Donald Trump may well be good for the Middle East. Far from being isolated, Israel has never had wider or deeper diplomatic contacts and international friendships than now. The route to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may lie through the broader Arab region. And Israel wants to pursue direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership towards a two-state solution even now, in the midst of everything that is happening in the Middle East.
These superficially counterintuitive insights were delivered this week by Tzachi Hanegbi, the Israeli minister in the Prime Minister’s office with responsibility for national security and foreign affairs.
Hanegbi is a heavyweight of the Israeli government, a long-serving and often controversial minister in several previous governments, a senior Likud cabinet minister and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Laconic and soft-spoken, Hanegbi nonetheless has a reputation as a hard man in Israeli politics. He gradually has moved from the right to the centre, and is now a passionate advocate of the two-state solution.
I had a long discussion with him in Sydney this week as he wound up a remarkably low-key but highly influential Australian visit. First, to Donald Trump. “I personally think Donald Trump will be less challenging to Israel than Hillary Clinton would have been,” Hanegbi says.
“In a sense the Israel-US relationship has nothing to do with the personality of the individual leaders. We have had decades of steadily enhancing co-operation. But in the last eight years, especially in the last two or three, we have had more concrete disputes with the President (Barack Obama), which still didn’t interfere with an unprecedented military agreement.
Read the full article by Greg Sheridan at The Australian.
[Also catch Tzachi Hanegbi being interviewed by David Schulberg on J-AIR Radio.]