Anyone attempting to understand why Joe Biden is so unswerving in support of Israel’s right to attack Gaza might look back four decades to a meeting between the then US senator and the Jewish state’s rightwing prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin.
It was 1982, and Begin began an official visit to Washington days after Israel invaded Lebanon after cross-border attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that when Begin addressed the Senate foreign relations committee no one was more enthusiastic than Biden in support of the Israeli attack.
“If attacks were launched from Canada into the US everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed,’” Biden told the meeting, according to a quote uncovered by Jacobin magazine.
Begin later expressed surprise at the vehemence of Biden’s support, particularly the senator’s attempts to justify the killing of women and children.
“I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin told Israeli reporters. “I said to him: ‘No, sir, attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war.’”
As president, Biden has been no less determined in his backing for the latest assault on Gaza in the wake of the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and hundreds of others abducted.
Even as the number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel in its retaliatory assault on Gaza rose into the thousands, the president justified the human cost.
“I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” Biden said two weeks into the Israeli bombardment.
The president added that Israel “should be incredibly careful” to target the armed groups responsible for the 7 October attack but he also questioned whether as many civilians were dying as the Palestinian health ministry claimed.
On a visit to Israel a few days before, Biden warned Israel not to be “consumed” by rage in its response to the Hamas attack and to avoid the “mistakes” the US made in lashing out after 9/11. But the president also endorsed Israel’s right to hit back militarily as he proclaimed himself “a Zionist” and attended a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
One interpretation of the president’s actions is that he believes a very public embrace of Israel and backing for Netanyahu gives him greater leverage over the Israeli prime minister in private. If so, there is not much evidence it has worked.
In his State of the Union address on Thursday, Biden reiterated that “Israel has a right to go after Hamas” while adding that it has “a fundamental responsibility” to protect innocent civilians in Gaza. The Israeli attack has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children.
Biden then announced that the US will build a temporary pier in Gaza to deliver aid by sea and he warned Israel’s leaders that “humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip”.
But building a pier and getting the aid flowing is likely to take weeks at best and, for some, the plan only emphasised Biden’s unwillingness to use his power to pressure Israel, including to immediately allow food and other necessities into Gaza on the scale required to combat widening malnutrition and starvation.
More than half of Americans say Washington should halt weapons shipments to Israel until it stops the assault on Gaza, according to a YouGov poll this week, and many in the Democratic party want Biden to use some of the US’s considerable military aid to Israel as a lever.
That would be out of character for a president who remains wedded to a view shaped by his first visit to Israel in 1973, just before its Arab neighbours attacked in the Yom Kippur war, of a plucky little country surrounded by enemies and fighting for its survival.
Shortly after Biden won the 2020 election, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Times of Israel that the then president-elect “gets” his country. Oren often clashed with the Obama administration, when Biden was vice-president, over its policies on Iran and White House pressure on Israel to stop settlement construction. But he described Biden as having “a deep feeling for Israel”.
“Biden is from a generation that remembers 1967 [the six-day war] and 1973,” he told the Times of Israel. “He has Israel in his heart. He actually gets it.”
But the world has changed in the past half a century and that perspective is not shared by younger generations, who see a strong and oppressive Israel imposing a brutal occupation in the West Bank interspersed by periodic wars on Gaza in which thousands of Palestinians have been killed.
Biden did once threaten to cut off US aid to Israel. Begin recalled that at the same meeting at which the senator offered his support for the invasion of Lebanon, Biden warned the Israeli prime minister that settlement construction was costing his country support in the US and even threatened to cut American financial assistance.
But nothing came of it, and four years later Biden told the Senate that it was time for Israel’s supporters to stop apologising for sending billions of dollars a year to the Jewish state.
“There’s no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3bn investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region,” he said.
Four decades later, Biden’s core belief has not changed. He told the New Yorker this week that he doesn’t want to see more Palestinian civilians killed because “it’s contrary to what we believe as Americans”.
But the president fell back on his old analogy as he said that Arab Americans and young Democratic voters angered by his unwillingness to use US power to rein in Netanyahu should ask themselves what they would do if their communities came under attack.
“I think they have to give this just a little bit of time, understanding what would happen if they came into their state or their neighbourhood and saw what happened with Hamas,” he said.
