Even as the anti-overhaul protesters rallied in their hundreds outside New York City’s Intercontinental Hotel, warning that the prime minister is bent on destroying Israeli democracy by crushing the independence of the judiciary, Biden greeted Netanyahu on Wednesday with a four-times repeated “welcome” and the offer of a White House get-together “by the end of the year.”
The president had said in March that Netanyahu needed to “walk away” from his planned judicial overhaul package. The prime minister instead enacted its first component in July, barring the courts from using the “reasonableness” measure to review and if needed strike down government and ministerial decisions. And he stressed as recently as Monday that he still intends to pass the core legislation, to remake and politicize the process by which Israel chooses its judges — something he disingenuously told Elon Musk was a “minor correction.”
But while Biden, in his opening public remarks, reminded Netanyahu of the imperative to uphold the “democratic values that lie at the heart of our partnership, including checks and balances in our systems,” and Netanyahu responded with the vague pledge that Israel’s commitment to democracy “will never change,” the president was plainly not primarily focused on publicly haranguing Netanyahu over the issue.
Rather, he was telling Netanyahu, and the people of Israel back home, that the modern Jewish state’s dream and goal of normalized relations in the region, advanced under “previous administrations,” could be widened further — as evidenced, for example, by the newly declared plan for an economic “corridor” linking India to Europe via, crucially, Saudi Arabia and Israel. “I think it’s a big deal, and we’re working on a lot more together,” said Biden. READ MORE