US Vice President Jay D. Vance and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a meeting today.

Initially, Netanyahu praised the “incomparable alliance and cooperation with the United States.”

“This is changing the Middle East and changing the world,” he said, adding that “this creates opportunities not only for security, but also for the expansion of peace, which we are working very, very diligently on.”

In addition, Netanyahu claimed to Vance that he was impressed “with your clarity, with your sharpness, with your solidarity for our common cause, and just with a genuine friendship that I found both in conference meetings, but also in our private meetings.”

In turn, Vance asserted that “these are fateful days and we are very excited to sit down and work together on the Gaza peace plan. We have a very, very difficult task ahead of us, which is to disarm Hamas, to rebuild Gaza, to improve life for the people in Gaza, but also to ensure that Hamas is no longer a threat to our friends in Israel.”

He also underlined that yesterday, Tuesday there were very good discussions with Israel and with the Arab countries, “which are taking action to play a very positive role in this”.

“We’re just creating an incredible next day, with a whole new vision,” Netanyahu said as he took the floor, adding that they discussed who would rule Gaza, who would provide security, and that there were some “very, very good ideas.”

“It will not be easy, but I think it is possible,” Netanyahu said.

Asked about a possible Turkish presence in Gaza, Netanyahu replied: “Israel, obviously, will have to decide together who will do that. So I have a very strong opinion on that.”

Vance argued for his part that “we are creating a peace plan, an infrastructure here where there was nothing not even a week ago, not even a day ago.”

“This will take a lot of work. It requires a lot of ingenuity,” he said. “We are on an incredible path to do something that has never been done before,” he said, adding that if the Gaza plan is implemented properly, it could “create a model for peace agreements around the world.”

Vance

Earlier, Netanyahu dismissed the idea that Israel is a client state of the US as “nonsense”.

“I want to make it very clear. One week they say Israel controls the United States. A week later they say the United States controls Israel. This is nonsense. We have a partnership, an alliance of partners,” Netanyahu said, “who share common values ​​and common goals. We can have discussions, we can have disagreements here and there, but overall, I have to say that last year we had agreement — agreement not only on the goals but also on how to achieve them.”

As he said, Israel managed to “put the knife to Hamas’s throat, that was the military effort that was led by Israel, and the other effort was to isolate Hamas in the Arab and Muslim world, which I think the president [των ΗΠΑ] he did it brilliantly with his team.”

Vance made similar comments saying “we don’t want a vassal state, and that’s not Israel. We do not want a client state, and this is not Israel. We want a partnership. We want an ally here.”

“The president believes that Israel, with our allies the Gulf Arabs, can play a very positive leadership role in that region — to the point where, frankly, the United States doesn’t care about the Middle East at all because our allies in the region are taking action, taking control and ownership of their area of ​​the world.”

“That doesn’t mean we don’t have interests here,” Vance continues. “That doesn’t mean we don’t care about what’s going on here. But we actually see this as an opportunity to build on the Abrahamic Covenants. I think this Gaza deal is a critical piece to unlocking the Abrahamic Covenants, but what it could enable is an alliance structure in the Middle East that will persist, that will endure, that will allow good people in that region of the world to take action and take charge of their own backyard. This is in the interest of the United States. I happen to believe that this is also in Israel’s interest.”