Biden embraces a signature Trump achievement on first trip to the Middle East, aiming to

After arriving, Biden received a briefing on the Iron Dome defense system and the next-generation, laser-enabled Iron Beam system on Wednesday. Later in the day, he will head to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

In the lead-up to the trip, US officials have been working to deepen Israeli-Arab security coordination and broker agreements that will inch Israel and Saudi Arabia — which do not have diplomatic relations — closer to normalization.

People familiar with the matter said Saudi Arabia is expected to announce this week that it will allow all commercial flights to and from Israel to use its airspace and allow Israel’s Muslim minority to take charter flights directly to Saudi Arabia to participate in the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Biden will also fly directly to Saudi Arabia from Israel, a moment that he called a “small symbol of the budding relations” between the two countries.

Senior Biden administration officials said full Saudi-Israel normalization remains out of reach, though covert coordination between the two countries has expanded.

“It’s changed the security situation in the Middle East,” a senior US official said of the Abraham Accords signed in late 2020. “Our job is to go deeper with the countries that have signed up and to go wider if we can.”

The Biden administration’s focus on expanding normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries has frustrated Palestinian officials who would prefer the US focus on reviving the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But US officials say their focus on Arab-Israeli normalization is a recognition of realities in the region: The momentum for growing Arab-Israeli ties coupled with dead-end political conditions in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Two senior administration officials said the administration would like to see movement toward Israeli-Palestinian peace but said the White House has decided not to pursue the kind of high-level shuttle diplomacy that previous administrations have chased because it would likely fail.

“We’re very careful about setting objectives, particularly in the Middle East. Where administrations have gotten themselves in deep trouble is by promising the Moon and not being able to deliver and wasting time and resources and investment,” a senior administration official said. “Had we launched a peace process, there would have been nobody at the table.”

“If the parties are ready to talk, we are always going to be right there to help, but we are not going to come out with some top-down mandated plan and create expectations that can’t be met,” the official said.

Attempting to make incremental progress on Israeli-Palestinian relations

US officials have instead focused on making incremental progress to improve living conditions for Palestinians and restoring relations with the Palestinian Authority.

“The Palestinian relationship that we walked into had been totally severed. We restored relations with the Palestinians, we turned back on funding for the Palestinians — almost $500 million — and we have looked for opportunities to improve the lives of Palestinians wherever we could,” the senior administration official said.

Biden is expected to visit a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem this week and announce $100 million in new funding for those facilities, US officials said. The Biden administration has also been working with Israel on an aid package to bolster the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank.

Palestinian officials are still calling on Biden to do more to reverse Trump administration actions, including making good on his pledge to reopen a US consulate in Jerusalem to deal with Palestinians. That promise has gone unfulfilled amid disapproval from Israel.

Palestinian officials are also urging the US to do more to hold Israel accountable for the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May, which the US State Department said last week “likely” resulted from gunfire from Israel Defense Forces positions during an IDF-led raid in the West Bank.

The State Department caveated their conclusion, however, by saying that a forensic analysis “could not reach a definitive conclusion regarding the origin of the bullet that killed” Abu Akleh. The statement angered Abu Akleh’s family, who wrote a letter to Biden saying his administration failed to conduct a thorough probe into her killing.

The Israeli government was angry with the statement, too, according to a senior Israeli official, because it appeared to contradict itself. On the one hand it said the analysis was inconclusive, and on the other concluding the bullet likely came from the IDF. “We do have a problem with the way it was presented,” the official said.

Even amid that dispute, US officials have been working to ensure that the trip is not marred by an increase in tensions between Israel and Palestinians, encouraging dialogue between the two sides that led to the first call between an Israeli Prime Minister and Palestinian Authority President in five years last week, in which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas congratulated new Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid on his ascension and the two leaders expressed their wishes for peace.

“We’re encouraging them (Israelis and Palestinians) to have conversations and encouraging them to do things that keep things calm,” a senior US official said.

State Department officials also requested last month that Israel tamp down on any military operations and settlement activity in the West Bank at least while Biden is in town, a second senior US official said.

The White House is particularly keen on avoiding a repeat of Biden’s visit to Israel as vice president in 2010, when Israel’s Interior Ministry approved a settlement expansion in east Jerusalem while Biden was in the country trying to build support for new talks with the Palestinians. Biden condemned the announcement and White House officials were so furious at the time that they urged Biden to fly home, officials told CNN.

Asked whether Israel will honor US requests not to engage in settlement announcements around Biden’s trip, the senior Israeli official would say only that Israel is doing “everything possible” to make the visit a success.

‘A policy earthquake’

The Biden administration’s focus on the Abraham Accords more broadly, though, also reflects a recognition that a fundamental shift in regional dynamics has begun.

“In some ways, it’s a policy earthquake,” said David Makovsky, a distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy who worked on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process during the Obama administration. “I think there’s a fundamental paradigm shift from which there’s no return.”

Ahead of Biden’s trip, Israeli officials have made no secret of their eagerness to advance toward normalization with Saudi Arabi and their hope that Biden can help them make progress on that front.

“Saudi Arabia, the way we see it, is that it is a very important country in the Middle East and beyond. In expanding Israeli normalization with the Arab world, we would also like to see Saudi Arabia as part of that expansion,” a senior Israeli official told CNN.