Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address the U.S.-Israel relationship and the challenges Israel faces in the Middle East at a dinner hosted by the Hudson Institute during his visit to New York next month.
Netanyahu will be presented with the conservative think tank’s 2016 Herman Kahn Award at a gala dinner on September 22nd, 2016 in Manhattan, according to an invitation obtained by Jewish Insider.
Rather than offering formal remarks, the prime minister will engage in a conversation with Roger Hertog, president of the Hertog Foundation and chairman of The Tikvah Fund.
Host committee members include Jack David, Ira and Ingeborg Rennert, Betsy and Walter Stern, and Paul Singer, among others.
Last November, Netanyahu held a similar question-and-answer session at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., following a meeting with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. He also received an award from the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Netanyahu will be in New York to address the 71st UN General Assembly on September 22nd. It is still unclear whether he will meet with President Obama during the 5-day trip to the United States.
The United States and Israel are close to signing a new 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU). Under the emerging agreement, Israel is “>speculations that President Obama may refocus his attention after the November elections on the failed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
According to Aaron David Miller, an American Middle East analyst and Vice President for New Initiatives at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, while Netanyahu is looking past Obama to the next U.S. administration, “in the next several months there is important unfinished business that he believes needs to get done.” Those include “concluding the MOU, doing what he can to preempt some 11th-hour move by the administration on the peace process, which puts him in a tough spot, and keeping Iran as a front-burner issue.”
But Miller does not see any forthcoming ‘reset’ in the relationship between Netanyahu and Obama. “This has been the most dysfunctional relationship between a U.S. President and an Israeli Prime Minister arguably in the history of the US-Israeli relations, and in many areas one of the most unproductive too,” he told Jewish Insider on Wednesday. “Maybe they can avoid another blow-up, but it’s too late for any reset.”
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