Trump meets with Netanyahu
Trump meets with NetanyahuFlash90

Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States this Friday. Among the attendees at the inauguration will be Oded Revivi, the mayor of Efrat, a city in the Gush Etzion region.

Revivi was invited along with other leaders of the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria.

Revivi told Arutz Sheva that he had received short notice of his invitation to the inauguration from the event's organizers.

Formal procedures require that the physical form of the invitation, which was initially received via email, be picked up in Washington DC.

As for the decision to invite him, Revivi said that the President-elect likely had little to do with it. "Let's be precise. The President-elect is not in charge of the guest list...There are circles of people around him, and the current administration probably has people in the first circle. We are in contact with them and they know us. We are working together and in the end they are the ones that will compile the guest list."

As for whether Trump knows that leaders of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are on the guest list for his inauguration, Revivi said: "We don't know what his level of awareness on the list of invitees is, and I don't want to say he's the one who gave it the stamp [of approval], but we do know one of Trump's advisers (Jason Greenblatt). He studied at Gush Etzion, and he is a person familiar with the settlement enterprise and supports the settlements."

"We know that the Trump family is close to the settlements, and that there are some in the circles who are definitely close to our ideology and understand the importance of the settlements." Revivi said.

He said that it is appropriate to wait and see what the Trump Administration's approach to Israel will be, but he is optimistic that Trump's advisers have a better understanding of the realities in the Middle East than the outgoing Obama Administration.

"The Unites States undoubtedly needs [to formulate] its own policy, and in the end it will not all be consistent with what we want to see, but the starting point certainly raises the potential, and we need to [conduct ourselves] correctly so that we do not waste this opportunity." he said.