U.S. President Joe Biden is set to arrive in Israel next week, and his top diplomat in the country says that the long-expected visit won’t be affected by Israel’s recently-announced election. “The show will go on,” Ambassador Thomas Nides told the Haaretz Weekly podcast in a special July 4th interview.

“Joe Biden is coming here for the Israeli people. He's not coming for one political party or another,” Nides told hosts Allison Kaplan Sommer and Amir Tibon, describing the U.S. president as a “Zionist” who “knows more about the Middle East and Israel than probably any politician in the history of the United States.”

In a wide-ranging interview held on the eve of the Knesset’s vote to dissolve itself and Yair Lapid’s instatement as caretaker prime minister, Nides lays out the goals of Biden’s Mideast tour, with stops in Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia. He also answers our questions on related policy issues from Ukraine and China to Iran.

Also on this week’s episode, a special announcement: Haaretz’s Election Overdose podcast is back! As we begin the journey toward Israel’s fifth election in three years, Anshel Pfeffer and Dahlia Scheindlin will be in our studio each week to talk about the biggest political stories of the hour, and how they could impact the results in November. Listen to them discussing the Knesset’s dissolution and Lapid’s appointment, starting at time code 27:50.

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