President Shimon Peres is scheduled to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday, three weeks before Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will meet with the American leader. Peres will be substituting for the Prime Minister as the main speaker at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) meeting next week.
Prime Minister Netanyahu last week canceled his plans to attend the AIPAC meeting, but different reports have circulated whether he decided to stay home because he is too busy formulating policies or because President Obama refused to meet him before May 18, the date of his upcoming official visit to the White House.
President Peres’s office said that his American counterpart will meet with him during his trip next week.
President Peres officially has a ceremonial position but has spoken freely in support of the establishment of a new PA state and has been a long-time champion of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority. Since becoming President, he has reiterated several times that Israel must accept the “two-state solution,” a policy that Prime Minister Netanyahu has rejected until the PA is more economically and socially stable.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, chairman of the Labor party that is a key partner in the Netanyahu coalition government, said on Tuesday that he believes Prime Minister Netanyahu will back down from his position when he meets with President Obama. "I believe that during Netanyahu's visit to Washington, Israel must formulate how it intends to move forward, and that formula will not propose three states for eight peoples," he told the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha'aretz.
The Labor party chairman is the most dovish voice in the coalition and often has made statements indicating a more compromising stand than the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who heads the Israel Is Our Home (Yisrael Beiteinu) party.
President Peres and Prime Minister Netanyahu are to meet this week to coordinate positions before the President flies to the U.S. Although their views towards a new PA state are different, they are in agreement on the need to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. The Iranian issue also is at the top of the agenda for AIPAC, whose delegates are lobbying congressmen for support for a new bill that would impose stiffer sanctions on Iran.