US President Joe Biden congratulated Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu Nov. 7, some four days after the final election results confirmed the comeback of the former leader, and a week after the elections. Biden could have called sooner, as some foreign leaders did, but he might have remembered how long it took Netanyahu to call him after his own November 2020 defeat of Donald Trump, and decided to wait. They can now be considered even on that score.
The eight-minute call was a typically polite conversation between two well-acquainted veteran statesmen. That was also the tone of the White House statement, which hailed the US-Israel relationship as a “bedrock of shared democratic values.” Netanyahu told Biden he intends to achieve additional historical Israeli agreements with Arab states (a clear hint to Saudi Arabia), a reference to the normalization process he launched with Trump, known as the Abraham Accords.
