Milei travels to Israel while his scrapping law is at stake in the Argentine Congress

This Tuesday, while the Argentine Congress dissects point by point the megalaw with which it intends to promote its Government, President Javier Milei will be visiting the Wailing Wall. Milei will begin his first international tour on Tuesday in Jerusalem, a week-long trip that will be divided between Israel and Italy, and in which he is scheduled to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and with the Pope Francis in the Vatican.

The Argentine Congress is approaching the final stretch for the approval of the president's omnibus law. On Friday, after a month of negotiations, the lower house voted in favor of the law. It was a half-win: along the way, the Government had to eliminate almost half of its 664 articles and there is still the discussion of each specific article that will bring more fissures. This Tuesday, the deputies will debate some of the most controversial points of the reform – such as the delegation of legislative powers, the distribution of federal tax collection to the provinces, and the privatization of public companies – to deliver the draft of the law to the Senate. Argentina still does not know what law will come out of Congress this week, and Milei will be absent from the debate that leaves a good part of the reforms on which his government proposal has been based.

The president boarded a commercial flight at noon Monday that will leave him in Jerusalem almost 24 hours later via Rome. In Israel, where he will spend three days, Milei will visit the Western Wall, meet with Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, and rabbis, Israeli businessmen and relatives of victims of the Hamas militia attack in October. She will also plant a tree in the Jewish National Fund's Forest of Nations, a protocol act during visits by foreign leaders. Milei will be the first president to do so since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October last year.

For Milei it will be much more than a diplomatic trip to show his alignment with Israel in the midst of the conflict. The Argentine president, who was raised Catholic, has announced several times that he wants to convert to Judaism. In November, during his first trip as president-elect, he traveled to Washington to meet with senior White House officials with a stop in New York to visit the grave of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect of the Lubavitch, who He had visited before seeking a blessing to be elected president. Milei has not appeared in public in his two months of presidency, but he has been the star guest of the Jewish community of Buenos Aires at its major events: he was a speaker at the Hanukkah celebrations in mid-December, at the end of that month he was the speaker at the opening of the Maccabee Olympic Games, and at the end of January he visited the Shoah museum in the Argentine capital for the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

“In a global context of the resurgence of anti-Semitism, we have to be firm in our position of intransigence with terrorism and not look the other way,” Milei said then, pledging all his support to Israel in the war against Hamas. “I am also committed to strengthening our diplomatic, commercial and friendship ties with the State of Israel,” said the president, who during the campaign announced that he intends to move the Argentine embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The decision would be contrary to United Nations resolutions, which recognize the city with a special regime due to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and would follow less than a handful of countries that have made this gesture to close lines with Israel in the face of the conflict, such as United States during the Government of Donald Trump. Netanyahu himself thanked him for “his intention to move the Argentine embassy to Jerusalem” in a call on December 4, when Milei still had a week to assume the presidency.

On Thursday, Milei will leave for Italy and the Vatican, where she will attend the canonization of the Argentine nun María Antonia de Paz y Figueroa, nicknamed “Mama Antula,” who will become Argentina's first Catholic saint. After the event Milei will have a private audience with Pope Francis that Argentines will watch with expectation. The president went so far as to call the pontiff, who has not set foot on Argentine soil since he was named Pope in 2013, an “imbecile” and a “filthy lefty.” Having apologized for the grievances, Milei invited the Pope to visit his country by letter. Francis did not respond publicly, but since before the elections he has announced that he intends to visit his country this year. Milei's first international tour will end on Monday, February 12, when he meets with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

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