On Wednesday, the Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, will visit the Knesset at the head of a delegation of Members of Congress. We received her itinerary from the government press office:
9:00 AM – Official welcome ceremony in the Knesset Courtyard.
9:15 – Chagall Hall, Speaker Pelosi will sign the Knesset Guest Book, with press statements by Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy (in Hebrew) and Ms. Pelosi (in English).
9:30 – Jerusalem Hall, a meeting of the two speakers, attended by MKs Congress Members.
During the Knesset plenary session, Speaker Levy will formally welcome Speaker Pelosi, who will be seated in the VIP gallery).
Back in 2007, Speaker Pelosi visited the Knesset for the first time, but caused a brouhaha about 100 miles to the north, when she met with Bashar al-Assad and told him then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asked her to deliver a message that he was prepared to talk peace. Olmert’s office followed up with a major denial. The Bush White House, which was trying to isolate Assad in 2007, was also upset with Pelosi’s visit to Damascus that earned the Syrian dictator much-needed prestige.
In January 2021, a week after the attack on Capitol Hill, Pelosi read a few lines from the poem “I Don’t Have Another Country” by the late Israeli songwriter Ehud Manor: “I won’t keep silent because my country has changed her face / I won’t let her get away with it / I’ll remind her and sing it in her ears until she’ll open her eyes / I won’t keep silent because my country has changed her face.”
Wherever you go, someone is always complaining that someone else has taken over the culture they used to dominate…
