The big questions: Will he meet Trump and how to discuss Iran without getting mired in the U.S. election campaign.
Amichai Stein
(JNS)
“There’s one thing I can tell you for certain, there will be more eyes on Biden, following his decision to quit, than on Netanyahu, during their meeting this week in Washington,” a U.S. official tells JNS.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew on Monday to the United States where he will deliver his fourth address to a joint session of Congress (the most by any foreign leader) and is slated to meet President Joe Biden at the White House, his first visit there since he entered office in December 2022.
During his time in Washington, Netanyahu will engage with the top two Democrats, one who still sits in the Oval Office and another whom Biden has designated as his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Several questions surround the visit.
Will Netanyahu meet with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?
It is almost certain that Netanyahu won’t meet Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance. “The senator will not be in attendance for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress as he has duties to fulfill as the Republican nominee for vice president,” Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, tells JNS.
“Senator Vance stands steadfastly with the people of Israel in their fight to defend their homeland, eradicate terrorist threats and bring back their countrymen held hostage,” Miller says.
If there is a meeting with Trump, it won’t be in DC.
“There is a will, but there are scheduling problems,” sources involved in the attempts to schedule a meeting tell JNS.
Netanyahu wants the meeting, to clear up a certain degree of discord with the former president.
After Biden’s announcement that he won’t be the Democratic candidate in the 2024 elections, the question arises: Will this affect the hostage deal talks with Hamas?
Israel is dispatching a new delegation for talks on the deal on Thursday, so this will be an opportunity for the U.S. administration to receive answers and perhaps try to change the Israeli response to the current proposal.
“I think that Biden’s decision to quit won’t have a huge effect on the talks,” sources involved in the hostage talks tell JNS.
“The main U.S. official leading the talk is the head of the CIA William Burns, and he is outside of the political system,” say the sources.
Netanyahu might try to see what he can gain from the U.S. if he goes for a hostage deal, and then try to sell the deal to his governing coalition without it collapsing.
The Iranian question
How can the prime minister talk about Iran—without it affecting the U.S. election campaign?
During his over 90-minute speech at the Republican National Convention on July 18, Trump said, “Iran was broke [under his administration] and now it’s close to nuclear weapons.” This, and other statements by Trump, have turned Iran into an issue in the current U.S. election cycle.
“The prime minister will have to walk a very tricky tightrope here,” Dr. Eyal Hulata, a senior international fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Israeli national security adviser, tells JNS.
“After all, Trump is using the Iranian issue to show that the administration is weak, and Netanyahu very much likes to talk about the Iranian issue, and here he will not be allowed to be seen as someone who enters the cauldron of American politics. So, I’m not sure it’s possible at all,” says Hulata.
How many Democrats will be absent from the speech?
Fifty-eight Democratic senators and congressmen skipped Netanyahu’s address to Congress in 2015. This time around, they will have an excuse, the U.S. election campaign.
The big difference is that for this speech, as opposed to 2015, Democratic names are also on the invitation to speak and Biden is scheduled to meet Netanyahu. When the speech was arranged, the IDF was at the peak of its Rafah offensive, and the crisis between the U.S. and Israel on weapons shipments was public.
Now matters between Netanyahu and the administration have cooled down a bit.
Amichai Stein is the diplomatic correspondent for Kan 11, IPBC.
Image: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with then-Vice President Joe Biden at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Jan. 21, 2016. Photo by Haim Zach/GPO.
