Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims to be optimistic about a new Trump administration and hopeful that the next American president-elect and the Arab states can help to bring about “two states for two peoples” in Israel and Palestine.
“I know Donald Trump. I know him very well. And I think his attitude, his support for Israel is clear. He feels very warmly about the Jewish state and about the Jewish people. There’s no question about that,” Netanyahu said in an interview that aired Sunday night.
The long-serving prime minister admitted there’s been a thawing of relations between Israel and some of the nation’s Arab neighbors, including intelligence sharing. He even admitted some hope that Israel can recognize a Palestinian state in the near future.
“I’ve lifted checkpoints quite a bit and we’re trying to create bridges and thoroughfares so we can have freer movement [between Palestinian and Israeli territory].
“Palestinians know – they look at Aleppo in Syria, and they look at Yemen and they look at Libya and they look at other places – and they know that our intention is coexistence,” he said on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
Netanyahu said that he’d “like to have President Trump, when he gets into the White House, help me work on that. I’d like to see if the Arab states can help me achieve that. It’s a new reality. A new possibility,.”
He is also hopeful that a new administration will take a dimmer view of relations with Iran than the Obama administration did.
Journalist Lesley Stahl noted that Israel under Netanyahu took the almost unprecedented step of publicly opposing the Iran deal that President Barack Obama pushed for and got.
The Israeli prime minister emphasized that his opposition was not “borne of any disrespect” for Obama but rather a very serious disagreement about how that deal would affect the state of Israel.
As for President-elect Trump, Netanyahu said “I have about five things in my mind” to tell him about how to walk back some of the American concessions to Iran.
“Well, give me one,” Stahl prompted.
“I’d like to talk to the president before I talk to ’60 Minutes'” Netanyahu said, and laughed.
