‘Israel in his heart’: why Biden ignores growing anger over the Gaza offensive

Anyone attempting to understand why Joe Biden is so unswerving in support of Israel’s right to attack Gaza might look back four decades to a meeting between the then US senator and the Jewish state’s rightwing prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin.

It was 1982, and Begin began an official visit to Washington days after Israel invaded Lebanon after cross-border attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that when Begin addressed the Senate foreign relations committee no one was more enthusiastic than Biden in support of the Israeli attack.

“If attacks were launched from Canada into the US everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed,’” Biden told the meeting, according to a quote uncovered by Jacobin magazine.

Begin later expressed surprise at the vehemence of Biden’s support, particularly the senator’s attempts to justify the killing of women and children.

“I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin told Israeli reporters. “I said to him: ‘No, sir, attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war’.”

As president, Biden has been no less determined in his backing for the latest assault on Gaza in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and hundreds of others abducted.

Even as the number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel in its retaliatory assault on Gaza rose into the thousands, the president justified the human cost.

“I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” Biden said two weeks into the Israeli bombardment.

The president added that