Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Wednesday slammed President Joe Biden for saying earlier this week that he would not invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House and for meddling with Israel’s internal affairs.
“Utterly disgraceful. Biden gleefully hosts anti-American radicals like Lula, while shunning close American allies like Netanyahu,” Cruz posted on Twitter.
“It’s clear that Biden and his officials are high from funding what they believe to be successful anti-government protests in Israel,” added Cruz, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Utterly disgraceful. Biden gleefully hosts anti-American radicals like Lula, while shunning close American allies like Netanyahu.
It’s clear that Biden and his officials are high from funding what they believe to be successful anti-government protests in Israel. https://t.co/hCBNABkDSi
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 29, 2023
Biden’s refusal to invite Netanyahu came after he proposed judicial reforms to increase the power of the legislature, including giving it the power to approve judges as the Senate does in the U.S.
However, the left-wing opposition in Israel, who sees the courts as a “bastion of left-wing power,” took to the streets in protests, as reported by Breitbart News.
Vice President Kamala Harris also echoed Biden’s remarks, saying, “We are all watching.”
Biden had invited Netanyahu’s predecessors, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, to the White House weeks after they took office, but despite Netanyahu entering office in December, there has been no invite.
Biden’s snubbing of Netanyahu came only hours after the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, said that Biden would extend an invitation. Nides told Israel’s Army Radio, according to The Times of Israel:
I’m sure he’ll be coming relatively soon. I assume after Passover, obviously no date has been set yet. There’s no question he will come and meet [US President Joe] Biden. They will see each other personally, I’m sure, quite soon. Without question, he’ll be coming to the White House as soon as their schedules can be coordinated.
But Biden later told reporters that there would be no such invitation: “No. Not in the near term.”
He also said:
Like many strong supporters of Israel, I’m very concerned, and I’m concerned that they get this straight. They cannot continue down this road. And I thought I made that clear. And I — hopefully the prime minister is going to act in a way that he’s going to try to work out some genuine compromise. But that remains to be seen.
Netanyahu’s conservative government supports these judicial reforms after decades in which Israel’s judiciary has struck down Knesset legislation on religious matters and micromanaged national security decisions, as Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak reported in January.
The Israeli right has slammed Biden for his comments, particularly since Biden himself had considered judicial reforms at the outset of his presidency, convening a commission to consider “packing” the U.S. Supreme Court with liberal justices and leading Democrat politicians who have attacked the Court.
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