Rivlin heads to Washington for first meeting with Obama

President Reuven Rivlin departed on a visit to the United States Tuesday morning, in a trip during which he will meet with US President Barack Obama for the first time as well as other senior administration officials.

In addition to high-level meetings in Washington, DC, Rivlin plans to deliver an address at the Brookings Institution and participate in a Hanukkah candle lighting ceremony with UN ambassadors from around the world in New York.

The president said before taking off that topics of discussion in his meeting with Obama would include Middle Eastern security issues and common values of “freedom and democracy” shared by the two countries.

“These are days of great regional instability, and a far from simple security situation in Israel,” Rivlin said. “I am in no doubt that the array of meetings planned during this visit will serve to further strengthen and deepen the relations between our peoples.”

Before his departure, Rivlin also spoke of the deep bond between Israel and the United States, which he called “our strongest and closest ally.”

“The friendship between Israel and the United States is an expression of a deep bond. It is the bond between two countries, and between two peoples, and I intend to express to the President, in the name of all the people, Israel’s appreciation for the uncompromising support of the United States, in each moment, and in every situation,” Rivlin said.

Rivlin’s trip comes one month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s US visit, which was widely seen as an attempt at official reconciliation between Netanyahu and Obama after the passage of the controversial Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu had publicly opposed for months.

At the time, Netanyahu said his talk with Obama had been “one of the best meetings I’ve had with him.”

Just days ago, Rivlin appeared to break with his long-held position against a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, indicating that a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel within the framework of a joint confederation was the only way toward peace.

“There would be a confederation,” he told Aude Marcovitch and Patrick Wajsman of the French quarterly Politique Internationale. “Decisions that concern the two states in the confederation — or the two states of the united… Israeli-Palestinian state — we will have to [make]… together.”

The Obama administration, while reportedly taking peace talks off of the agenda for the rest of the president’s term, has nevertheless not kept completely silent on the issue recently.

On Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry warned that the current trends in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were leading to a one-state solution, and said Israel would not be able to maintain its Jewish and democratic nature in such a reality. He also seemed to place blame for the stalemate on Israeli actions.

“The status quo is simply not sustainable and the fact of the matter is that current trends, including violence, settlement activity, demolitions, are imperiling the viability of a two-state solution,” Kerry warned. “And that trend has to be reversed to prevent this untenable one-state reality from taking hold.”

Raphael Ahren and Rebecca Shimoni Stoil contributed to this report.