Israeli diplomat, Mexican deputy FM meet to smooth over wall spat

Israel’s Ambassador to Mexico Yoni Peled met on Monday with Mexico’s deputy foreign minister as part of efforts to smooth the ruffled feathers caused by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments on walls that deter refugees.

US President Donald Trump made construction of a controversial anti-immigration wall between the US and Mexico a key plank of his election campaign. One of his first acts after inauguration as president was to sign an executive order to begin work on the wall.

In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump appeared to be touting Israel’s West Bank security barrier as an example of a successful deterrent to unlawful entry into a country. Israel built the barrier — a combination of fence, concrete wall and sophisticated sensors — in response to the massive wave of deadly Palestinian terrorism that hit the country during the Second Intifada at the start of the millennium, with suicide bombers traveling the short distances into Israel to carry out murderous attacks, and it saw a dramatic fall in suicide bombings.

“The wall is necessary,” Trump said. “That’s not just politics, and yet it is good for the heart of the nation in a certain way, because people want protection and a wall protects. All you’ve got to do is ask Israel. They were having a total disaster coming across and they had a wall. It’s 99.9 percent stoppage.”

On Saturday, Netanyahu posted a twitter message that said, “President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.”

Mexican officials phoned Jerusalem and angrily demanded a clarification.

Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray reportedly called on Netanyahu to apologize, saying his comments “felt like an act of aggression.”

“We hope that Israel’s government will be sensitive enough to correct Netanyahu’s statement,” Videgaray said.

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said in a communique that it had expressed its “profound surprise, rejection and disappointment in the prime minister’s message on Twitter” to Israel’s ambassador. “Mexico is Israel’s friend and should be treated as such.”

On Monday, Netanyahu denied that his tweet had represented support for Trump’s border wall with Mexico. He told the weekly Likud faction meeting he had merely been responding to Trump’s praise for the Egypt border in the social media post, which was later retweeted by the US president. “Who even mentioned Mexico?” asked the prime minister.

At Monday’s meeting, the two officials agreed to maintain contact in order to work through the diplomatic spat and restore a positive relationship.

President Reuven Rivlin was meanwhile scheduled to speak to his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Pena Nieto, on Tuesday.

Backtracking after Mexican officials demanded a clarification, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry stressed Saturday that Netanyahu was not commenting on US-Mexican relations.

“[Netanyahu] referred to our specific security experience which we are willing to share,” spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon wrote on Twitter. “We do not express a position on US-Mexico relations.”

On Sunday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman wrote on Twitter that the prime minister “referred to our specific security experience which we are willing to share.”