President Joe Biden on Monday invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to a meeting in the US for the first time since Netanyahu re-entered office in December, easing months of tensions about the direction of Israel’s government.

Netanyahu’s office said that Biden made the invitation in a “warm and long” phone call on Monday evening, on the eve of a visit to Washington by Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President. Until Monday, that visit had been widely seen as a slight to Netanyahu.

The invitation to the Prime Minister reversed Biden’s decision in March to avoid meeting Netanyahu “in the near term”. But White House officials said the prospect of a face-to-face meeting should not be interpreted as Biden’s abandoning his objections to some of the Israeli leader’s hard-line positions.

Biden recently described Netanyahu’s coalition as “one of the most extremist” since the 1970s and voiced particular opposition to Netanyahu’s decisions to undermine the power of Israel’s Supreme Court, expand Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and retroactively authorize settlements built in the territory without government approval.

“You shouldn’t take away from the fact that they had a conversation today and that they will meet again that we have fewer concerns over these judicial reforms or fewer concerns over some of the extremist activities and behaviour by some members of the Netanyahu cabinet,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said.

New York Times News Service