Biden’s Middle East Trip Begins in Israel

Welcome to today’s Morning Brief, looking at U.S. President Joe Biden’s Middle East trip, the U.K. Conservative Party’s leadership contest, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country, and more news worth following from around the world.

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U.S. President Joe Biden arrives in Israel today on the first leg of a Middle East tour that includes a controversial stop in Saudi Arabia.

As Aaron David Miller and Steven Simon wrote in Foreign Policy last week, the Israel trip is likely to be heavy on protocol but light on substance.

By visiting Israel before Saudi Arabia, Biden avoids the snub of his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, who rankled Israelis by traveling to Egypt for his first Middle East trip and skipped Israel altogether.

With Israel ruled by a caretaker government following the collapse of its multiparty coalition last month, the visit is a chance for interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid to audition for the full-time role.

Biden is handing Lapid a diplomatic layup by participating in a signing ceremony as part of the trip. On Thursday, the two men are set to put their signatures to “The Jerusalem Declaration”—a framework for relations that will include a statement that neither country will allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Israelis vote in a fifth election in less than four years on Nov. 1 ,but recent polls show that its unlikely to break the years of deadlock. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party is set to remain the largest in the Knesset, though his right-wing alliance is still projected to fall short of a majority.

Biden will meet with Netanyahu as part of the trip, but as Miller and Simon write, “the happy talk will mask the fact that Biden is not relishing” the Likud leader returning to power.

The Biden administration has been laying the groundwork by attempting to preempt criticism of the trip—much of it centered on the Saudi leg—and by trying to avoid awkward questions.

On July 4, while most Americans were watching fireworks rather than paying attention to the news, the Biden administration drew a line under the investigation of the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American, in the West Bank by releasing a short statement.

Despite investigations from multiple news organizations—including CNN and the New York Times—suggesting Abu Akleh was targeted by Israeli forces, U.S. officials have described the motives around the incident as inconclusive.

Senior Democratic senators say that response is not enough and have called for a deeper investigation.

In a weekend Washington Post op-ed, Biden gave his reasons for traveling. Biden said he was going to the Middle East “to start a new and more promising chapter of America’s engagement” as well as promote the “diplomacy and cooperation” that he said ultimately prevents violent extremism from attacking Americans on U.S. soil.

Biden reserved one paragraph to discuss the Palestinians, trumpeting an increase in U.S. aid but saying little else ahead of his meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas later this week.

“There was not even any mention of Palestinian statehood or a two-state solution. Even the usual talking point wasn’t there, which is kind of striking. It’s clearly not on the agenda for this trip,” Khaled Elgindy, an Israel-Palestine expert at the Middle East Institute, told Foreign Policy.

Palestinian self-determination appears to have moved further down the U.S. priority list, as a broader push for normalization agreements between Israel and Persian Gulf states threatens to remove any leverage the Palestinians have had in negotiations.

The lack of attention is seen as a disappointment from the early days of Biden’s presidency, when a new vision for relations was still a possibility. “On its face, the Biden approach—with the exception of tone and restoring aid—is still more Trump than it is Obama,” Elgindy said.

Britain’s next prime minister. Conservative Party leadership candidates face their parliamentary party colleagues for the first round of voting today to determine who will replace Boris Johnson as prime minister in September. Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak is favored to make it through to the final round, whereas his challenger will come from one of the seven other candidates still standing in the race.

Rajapaksa flees. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled to the Maldives in the early hours of Wednesday morning before his expected resignation following months of mass protests—allowing him to escape possible arrest by a new government. Rajapaksa’s brother Basil, a former finance minister, was reportedly stopped by airport staff and protesters from boarding a flight to Dubai en route to the United States on Tuesday.

Ukraine’s food crisis. Turkish military officials host four-way talks in Istanbul today with their Ukrainian and Russian counterparts as well as a United Nations delegation as negotiations continue regarding Ukraine’s grain exports. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said yesterday that there was “still a way to go” on talks. Among a number of concerns, Russian officials have demanded the right to search ships bound for Ukrainian ports while Ukraine has been wary of de-mining its waterways for fear of weakening its defenses.

Russia-Iran ties. Russian President Vladimir Putin is to visit Tehran next week for three-way talks alongside Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss the Syrian peace process. Putin’s visit comes after U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned that Iran was supplying “hundreds” of drones in support of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia has confirmed that Putin will hold a bilateral meeting with Erdogan while in Tehran.

Washington residents will be familiar with the 20 mph limit, if not its application. Even though the measure was introduced on residential roads in 2020, driving deaths in the district still increased the following year.