JERUSALEM — This may be President Biden’s first visit to the Middle East since taking 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 half a century, starting with Golda Meir in 1973, or his long history 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 soon after, beginning with surprise Egyptian and Syrian attacks on Israel.
Mr. Biden has become a staunch defender of substantial annual economic and military aid to Israel, once calling it “the best investment of the $3 billion we’re making.”
He was also a strong opponent in the 1970s and 1980s of the sale of advanced American weapons to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, arguing to preserve Israel’s qualitative military advantage in the region.
In 2007, Mr. Biden told an interviewer that “Early on, when I was a kid, I would say, when I was a young senator, I would say, ‘If I were Jewish, I’d be a Zionist.’ I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist.”
But Mr. Biden’s relationship with Israeli prime ministers has also been strained. In 1982, he got into a heated argument with Menachem Begin on Capitol Hill over Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank. Mr Begin, a supporter of a Greater Israel extending beyond the narrow pre-1967 borders into territories captured by Jordan and Egypt, described the discussions as “lively”.
Attending Ariel Sharon’s funeral in 2014, Mr Biden described the former prime minister – who supported settlement building and Israel’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip – as a “complex man” who “also lived in complicated times in a very complicated neighborhood.”
As vice president during the Obama administration, Mr. Biden went through some unpleasant episodes with Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative who served continuously from 2009 to 2021. When Mr. Biden was in Israel in 2010, in part for to push for the resumption of Israeli Palestinian peace talks Israel’s Interior Ministry has approved 1,600 new housing units for Jews in Ramat Shlomo in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, an area that much of the world still considers occupied territory. A temporary and partial freeze on settlement in effect at the time did not apply in Jerusalem.
Washington saw the announcement as a slap in the face, and Mr Biden condemned the move as “exactly the kind of step that undermines the confidence we need right now”. Since then, Ramat Shlomo has grown significantly.
In Israel, again as vice president in 2016, Mr. Biden strongly condemned the failure of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority to condemn a series of bloody attacks. A Palestinian assailant had fatally stabbed an American student and combat veteran along the coast near Tel Aviv about a mile from where Mr. Biden was meeting with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
After the Palestinian leadership severed most ties with Washington under the Trump administration, which recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the United States embassy there from Tel Aviv, Mr. Biden has restored contact and restored aid that had been severed by his predecessor.
But the Biden administration has not reversed several Trump-era policies that have undermined Palestinian statehood aspirations and sought to dampen expectations of an imminent resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
The mutual embrace between Mr. Netanyahu and President Donald J. Trump has further damaged bipartisan support for Israel in Washington, which the country has long viewed as a strategic asset, experts say.
It took Mr. Biden almost a month after taking office in January 2021 to make the traditional courtesy call to Mr. Netanyahu, which many analysts saw as a snub, although the White House denied there had been one.
Myra Noveck and Hiba Yazbek contributed research.
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