President Donald Trump should sign a new free trade agreement with Israel and extend the Visa Waiver Program to cover Israelis, the U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama wrote on Tuesday.
Daniel Shapiro, who co-authored the analysis with his senior advisor Scott Lasensky, credited Obama with making progress on these two “critical yet seemingly unremarkable issues,” but that noted that improvements still need to be finalized.
The United States and Israel signed a free trade agreement in 1985, but the deal is now “sorely out of date and out of sync with an economic alliance that is booming in myriad and dynamic ways,” the two wrote. They cited the construction of a desalination plant by an Israeli company in California, U.S. tech companies’ ever-growing presence in the “Start-Up Nation,” and the efforts of American companies to help develop Israel’s offshore natural gas fields.
But issues remain, Shapiro and Lashensky wrote: The existing government-to-government trade and investment framework is inadequate, Israelis have difficulty accessing many low-cost American consumer products, and other than El Al, which supplies its fleet with American-made Boeing jets, “most other transport and infrastructure arenas are dominated by European and Asian contractors and operators.” An updated trade agreement “could unleash a flood of new direct investment in both countries and bring relief to Israeli consumers.”
Israel also appears to be close to achieving the benchmarks necessary to qualify for the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), which would exempt Israelis from having to apply for tourist visas to enter the United States. (The controversial executive order signed by Donald Trump two weeks ago does not drastically modify the VWP, but did mandate that citizens from VWP-eligible countries who want to renew existing non-tourist visas must sit for interviews that they previously may have been able to skip).
A criteria for VWP eligibility is having a maximum of three percent of visa applications being denied; a joint U.S.-Israeli task force to educate the Israeli population on visa requirements has sharply cut the refusal rate to nearly the benchmark level. Israel would also have improve its sharing of traveler data with the U.S. and ensure equal treatment for all American citizens traveling to Israel, which the writers believe is possible if the issue is given more attention by high-level officials.
These policies, they wrote, could “make Israelis safer, more self-assured and more prosperous,” and could help peace talks down the road. By taking advantage of these opportunities, Trump and Netanyahu, who are scheduled to meet on February 15, “could benefit Americans and Israelis and further strengthen this alliance.”
[Photo: IsraeliPM / YouTube ]