Trump - Netanyahu to discuss Palestine at White House
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JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warmly welcomed Donald Trump’s election as US president, will visit the White House on Wednesday to test his supportive campaign pledges against emerging policy.
Since taking office, Trump has edged away from unqualified backing for Netanyahu’s drive for more Jewish settlement in territory the Palestinians claim for a state, and also from a pledge to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Mark Heller, a political scientist at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, said the embassy issue was “marginal, to the extent that such a promise is unlikely to be kept”.
The prospect of a Trump rethink challenges the hopes of the settler lobby, a driving force in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government, and others on the Israeli right who want to see at least partial annexation of the West Bank.
In an interview published on Friday in the pro-Netanyahu daily Israel Hayom, Trump said settlement growth was not “good for peace”.
Netanyahu has announced more than 5,000 settlement homes since Trump’s January 20 inauguration, as well as the first new settlement for more than 20 years. Around 600,000 Israelis currently live in settlements in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, communities considered illegal by the United Nations and most world powers.
“In Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu will test his room to manoeuvre with Trump on settlements,” Heller told AFP. “For the past three weeks Donald Trump has been speaking differently,” said Michael Oren, deputy minister in charge of diplomacy in Netanyahu’s office. “We must act cautiously.”
Netanyahu himself said at Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting that strengthening Israel’s ties with its historic ally “requires a responsible and considered policy, and that is how I intend to act”.
“I have navigated Israeli-US relations in a prudent manner and I will continue to do so now,” he told ministers and media. His comments may have been aimed at education minister and staunch settlement backer Naftali Bennett, of the far-right Jewish Home party.
On Sunday, Bennett urged Netanyahu “not to miss an historic opportunity” provided by Trump’s election and to drop his declared support for a two-state solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
“Netanyahu, please make it clear to Trump in our name: There will not be a Palestinian state in the heart of our land,” he wrote on Twitter. “It will not happen.”
