Bibi Confident U.S. Elections Will Not Harm Relations With Israel
Image by getty images
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reassured his Cabinet that relations between the Unites States and Israel will remain strong “whoever is elected” president in U.S. elections this week.
“Whoever is elected the new president, I am convinced that US-Israel relations, which are solid and strong, will not only remain as such, but will further strengthen,” Netanyahu said Sunday at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting.
He also called on the United States to continue to help seek a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict through direct negotiations between the two sides and not through international institutions such as the United Nations.
“We also expect that the US will remain faithful to the principle that it has set over many years, that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute can be resolved only by direct negotiations without preconditions, and of course, not in decisions by the UN or other international institutions,” he said.
Israeli officials fear that once the election is over, President Barack Obama will advance a proposal in the United Nations Security Council to lay out his vision for a solution to the conflict, a first for the U.S., which traditionally uses its veto to stop the advance of anti-Israel proposals.
Netanyahu also said in his statement: “I would like to note that the alliance with the US is the first, most fundamental and most important of all of our relationships. Thus it has been and thus it will continue.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
