John Bolton Makes First Israel Visit

United States National Security Adviser John Bolton stopped-by Jerusalem over the weekend on his way to visit his Russian counterpart in Geneva. For Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, it was one of those days when it must have been rewarding to be premier: playing host to a senior American diplomat who sings his song: the importance of denying Iran a nuclear weapon. Bolton cited it as a Washington imperative while discussing other issues of apparent agreement including Syria and the future of the Gaza Strip and Israeli-Palestinian issues as a whole. The Israelis are spinning the Bolton stop-over in Israel prior to the Geneva meeting as a sign of the importance Russian President Vladimir Putin places on the concerns of the Jewish state. But some officials in Jerusalem are trouble by a reported comment made by President Trump to King Abdullah II of Jordan during a recent White House visit. Responding to the king’s assertion that a growing number of young Jordanians are abandoning the so-called “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in favor of living with Israelis in a single democratic, albeit non-Jewish, state, President Trump apparently warned that if there is no negotiated settlement to the conflict, in a few years the Israeli prime minister will be named “Mohammed.”