When I was serving in Washington, I was part of a small forum of diplomats in key positions. We held one of our meetings when relations between Israel and the White House were at their rockiest under former President Obama. Newspaper headlines and talk shows celebrated the crisis and the dispute. The phone lines form the Israeli Embassy to the White House and the UN Security Council were burning up, and not always with nice words.
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Needless to say, Israel was the talk of that same meeting, but not in the way I had expected. Surprisingly, the consensus in the room was that most countries represented would be happy to embrace the worst day in Israeli-US relations as a new peak in their own relations with the world's strongest superpower.
Just before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the US, the understandable insight that bilateral relations are built on shared values, deep mutual commitment, common interests, and a tradition of cooperation at all levels is of unparalleled important to understanding the new few months to come. They will be marked by new stances, new rhetoric, and of course, figures that will become the face of our alliance with America, but nothing essential will change.
On the first day post-Trump, Israel will realize that there is a new resident of the White House, one that might hold a different worldview than his predecessor when it comes to a solution to the Palestinian conflict and how Iran should be handled, but this resident also has a deep, uncompromising commitment to Israel's existence and security. The American side will realize that the days of watching the relations of the Trump and Netanyahu governments from the side are over, and that it is in both countries' interest to build a relationship that includes the greatest possible amount of coordination and cooperation.
Given the fateful matters that the American and Israeli governments discuss on a daily basis, neither side can allow itself to wait with the process of coordinating priorities and building trust, and it's almost certain that in the next few days, we will hear about conversations between the president and the prime minister, the secretary of state and the foreign minister, the secretary of defense and the defense minister, and both national security advisors.
Over the years, the walls of the Oval Office have seen serious disputes between Israeli and American leaders, and there will be many more. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in the House of Representatives a few days ago, Israel has no other America and America has no better ally in the Middle East than Israel. With that understanding in place, close ties must necessarily be the result.
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