In June 1986, a 43-year-old Joe Biden, then a relatively senator for Delaware, famously said: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
Since he began his political career as a senator in 1973, President Biden has stood firm in his support for the Jewish state; from the Yom Kippur War to the atrocities of October 7, he has affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, leading some to call him the most pro-Israel president in American history. In recent years, especially since October 7, critics have argued that his policies toward Netanyahu have been erratic, bouncing between scolding and supporting.
In the last nine months, he’s also clashed with Netanyahu, especially over the handling of the war in Gaza. At the White House Chanukah reception in 2023, the president recalled his decades-long relationship with the Israeli Prime Minister, remembering how he once wrote on a picture of the two of them: “I wrote on the top of it, 'Bibi I love you but I don't agree with a damn thing you had to say."
He also drew fury from the more extreme elements of Netanyahu’s coalition, who attacked his decision to sanction violent settlers as well as accusing him of withholding weapons to the Jewish state in return for increased collaboration on Gaza.
US President Joe Biden, who announced he will be stepping down from his re-election campaign, has been called the 'most pro-Israel president' in US history. (DAVID FURST/AFP via Getty Images)
But, as Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator who served six secretaries of state in both Democratic and Republican administrations, told Reuters last year: “Biden's connection to Israel is deeply engrained in his political DNA.”
As support for Israel hits an all-time low among Democrat politicians, Biden’s late-stage decision to drop out of the running for a second term as president seems to mark the end of a certain era in US-Israel relations, defined by a default pro-Zionist position, seeing Israel as the plucky underdog against invading Arab armies, rather than a midweight regional power.
Biden’s attachment to Israel was spurred by his oft-recounted meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973, just weeks before the Yom Kippur War, when Meir reportedly told the 30-year-old senator that Israel’s secret weapon was “we have no place else to go.”
The encounter bolstered Biden’s view of Israel as a country whose interests were “inextricably tied” with those of the US, as he said at a Jewish Federation conference in 2014, leading him to become the Senate’s biggest recipient of donations from pro-Israel groups in American history, taking $4.2 million (£3.25 million) in campaign support.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (L) laughs with Biden, then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, during a meeting at the US Capitol 11 June 2002. (STEPHEN JAFFE/AFP via Getty Images)
Biden was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when, in 1982, then-prime minister Menachem Begin visited Washington to address the group. It was several days after Israel invaded Lebanon in response to cross-border attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that no one was more supportive than Biden of Israeli retaliation. According to a quote uncovered by Jacobin magazine, Biden said during the meeting: “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.’”
Even right-wing Begin “disassociated” himself from Biden’s vehement remarks.
But Biden has also played the pacifist. As a friend of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for over 40 years, Biden often mediated former President Barack Obama’s relationship with Netanyahu during his time as vice president.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets visiting then-Vice President Joe Biden on 9 March, 2010 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by Avi Ohayon - GPO via Getty Images)
According to Reuters, Dennis Ross, a Middle East adviser during Obama's first term, recalled Biden intervening to prevent retribution against Netanyahu for a diplomatic affront in 2010, and assuaging tensions between the two again in 2015 when Obama was brokering a nuclear deal with Iran.
"Whenever things were getting out of hand with Israel, Biden was the bridge," Ross told Reuters. "His commitment to Israel was that strong ... And it's the instinct we're seeing now."
A regular speaker at AIPAC, the country’s largest pro-Israel conference, Biden said at the annual event in 2016: “Israel will always exist strong and capable as the ultimate guarantor of security for Jewish people around the world. That is the abiding moral obligation we have.”
He called the BDS movement “wrong,” saying: “Jewish people know better than any other people, any action that marginalises one ethnic and religious group imperils us all.”
Biden has also been a supporter of a two-state solution, telling the Council on Foreign Relations in 2019 that it is “the only path to long-term security for Israel, while sustaining its identity as a Jewish and democratic state.
“It is also the only way to ensure Palestinian dignity and their legitimate interest in national self-determination. And it is a necessary condition to take full advantage of the opening that exists for greater cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors,” he said.
But even as Biden “strongly opposed” Israel’s settlement policy on the West Bank, he rejected the idea of withholding aid to pressure Israel into policy changes. He told PBS in 2019: “The idea that we would cut off military aid to an ally, our only true, true ally in the entire region, is absolutely preposterous. It’s just beyond my comprehension [that] anyone would do that.”
US President Joe Biden speaks at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual policy conference at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, 5 May, 2009. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
During the Israel-Hamas flare-up in 2021, Biden affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself against “indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups,” keeping with a position he would maintain at the onset of Israel’s campaign against Hamas after October 7, even at the expense of his own political capital.
Joe Biden in Israel in 2023(Photo by MIRIAM ALSTER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
He called Israel “the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East,” and, in 2007, even identified as a Zionist himself.
It’s a sentiment he has repeated over the course of his political career and credits his father with inspiring.
“Different people don’t know what a Zionist is,” Biden said in an interview last week, responding to the increasingly denigratory use of the word among pro-Palestine activists in recent months. “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and [being] a Zionist is about whether or not Israel is a safe haven for Jews because of their history of how they’ve been persecuted.”
As President Biden’s political career reaches its denouement, the same appears true for the Democratic Party’s golden era of friendship with Israel.
But, as Biden told J Street in 2013, “There is no contradiction between being progressive and being a supporter of Israel.”
