(DCWatchdog.com) – President Joe Biden has failed to congratulate Israel’s new Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after last Tuesday, a political alliance led by the latter won the Israeli general election and set out to form a government.
Netanyahu’s conservative party Likud won 32 seats in Israel’s 120-seat legislature, the Knesset, but its coalition with three smaller right-wing parties scored a combined total of 64 seats.
This result has given the incoming Israeli Cabinet the most significant and stable parliamentary majority in a long time after last week Israel held its fifth general election in the past four years.
Conservative Benjamin Netanyahu is already Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister, with a combined tenure of 15 years after two prior stints as the nation’s leader in 1996-1999 and 2009-2021.
Several days after Netanyahu’s electoral triumph, President Joe Biden still has not congratulated him in any way even though Israel is one of America’s most important international allies, The Times of Israel reported, as cited by Breitbart News.
Only a few foreign leaders had congratulated Netanyahu by last Friday, possibly waiting for him to formalize his new ruling coalition and Cabinet.
Yet, shortly after the election results were finalized on Thursday, global leaders such as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban posted congratulatory messages for Netanyahu on Twitter.
On Thursday, Netanyahu was contacted by US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides, who offered congratulations on the part of the US government and said he was looking forward to collaborating to advance shared values.
According to Israel’s Channel 12, Nides also told the new old leader of Israel that he would get a call from Biden in the next few days.
The US ambassador did not, though, that Biden was busy with the Democratic Party’s campaigning ahead of America’s midterm election, which is taking place on Tuesday, November 8.
At the same time, however, the US President congratulated Brazil’s newly elected Socialist President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, after the latter narrowly won the presidential vote on October 30.
Biden first issued an official statement on Lula’s victory and then followed up with a congratulatory telephone call the next day, even though the results from Brazil’s presidential election remained very close. Conservative incumbent Jair Bolosnaro, an ally of former US President Donald Trump, was disputing them.
When Joe Biden entered the White House in January 2021, he went a full 28 days before even having a telephone conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter was Israel’s Prime Minister also back then.
Pundits construed that as a sign that under Biden, the US administration would not seek to be as close with Netanyahu as Israel’s leader as past US administrations have been.
Incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already busy forming a government, but has yet to receive a congratulatory phone call from President Joe Biden, several days after the result in the Nov. 1 election was finalized. https://t.co/z3IDjQk37I
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 6, 2022
