Red faces over Sara Netanyahu's ‘bread gaffe’ in Ukraine

A pre-election visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week to Ukraine yielded few actual achievements; instead, it was a source of political embarrassment.

The two-day visit to Kiev seemed curiously timed, exactly four weeks before an election in which the votes of Israeli citizens who emigrated from the former Soviet Union are expected to be crucial.

Mr Netanyahu has not visited Ukraine as prime minister before, but he is currently fighting Yisrael Beiteinu leader, Avigdor Lieberman, for the same constituency.

Two months ago, Israel did not even send a senior representative to the inauguration of Ukraine’s new Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky.

One reasons cited in the past for not visiting Ukraine had been the desire not to fall at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but Mr Netanyahu’s political predicament appears to have  trumped those considerations.

The prime minister emphasised a number of times that he would be talking with his Ukrainian counterparts about the issue of pensions for Israeli citizens who lived and worked most of their lives in Ukraine.

An agreement on Ukraine continuing to pay their pensions was signed in 2008, but successive governments in Kiev have failed to act upon it.

But despite taking part in a number of events together with Mr Netanyahu, President Zelensky would not commit to anything on pensions.

What dominated the visit instead was an embarrassing incident after the Israeli delegation arrived, when Mr Netanyahu and his wife Sara were presented with a traditional offering bread and salt.

The prime minister sampled the bread but Mrs Netanyahu was seen on camera dropping her piece of bread on the ground — and was widely attacked in Ukrainian media for doing so.

Mr Netanyahu is planning another foreign trip, just a week before the election. On September 9, he will arrive in India for a single day.

The meeting is being billed as “strategically important” and various “cooperation” agreements will be signed, but the timing — Mr Netanyahu visited India only last year — and brevity of the visit is a sign of the closeness of the prime minister to his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi.

Both men share nationalist politics and have built a warm relationship since Mr Modi first became India’s leader in 2015.

One senior Indian diplomat has called the visit “a photo-opportunity”,  taking place mainly to showcase Mr Netanyahu’s statesmanship.

Mr Modi is one of three leaders, along with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, whose photographs appear on massive billboards hung on the sides of Likud’s 16-floor headquarters in Tel Aviv, shaking hands with Mr Netanyahu.