An Untold History of Joe Biden's Support for Israel

All the while, a question has remained: what explains Biden’s persistent, near-unconditional support for Netanyahu and the Israeli war machine?

There appears to be some consensus that Biden is driven by a belief in Zionism and a deep emotional attachment to Israel. He has ​“a deep-seated, personal commitment to Israel that goes back to his first years as a U.S. senator,” according to the Washington Post. Biden is a ​“true believer” who ​“alone among modern American presidents has an emotional relationship with the idea of Israel, the people of Israel, the security of Israel,” according to the author of a Biden book, speaking on MSNBC. And Biden has told audiences for decades that his commitment to Israel is ​“personal” and ​“began at my father’s dinner table.”

The reality is more complicated. Over four decades, Biden has also established a reputation as a politician who can choose paths of least resistance, of giving ​“different talks to different people,” as one voter in New Castle County, Del., put it in 1978. Or, as another voter that year put it more harshly, Biden ​“is a phony.” That election year, data showed that half of Delaware voters, including 39% of those supporting Biden, agreed he was inconsistent.

The most common example is Biden’s famous flip-flop on busing. But there are many others, too. After running as a Rooseveltian populist, Biden also urged his party to become more hawkish on both war and the deficit in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s victory. He went serially back and forth on a balanced budget amendment, expressing fiery outrage one minute, voting for it the next. After he faced a challenge from a Republican accusing him of being soft on terror, Biden pushed the War in Iraq, before later telling a group of Black columnists he opposed unilateral military action against it.

In searching for the origins surrounding the president’s views on the U.S.-Israel relationship, In These Times and Jacobin found what appears to be a similar story. Drawing on a combination of contemporary newspaper reports, largely from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Wilmington News Journal, and records held at archives in Delaware and New York, including copies of the Jewish Voice and correspondence to and from Biden with, among others, advocacy groups and community leaders, at least some portion of the historical record suggests Biden’s position developed alongside his political interests over time — but also took a sharp turn early on. 

Biden’s campaign pushed back to the newspapers fiercely. The candidate charged Livingston was ​“stupid, emotionally mixed up or a downright liar” before later calling him ​“a flat-out liar.” 

Biden claimed he had merely been arguing as the devil’s advocate if he had ​“said something like that,” referring to other alleged remarks that Israeli leaders were the world’s biggest arm-twisters and that Jews were too emotional about the country. One campaign staffer told the Inquirer the same, adding that, ​“in the confines of an office, things can always be said that can be misconstrued.” 

Another staffer first said it was simply a ​“brainstorming” session where lots of ideas were floated, before later saying he couldn’t remember what was said and that Livingston was carrying out ​“a vendetta.” 

Yet the reporter who broke the original story — Norm Lockman, the News Journal’s first full-time Black reporter, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize at the Boston Globe—didn’t appear to buy the non-denials. Two years later, writing about then-Sen. Biden’s refusal to read the transcripts of the Richard Nixon White House tapes, Lockman offered his own theory of what lay behind Biden’s decision: ​“He’d had a taste of being criticized for private remarks that later became public.”

In the column, Lockman offered more details of the October 1972 incident. After Biden had commissioned the position paper, a philosophical argument followed about the wisdom of the U.S. commitment to Israel ​“with Biden generally taking the position that Israel might be expecting too much of the United States.” Lockman noted the candidate ​“immediately acknowledged that he had made some of the statements attributed to him” and claimed he had been playing devil’s advocate. 

“He still reacts bitterly when he is reminded of it,” wrote Lockman. ​“Biden is a rough talker when he thinks it’s private, and I suspect a lot of other politicians are, also. I doubt if there is a politician on Capitol Hill, anywhere perhaps, who could safely allow his private conversations to be made public.”

Both of the men who reported the story at the time, Lockman and the Inquirer’s Robert Schwabach, passed away years ago. Biden’s senatorial papers are locked away from the public and as this article is being published, attempts to reach Livingston have been unsuccessful.

But other documents shed light on the various relationships surrounding a young Biden as he formulated his political stance on an issue that will undoubtedly play a large role in defining his presidency.

Biden already had the support of one particularly influential pro-Israel leader in Delaware: campaign donor Irving S. Shapiro, chair and CEO of DuPont, a preeminent corporate power in the state. 

“Irving Shapiro, I consider a good personal friend,” Biden said three years later, in 1975. ​“I’ve sought out his opinion on a number of occasions.” Shapiro had swiftly come to Biden’s defense when the Livingston story broke, insisting that both Biden and his opponent ​“have clearly demonstrated their commitment to the state of Israel,” and likening any suggestion to the contrary to the ​“big lie.”

Shapiro was not just a local industrialist. As a former JFD president, he was deeply involved in pro-Israel advocacy at both the local and national levels. Shapiro sat on the DuPont executive committee that Biden early on requested a meeting with to discuss positions he had taken on the 1973 oil embargo and to ​“exchange views on national issues”; together, in October 1973, the two arranged a breakfast with a visiting Walter Mondale to discuss U.S.-Israel policy with local Jewish leaders. Years later, as Shapiro led the effort to pass legislation undermining the decades-old Arab League boycott of Israel, documents show that Biden was one of the small circle of Congressmen kept in the loop. (Biden ultimately voted with 55 other senators to make it law). 

In 1975, the elected senator was asked which of the state’s interest groups tried to influence him. ​“The interest groups that I hear from are the Jewish interest groups concerned about Israel,” he replied, and then went on to list a handful of other groups. ​“And they’ve always been reasonable when they’ve come to me, they’ve never threatened me in any way. Maybe it’s because I tend to vote their way.” 

Archival documents provide a window into how this outreach worked. In April 1975, Barnett followed up on a personal request from Biden to put ​“together a group to discuss Israel further,” and he recorded the senator’s comments. Alongside Biden’s thoughts on the mood in Congress and his less-than-flattering opinion about Gerald Ford’s foreign policy, Biden laid out his position on Israel and Palestine — one that had strayed far from what he allegedly told Victor Livingston.

Biden did ​“not believe that Israel is intransigent,” thought ​“the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] is nothing but a murdering group of people,” and questioned why Israel should ​“move simply for a promise.” Barnett also noted Biden ​“will change his principles to support aid for Israel if necessary,” the notes from that April 14, 1975 meeting stated, and would bend on Israel’s obligation under international law to return the territory it was occupying. ​“1948 is irreversible,” Biden said, according to the notes. ​“Israel does exist and the starting point is 1975, not 1948.”

It was a starting point that came after Israel’s seizure of various territories in 1967, including Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Biden seemed to hint he would be willing to accept Israel’s expansion two years prior, in 1973, when recounting his conversation with then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in a letter to a Jewish refugee advocate . Biden met Meir in August 1973 on his first trip to the country during a congressional junket.

“In my conversations with Mrs. Meier [sic], I conveyed my support for the security of Israel, including retention of certain geographical points she said were necessary to assure Israel’s existence,” he wrote. 

But typically, the correspondence In These Times and Jacobin found was strictly business. Five months into Biden’s first Senate term, Barnett delineated whom to listen to if Biden really wanted to take the temperature of Jewish opinion in Delaware, creating a short list of ​“people who can represent the Jewish community in the state,” including several JFD personnel. 

JFD’s president, he wrote, ​“represents the entire Jewish community.” 

Biden was often proactive in seeking input. In one December 1973 letter to Barnett, Biden explained at length why he voted against aid for Soviet refugees resettling in Israel. Barnett passed the letter on to two leaders of national Jewish groups for comment, noting the senator ​“makes a very persuasive argument.”

After another April 1975 meeting to discuss the Middle East, several letters of gratitude informed Biden his ​“open and frank comments” were appreciated and his ​“honesty was quite refreshing,” and thanked him for his ​“very supportive stance” regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship. ​“I don’t ever remember coming out of a meeting where there was total unanimity in the positive feelings that everyone had in your comments,” Barnett wrote, thanking the senator for being willing to ​“get to know the facts and then to let us know the facts.”

Biden’s pro-Israel advocacy didn’t proceed in a straight line. Throughout the early 1970s, Biden cast several votes against military aid to Israel, usually when packaged with military spending more broadly, such as to Vietnam or Cambodia. Through 1975, he waged a headline-grabbing, almost one-man campaign against an Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement on the same basis he had once allegedly said was his personal view, that ​“we shouldn’t get tied down to countries like this.” Biden vehemently opposed the deal’s apparent requirement of sending 200 U.S. civilian technicians to Sinai to operate radar stations because it could ​“prove to be just the beginning of an ever-expanding American presence in the Mideast,” drag the United States into a ​“moral quagmire” and ​“bind us.” 

But Biden still found himself on the list of 76 senators telling the president, in May 1975, that cutting back U.S. aid for Israel would be dangerous, then the largest number to have ever signed a pro-Israel letter or resolution. That letter came only one month after Biden told local pro-Israel advocates he would ​“change his principles to support aid for Israel if necessary.”

By the latter half of the decade, Biden sounded much more like ​“one of Israel’s most ardent backers” in Congress, as he was often called. Biden waged a similarly ferocious, losing campaign against Jimmy Carter’s plan, opposed by Israel, to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Two weeks from his first re-election, his campaign ran an ad in the Jewish Voice —“an open letter to the Jewish community” urging a vote for Biden and signed by dozens of community members — touting these efforts, insisting ​“that Joe Biden’s support for Israel is more than an interested concern. It is a heartfelt commitment.”

The following year, in what one senator called a ​“valuable test” of whether U.S. support for Israel was shrinking, Biden voted with the overwhelming Senate majority against cutting $100 million from a $1 billion military aid package to Israel, as well as with the much smaller majority who narrowly beat back an attempt to cut it by 5%. A month earlier, he had received a standing ovation from a pro-Israel group in Pittsburgh as he called for the United States to re-establish its ​“special relationship” with Israel and commit to more military aid. 

Biden’s public rhetoric began stressing Israel as a core part of U.S. security. After Reagan’s election, Biden would find himself consistently to the right of the famously pro-Israel Republican, fighting his 1981 arms sale to the Saudis once Israel officially came out against it — a major AIPAC priority — and pushing legislation, that Reagan opposed, stepping up U.S. aid to Israel while alleviating its U.S. debt. Another key example was his justification of hard-wing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s brutal war on Lebanon, which had so outraged the U.S. public, even Reagan moved to end it.

“What did you do in Lebanon? You annihilated what you annihilated,” Biden told Begin, according to Begin’s recollection. ​“It was great! It had to be done! If attacks were launched from Canada into the United States, everyone here would have said, ​‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’”

Less than a week after the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon in 1982, Biden flew to a retreat held by the United Jewish Appeal Young Leadership Cabinet, where he spoke alongside AIPAC’s executive director and an official at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., named Benjamin Netanyahu. A year later, even as other pro-Israel politicians urged Israel to withdraw from the country, Biden insisted that ​“Israel’s presence in Lebanon is vitally important.” 

His steadfast backing reflected only one segment of Jewish opinion. In Delaware, Jewish Voice assistant editor Bill Frank excoriated the JFD, which put out the publication, for dragging its feet on issuing an ultimately weak statement on the massacre, noting the outrage at Begin’s government both in Israel and among Jewish leaders around the country that followed.

Biden’s closeness to the pro-Israel lobby deepened through the 1980s, speaking regularly at AIPAC conferences and other events. AIPAC was deeply embedded in Biden’s 1987 presidential campaign, which members of the lobby group donated to, fundraised for and served on, with five former AIPAC staffers ending up in key posts, turning his campaign into a fundraising juggernaut. ​“The candidate’s all-important National Finance Committee is well stocked with AIPAC activists and regional United Jewish Appeal leaders,” reported the Detroit Jewish News.

The relationship remained strong even after his first tilt at the presidency fizzled out. In June 1989, one year before Biden’s third Senate re-election, he wrote a letter to major pro-Israel backers Stephen Lowey, an antitrust lawyer, and his wife Nita, who had then just won a Congressional seat while insisting she was ​“firmly opposed to an independent Palestinian state.”

“You have helped me in the past, and I need your help again,” read Biden’s hand-signed letter to the couple. ​“If I can amass a substantial warchest by June 30, I’m convinced this special fundraising effort will clearly impact on potential opposition, and do more to help my reelection than would many such contributions later.”