Republican re-election candidate Donald Trump will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida, the former president announced on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. It will be the first meeting between Trump and Netanyahu since their disagreement after the 2020 elections and also the last item on the latter’s agenda on his trip to the US, during which he will address Congress and meet with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the midst of the Democratic electoral tsunami.
The Israeli prime minister hopes that the meeting with Trump, who many polls indicate will likely win the November 5 presidential election, will open a new page in their relations, after the Republican’s term in office (2017-2021) was so fruitful for Israel’s interests: he moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem and almost definitively put paid to any attempt to resolve the Palestinian issue by forging what he then called the “deal of the century,” the Abraham Accords, through which Israel normalized relations with several Arab countries.
Netanyahu, under mounting international pressure over the Gaza war and, along with the Hamas leadership, in the crosshairs of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, will also be the second world leader to meet Trump as a presidential candidate after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited the former president at Mar-a-Lago nearly two weeks ago after attending NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington.
The last time Netanyahu met Trump was at the White House on September 15, 2020, precisely at the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords. The Israeli prime minister is now courting the Republican for his expected victory in November, at a time when some foreign ministries, such as those of Brazil and Colombia, are encouraging Israel to be held accountable for the very high cost in human lives of the war against Hamas in Gaza. The agreement reached on Tuesday in Beijing by 14 Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Fatah, which has been welcomed with optimism by the UN, adds pressure on Israel.
Trump has held a grudge against Netanyahu for years. “Fuck him,” the Republican told the website Axios about the Israeli prime minister in April 2021, only because he had congratulated President Biden on his 2020 election victory, a result that Trump baselessly disputes. But subsequently, and especially throughout the campaign, as highlighted during the Republican national convention last week, Republicans have defended their solution – Trump’s solution – to the Gaza war, claiming that had they been in power, the conflict would not have happened.
Netanyahu will address the US Congress on Wednesday, meeting in a joint session, after being invited by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian – a confession absolutely devoted to Israel. On Thursday afternoon, he will meet with Biden, who has already recovered from the Covid that has kept him isolated since last Wednesday. And at some point during his visit, supposedly also on Thursday at the White House, he will meet with the vice president, and candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, Kamala Harris, who has been clearer in her position on the war than Biden: she was the first to call for a ceasefire in the war. In theory, as president of the Senate, Harris should co-chair the solemn session of Congress, but a rally in Indianapolis, also on Wednesday, prevents her from doing so. That at least has been the explanation given by her campaign.
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At the meeting with Netanyahu, Harris is expected to underline her commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas, but also to tell him that “it is time for the war to end in a way in which Israel is safe, all hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can enjoy their right to dignity, freedom and self-determination,” according to an advance made by one of her advisers on Monday. The vice president has received significant support in recent hours from pro-Israeli pressure groups, among which the clearly progressive JStreet stands out.
Trump’s verbal and viral incontinence prompted him to post on his Truth Social account that he was going to meet with Netanyahu on Wednesday, the day of the address to Congress, in which he will invite legislators to continue supporting Israel — politically and militarily, after Biden stopped sending 3,500 bombs in May — to completely defeat Hamas. Trump’s advance announcement surprised Netanyahu’s team, as he was already in talks with his host’s collaborators to finalize the details of their meeting on Friday. The former president immediately corrected the announcement and summoned Netanyahu, and the corresponding swarm of media, to the Mar-a-Lago mansion on Friday.
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