket launched from the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

“As president, peace will be my solemn goal,” Republican Mitt Romney said in a public address to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee’s policy conference in Washington on March 6.

“A peace based not on empty assurances, but on true security and defensible borders,” Romney told AIPAC’s audience. “This will require American strength, and a demonstration of our resolve. That’s why, as president, my first foreign trip will not be to Cairo or Riyadh or Ankara. It will be to Jerusalem.”

Two months later, in a closed-door, $50,000-per-plate campaign fundraising dinner at the Boca Raton, Florida, home of a private equity executive on May 17, Romney said this to his audience:

“I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, `There’s just no way.”’

“You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem,” Romney told his campaign donors. “We live with that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

Romney has approached his campaign for the White House with sharp criticism for President Barack Obama’s handling of the Middle East, and in particular has questioned Obama’s commitment to Israel’s security. Romney’s fundraising comments, secretly video-recorded and released today by Mother Jones magazine, will limit his ability to fault Obama’s handing of the Israeli-Palestinian tensions, Richard Armitage, former U.S. deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush, told Bloomberg News.

“It’s difficult to criticize the president and his Middle East policy on the one hand, and then suggest, on the other hand, that the best you can do is kick the ball down the street,” Armitage said in a telephone interview today.

“It is simply the wrong approach to say we can’t do anything about it so we’ll just kick it down the field — that’s not leadership,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. Peace is in the best interests of Israelis and Palestinians, he said, and “this president will continue to pursue it.”

Of course, Romney is not alone in his pessimism about peace. Aaron David Miller, who was a Middle East peace negotiator for President Bill Clinton, calls the odds of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement “almost slim to none.”

`I don’t care if it’s Obama or Romney,” he said, as Bloomberg’s Hans Nichols and John McCormick report today. “The question is what you do about it.”

For campaign-watchers, the question today centers on what Romney has said publicly about his “solemn goal” of peace, and what he has said privately about his view of a problem likely to “remain unsolved.”

Original post is Romney Peace Plan: Public, Private by Political Capital.

Photograph by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

Mitt Romney visits the Western Wall on July 29, 2012 in Jerusalem's old city.

Updated at 11:51 am EDT with White House comment

Add to the revelations from the secretly recorded video of Mitt Romney’s fundraising remarks about the 47 percent of Americans whom he views as politically unreachable: The prospect of peace in the Middle East, impossible because of Palestinians who don’t want it.

“I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and I say there’s just no way,” Romney is heard saying in the video. “What you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

“That’s not leadership — that’s the opposite of leadership,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said today in a White House press briefing.  President Barack Obama is pursuing peace in the Middle East, he said, “and this president will continue to pursue it. ”

The recordings were revealed by Mother Jones magazine,  which obtained the video from a private fundraiser in Florida in May. Romney was speaking at the Boca Raton home of private equity manager Marc Leder, who has donated $225,000 to the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future and $63,330 to the Romney Victory PAC. Mother Jones notes that employees of his firm, Sun Capital Partners,and spouses  have given more than $970,000 to the Romney campaign and its related PACs in this election cycle.

He informed his donors that a former secretary of state — unidentified — had told him there was “a prospect for a settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis.” Romney recalled that he had replied, “Really?” and didn’t inquire about details.

“I’m torn by two perspectives in this regard,” Romney said. “One is the one which I’ve had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

“Now why do I say that? Some might say, well, let’s let the Palestinians have the West Bank, and have security, and set up a separate nation for the Palestinians. And then come a couple of thorny questions. And I don’t have a map here to look at the geography, but the border between Israel and the West Bank is obviously right there, right next to Tel Aviv, which is the financial capital, the industrial capital of Israel, the center of Israel. It’s—what the border would be? Maybe seven miles from Tel Aviv to what would be the West Bank…The other side of the West Bank, the other side of what would be this new Palestinian state would either be Syria at one point, or Jordan. And of course the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon, what they did near Gaza. Which is that the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armament into the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel.”

“So Israel of course would have to say, `That can’t happen. We’ve got to keep the Iranians from bringing weaponry into the West Bank.’ Well, that means that—who? The Israelis are going to patrol the border between Jordan, Syria, and this new Palestinian nation? Well, the Palestinians would say, `Uh, no way! We’re an independent country. You can’t, you know, guard our border with other Arab nations.”’

“And now how about the airport? How about flying into this Palestinian nation? Are we gonna allow military aircraft to come in and weaponry to come in? And if not, who’s going to keep it from coming in? Well, the Israelis. Well, the Palestinians are gonna say, `We’re not an independent nation if Israel is able to come in and tell us what can land in our airport.’ These are problems—these are very hard to solve, all right? And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, `There’s just no way”’

“You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem,” Romney told his donors. “We live with that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it. ”

This is Mother Jones’ recording:

Original post is Romney: Middle East Peace `Almost Unthinkable’ – to Remain `Unsolved’ by Political Capital.