Iranian Nuclear Deal Tops Trump, Netanyahu Talks

But Trump should be clear about what it will take for him to indeed dedicate time and political capital to this effort. “We made the decision before all this info came out”.

The meeting with Mr. Trump on Wednesday is expected to set the tone for the American-Israeli relationship, which was notably frosty under President Barack Obama because of Israeli settlements in occupied territory, Israel’s vehement opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran and personality clashes with Mr. Netanyahu.

“The embassy is not an easy decision”, Trump said in a recent interview with an Israeli newspaper.

“We have to wait and see whether he will be reciprocated in the same way that he hopes and whether he might be disappointed”. And he backed off a campaign pledge to relocate the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

In the interview with the newspaper owned by billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a Republican Party and Trump campaign donor, the president walked back some of the positions he took on Israel during his free-wheeling campaign, specifically regarding settlements and the USA embassy.

The note of caution coincided with a recalibration of statements from the Trump administration on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, bringing them more in line with traditional American positions after earlier indications from the Trump campaign that there would be a relaxing of United States constraints on Israel.

And in December after his election win, he nominated bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman to serve as the US ambassador to Israel, signaling his intention to follow through with this campaign promise. That month, top aide to the president Kellyanne Conway also called the promised relocation a “very big priority” for the next administration. According to Israeli media, the issues of embassy and settlements are not atop the agenda: Iran is.

Erdan belongs to the right-wing Likud party, many of whose legislators often espouse a harder line than Netanyahu himself.

Trump has said he would love the challenge of negotiating a long-elusive peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. There is so much land left.

“For the rest of my life there is one thing that is going to be consistent. that I’m a black man in America”, he said.

However, he has also announced plans for the construction of 6,000 more settlement homes and has faced pressure from far-right figures within his coalition to annex parts of the West Bank viewed by the Palestinians as part of their future state. Netanyahu has also floated the idea of constructing completely new settlements – the first in years.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that Mr Trump was informed by White House counsel that Mr Flynn had misled senior officials weeks before he demanded his resignation on Monday night.

“I want to be a “voice for the voiceless” and I can not do that by going on this kind of trip to Israel”, Bennett said. Israel has been quietly reaching out to Gulf states which share its fear of a resurgent Iran. I want to be a “voice for the voiceless”, and I can not do that by going on this kind of a trip to Israel. He urged Israel to “be reasonable with respect to peace”.

Whether Trump adopts such an approach remains to be seen, though it seems unlikely.

In fact, the nuclear deal strengthened ties between Israel and its neighbors “more than I think numerous Arab leaders even want their citizens to know”, Corker added.

Netanyahu might find out during his two-day trip to the United States capital that “no American president-not even the galactically idiosyncratic Donald Trump-can escape the political laws of gravity that govern the transition from the campaign trail to the White House”, writes Aaron David Miller, a Wilson Center scholar and Middle East advisor to past Republican and Democratic administrations.