Former US President Donald Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday, the first meeting between the two leaders since the Republican candidate for re-election left the White House in January 2021. The meeting, at Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago (Florida), was requested by Netanyahu, sources familiar with the agenda told CNN. It was the culmination of the Israeli head of government’s visit to the US – the first since the start of the war on October 7 – after a speech before Congress in which he defended his management of the offensive against Gaza, and separate meetings with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House. At the end of the meeting, attended by advisers from both sides, Trump assured that he has always maintained “a very good relationship” with his guest, and Netanyahu, that Israel would send a team of negotiators to the ceasefire talks in Rome “probably at the beginning of the week.”
Trump also called the Democratic candidate’s statements the day before the election “disrespectful,” in which she spoke out strongly about the suffering of Palestinian civilians and the need for an immediate ceasefire to end the war. In a very different tone and for a different reason — without a single reference to the victims or the serious humanitarian crisis in the Strip — the Republican candidate had also stressed the need for Israel to “put an end to this” in an interview with Fox News. [la guerra] “fast.” “It can’t go on like this. It’s too long. It’s too much,” he said.
“Israel needs to take care of its PR. Its PR is not good,” he said on Fox. “And they need to do it quickly because the world is not taking this lightly. It’s really unbelievable,” he stressed, more for a question of bad image than for considerations such as the suffering of the population of the Palestinian enclave. In his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for the White House last week in Milwaukee, Trump said that if he had been president instead of Joe Biden, the war in Gaza would not have started and he expressed his willingness to end it quickly.
Trump has not laid out a clear plan for how he would help end the conflict, instead criticizing the Democratic administration for failing to do so. He has at times suggested he would support Israel’s use of greater force in Gaza, in keeping with the belligerent tone of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, in which he called for “more weapons to finish off Hamas faster.”
Trump’s willingness to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza in one fell swoop if elected in November contrasts with Netanyahu’s reported anger at Harris’s remarks to reporters after their 40-minute White House interview on Thursday. The Israeli prime minister fears that the remarks by Biden’s virtual successor as the Democratic candidate could harm negotiations on Gaza, an Israeli official told reporters on condition of anonymity. Since the beginning of the conflict, Netanyahu has given different reasons for the possible derailment of the dialogue, which Washington is promoting, such as Harris’s aforementioned harshness in her remarks on the conflict.
Netanyahu is the second foreign leader to meet Trump in just two weeks, following the visit of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which has greatly unsettled the European Union. The meeting was an opportunity for both to reestablish their relations at critical moments for both: the open criticism of the Israeli for his management of the war and the surprise that Biden’s withdrawal has brought to the 2024 election campaign. Trump boasted at the time of his close personal relationship with Netanyahu, as he recalled on Friday. In open competition with Biden, whom Netanyahu defined as “a proud Zionist” on Wednesday before Congress, he also boasts of being Israel’s closest ally who has ever passed through the White House, although a few days after October 7 he criticized the poor preparation of the Israeli intelligence services (since then, he has retracted those criticisms). By welcoming Netanyahu, Trump is also reaffirming his ties to Israel, as part of his effort to divert Jewish Americans from their former preference to vote for Democrats.
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Around fifty pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered at the entrance to the tycoon’s mansion, closely guarded by a police cordon, in anticipation of mass protests like those on Wednesday in front of Congress, which Netanyahu blamed on Iran in an attempt to divert attention. There were also some demonstrations by citizens with flags bearing the Star of David.
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