Le Monde: Biden declared himself Zionist since 1973
Joe Biden, the first president of the United States to declare himself a Zionist, remains determined to remain faithful to more than half a century’s commitment to Israel, and now, despite being the most powerful man in the world, he hasn’t been able to prevent the ongoing Israeli military operation in Rafah, a French academic said.
Political science professor Jean-Pierre Filiu wondered – in his column in Le Monde newspaper – why the US Democrats chose Joe Biden’s octogenarian to face former President Donald Trump, who is 4 years his junior, highlighting that Biden’s age isn’t more controversial than his repeated and embarrassing gaffes, such as his confusion between Haifa and Rafah when urging him not to attack the latter.
Filiu reviewed the biography of Biden, who born in 1942, became a Democratic senator at the age of 30, making his first visit abroad to Egypt and Israel in 1973, where he was received in Egypt only by second-class officials, and instead his meeting in Israel with Prime Minister Golda Meir was one of the most important meetings of his life, according to him.
Biden often recounts how the prime minister revealed Israel’s “secret weapon” to him, saying “we have nowhere else to go,” repeating in the US media that the “Palestinian nation” doesn’t exist and so does the “Palestinian people,” and saying that she “cannot forgive the Palestinians for forcing her to kill their children,” a quote widely used today in Israel.
The young senator Biden returned so enthusiastic about Israel that he declared himself a “Zionist,” and kept repeating it publicly, explaining each time that “you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist”.
Biden supported Menachem Begin’s government in its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, despite the death of many civilians, and was so enthusiastic that it was Begin who had to soften his exaggeration, reminding Biden that any belligerent party is required to preserve women and children.
Biden enthusiastically defended massive military aid to Israel in Congress, saying, “It’s the best investment we’ve ever made, worth $3 billion… If there were no Israel, the United States would have to invent Israel to protect its interests in the region”.
Biden voted for the congressional resolution to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an initiative that would torpedo the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace process at the time, was made by the Republican right to embarrass both US President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was later assassinated by a Jewish extremist.
As the current US president, Biden has devoted most of his diplomatic energy in the Middle East to achieving normalization between Israel and Arab states, rather than relaunching an Israeli-Palestinian peace process worthy of the name.
Thus, Biden renounced the role of the United States as a historical mediator, and the attack of the seventh of October 2023 didn’t change anything in his bias, to confirm with him his country’s inability to stop the ongoing tragedy, and worse, he believed the lie of “terrorists who cut off children’s heads”, before his services denied it.
Biden’s recent decision to suspend a single military shipment to Israel after a genuine airlift amounts to recognizing some form of joint combat, as the White House claims to be able to control the scope and intensity of the war waged by its ally in Gaza.
