President Joe Biden is set to hold a long-anticipated meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday in New York, marking the first time the two leaders will meet one-on-one since the prime minister returned to office last December.
The meeting will be their first opportunity to confer face-to-face amid tensions over the Israeli leader’s judicial reform efforts.
Biden and Netanyahu will “discuss a range of bilateral and regional issues focused on the shared democratic values between the United States and Israel and a vision for a more stable and prosperous and integrated region, as well as to compare notes on effectively countering and deterring Iran,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters last week.
The meeting, notably, will take place on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly rather than the White House, where Biden will host Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky later this week.
Netanyahu has not been invited to the White House since he re-took his nation’s top post, a move widely interpreted as linked to the Biden administration’s disapproval of the Israeli government’s proposed judicial reforms.
Earlier this year as mass protests and strikes brought Israel to a standstill, Biden offered an unusually stinging rebuke of the proposed reforms.
“Like many strong supporters of Israel, I’m very concerned. I’m concerned that they get this straight. They cannot continue down this road. I’ve sort of made that clear,” Biden told reporters in March.
“Hopefully the prime minister will act in a way that he can work out some genuine compromise,” he said, adding “That remains to be seen.”
Israel’s Supreme Court held hearings on the law to curb its powers last week.
Netanyahu’s office trumpeted in July that he had been “invited” to…
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