The strategic fallout of Biden’s failure

Arguably, the moment U.S. President Joe Biden’s trip to Israel crashed and burned was on Friday morning during his remarks at Augusta Victoria Hospital on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

Biden’s visit to the all-Arab hospital was the most controversial stop during Biden’s visit to the Jewish state, because it signaled an about-face on America’s long standing support for an undivided Jerusalem.

Not only did Biden refuse to permit Israeli officials to accompany him on his visit to the Jerusalem hospital, but his team removed the Israeli flag from Biden’s limousine as he made his way to it, and refused to permit Israeli reporters to participate in the press pool.

Quite simply, even before Biden made the visit, the hospital tour represented a glaring contradiction of his repeated protestations of undying friendship and support for Israel. If anyone still held out hope that the president who told Israeli television that he was a Zionist was telling the truth, that hope was dispelled utterly when Biden began his remarks at the hospital.  

Biden began what quickly became a rambling, largely incoherent speech about how much he likes nurses, hates cancer and misses his late son Beau with the most hostile, anti-Zionist characterization any sitting U.S. president has ever made of Israel. 

In his words: “My background and the background of my family is Irish America, and we have a long history of … not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish-Catholics over the years, for 400 years.”

Whereas the rest of the speech was so incoherent it is hard to imagine it was anything other than off the cuff, Biden’s slander of Israel as a colonialist power was clearly prepared because it was followed by a quote from an Irish poem. 

The idea that Israel is a harsh colonial overlord in someone else’s land is the essence of the anti-Zionist slander. The false claim that Jews have no history in their historic homeland and no national rights as the indigenous people of the land of Israel is inherent to the narrative.