US president, on tour in the region, calls for “diplomacy” to discourage Tehran, while the Jewish state claims to “put a credible military threat on the table”
Iran overshadowed the second day of Joe Biden’s trip to Israel, and the US president, along with Prime Minister Yair Lapid, signed a new security pact in which the United States pledged to use “all” his country’s power to prevent Tehran from having a nuclear weapon. However, the signing of this document failed to hide the differences between Israelis and Americans about how best to stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear race. While Lapid insisted time and again that “the only thing that will stop them is knowing that if they continue to develop that nuclear program, the free world will use force. The only way to stop them is to present a credible military threat,” Biden said, saying he still believes “diplomacy is the best course of action.”
The Strategic Association’s joint statement also served to collect $38,000 million in security assistance that the United States provides to the Jewish state that has automatically extended president after president, regardless of party, with the goal of “addressing emerging threats.” and new realities”.
Biden pledged during the election campaign to get back the nuclear deal with the Iranians that Barack Obama signed in 2015 and Donald Trump broke three years later. Negotiations have opened in Geneva, but for now the United States has not lifted sanctions and the Iranians continue to take steps that divert them from what was agreed. Israel is one of the staunch opponents of the accord and Benyamin Netanyahu reminded Biden of this during their meeting. The current opposition leader, who aims to regain power in November’s elections, told the president that “a credible military option against Iran must be on the table”.
Netanyahu and Biden are long-time acquaintances, and during Obama’s then number two’s last trip to Jerusalem, Bibi publicly humiliated him in response to his request to freeze settlement expansion in the occupied territories. In this tenth trip of the Democratic politician to the Holy Land, after 48 hours in Israel, he will devote Friday to two events in the Palestinian territory. Biden will visit Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, the area of the holy city that Palestinians claim as their future capital after the hypothetical two-state solution, and travel to Bethlehem to meet his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas. .
The visit to the hospital, which will not be attended by Israeli leaders, was not well received by the Jewish state leadership, who see it as a way to give legitimacy to Palestinian aspirations for East Jerusalem. However, it is still something purely formal, as Biden made it very clear that, despite his support for the two-state solution, he has no intention of going back on Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital.
After spending two days in Israel and a few hours in the Palestinian territories, Biden will head to Saudi Arabia on a direct flight from Tel Aviv that will go down in history as the first US president to make this connection. There he will come face to face with the Crown Prince, Mohamed Bin Salman, with the aim of getting the Saudis to increase oil production in the face of the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A rally marked by the murder and mutilation of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Kashoggi in October 2018, in which the CIA sees the hand of the young heir, according to reports Biden made public after he became president.
Source: La Verdad
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