Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel
When Bibi Netanyahu visited President Trump in early March, they dispensed with the traditional joint press conference, thus avoiding awkward questions. Trump had a smorgasbord of issues on which he preferred not to take reporters’ questions.
Netanyahu is entangled in a series of corruption scandals in Israel and was hanging on to the premiership by a thread. In Washington, he received his usual standing ovation at the annual AIPAC conference, but at home Israeli police said they have enough evidence to indict him on bribery, fraud and breach of trust in two cases.
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, with whom Netanyahu has stayed in New York on past visits, has been stripped of his top security clearance, which experts say will hurt his assigned task of planning the White House’s new Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
What deal? The Israeli paper Ha’aretz reported that the Trump-Netanyahu meeting “reflected the rapid death of the peace-deal – before it was even born.
” And although the White House says it’s almost complete, Netanyahu admitted to Israeli reporters, “We didn’t see a draft of their peace plan and I can’t say in their name what there is or isn’t [in it].”
