It is a tour with very high stakes that the American president will begin.

Joe Biden is indeed expected this Wednesday in Israel on the occasion of his first tour in the Middle East, a real balancing act between the twists and turns of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tensions with Iran and negotiations with the power Saudi oil.

Air Force One is due to land around 3:30 p.m. at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where Joe Biden will be greeted by President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

And, immediately, the Israeli army must give him a demonstration of its technologies, including an anti-drone laser, a way of rallying Washington to its cabal against its number one enemy: Iran.

The thorny question of Jerusalem

"The discussions will focus above all and above all on Iran", declared this week Yaïr Lapid, interim Prime Minister until the early elections of November 1st.

In particular, Israel will try to prevent Western powers from putting back on track the 2015 international agreement governing the Iranian nuclear program, which Donald Trump had scuttled in 2018.

During this first visit by an American head of state since Donald Trump in 2017, the question of Jerusalem could also come up.

To the chagrin of the Palestinians, the Trump administration had indeed recognized the city as the capital of Israel and moved the United States embassy there, a measure that Joe Biden did not cancel.

The status of Jerusalem is one of the main stumbling blocks in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which has been suspended since 2014. The Palestinians aspire to make East Jerusalem, the eastern part occupied by Israel since 1967, the capital of a future state.

On Monday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan assured Washington of "unequivocal" support for a "two-state" solution, Palestinian and Israeli.

Joe Biden is due to discuss Friday in Bethlehem in the West Bank with the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas.

A symbolic flight between Tel Aviv and Jeddah

Another crucial subject: the prospect, still quite hypothetical, of a normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The American president will draw a symbolic link between the two countries for this purpose by carrying out an unprecedented direct flight on Friday between Tel Aviv and Jeddah.

The Biden administration would also like to get the Saudi kingdom, a strategic ally of the United States and the world's largest exporter of crude oil, to open the floodgates to calm the surge in black gold prices and soothe inflation.

In the campaign, he wanted to reduce this kingdom to the rank of "pariah" after the assassination in 2018 of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Elected, he declassified a report concluding that the crown prince and strongman of the kingdom Mohammed ben Salmane, known as "MBS", had "validated" this murder.

On Saturday in Jeddah, he is expected to meet this same “MBS”.

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