A rift between the former and future Israeli prime minister and Democrats resulted from Benjamin Netanyahu accepting a Republican invitation to testify before Congress in 2015 to criticize the Obama administration’s Iran policy.
Netanyahu now claims that the choice contributed to the establishment of covert relationships with Arab nations that, five years later, resulted in the Abraham Accords, the 2020 agreements mediated by the Trump administration and normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab nations.”
“We received phone calls in real-time from the Gulf States saying that they couldn’t believe what your prime minister was doing.
He is, after all, up against the world’s most powerful man, the American president, but if he’s willing to do that, we’d like to strengthen our ties even more, which led to the secret meetings between myself and Gulf leaders in 2015,” stated Netanyahu on Saturday.
That resulted in the Abraham Accords’ framework being established.
Netanyahu was addressing the annual Republican Jewish Coalition conference while discussing the advantages of a speech that appeared to be intended to inflame partisan tensions in the United States.
He became the first Israeli prime minister, elected or not, to address a Jewish political group in the United States with his live speech from Israel.
Netanyahu claimed he could not go into more detail on the contacts with the Gulf States.
In his book, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special adviser to Donald Trump, said that Netanyahu nearly scuttled the transactions numerous times.
After being questioned by Norm Coleman, the RJC conference’s chairman, on why he accepted the invitation to speak in Congress despite the fact that the choice had not been made with White House approval, Netanyahu related his tale to the audience.
John Boehner invited American House Speaker for the Republicans Netanyahu, the Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2015, who went against the convention by keeping the invitation a secret from the White House and from Democrats in Congress until the very last moment.
Before Boehner extended the official invitation, Netanyahu and his envoy to Washington, Ron Dermer, agreed to keep the information a secret.
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