Biden on his way to his first Middle East tour
A balancing act awaits the American president, between the twists and turns of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tensions with Iran and negotiations with the Saudi oil power.
Joe Biden boards Air Force One on July 12, 2022 in Maryland.
AFP
The US president is expected in Israel on Wednesday on his first tour of the Middle East. Air Force One is due to land around 3:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m. in Switzerland) at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where Joe Biden will be greeted by President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Yair Lapid. And, immediately, the Israeli army must give him a demonstration of its technologies, including an anti-drone laser, a way of rallying Washington to its cabal against its number one enemy: Iran.
“Discussions (with Mr. Biden) will focus first and foremost on Iran,” Yair Lapid, interim prime minister until the snap elections on November 1, said this week.
Joe Biden, a veteran of the American political scene, first visited Israel in 1973, when this country was, under the leadership of Golda Meir, an ally of the Shah’s Iran. Today, Israel is trying to prevent Western powers, including the United States and France, from reviving the 2015 international agreement governing Iran’s nuclear program, which Donald Trump scuttled in 2018.
With US economic sanctions on Iran lifted, Israel fears a deal could swell aid provided by the Islamic Republic to allies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, Israel’s pet peeves .
Enhanced security
The Israeli police will deploy some 16,000 troops during the visit, an operation dubbed “Magen Kahol Shalosh (Blue Shield-3)”.
And many roads will be closed across Israel, including in Jerusalem. On King David Street in Jerusalem, where Joe Biden will stay, poles were topped with American flags to mark the first visit by a US head of state since Republican Donald Trump in 2017.
Much to the chagrin of Palestinians, the Trump administration recognized the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy there, a move that Joe Biden did not reverse.
The question of Jerusalem is one of the main stumbling blocks in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process suspended since 2014. The Palestinians aim to make East Jerusalem, the eastern part occupied by Israel since 1967, the capital of a future State.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Monday that Washington had reestablished “almost severed diplomatic ties” with the Palestinians. He listed restored financial support and Washington’s “unequivocal” support for a “two-state” solution, Palestinian and Israeli. Joe Biden could announce economic aid to the Palestinians in East Jerusalem on Thursday.
Despite a request, no meeting is scheduled with the family of Shireen Abu Akleh, an American-Palestinian journalist from the Qatar channel Al-Jazeera who was shot dead in May during an Israeli operation in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 .
The UN, Al-Jazeera, Qatar, the Abu Akleh family and various journalistic investigations maintain that the shot came from an Israeli soldier, a scenario deemed “likely” by the United States, which has ruled out the hypothesis of a deliberate shooting.
“Meaningless”
Joe Biden is due to discuss Friday in Bethlehem in the West Bank with the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas. If he claims to take the opposite view of Donald Trump, the 79-year-old Democrat has not reopened the American consulate in East Jerusalem, nor has he really sought to relaunch the peace process.
“So far, we only hear empty words and we don’t see any results,” Jibril Rajoub, a tenor from the Palestinian Authority, told AFP.
Another crucial subject: the prospect, still quite hypothetical, of a normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Joe Biden will draw a symbolic link between the two countries by making an unprecedented direct flight on Friday between Tel Aviv and Jeddah.
“President Biden flying directly to Saudi Arabia sums up the dynamics of the last few months (…) We hope and act in such a way that this is the first steps, the beginning, of a process of normalization”, a senior Israeli official said on Tuesday.
The Biden administration would also like to get the Saudi kingdom, a strategic ally of the United States and the world’s largest exporter of crude oil, to open the floodgates to calm the surge in black gold prices and soothe inflation.
In the campaign, Joe Biden wanted to reduce this kingdom to the rank of “pariah” after the assassination in 2018 of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Elected, he declassified a report concluding that the crown prince and strongman of the kingdom Mohammed bin Salman, known as “MBS”, had “validated” this murder. On Saturday in Jeddah, Joe Biden is expected to meet this same “MBS”.
Posted today at 04:51
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