Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is expected to travel to the United States next week to meet with President Joe Biden.
The meeting, set for next Thursday (August 26), is scheduled to take place at the White House in Washington, DC, according to US officials. A meeting set for July didn’t happen because of Biden’s schedule conflicts and Bennett’s domestic political crises.
Bennett’s first visit to the White House comes as the president is engaged in dealing with the worst foreign policy crisis since the start of his term this past January.
Israeli journalist Barak Ravid wrote Wednesday night that although the Israeli government has been careful not to criticize the Biden administration in public, “privately several senior Israeli officials have told me they were stunned by what they saw as a major US intelligence failure.”
Ravid added that Israeli officials “hope the Afghanistan crisis will make the Biden administration rethink potentially pulling US forces out of Iraq and Syria.”
Netanyahu: In 2013, John Kerry Offered Israel to Adopt ‘Afghanistan Model’ with PA
Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday in a Facebook post that back in 2013, he declined an offer by the US to adopt the now-failed “Afghanistan Model” that would have seen Israel rely on Palestinian Authority police for security.
“The message was clear – the ‘Afghanistan model’ is the model the US seeks to apply to the Palestinian issue as well,” he wrote. “I estimated then that as soon as the US left Afghanistan, everything would collapse.”
Netanyahu pointed out that the extremist Taliban Islamic regime has now conquered Afghanistan and warned the regime “will turn it into a state of terror that will endanger world peace.”
Israeli National Security Adviser and National Security Council chief Eyal Hualta traveled last month to Washington with diplomatic adviser Shimrit Meir.
The two aides met with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and NSC Mideast coordinator Brett McGurk.