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“It’s not Israel’s business to deal with that. We will await the election results,” Jerusalem’s top diplomat told Channel 12‘s “Meet the Press” news program on Saturday night. “The working assumption has to be that we don’t intervene there [in the U.S.], and they don’t intervene here.
“I watched the debate,” Katz said, in reference to the Sept. 10 face-off organized by ABC News between Harris and former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for the White House. While Katz said he believed Harris won the debate, “there’s still a long time to go” until November.
In the interview, Katz was asked about Trump’s insistence that if Harris were to be elected, “Israel will not exist within two years from now.” He answered by saying that the Jewish state “will be and will exist forever.”
The Republican candidate “wanted to show his great commitment to the State of Israel …, and that’s how he presented it,” the foreign minister explained.
In a JNS/Direct Polls survey of Israelis conducted on Aug. 19 regarding their view of the presidential race, Harris enjoyed the support of 28% of respondents to Trump’s 64%, with 9% professing to have no opinion.
In July, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir endorsed Trump for the White House, accusing the Biden-Harris administration of trying to prevent Jerusalem from destroying the Hamas terrorist group.
Ben-Gvir told Bloomberg that while Cabinet ministers are supposed to remain neutral on foreign politics, “that’s impossible to do after Biden.
“The U.S. has always stood behind Israel in terms of armaments and weapons, yet this time the sense was that we were being reckoned with—that we were trying to be prevented from winning. That happened on Biden’s watch and fed Hamas with lots of energy,” he said.
Ben-Gvir did not address Harris directly but suggested her policies would be a continuation of Biden’s. Washington’s attitude toward Israel needs to change, he said, implying that will only happen with Trump.
Three months earlier, Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli declared that if he “were an American citizen with the right to vote, I’d vote for Trump and Republicans.
“Biden is a friend of Israel, but he’s under intense pressure that is affecting him and creating real damage to relations between the countries, the minister from the ruling Likud Party said.
