Washington is not linking Israeli progress on the Palestinian track with forming an international coalition against Iran, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in New York Monday. During their meeting, one of a host of talks Livni held with world leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, Rice said the US continued to view the Palestinian issue and the Iranian problem as separate. According to officials in Livni's office, Rice - not Livni - raised the issue, and she did it in the presence of Philip Zelikow, one of her top advisers, who seemed to indicate linkage last week in a speech to a conference organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In that speech, Zelikow said there was a need to form a "coalition of builders" to confront the Iranian threat, an alliance composed of the US, Europe and moderate Arab states. He indicated that progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track was an essential element for the Arabs and Europeans to get on board the efforts to stop Iran. "It is an essential ingredient for forging the coalition. I would say it is an essential ingredient for Israel," Zelikow said, adding, "It is an essential glue that binds all these things together."
He said that when building coalitions, there was a need to address concerns of other members, in this case the Europeans and Arabs. During the Livni-Rice meeting, the second between the two in a week, Livni spoke of the need for the international community to remain firmly behind the demands that in order for the Palestinian Authority to gain legitimacy, it needed to accept the international community's three benchmarks: recognizing Israel's right to exist, forswearing terrorism and accepting previous agreements.