Early this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his Cabinet not to contact Donald Trump’s emerging administration or anyone close to the president-elect. He also instructed them not to try to pressure the new administration. Any contact with a Trump associate should be handled only through the Israeli Embassy in Washington. But his Nov. 21 instructions came too late. According to a Haaretz report, Education Minister Naftali Bennett had already met a day earlier with Trump’s people in New York. At these meetings, Bennett pleaded with his hosts not to adopt the two-state-solution model as the basis for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and to be open to “new ideas.” Bennett is suggesting that Israel take advantage of the opportunity to announce Israel’s annexation of the settlements in the West Bank's Area C.
As of now, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman is the sentry patrolling the wall around the future relationship between the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government. Liberman is passionate about his new position right in the nerve center of Israel’s defense establishment. He shocked everyone while briefing political journalists in Jerusalem on Nov. 16 by saying that he will strive to reach an agreement with the Trump administration in which Israel will freeze construction outside the major settlement blocs while building within them. The defense minister explained that what he meant was official reconfirmation of the “Bush Letter” of 2004. In that exchange of letters between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the president made a commitment to accept the new reality on the ground, meaning the settlement blocs. “If we get permission by the administration to act according to the Bush-Sharon formula, we have to grab it with both hands,” he said, adding that in such a setup, Israel would no longer build outside the settlement blocs. "We should follow that correspondence to the letter, without being extreme. We must neither add to it nor detract from it.”
