Israel's former ambassador to the United States says President Donald Trump did no harm by giving classified information, which reportedly came from Israel, to Russian officials who visited the Oval Office earlier this month.
"The president is the commander in chief, that's his right and he decides to share whatever information he wants with leaders of other [countries]. There's nothing wrong with that," Ido Aharoni told Newsmax's Steve Malzberg.
"We have the same system in Israel, only in Israel the commander in chief is the Cabinet and not just one person like here."
Aharoni, who is now a professor at New York University, said the more concerning issue is that what was said at Trump's private meeting with Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and its ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, was leaked to the media.
The Washington Post reported on May 15 that Trump informed the Russian delegation of intel that revealed the Islamic State is plotting an attack. The New York Times later reported that Israel was the source of the classified intelligence.
"I can tell you as someone who has spent almost three decades in government and worked with some of Israel's most important decision makers, what should worry the president is how come such information is being leaked from the media from his own immediate environment?" he told Malzberg.
"This should be his number one concern and I think that's the biggest problem I see here ... how come this information is being shared with the media? And this I not the first incident since he became president.
"Many conversations were leaked to the media, it shows to me that there's a problem in his immediate environment that has to be handled very, very quickly."
Aharoni said he was not aware of what was discussed between Trump and the Russians, but "whatever the content may have been, it's important to know the relationship between Israel and the U.S. has been extremely intimate for over many decades now."
"No one specific incident is going to change the fact that Israel is the most reliable ally the United States has in a religion that is largely hostile to everything the United States represents. Israel is an outpost. Everything that you can I believe in as democracies, as pluralistic countries."
ABC News reported last week that an Israeli spy's life was in danger from the leak.
Aharoni added that it was proper for Trump to point at Iran as a "problem" in the Middle East.
"The fact that Iran is adhering to its original plan, and they're still talking about annihilating the state of Israel, they're still talking about death to America, after the sanctions were lifted, after the [nuclear arms] agreement was signed, really exposes the true nature of the regime," he said.
"Iran is the problem and interestingly enough, Iran is creating new divisions in the Middle East. All of a sudden Israel finds itself in the same boat as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and most of the Gulf countries.
"And all of a sudden there is a new opportunity to create an internationally backed process that will not bring about just a solution to the problem of Palestinian statehood, but also to the problem of Jewish statehood because as I've said many times before, historically the problem was never a Palestinian state."
The problem, according to Aharoni: "[It's] always the Jewish state, the reluctance of the Arabs and the Muslims to recognize our right to exist and with that front behind him. I believe President Trump is in a unique position to solve the problem of lack of recognition in Israel's right to exist."
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