The US Vice President Mike Pence will later today address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in a speech that will be boycotted by Arab lawmakers following Donald Trump's announcement in December that the US was recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Pence, an evangelical Christian, earlier today met with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has praised Pence as a 'great friend' and said it was 'disgraceful' that members of the Knesset planned a boycott.
'[Pence] is a dangerous man with a messianic vision that includes the destruction of the entire region,' said Ayman Odeh, the chairman of the Joint Arab List, a grouping of four Arab-dominated parties that hold 13 of the Knesset's 120 seats.
He described Trump as 'a political pyromaniac, a racist misogynist'.
Pence's visit, which is being boycotted across the board by Palestinians, is the highest-level US visit to the region since Trump on December 6 unilaterally recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital and promised to begin the process of moving the American embassy to the city, whose status is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Outraged at Trump's Jerusalem declaration, a move that reversed decades of US policy on the city's status, the Palestinians are snubbing Pence.
The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas left for talks with EU leaders today, and was reported in the Middle Eastern media as being set to appeal to the EU formally to recognise the state of Palestine.
Sweden officially recognised Palestine in 2014, and lawmakers in Britain, France and Spain have voted in favour of doing the same in non-binding moves.
Meanwhile, Pence is not scheduled to make any private trips to Palestinian areas such as Bethlehem, a city whose Christian significance usually draws Western dignitaries.
US officials have said an embassy move from Tel Aviv could take up to three years. But there has been speculation that Pence could announce a stop-gap arrangement, such as the conversion of one of the US consulate buildings in Jerusalem to a de facto embassy.
Netanyahu has said he expected at least an interim arrangement to go into effect very soon, perhaps within a year.
Trump has made no firm public commitment on timing, saying: 'By the end of the year? We're talking about different scenarios – I mean, obviously, that would be on a temporary basis.'
On Tuesday, Pence will attend Judaism's Western Wall in Jerusalem and lay a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance centre in the city.
In Jordan on Sunday, Pence tried to reassure King Abdullah during a meeting that was reportedly tense that the US was committed to restarting dormant peace talks and to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if both sides agreed.
Additional reporting by Reuters.
