(DCWatchdog.com) – Joe Biden insulted vital US ally Israel by reiterating his refusal to invite Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House because he disagrees with Netanyahu’s agenda.
Biden hasn’t extended a state visit invitation to Netanyahu even though the latter assumed the Prime Minister position more than six months ago, heading an alliance of conservative and right-wing parties.
In March, the president openly stated that he wouldn’t invite Netanyahu, the longest-serving state leader of Israel, to the White House because of the latter’s controversial reforms to “Israel’s powerful judiciary… [that] largely parallel existing practice in the US,” Breitbart News points out.
Biden doubled down on his refusal to meet with Israel’s Prime Minister in a pre-recorded CNN interview aired on Sunday.
This time he focused on the five-party government led by Netanyahu, saying the Israeli leader should first “work through … his existing problems in terms of his coalition.”
According to the president, some of Netanyahu’s coalition partners are the “most extreme members of Cabinet that I’ve seen” since meeting late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the early 1970s. He clarified he didn’t consider Meir an extremist.
The report notes that Biden was quick to meet with both rotating prime ministers in the previous left-right coalition government of Israel, which included an Arab party denying the country’s right to exist.
In his interview, the president claimed to be an “unyielding supporter of Israel.” He said some of the problems in the Israeli-Arab conflict were caused by the Palestinian leaders, who created a “vacuum for extremism.”
At the same time, Biden scolded members of Netanyahu’s cabinet for believing that Jews could “settle anywhere where we want” in the historical territories of Judea and Samaria, which Israel took from Jordan while defending itself in the 1967 war.
The territories are still disputed, and the Palestinian Authority administers some.
Biden declared his hopes Netanyahu “will continue to move toward moderation.” The report notes he seemed to make US support for Israel conditional on ideology rather than democracy and a strategic alliance.
The president argued a possible Israel-Saudi Arabia peace deal from the final months of the Trump administration was “a little way off.”
President Joe Biden doubled down on refusing to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pay a customary visit to the White House, despite the fact that Netanyahu was elected last year by the Israeli people. https://t.co/rYTkPsCpUg
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) July 9, 2023
