Netanyahu will meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago, mending a years-long rift

Donald Trump will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time in four years.

As president, Mr Trump exceeded his predecessors in fulfilling the Israeli leader’s top wishes from the United States.

Yet by the time the former president left the White House, relations between the two had broken down after Mr Netanyahu rapidly congratulated Joe Biden on his 2020 presidential victory.

Both are interested in overcoming their differences.

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For Mr Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, the meeting could cast him as an ally and statesman, as well as sharpen efforts by Republicans to portray themselves as the party most loyal to Israel.

That is as divisions among Americans over US support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza open cracks in what has been decades of strong bipartisan backing for Israel, the biggest recipient of US aid.

For Mr Netanyahu, who was in the United States to address Congress and meet with incumbent President Joe Biden, repairing relations with Mr Trump is imperative because he may once again become president of the United States, Israel’s main arms supplier and protector.

For both men, Friday’s meeting at Mar-a-Lago will highlight their home audiences’ depiction of themselves as strong leaders who have gotten big things done on the world stage and can again.

One political gamble for Mr Netanyahu is whether he could get more of the terms he wants in any deal on a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release and his much-hoped-for closing of a normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia if he waits out the Biden administration in hopes that Mr Trump wins.

“Benjamin Netanyahu has spent much of his career in the last two decades in tethering himself to the Republican Party,” said Aaron David Miller, a former US diplomat for Arab-Israeli negotiations, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

For the next six months, that means “mending ties with an irascible, angry president,” Mr Miller said, meaning Mr Trump.

Relations between the two soured in 2021 after the Israeli prime minister became one of the first world leaders to congratulate Mr Biden for his presidential election victory, disregarding  Mr Trump’s false claim he had won.

“Bibi could have stayed quiet,” Mr Trump said in an interview with an Israel newspaper back then. “He made a terrible mistake.”

The pair last met at a September 2020 White House signing ceremony for the signature diplomatic achievement of both men’s political careers.

The accord brokered by the Trump administration involved the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain agreeing to establish normal diplomatic relations with Israel.

For Israel, it amounted to the two countries formally recognising it for the first time. It was a major step in what Israel hopes will be an easing of tensions and a broadening of economic ties with its Arab neighbours.

In public postings and statements after his break with Mr Netanyahu, the former president portrayed himself as having stuck his neck out for Israel as president and Mr Netanyahu paying him back with disloyalty.

Mr Trump also has criticised Israel’s prime minister on other points, faulting him as “not prepared” for the October 7 Hamas attacks that started the war in Gaza, for example.

In his high-profile speech to Congress on Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu gave recognition to Mr Biden, who has kept up military and diplomatic support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza despite opposition from within his Democratic Party.

However, Mr Netanyahu praised Mr Trump, thanking him “for all the things” he did for Israel.

Mr Netanyahu listed actions by the Trump administration long-sought by Israeli governments — the US officially saying Israel had sovereignty over the Golan Heights, captured from Syria during a 1967 war; a tougher policy toward Iran; and declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, breaking with longstanding US policy that Jerusalem’s status should be decided in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

“I appreciated that,” Mr Trump told Fox & Friends on Thursday, referring to Mr Netanyahu’s praise.

He did not quiet his criticism, however, of Israel’s conduct of the war, which has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians.

“I want him to finish up and get it done quickly. You gotta get it done quickly, because they are getting decimated with his publicity,”  Mr Trump said in Thursday’s interview.

“Israel is not very good at public relations, I’ll tell you that,” he added.