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JERUSALEM – Joe Biden and Israel are far behind. When he began his tenth trip to the Holy Land, he can look back on visits, as a senator and vice president, spanning nearly five decades and nearly a dozen prime ministers.
“I was telling a couple of younger members of my staff, before I came, about how many times I’ve been to Israel,” he said in December at the Hanukkah celebration at the White House. “I said, and then all of a sudden, I realized,‘ My God, you’re getting old, Biden. ’I’ve known all the prime ministers since Golda Meir.
It was not the legendary Meir, who ruled Israel from 1969 to 1974, hosting Biden on his first trip as president, of course, not even Benjamin Netanyahu, the longtime prime minister, whose enemy relationship with Biden goes back 30 years. It was the newly coined prime minister, Yair Lapid, the former television news presenter who reaches his 13th day of work while greeting the president on the tarmac.
Biden landed in Israel promoting his decades-long relationship with the country and reaffirming his Zionist credentials.
“The connection between the Israeli people and the American people is deep,” he said at the airport after landing. “It’s very deep. Generation after generation, this connection grows. We invest in each other. We dream together. We are part of what has always been the goal we both had. I was part of that as a senator, as a senator. vice president and, frankly, before he was raised by a righteous Christian. “
While Biden was visiting, Palestinians remembered his descent into autocracy
Israel’s volatile political scene – Lapid took office when the coalition government collapsed in unrest in late June – means leaders will be navigating domestic pressures during a state visit with a tight script, according to officials from both countries.
Lapid’s centrist party faces a November election and polls show Netanyahu is ready for a possible comeback. Biden, a supporter of Israel’s old Democratic school, fights with the left wing of his own party, which has increasingly aligned itself with the Palestinians and connects the Middle East conflict with the fight for justice. racial in the United States.
Lapid, a centrist and Israel’s most moderate leader in more than a decade, is one of the few national politicians willing to endorse the possibility of an independent Palestine and the “two-state solution” that Biden has returned to the center of. American politics. But the dynamics of both countries will bring to the table the most controversial issues.
“Some things just aren’t on the charts,” said Dan Shapiro, President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Israel and now a distinguished member of the Atlantic Council think tank. “Any significant movement on the Palestinian issue is not possible during the election season in Israel,” he added that the current leadership could easily disappear in a few months.
In a joint statement Wednesday before the arrival, Biden and Lapid announced the creation of a “high-level strategic dialogue on technology”. Leaders said the two countries will partner to address a number of issues, such as climate change, pandemic preparedness and the implementation of artificial intelligence.
Biden’s trips to Israel have not always gone well. Diplomats here are still frightened by the dust of 2010 in which the vice president almost cut short his trip after the Israeli government announced an expansion of settlement construction shortly after the landing of Air Force Two .
But a repeat of such a controversy, which Netanyahu at the time blamed for a bureaucratic mistake, is unlikely during the two days Biden is to spend in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
After Trump’s dramatic inclination toward Israel, Biden is likely to regain the traditional approach
For their part, many Israelis see Biden as a backward president, a staunch supporter of Israel who is neither the right-wing proponent of Donald Trump nor the ideological quarrel that Obama was seen to be.
“His relationship with Israel, his relationship with foreign policy is different. He is a realistic, practical man,” said Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States.
Discussions between Biden and Lapid could cover very different ground from the Netanyahu-Trump meetings, which dramatically tilted U.S. policy toward Israel by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, approving the annexation of the Golan Heights, and declaring legal the West Bank settlements.
But like Netanyahu, Trump has refused to withdraw from political life. The former president is weighing a comeback in 2024, and Israelis know that the current moment, with centrists in both Washington and Jerusalem, could be short-lived.
“It has to be said that it may soon seem like just a mistake, and we’ll have Trump and Bibi again,” said an Israeli official familiar with the government’s planning for the visit, using the nickname Netanyahu, who spoke with the condition of anonymity to comment on internal discussions. “They could both be waiting on the wings.”
Biden and Netanyahu have a history of decades ago. But Netanyahu outraged Obama’s White House in making his complaints about the potential nuclear containment deal with Iran at a joint session of Congress. Biden, when he was declared the winner of the 2020 elections, waited almost a month before calling on Netanyahu, which many Israelis saw as disrespectful.
Biden, as usual, will meet with Netanyahu in his role as official leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition. But Israeli media have reported that only 15 minutes are set aside for the session and no joint appearance is planned.
The president will strive not to be seen as favoring any of Israel’s competing parties in the next election, Israel’s fifth in the last three years. But Lapid supporters are enjoying his chance to appear alongside the American leader just as the campaign begins.
The president will also meet with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem. He plans to visit a hospital in East Jerusalem and is expected to announce $ 100 million in new aid to the Palestinian health system.
But these gestures may not satisfy the Liberal Democrats who have been denouncing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank for six decades. When the fight between Israel and Gaza erupted in May last year, prominent liberals warned Israel of its military attacks and called on Biden and the United States to condemn their actions more forcefully.
“We oppose our money to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma,” said MP Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Who achieved political prominence as a Black Lives activist. Matter, in a speech on the House Floor in May 2021. “Until all our children are safe, we will continue to fight for our rights in Palestine and Ferguson.”
The dynamic has put Biden, an ardent and staunch supporter of Israel, at odds with a growing contingent of Democrats who not only refuse to avoid criticizing Israel, but have also called for significant political changes in the way the United States supports them. in the country.
Beyond Israel’s top critics in Congress, several politicians who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) And the then South Bend, Ind. , Mayor Pete Buttigieg, noted at a 2019 event hosted by J Street, a liberal Jewish pressure group, that they would be willing to make foreign aid to Israel contain for the country to forge more peaceful relations with the Palestinians. Biden, who participated in the event, did not raise the idea of conditioning the aid.
Still, Israel has long enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States, and while the mood for the country is changing, American politicians still overwhelmingly support it. In September, for example, the House of Representatives approved $ 1 billion in new funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system by a vote of 420 to 9.