By David Harris

The latest comments from the US Department of State confirmed a planned meeting has been canceled between US Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The parley should have taken place in Paris on Thursday, but a State Department spokesman said it had been postponed. Instead, Mitchell is now slated to meet Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak next Monday.

Ian Kelly, the State Department official, put a polite sheen on the cancellation and downgrading of the talk, suggesting Mitchell needs to speak with Barak first to discuss a series of issues.

Israeli and Palestinian columnists have suggested during the last 24 hours that the cancellation might be a snub to Netanyahu because of the reports that Barak has approved the construction of 240 homes in the West Bank, an area deemed by the international community to be occupied territory and land slated for the creation of any Palestinian state.

The Obama administration has repeatedly warned Israel to "stop the settlement activity".

Now there are suggestions that the message is being driven home in unpublicized meetings between Israeli and US officials.

If the Barak approval turns out to be true, it may fly in the face of Netanyahu's June 14 speech in which he promised an end to the settlement activity outside the existing built-up areas.

Israel says it wants to retain the right to build new residential areas in existing settlements to allow for "natural growth".

"When Netanyahu was in power the last time and he didn't do things the Americans wanted, suddenly meetings were canceled," said Dr. Jonathan Rynhold, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

However, he insisted the US-Israeli relationship be unbreakable, as US President Barack Obama put it in his June 4 Cairo speech to the Muslim world.

As long as Israel continues to remove illegal outposts in the West Bank and does not expand the boundaries of existing settlements, Washington is not going to object if a new kindergarten is built in the middle of a Jewish community in the territories, he said.

That special relationship is a constant one, according to Menahem Blondheim, a professor of American history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Where there are shifts, it is more an explanation of the specific nuances of differing administrations both in the US and Israel, he said.

Right now, the Obama team has taken policy somewhat leftwards in comparison with that of the last president, George W. Bush, while Netanyahu's government is more hawkish than its predecessor, which was headed by Ehud Olmert.

There have always been certain topics on which Israel and the United States have not seen eye to eye and that continues till today, said Blondheim.

"Take Jerusalem as a good example," he said, "if you look throughout the history of the relation between Israel and the US, there's always been tension around the subject of Jerusalem."

On the other hand, the US still sees Israel as a key military partner, Blondheim noted.

While neither expert would say with certainty why the Mitchell- Netanyahu meeting was canceled, both agree that from time to time Israel is censured by Washington, when a particular administration feels the need to show Israel that it needs to make a course correction.

According to Blondheim and Rynhold, that course is the price of diplomacy on the international stage. However, the fundamentals of the US-Israel relationship remain strong.

The fact that Obama differentiates between Iran's nuclear program and that of Israel is yet more proof that whatever is happening right now is a temporary blip. The key elements of Obama's Cairo speech pointed time and again to the bond between Americans and Israelis.

Obama realizes Netanyahu will not or can not go quite as far as Olmert was prepared to travel in terms of compromises, but Netanyahu has left the door open by talking up a unity government, said Rynhold.

At some point during his term in office, one could well see Kadima, the largest party in Israeli politics, entering the coalition, to strengthen the peace camp. The current hawkish composition of the government does not allow Netanyahu the wiggle room he may need to satisfy both the Palestinians and the Americans.

In Netanyahu's three months in office thus far, he will have come to realize pretty quickly that finding the middle ground between his coalition partners, the electorates at home, his prospective Palestinian interlocutors and the Obama administration is no easy task.

Yet the experts say America is fully aware of the nature of this balancing act, and is likely to give Netanyahu as much leeway as it possibly can without losing the interest of the Arab world in a comprehensive peace with Israel.

(Xinhua News Agency June 25, 2009)