After decade of Bibi, how will Bennett approach first US visit?

With Democrats and right-wing Bennett seeking relations reset after Netanyahu, Palestine likely to be back-burnered.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, just two months on the job, will meet with United States President Joe Biden in a visit in which both are expected to attempt to reset relations between Israeli leadership and Biden’s Democratic Party. Bennett’s first trip abroad as leader of a diverse – and precarious – coalition government also represents, on Thursday, the first time in 12 years that the US will host an Israeli prime minister who is not Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud party whose own belief in his unique grasp of the US public and politics, analysts say, saw headline-grabbing stunts and an erosion of once hearty relations between Israeli leaders and the Democratic Party. “I think Bennett’s approach is going be more low key than Netanyahu’s. He wants to work behind the scenes quietly to express Israeli positions, not by grandstanding before Congress, or on CNN or Fox News,” Dov Waxman, a professor of political science and the director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, told Al Jazeera.