Would a President Biden Be Good for Israel?

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has a 40-year history of outreach to the American Jewish community, with frequent expressions of support for Israel. He opposes anti-Semitism and the boycott, divest and sanctions (BDS) movement, and has endorsed security assistance to Israel, including the Iron Dome system, although he had fiercely opposed the development of missile defense technology.

According to Israeli national security adviser Uzi Arad, then-vice president Biden told him, “I’m your best f-ing friend here.” Biden once said to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “I don’t agree with a damn thing you had to say, but I love you.”

Unfortunately, Biden can be an intemperate friend, frequently confronting Israeli officials and raising red flags about his strategic choices.

Biden once said to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “I don’t agree with a damn thing you had to say, but I love you.”

In recent months, Biden has moved to the political left, pandering to progressives by changing course on border security and the deportation of illegal immigrants, tuition-free college, school busing and the Hyde Amendment, which withholds federal funding for abortions, except in narrow circumstances.

Robert Gates, the widely admired former Barack Obama administration Secretary of Defense, likes Biden personally, but expressed in his memoir the common concern that Biden shifts his principles. “He’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” For example, Biden recommended caution and waiting to embark on the successful operation that took out Osama bin Laden.

Now, by accepting the endorsement of the J Street lobby and by inviting Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisers into his campaign brain trust, Biden is signaling his embrace of his party’s growing anti-Israel left-wing.

Now, by accepting the endorsement of the J Street lobby and by inviting Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisers into his campaign brain trust, Biden is signaling his embrace of his party’s growing anti-Israel left wing.

Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt was hostile to Jews: supporting quotas at Harvard; denying thousands of Jewish World War II refugees entry into the U.S.; and turning away the SS St. Louis, directly resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Jews in the Holocaust. However, he is credited as commander-in-chief while the GIs liberated Nazi death camps.

His successor, President Harry Truman, who also was anti-Semitic, heroically endorsed the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Sens. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Joe Lieberman were leading Democrats who affirmed the bipartisan consensus for a special alliance between the United States and Israel.

But Obama formally broke the tradition of unified American public support for Israel, proclaiming there should now be “daylight” between the allies.

Obama considered Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a key part of his foreign policy team. As point man on the controversial Iran nuclear deal, Biden stood by while the U.S. administration and its allies promoted dual-loyalty smears against wavering Jewish senators and those lobbying in opposition to the deal.

Scholar Michael Oren summarized this period as the darkest ever for U.S.-Israel relations.

By 2012, growing anti-Israelism on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., resulted in loud boos during a vote to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The 2016 DNC convention in Philadelphia featured harsh critics of Israel such as Keith Ellison, James Zogby and Cornel West.

Now, Joe Biden isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, the recently rejected British Labour leader who panders to Arab terrorists and detests all things Israel.

Now, Joe Biden isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, the recently rejected British Labour leader who panders to Arab terrorists and detests all things Israel.

Biden opposed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ calls to condition aid to Israel as “absolutely outrageous” and a “gigantic mistake.” However, in 1982, as Delaware’s senator, Biden similarly threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Israel, earning a dramatic public rebuke from then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that was praised by Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y.).

The problem with Biden isn’t anti-Semitism or dislike of Israel. Instead, it’s his unpredictable but brash confrontations with Israeli leadership and the mainstream pro-Israel community.

For example, after publicly supporting Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, with statements on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1983, 1995 and 2008, Biden reversed his position and opposed President Donald Trump’s action to achieve this long-sought, bipartisan goal. Biden says he now would not move the Embassy back to Tel Aviv.

More important, Biden frequently joins in with the most aggressive political and diplomatic attacks on Israeli settlements.

In 2010, Biden led the Obama administration efforts harshly to condemn Israeli authorization to build 1,600 housing units in the Jerusalem suburb of Ramat Shlomo. In 2016, speaking to J Street, Biden controversially criticized the Jewish state.
More recently, when the U.S. State Department clarified that Israeli housing settlements are not per se illegal under international law, Biden stated that settlements are an “obstacle to peace” that will only further inflame tensions in the region.

Biden frequently joins in with the most aggressive political and diplomatic attacks on Israeli settlements.

He is wrong as a matter of law. The West Bank (Judea-Samaria) is inside the land set aside for the Jewish National Home, as envisioned by the 1917 Balfour Declaration; confirmed in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine; re-confirmed by the 1945 U.N. Charter, Article 80; and repeatedly affirmed by the late professor Eugene Rostow, the drafter of the 1967 U.N. Security Council Resolution 242.

Biden is wrong as a political analyst as well. The Saudi leadership, fed up with Palestinian irredentism, has warned that if the Palestinian Authority continues to reject all peace proposals like the recent Trump plan, which specifically calls for a Palestinian state, it will deserve to see strategic setbacks vis a vis “facts on the ground.”

When Netanyahu, with the support of new coalition partner Benny Gantz, soon announces the annexation of Jewish-majority portions of the Jordan Valley that form Israel’s defensible eastern border, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is likely to approve. Biden likely will not.

Biden asserts a moral equivalency between Israeli housing development and security concerns with Palestinian incitement and terrorism.

Biden asserts a moral equivalency between Israeli housing development and security concerns with Palestinian incitement and terrorism. This past week, Biden announced he would reopen the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem and the PLO mission in Washington, D.C., and resume “economic and security assistance efforts” to Palestinians.

Biden may be called a friend, but he sides with Israel’s harshest critics, who promote a dangerous Israeli return to its indefensible pre-’67 borders.

Larry Greenfield is a Fellow of The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship & Political Philosophy.