PM off to New York for Trump meeting on Wednesday, address to UN on Thursday
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to leave on Tuesday for New York, where he will meet US President Donald Trump and address the UN General Assembly, amid concerns of a crisis because Moscow blamed Israel for Syria’s downing of a Russian spy plane.
The crisis with Russia is expected to be one of the issues Netanyahu will discuss with Trump. When the US president met Russian President Vladimir Putin in July, Syria and Israel’s concerns about Iranian military entrenchment there were a significant part of the conversation.
This will be the fifth time since Trump took office in January 2017 that Netanyahu will meet with the US president. They last met in Washington in March.
The meeting comes shortly before a second round of US economic sanctions are to kick in against Iran in November, and as the US has taken a number of punitive measures against the Palestinians for failing to enter peace negotiations and for boycotting US negotiators. The meeting also comes as Jerusalem anticipates the eventual roll-out of the US administration’s long-awaited blueprint for Middle East peace.
Netanyahu is scheduled to meet Trump on the same day that the US president will take the rare move of chairing a session of the UN Security Council. The US currently holds the rotating presidency of the council, and the meeting is expected to focus to a large extent on Iran.
The Prime Minister’s Office has not released a list of which other leaders he will be meeting on the sidelines of the UN session.
Netanyahu, who will be addressing the UN General Assembly for the ninth time since taking office for a second time in 2009 – the only year he skipped was 2010 – is scheduled to speak on Thursday, the last day of the General Assembly’s annual General Debate, which brings leaders from all around the world to New York.
He is scheduled to speak shortly after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in an address expected to focus on Iran, its aggressive behavior in the region and its attempts to entrench itself in Syria. In addition, he will likely respond to at least some of the accusations Abbas is sure to level at Israel.
Netanyahu, according to sources close to him, considers these speeches to the UN as extremely important, and devotes a good deal of time preparing them.
Last year’s speech was noted for the phrase he coined regarding the Iranian nuclear accord: “Fix it or nix it.” In previous years he has used props to get his point across, such as a cartoonish picture of a bomb in 2012 to show where Israel’s red line was regarding Iran’s nuclearization, and his brandishing original plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 2009 to push back against then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial.
And in 2015, Netanyahu used a 44-second pause to ram home his point of the world’s silence in the face of Iran’s threats to Israel’s existence.
The prime minister is scheduled to fly home Saturday night, arriving just before the onset of Simhat Torah. He has timed his arrival in New York on Tuesday night to come after the end of the second day of Sukkot there, which is a holy day for Jews living in the Diaspora. •