JERUSALEM – This may be President Biden’s first visit to the Middle East since he took office, but he is no stranger to regional politics and diplomacy. Few leaders can match his claim to have known every Israeli prime minister for more than half a century, starting with Golda Meir in 1973, or his enduring record of support for Israel. .
Mr. Biden’s first visit abroad to Egypt and Israel, as a young senator, was a baptism of fire. The Arab-Israeli War of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War, broke out shortly thereafter, beginning with surprise Egyptian and Syrian attacks against Israel.
Mr. Biden has become a staunch supporter of substantial annual military and economic aid to Israel, calling it “the best $3 billion investment we’ve ever made.”
He was also a staunch opponent in the 1970s and 1980s of advanced American arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, arguing for maintaining the country’s qualitative military advantage. Israel in the region.
In 2007, Mr. Biden tell an interviewer that, “Ever since I was a kid, I said, when I was a young senator, I said, ‘If I were a Jew, I’d be a Jew. .’ I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. “
However, Mr. Biden’s dealings with Israeli prime ministers have also become strained. In 1982, he joined a bitter exchange with Menachem Begins at Capitol Hill on the Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank. Mr. Begin, who proposed an Expanded Israel beyond the narrow pre-1967 boundaries to territories captured from Jordan and Egypt, described the discussions as “energetic”.
Attending Ariel Sharon’s funeral in 2014, Mr Biden described the former prime minister – who championed settlement building and Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 – as a “complicated man”. ”, who “also lived in complicated times in very complex neighborhoods. “
As vice president in the Obama administration, Mr. Biden has run some rough times with Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative who has been in power from 2009 to 2021. When Mr. Biden was in Israel in 2010, a conservative. As part of promoting the resumption of Israel-Palestine peace talks, the Israeli Interior Ministry approved 1,600 new Jewish housing units in Ramat Shlomo in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, an area where much of the world still considered occupied territory. At that time, temporary and partial settlement freezes were not in place in Jerusalem.
Washington took the announcement as a slap in the face, and Mr Biden condemned the move as “exactly the kind of trust-eroding step we need right now.” Ramat Shlomo has since grown significantly.
When he returned to Israel as vice president in 2016, Mr. Biden strongly criticized the Western-backed Palestinian Authority’s failure to condemn the series of bloody attacks. A Palestinian attacker stabbed an American graduate student and a combat veteran along the coast near Tel Aviv, about 1 block from where Biden was meeting a former Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, 6 km.
After the Palestinian leadership severed most ties with Washington under the Trump administration, which recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US Embassy there from Tel Aviv, Mr. Biden re-established contacts. and restore aid that was cut by its predecessor.
But the Biden administration has failed to reverse some of the Trump-era policies that have dented Palestinian aspirations for statehood and has sought to lower expectations of any upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. resumed.
The embrace of Netanyahu and President Donald J. Trump further damaged bipartisan support for Israel in Washington, which it has long viewed as a strategic asset, experts say.
It took nearly a month after taking office in January 2021 for Mr. Biden to make the traditional courtesy call with Mr. Netanyahu, which many analysts consider unpleasant, though the White House denies that information. .
Myra Noveck and Hiba Yazbek Contributing research.
