Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Wednesday morning!
President Joe Biden kicks off his first presidential trip to the Middle East today when he lands at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport at approximately 3:30 p.m. local time, reports Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash, who will be sharing the latest updates from Biden’s trip over the next few days.
Biden, who is traveling with an entourage of some 500-plus people, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, as well as security personnel and more than 100 members of the White House press corps, will be greeted at the airport with a festive ceremony.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Yair Lapid and members of the Israeli cabinet will officially welcome the president as he descends from Air Force One. In addition to welcoming speeches, the ceremony will include a display of Israel’s multiple air-defense systems including the Arrow, David’s Sling, the Iron Dome and the latest laser-defense system, Iron Beam.
Biden will hold a bilateral meeting with Lapid on Thursday, with the two leaders expected to sign a statement affirming the strategic partnership between the two countries. A senior Israeli official said the statement, which has been dubbed the “Jerusalem Declaration,” will also include a U.S. pledge not to allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
Biden and Lapid will also hold the first-ever I2U2 virtual summit along with the leaders of India and the United Arab Emirates. The president will also visit Herzog’s residence, where he will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor, bestowed to individuals who have made an extraordinary contribution to the State of Israel.
The president is also slated to meet with opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, as well as attend the opening ceremony of the 21st Maccabiah Games in Jerusalem.
On Friday, he will meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem and tour Augusta Victoria, a Palestinian-run hospital in East Jerusalem. Biden will also visit the Church of Nativity and in the afternoon he will fly directly to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Hours before Biden’s arrival, the Prime Minister’s Office published a joint statement of technology cooperation announcing the launch of a “new Strategic High-Level Dialogue on Technology” between the two countries. The document calls for the establishment of a U.S.-Israel technological partnership on critical and emerging technologies and solutions to global challenges: pandemic preparedness, climate change, implementation of artificial intelligence and trusted technology ecosystems.
book shelf
Walter Russell Mead on the ‘insanity’ that led him to write a new book on American support for Israel

Walter Russell Mead
For a remote country with a relatively small — but growing — economy, Israel engenders surprisingly sharp feelings in America’s national discourse. In a new book, foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead offers a comprehensive narrative about American support for Israel throughout history while assessing how Americans view Israel today, Jewish Insider’s Jacob Miller reports. Mead’s latest book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, joins a growing bookshelf of literature about the connection between the two nations. Yet unlike other books, Mead does not focus only on policy, Jewish attitudes or recent history; his goal is to dispel common myths about American support for Israel by chronicling Americans’ attitudes about Zionism — and later about the State of Israel — going back more than a century.
Correct the narrative: The impetus for Mead’s book came during the George W. Bush administration, when the Wall Street Journal columnist became disgruntled with Bush critics insinuating that Jewish interests were running foreign policy and that “the neoconservatives were part of a Jewish cabal.” Mead told Jewish Insider in an interview on Tuesday that “It’s insanity to blame a president who[m] the majority of Jews voted against and the majority of Jewish giving went against, and say he’s carrying out the Jewish pro-Israel agenda because of the financial power of Jews.”
Hate watch: In the book, Mead also examines the “cyclical” history of American antisemitism, which was prominent during the Civil War, and then began rising again during the 1880s, peaking during World War II, and has again witnessed a revival over the past several years. “At moments of national crisis, you do get these expressions of antisemitism,” he explained.
Mideast moves: President Joe Biden’s trip to the Middle East this week, according to Mead, is a “reversal of Biden’s earlier Middle East policy.” Breaking from the president’s earlier approach, which focused on holding Saudi Arabia accountable for its human rights abuses and unsuccessfully cajoling Iran into compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Biden is now reengaging America’s Middle East allies, in part in the hopes of driving down energy prices, which have soared in recent months. “His big problem is that the price of energy is killing him in the polls, and second to that, the plan with Iran does not appear to be working,” Mead explained.