Fresh violence in and around Jerusalem over the weekend has raised the stakes of a meeting between the Israeli Prime Minister and Barack Obama on Tuesday.
Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to participate in White House talks over a controversial settlement plan that has threatened to drive a wedge between the close allies.
The talks follow increasing unrest in Jerusalem and the West Bank over the weekend, which saw four Palestinians shot dead by Israeli troops.
Palestinian officials have accused Israeli forces of “escalating” the crisis in the region.
Washington has consistently pressed Netanyahu’s government for a freeze on the expansion of its territories and a return to peace talks.
However U.S.-Israel relations soured on March 9 when the Israeli foreign minister announced that the country would build 1,600 new homes in the mostly Arab east Jerusalem, known as Jewish settlements.
The timing of the announcement—during a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden—has been regarded in Washington as a direct snub.
Since then, a temporary freeze on the building of new settlements has been offered as a compromise package by Netanyahu. However, U.S. officials are hoping for a complete cancellation of the project—particularly in east Jerusalem—an area which Arab officials hope will form the capital of the Palestinian state.
The U.S. stance has put Netanyahu in a difficult position, particularly in not wishing to appear weak in the eyes of hawkish Cabinet members and the electorate.
On Sunday, he appeared to take a stand which may put him on a collision course with the United States, after he told a cabinet meeting that there would be no fundamental compromise on Jerusalem.
“Our policy on Jerusalem is the same as that of all previous Israeli governments in the past 42 years, and it hasn’t changed,” he told a Cabinet meeting. “As far as we are concerned, building in Jerusalem is like building in Tel Aviv.”
Despite that, there are signs that the United States may attempt to force a compromise on the issue. One unnamed U.S. official was quoted by the Telegraph newspaper as saying that Israel faced the “mother of all kickings” over the issue.
Many of Obama’s senior foreign policy officials are veterans of the former Clinton administration, which previously took revenge on Israel for an attempt to block the peace process by leaning on Netanyahu’s administration so heavily that Netanyahu was voted out of office in 1999.
Indeed, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami told Israeli Army Radio on Sunday, according to the Jerusalem Post, that the Obama administration was likely to present a unilateral plan to “force a peace agreement on the Israelis and Palestinians.”
Citing an American official, Ben-Ami said the United States was planning to present its own plan for peace in the Middle East, and that such pressure could cause the Netanyahu coalition to crumble.
Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama today, coincides with a tour of the Middle East by regional envoy George Mitchell. On Monday, Mitchell said that a “period of calm and quiet” was needed in order to help broker peace talks between Israel and Palestine.
However, on Saturday Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinian teenagers who were taking part in a riot against the expansion plans in east Jerusalem. Security forces said that rubber bullets were used to disperse the crowd.
On Monday, two more Palestinian men were shot dead in the West Bank. Officials said that the men had attacked an Israeli soldier with pitchforks at a checkpoint outside Nablus.
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