Netanyahu set to visit US again

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would meet with President Obama on Tuesday next in Washington amid a rocky patch in US-Israeli ties that began with a dispute in March over Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who is in Israel celebrating his son's bar mitzvah, issued the invitation on Monday in Jerusalem, which was accepted by the Israeli Prime Minister. But tensions in recent months have sprung from a deeper rift over whether the US ought to focus on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or, as Israel would prefer, on confronting Iranian nuclear ambitions. One of the disputes that we have with the White House today is about the priority, and what is called the linkage, between the Iranian issue and the Israeli-Palestinian issue. We claim that without containing, if not defeating, the Iranian regime, there is no way to stabilize the Middle East, a senior Israeli official said this week. They believe that the core of the problem is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we don't accept it, the official added. Publicly, Israeli officials portrayed the upcoming visit as a fence-mending trip after a strained White House encounter in late March when Obama and Netanyahu met at night without cameras present.