Joe Biden told American Jewish leaders last fall that
American Jews can only rely on Israel and not on the United States (Hat Tip:
Mike P).
One evening this past September, Vice President Joe Biden and his
wife, Jill, hosted a gathering in Washington to celebrate Rosh Hashanah,
the Jewish new year. The guests—political supporters, leaders of Jewish
organizations, members of Congress, Jewish officials of the Obama
administration, and the stray journalist or two—gathered by the pool of
the vice president’s house, on the grounds of the U.S. Naval
Observatory.
Biden was characteristically prolix. He talked about the Shoah, and
about the many contributions Jews have made to American life, and he
mentioned, as he invariably does in such settings, his first encounter
with a legendary Israeli prime minister.
“I had the great pleasure of knowing every prime minister since Golda
Meir, when I was a young man in the Senate, and I’ll never forget
talking to her in her office with her assistant—a guy named Rabin—about
the Six-Day War,” he said. “The end of the meeting, we get up and walk
out, the doors are open, and … the press is taking photos … She looked
straight ahead and said, ‘Senator, don’t look so sad … Don’t worry. We
Jews have a secret weapon.’ ”
He said he asked her what that secret weapon was.
“I thought she was going to tell me something about a nuclear
program,” Biden continued. “She looked straight ahead and she said, ‘We
have no place else to go.’ ” He paused, and repeated: “ ‘We have no
place else to go.’ ”
“Folks,” he continued, “there is no place else to go, and you
understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no
matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how
engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States …
there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee,
and that’s the state of Israel. And so I just want to assure you, for
all the talk, and I know sometimes my guy”—President Obama—“gets beat up
a little bit, but I guarantee you: he shares the exact same commitment
to the security of Israel.”
Who'd have thought that Biden actually gets it?
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