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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Chris McGreal in New York

‘Israel in his heart’: why Biden ignores growing anger over the Gaza offensive

A pensive Joe Biden sits in front of US and Israeli flags.
‘It’s the price of waging a war,’ Biden said two weeks into the Israeli bombardment. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

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.

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