Watch closely when President Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House Wednesday. Is Netanyahu wearing an unfamiliar face, a smile and a look of relief?
If so, don’t be surprised. After 11 years in office, Netanyahu will be meeting with a Republican president for the first time.
When he met President Bill Clinton in 1996, Clinton left the meeting nonplussed, telling aides, “he thinks he is the superpower.” The two went on to have an icy relationship.
Relations got even frostier with President Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu felt disrespected by from the start. The pageantry that leading heads of government are usually afforded was missing from heir initial meeting in 2010. It began more than six years defined by mutual suspicion, misunderstanding, slights both real and perceived, edging into outright hostility.
We editorialized in December that the United Nations resolution condemning Israel for building new settlements amounted to Obama’s Parthian Shot at the Jewish state.
Trump and Netanyahu are likely to hit it off better. Although Trump evinces little detailed knowledge about Israel, he seems to understand, as his predecessors did not, that Israel shares important values with America and is our only reliable ally in the world’s most volatile region.
Trump has pledged to be the “most pro-Israel president ever,” and we must wait to see what that will mean. He has vowed to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and we expect and hope the U.S. becomes once again a bulwark against anti-Israel measures in the vipers’ nest that is the U.N.
Where Trump stands on other issues is less clear. He has seemed ambivalent about Israel’s building of settlements in areas that would be claimed by Palestinians in a two-state peace deal. He chose David Friedman, a pro-settlement hardliner, as ambassador to Israel. But Trump recently said settlements “may not be helpful.”
Trump is yet more inscrutable on Iran. He and Netanyahu may be able to agree on placing harsher sanctions on the Islamic Republic even as they both conclude that abandoning the nuclear deal may not be feasible. Then there’s the problem of Trump’s ambiguous relationship with Russia, which is working with Iran and its proxies to sow discord across the Middle East, and thus making the neighborhood more perilous for Israel.
Every president enters office pledging his efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. Trump has called the prospect “the ultimate deal,” and tapped his son-in-law Jared Kushner to be his envoy in this process.
But changing America’s relationship with Israel won’t require Trump to secure Middle East peace, something that will ultimately be up to Israel and the Palestinians. Nor will it require Trump to fall in line with Netanyahu (who’s being pulled rightward by more hardline elements in his conservative coalition) on everything from settlements to the Iran nuclear deal.
Mainly, it will mean making it clear that Washington, as Obama once unconvincingly put it, “has Israel’s back.”
