Israel remains America’s closest Middle East ally, but there are likely to be disagreements when new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett makes his first visit to the White House on Thursday.
The far-right Mr. Bennett, who unseated longtime leader Benjamin Netanyahu in June, says he’ll push President Biden to take a much harder posture toward Iran, Israel‘s archenemy.
While Biden administration officials say the meeting will show U.S.-Israel unity, Mr. Bennett has made headlines ahead of time by vowing to press the president to stop trying to revive the defunct, Obama-era Iranian nuclear deal.
“I will tell President Biden that it is time to stop the Iranians … not give them a lifeline in the form of reentering into an expired nuclear deal,” he said at a Cabinet meeting Sunday in Jerusalem.
Former President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran deal in 2018. Mr. Biden has spent the past six months trying to revive it, even as Iranian leaders refuse direct talks with U.S. diplomats.
Mr. Bennett told his aides the deal is simply “no longer relevant, even by the standards of those who once thought that it was,” according to a report by The Times of Israel.
The prime minister’s two-day visit to Washington will also include discussions on a range of other fronts.
He‘s slated to meet Wednesday with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin before gathering with Mr. Biden on Thursday.
The visit comes as Israel faces a gradual resurgence of hostilities on its southern border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, barely three months after an 11-day war with the Islamist militant group left 265 dead in Gaza and 13 in Israel.
The Biden administration‘s desire to help rebuild Gaza without channeling aid to Hamas, as well as wider regional security issues and the potential expansion of the former Trump administration’s historic Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab powers are all likely to be on the agenda.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week that Mr. Bennett‘s visit “will strengthen the enduring partnership between the United States and Israel, reflect the deep ties between our governments and our people, and underscore the United States’ unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.”
But the extent to which the two men will show unity on Iran policy remains to be seen.
Friction over Iran
In his remarks Sunday, Mr. Bennett warned that Iran is “advancing uranium enrichment” and said he intends to present Mr. Biden with “an orderly plan that we have formulated in the past two months to curb the Iranians, both in the nuclear sphere and vis-à-vis regional aggression.”
Biden administration officials have shown no sign of backing off their pursuit of a renewed nuclear deal with Iran, even as the effort stalled over the summer in the face of increasingly bare-knuckle rhetorical posturing from President Ebrahim Raisi, Iran‘s new hardline leader.
Mr. Raisi has vowed to fight “tyrannical sanctions” that Washington reimposed on Iran following the former Trump administration’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018. In pulling out, Mr. Trump said Tehran was violating the spirit of the deal by using sanctions relief it had received under the terms of the agreement to fund terrorists around the Middle East.
When it was reached in 2015, the nuclear deal had dramatically eased sanctions on Iran in exchange for limitations to — and U.N. inspections of — Iranian nuclear activities. While Iran claims the activities are purely peaceful, the U.S., Israel and others accuse Tehran of having long pursued nuclear weapons in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Mr. Netanyahu was one of the nuclear deal’s biggest critics, and Mr. Bennett has embraced a similar posture since ending Mr. Netanyahu’s tumultuous 12-year run as prime minister.
Mr. Bennett‘s rise to the top in Jerusalem surprised many on the international stage.
The 49-year-old tech industry millionaire is the son of American immigrants to Israel and a former head of a major Israeli settlers group in the largely Palestinian West Bank.
After repeated failures by the centrist-conservative Mr. Netanyahu to form a ruling coalition among Israel‘s widely varied and divided political parties, Mr. Bennett emerged in June atop a cobbled together alliance of eight disparate parties — ranging from Jewish ultra-nationalists to a small Arab faction.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Bennett are expected to publicly praise each other despite their varied political stances and sharply different personal backgrounds.
Mr. Biden, 78, is a career politician and left-leaning centrist, while Mr. Bennett made millions in the New York and Israeli software markets as a young man prior to jumping into politics and building alliances across Israel‘s ideological spectrum.
One area the two are likely to try and show unity on is the future of the so-called Abraham Accords.
The former Trump administration sought to advance Middle East peace by putting Israeli-Palestinian tensions in the background while instead pursuing diplomatic normalizations between Israel and the major Arab powers.
Unity over accords
The historic accords eased regional enmity and isolation for the only Jewish state in the Middle East by getting the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain and Morocco to become the first Arab countries in decades to recognize Israel‘s existence and to establish diplomatic relations and normal trade and travel ties.
The Biden administration has thus far not pursued the accords with the same fervor as the former Trump administration, although The Associated Press reported in June that the White House had begun laying the groundwork for a renewed push to encourage more Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel.
Saudi Arabia is among the Arab powers that have yet to join the accords.
While a direct buy-in from Riyadh is unlikely in the short term, national security sources say Mr. Biden and Mr. Bennett will rally to expand the accords as a way to keep smoothing Arab-Israeli tensions that soared at the start of the summer following the 11-day Israeli-Palestinian war.
But the threat of a new spike in violence between Israel and Hamas — an Islamist terrorist group that has long received support from Iran — has threatened to derail efforts to expand the accords, let alone attempts by the Biden administration to push directly for Israel-Palestinian peace.
Indirect negotiations between the two sides to reach even an arrangement for the reconstruction of Gaza following the Israeli military’s pounding of the area in May have broken down over the past week.
Hamas has launched incendiary balloons into southern Israel and staged violent demonstrations on the border. Israeli warplanes have responded with a series of fresh airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza.
With that violence as a backdrop, Mr. Biden is unlikely to press Mr. Bennett for any major concessions to the Palestinians in Gaza or even in the West Bank, despite the administration’s frustration at expanding Israeli settlement activity there on land that Palestinians seek for their own independent state.
A report by Reuters news agency noted that while Mr. Bennett has advocated in favor of Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, he has moved cautiously on the settlement issue as prime minister.
The news agency said Israel‘s scheduled approval last week of 2,200 new Israeli settler homes — along with 800 houses for Palestinians — was postponed, apparently with the goal of avoiding dissonance with Washington ahead of Mr. Bennett‘s visit.