Times of Israel
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not been formally invited to US President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration later this month, a senior aide to the premier told The Times of Israel on Thursday, putting the kibosh on a trip to Washington for the ceremony.
Israeli officials had said in recent weeks that Netanyahu was expected to attend the January 20 swearing-in and insisted that he was still planning on doing so even after undergoing prostate removal surgery late last month.
But on Thursday, an aide said that he would not be in the audience, barring any last-minute changes.
The aide said Netanyahu had not received an official invitation, though it was unclear if he had been informally asked to attend.
Beyond the premier’s medical troubles, the trip, should he have taken it, would have been made slightly more fraught with danger by an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in November for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
While the US has said that it will not execute the warrant against the prime minister or his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, they could still be at risk of arrest while traveling should they need to make an emergency landing en route.
Foreign leaders generally do not attend US presidential inaugurations and Netanyahu did not attend Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017.
Not one to follow norms set by his predecessors however, Trump is reported to have extended informal invitations to his inauguration to several foreign leaders, past and present.
Among those invited to the ceremony or hoping to attend are China’s President Xi Jinping, sources said last month. Xi will not attend but will send a delegation of senior officials in his place.
A spokeswoman for Trump told Fox News in December that the invitation was an example of the president-elect ‘creating an open dialogue’ with the US’ ‘adversaries and our competitors, too.’
There was no comment from the Israeli side or Trump’s team regarding whether the prime minister had ever received an informal offer to attend.
Trump and Netanyahu have had a complicated relationship over the years after their partnership hit the rocks in 2020 when Netanyahu congratulated Joe Biden on his election victory, which Trump to this day contests as fraudulent.
In the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror onslaught in southern Israel, Trump said that Netanyahu had ‘rightfully been criticized’ for failing to prevent it, charged that the massacre had ‘happened on his watch’ and that he should be impeached.
He also charged, at a rally in Florida just days after the Hamas assault, that Netanyahu had ‘let us down’ before the US killed the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qassem Soleimani in a January 2020 airstrike.
Their relationship seemed to have shifted in a more positive direction in recent months, as Netanyahu visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home in Florida over the summer and became one of the first world leaders to call and congratulate him after his election win in November.
But on Wednesday, the president-elect shared a video on his Truth Social account that included an American professor calling Netanyahu a ‘dark son of a bitch’ and accusing him of being ‘obsessive’ in trying to get the US to go to war against Iran.
The post had no caption and was uploaded without context, and Trump has not commented on why he chose to share the video, which could undermine Netanyahu’s claim following Trump’s election victory that the two saw ‘eye-to-eye’ on the Iranian threat.