On Monday, an unusually camera-shy Benjamin Netanyahu hopped on a flight to Washington. It wasn’t totally clear he would. Officially, Netanyahu was travelling to attend the funeral of the late senator Lindsey Graham, last of the neocons, his supporter and friend. Unofficially, he wanted to get another face-to-face meeting with President Donald Trump. But some “sources” around Trump hinted that the President would be too busy to squeeze the Israeli PM into his diary. A Trump snub would be embarrassing for Bibi, and suddenly he, too, was very busy and might not be able to make the funeral after all.
The Israeli public has soured on Trump, feeling like he abandoned the country in the middle of a war
Well, Netanyahu did fly to DC, and he’s due to meet Trump too, with an unusually long list of worries and complaints to discuss. At the top of the list: Iran, of course. On Friday, the Trump administration was briefing that the daily bombings on Iranian targets would be massively stepped up. US troops were surged back into the region, and commando raids, land invasions and a full resumption of the US-Israeli strikes were about to begin any day. Pickaxe Mountain, the vital Iranian nuclear base, would be destroyed. And then over the weekend, Trump unilaterally declared another ceasefire and the war’s off again.
