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With Israel’s election only two weeks away, Benjamin Netanyahu will get to showcase his close ties with Donald Trump in a U.S. visit days after the president backed Israel’s hold over the occupied Golan Heights.
Axar.az reports citing Reuters that, the prime minister’s White House meeting with Trump on Monday could be overshadowed in the United States by the expected release of details from a confidential report into an investigation into possible collusion between the president and Russia in his 2016 U.S. election campaign.
But Netanyahu, facing possible indictment in three corruption cases and denying any wrongdoing, will play to a domestic audience in highlighting what he hails as the strongest bond ever between an Israeli leader and an American president.
Before returning on Thursday from the long-planned trip to the home stretch of a close race, Netanyahu can expect a warm reception from Trump, who along with the First Lady, will also host a dinner for Netanyahu and his wife, Sara.
Trump helped to set the scene for his ally on Thursday, announcing that the time had come to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, strategic territory that Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 in a move that did not win international support.
On Sunday Israel’s acting foreign minister, Israel Katz, said on Twitter that Trump would sign a decree codifying such recognition, with Netanyahu present, on Monday.
The president’s move on the Golan was widely seen in Israel - where Trump is a popular figure - as an attempt to provide an election boost to right-wing Netanyahu, who had pressed for yet another departure from long-standing U.S. policy in one of the world’s most volatile regions.
Trump had already fulfilled two major items on Netanyahu’s wish list, recognizing contested Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017 and moving the American embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv last May.
Those steps angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, also captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It also set them firmly against a peace plan Washington says it will present after the Israeli ballot.
“We have never had such a bond between the prime minister of Israel and an American president,” Netanyahu, who has featured Trump on his campaign billboards, told reporters upon his departure from Tel Aviv.
For Trump, Netanyahu’s embrace resonates with U.S. evangelists - a core constituency for the Republican leader, who is up for re-election in 2020.
Date
2019.03.24 / 20:39
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Author
Axar.az
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