The fake news media has decided to cover President Trump's visit exclusively in terms of...
1. Melania's hand
2. Trump stating that he got back from the Middle East while in Israel
Issues involving Saudi Arabia and Israel don't matter. Only the facile sneering does. Everyone "knows" Israel is in the Middle East from the late night talk show hosts to their equally well informed media counterparts.
Except that in its original definition, Israel isn't in the Middle East. The term has been used to include various groups of countries. At one extreme it would encompass Afghanistan. At the other a much smaller territory near India.
The sneering media, hoping to show President Trump's ignorance, only shows off its own.
But President Trump was speaking emotionally and culturally. Israel isn't in the same cultural space as Saudi Arabia. The great Zionist leader Jabotinsky spoke of Zionism as a movement to “expand the borders of Europe up to the Euphrates”.
That's somewhat simplistic. But Israel is fundamentally different from much of a region in which civilization was overrun and destroyed by waves of Muslim raiders. Israel has a geographic position. But culturally it is the only nation that still encompasses a civilization based on its indigenous population, rather than the Arab Muslim invaders who wiped out civilization across the Middle East.
Israel is what the Middle East should be. Saudi Arabia, where Trump had come from, is what the Middle East all too often is.