Anyone who wants to explain US President Joe Biden's support for Israel in attacking Gaza can look back four decades ago, when the US senator at the time met with the right-wing prime minister of the Jewish state at the time, Menachem Begin.

This is what the British newspaper The Guardian says, which adds that it happened in 1982, when Begin began his official visit to Washington days after Israel's invasion of Lebanon. The Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Joe Biden was the most enthusiastic in supporting the Israeli attack, during Begin's address to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Biden said during that meeting, according to what the American Jacobin magazine later revealed: "If attacks are launched from Canada on the United States, everyone will say: attack all Canadian cities, and we will not care if all civilians are killed." Begin later expressed his astonishment at the heat of support for Biden, especially the senator's attempts to justify the killing of women and children in Lebanon!

That's why Begin told Israeli reporters at the time: "I distanced myself from those statements. And I told him: No, sir, you have to be careful here, because our values prohibit the harming of women and children even during the war," but Israel committed many massacres against the civilians in those War like Sabra and Shatila and many others.

"I'm Biden, and I'm a Zionist"

After his inauguration as president, Biden was no less determined in his support for the latest aggression on Gaza following the Hamas attack on October 7th. Where the American president clarified the crimes and human losses, even as the number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel in its retaliatory attack on Gaza rose to more than 30,000. Biden said two weeks after the Israeli bombardment: "I am confident that the innocent were killed, and this is the price of fighting the war."

During a visit to Israel a few days before, Biden warned Israel against "getting lost" behind the anger in its response to the Hamas attack, and advised it to avoid the "mistakes" committed by the United States in its angry reaction after the September 11 attacks. But the president also supported Israel's right to respond militarily, and described himself as a "Zionist", and attended a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu's war government.

The Guardian newspaper says that the President's actions can be interpreted as stemming from his conviction that embracing Israel and supporting Netanyahu in public gives him greater influence over the Israeli Prime Minister in secret. And if this interpretation is correct, there is not much evidence of its success.

And more than half of Americans believe that Washington should suspend arms shipments to Israel, until the latter stops its aggression on Gaza, according to a YouGov survey this week. Many in the Democratic Party also want Biden to use the large American military aid as a pressure card on Israel.

"Israel is in Biden's heart"

But this idea seems far-fetched for the president who still clings to his point of view, which was formed during his first visit to Israel in 1973, when he saw Israel as "a brave little country surrounded by enemies from all sides and fighting for its salvation."

Shortly after Biden's victory in the 2020 elections, former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren stated to the Times of Israel: "Biden is from a generation that remembers the 1967 war and the 1973 war. Israel is in his heart, and he actually understands it."

But the world has changed over the past half century. And the younger generations no longer embrace the same point of view, but have come to see Israel as powerful, oppressive and criminal as it imposes its brutal occupation on the Palestinians, and this is punctuated by the periodic wars that have killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, mostly civilians.

And Biden once threatened to cut off American aid to Israel. Begin said that the meeting in which the senator expressed his support for the invasion of Lebanon witnessed a warning from Biden to the Israeli prime minister, when he told him that the construction of the settlements was losing support in his country within the United States and threatened to cut off American financial aid.

But that threat did not yield results. And four years later, Biden declared in front of the Senate that the time has come for supporters of Israel to stop apologizing for sending billions of dollars to the Jewish state every year. He said: "If there was no Israel, America would have had to invent a state like Israel to protect its interests in the region."

The justification of the crimes continues

After four decades, Biden's core conviction has not changed. As he told the American New Yorker magazine this week that he does not want to see more Palestinian civilians killed, because "this goes against what we believe in as Americans".

But the president returned to his old analogy, saying that Arab American voters and young Democrats, upset that he has not used US influence to rein in Netanyahu, should ask themselves what they would do if their communities came under attack.

He added: "I think they should just give themselves some time, so they understand what will happen if they return to their country or neighborhood and see what Hamas has done."

Source: Arabic Post