US President Joe Biden on Wednesday reaffirmed the United States’ “unshakable” commitment to Israel, whose better “integration” in the Middle East he defended during his first tour in this region.
Wearing his usual “Top Gun” style sunglasses, this devout Catholic described his arrival in the Holy Land as a “blessing”.
Anxious, according to the White House, to minimize the risk of contamination by COVID-19, the American president made small “checks” with his fist to the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, and to the prime minister, Yaïr Lapid, who each underlined the “support” and “friendship” of Mr. Biden to their country.
He reiterated, in a short speech on his arrival at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, the Americans’ “unshakeable” commitment “to the security” of the Jewish state, before going to the Israeli memorial in the Holocaust (Jewish genocide by Nazi Germany) from Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.
Wearing a black yarmulke, the American president laid a wreath, rekindled the eternal flame that burns there and had a visibly moving exchange with two survivors. “We must never, ever forget, because hatred is never defeated,” he wrote in the register of this place of memory.
Future common front in the Middle East?
The American president also attended a presentation by Israel on the country’s anti-missile defense capabilities, including the “Iron Dome” system, but also a new laser response device against drones, the “Rayon of iron” (“Iron Beam”).
What to set the scene: by detailing the threats that Israel must face, the Jewish state wants to show Joe Biden, as Mr. Lapid said, the “need to restore a strong global coalition to stop the nuclear program of Iran”.
Israel is trying to prevent Western powers, including the United States, from reviving a 2015 international pact governing Iran’s nuclear program, which Donald Trump scuttled in 2018.
The Biden government, for the moment, wants to continue diplomatic efforts.
Faced with Iran, Israel seeks to form a new “architecture” of the Middle East, that is to say, to form a common front with countries in the region deemed hostile to the Islamic Republic.
Under the leadership of the Trump administration, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized their relations with Israel in 2020. And the Israeli government hopes that Mr. Biden’s tour, which is also to take him to Saudi Arabia, would give impetus to a hypothetical normalization with the Saudi kingdom.
“We will continue to advance the integration of Israel in the region,” said Mr. Biden, who will draw a symbolic link between Israel and Saudi Arabia by carrying out an unprecedented direct flight Friday Tel Aviv- Jeddah.
“We hope and act so that this is the first steps, the beginning, of a process of normalization” with Saudi Arabia, a senior Israeli official said on Tuesday.
But with this visit to Saudi Arabia, Washington may want, first of all, to get the oil kingdom to open the floodgates to calm the surge in crude oil prices.
Even if it means that Joe Biden meets Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), yet considered to be the sponsor of the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by American intelligence.
Faced with the efforts of the United States, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said that Mr. Biden’s tour “will not bring security” to Israel.
Shireen Abu Akleh’s family in Washington?
If the enthusiasm is visible on the Israeli side, with American flags crowning the Jerusalem district, placed under high security, where Mr. Biden is staying, the reception could be more lukewarm on Friday, the day devoted to the Palestinians in the program.
The 79-year-old Democrat certainly repeated on Wednesday his support for a “two-state solution”, i.e. a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel, which he considered “the best possible”, but without promising to get involved in a possible relaunch of the peace process.
However, Joe Biden did not cancel Donald Trump’s decision, experienced as an affront on the Palestinian side, to recognize the disputed city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the United States embassy there.
And he did not commit to meeting in Jerusalem, as requested, the family of Shireen Abu Akleh, the American-Palestinian journalist shot dead in May on the sidelines of an Israeli military operation in the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
The UN and various journalistic investigations maintain that the shooting came from an Israeli soldier, a scenario deemed “likely” by the United States, which however dismissed the hypothesis of a deliberate shooting, which upset the Abu family. Akleh.
The head of American diplomacy, Antony Blinken, who is traveling with the president, has however invited the Abu Akleh family to the United States for a meeting. “We are studying” the invitation, replied Lina Abu Akleh, the journalist’s niece, to AFP.