U.S. President Joe Biden has told his story about his conversation with Golda Meir five weeks ahead of the 1973 Yom Kippur War countless times.
Meir told the young senator from Delaware not to cast doubt on Israel’s future, even in times of great peril for the Jewish state.
“Don’t worry, senator,” she said. “We Jews have a secret weapon in our fight: We have no place else to go.”
But a different conversation with an Israeli prime minister has become more relevant since Biden’s shockingly disturbing announcement to CNN on Wednesday that he would halt shipments of American weapons to Israel for the first time if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a major invasion of Rafah.
At a closed-door meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1982, Biden warned Menachem Begin that military aid for Israel’s war in Lebanon could be cut off. Begin responded furiously.
“Don’t threaten us with cutting off aid to give up our principles,” Begin said. “I’m not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
Biden has always painted himself as pro-Israel, but it should have surprised no one that he merely carried out his threat that he issued to the Jewish state 42 years ago.
The response in Israel has been to blame Netanyahu for harming relations with the U.S., the IDF for not defeating Hamas fast enough or decades of Israeli policies of outsourcing making munitions to America, in part because hey, it’s free.
Don’t.
The buck stops with the president of the United States, who has made a strategic decision to abandon his country’s top ally at a time of its greatest need. He has decided to try to prevent Israel from achieving its important goals of defeating Hamas, preventing further attacks from Gaza and bringing the hostages home.
Yes, those same hostages whose families have been to the White House. The American citizens Biden spoke about as if they were family.
Biden knew he was betraying them. He knew Israel has enough armaments to defeat the final four Hamas brigades in Rafah without a new shipment, but it has a severe shortage of leverage in hostage talks with Hamas.
Whatever leverage Israel had was taken away in a couple sentences the Arab world saw Biden utter on CNN. It’s no wonder the negotiations once again ended in failure, following the sabotage.
Imagine if Biden had used that interview to threaten Qatar with becoming an international outcast instead of threatening Israel. He could have announced that if Qatar did not bring the hostages home, America would remove its military base from the country and bar American universities from having campuses in a state that sponsors terror groups like Hamas.
Biden of course would never dare do that. But he apparently could lie to Rachel Goldberg-Polin and condemn her American citizen son Hersh to languish in Gaza until his untimely demise.
Why?
Because like many politicians, Biden’s ultimate loyalty is to himself and his chances of getting re-elected. It used to be the Jews who were the key to victory in purple states, so he pandered to them for decades.
Now it’s the Muslims in Minnesota and Michigan, the constituents of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who Biden mistakenly believes hold the key to his second term, and he is acting accordingly. He will now be able to tell them that while he did provide arms that killed thousands of Gazans, he could have provided even more but did not.
Biden will also allow 100,000 Palestinians to enter the United States and make other controversial decisions to reach out to those Muslim voters. The slippery slope will continue.
The tragedy of Biden’s decision is that it contradicts so many statements and promises he has made for many years and even only one day before he announced the embargo.
“My commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad, even when we disagree,” he said at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial on Tuesday. “My administration is working around the clock to free remaining hostages, just as we have freed hostages already, and we will not rest until we bring them all home.” The entire audience greeted this message with thunderous applause.
In what may be an international record in speed for breaking promises, that ironclad commitment rusted in just one day.
In 2019, Judy Woodruff asked Biden on PBS NewsHour about left-wing politicians who favored cutting off aid from Israel to protest its construction over the pre-1967 border.
“That would be a tragic mistake,” he said. “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 why anyone would do that.”
Preposterous as it may be, Biden was criticizing himself five years later. His actions will be remembered, not his words.
This is a critical juncture in Israel’s existential war to defeat Hamas. Israel will win this war, with or without Biden.
Its people do not have trembling knees. They will remain proud Jews, standing by the principles that Israel and America will continue to share long after Biden has been forgotten.
