U.S. President Donald Trump is considered a "rock star" in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's younger son Yair told an American conservative television network on Monday night.
Speaking to BlazeTV, the 27-year-old praised the president as "the best friend that Israel and the Jewish people ever had in the White House," citing Trump's decision to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to recognize the Golan Heights as Israeli sovereign territory, 52 years after the plateau was captured from Syria in the Six-Day War.
"He will be remembered in Jewish history forever for moving the embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Jerusalem [as the Israeli capital] and recognizing [Israeli sovereignty over] the Golan Heights," Netanyahu said.
"The Jewish people still remember King Cyrus the Great from Persia who recognized Jerusalem 2,500 years ago ... so we have a long term memory and the vast majority of Israelis adore America and adore President Trump. He's a real rock star in Israel."
Netanyahu senior has previously compared Trump to Cyrus, the king who is credited with allowing Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem from Babylon in circa 540 BCE.
Yair, who is described as a "social media activist," also compared the recently completed border fence between Israel and Egypt to the wall Trump wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico.
"We had a border with Egypt that [was] just open desert and we started having a... big flow of illegal immigrants crossing from Africa, because Egypt has a border with Sudan and then from there the rest of Africa and they would just walk from Sudan to Egypt and then right through the border with Israel and go all the way to Tel Aviv," he said.
"So they would just walk from third world countries into [a] first world country."
He added: "Israel is only eight million people, so tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants eventually would have (lead) to the destruction of Israel. So in 2011 we built a wall, coast to coast, on the border with Egypt and since the wall was completed the illegal immigration has completely stopped."
Israel's border with Egypt is primarily comprised of fence and electronic sensors, rather than solid concrete. It has been extremely successful in stopping African migrants crossing the border, of which there were some 38,000 in Israel in January 2018, according to government data (Hebrew).