When U.S. President Joe Biden meets in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will likely be in attendance.
“I would expect that he would attend the meeting with the president,” Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, told reporters on Monday. “But that meeting has not yet been formally announced.”
Originally announced for Tuesday, the meeting has reportedly been rescheduled for Thursday.
According to Axios, Netanyahu’s office was still awaiting a response from the White House on Monday. The Israeli prime minister is also slated to meet this week with Kamala Harris, the U.S. vice president whom Biden has endorsed for the Democratic nomination for president.
Harris does not plan to preside over the joint session of Congress which Netanyahu is slated to address on Wednesday. Although it is customary for vice presidents, who preside over the Senate, to attend speeches by foreign leaders, a Harris aide told The New York Times on Monday that the vice president has a scheduling conflict.
The presumptive Democratic nominee for president’s planned absence does not reflect a change in her approach to the Jewish state, the aide said.
Two people familiar with the plans for the joint session told the Times that Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.)—the pro-Israel, Jewish chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—will sit beside House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and behind Netanyahu during the address.
Asked during the Monday press conference whether Blinken will meet with the hostage families who are in Washington, Miller said, “I don’t have any meetings to announce today.”
“He has met a number of times with the families of hostages, both on our trips to Israel and here at home. And he’s met with them 10 times—more than 10 times,” Miller said. “It has been a consistent priority of his to meet with hostage families and let them know all that we’re trying to do to bring their relatives home.”
Netanyahu took off on Monday for Washington, where he is seeking to solidify bipartisan support for the Jewish state on the backdrop of Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 election.
“I am leaving this for a very important trip to the United States at a time when Israel is fighting on seven fronts and when there is great political uncertainty in Washington,” Netanyahu said on the tarmac before boarding his flight.
“I will seek to anchor the bipartisan support that is so important for Israel,” he said. “I will tell my friends on both sides of the aisle that regardless of who the American people choose as their next president, Israel remains America’s indispensable and strong ally in the Middle East.”
Netanyahu also said that the visit will afford an opportunity to discuss with Biden “how to advance in the critical months ahead the goals that are important for both our countries: achieving the release of all our hostages, defeating Hamas, confronting the terror axis of Iran and its proxies and ensuring that all Israeli citizens return safely to their homes in the north and in the south.”
The longtime Israeli leader will primarily focus on the threat posed by Iranian-backed terrorist organizations during his visit to Washington, according to Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog.
“There is a whole world of issues on the agenda on the bilateral level between Israel and the U.S., which will not wait and cannot wait, and these issues will be discussed during the prime minister’s visit here,” Herzog told Israel’s Ynet news outlet in an interview on Tuesday.
“The prime minister is coming here at a time when Israel has been in a difficult war already for more than nine months. However, the strategic focus of the visit will be on the Iranian axis,” added the diplomat.
Herzog noted that the outgoing U.S. administration remains “very, very” determined to close a hostages-for-ceasefire-and-terrorists-release agreement between Israel and Hamas as part of Biden’s legacy.
“I think they will continue to focus on this as a high priority,” he explained. “Biden has a strategic interest, and I think also a political one, to promote [the hostage deal], and this interest has not diminished.”
Asked by Ynet about Netanyahu’s upcoming meeting with Harris, he said that the presumptive Democratic candidate for the White House has made “problematic statements” about the war on Hamas recently.
“Overall, her record is positive, and she has often expressed support for the State of Israel and American aid to Israel,” he added. “I think we also saw the influence of the more progressive camp in the Democratic Party, and we saw it more as the political season here heated up.”
On Monday, Biden called in live to a Harris campaign event screened on video and discussed the Gaza war, among other issues.
“We’ve got to keep working for an end to the war in Gaza. I’ll be working very closely with the Israelis and with the Palestinians to try to work out how we can get the Gaza war to end and Middle East peace,” Biden said. “And get all those hostages home. I think we’re on the verge of being able to do that.”
