This is not a protest against a faceless, nameless monolith. We’re standing right here, and you’re calling for our destruction.
I would be tempted to say that our present circumstances call for a proud Jew to tell that to Joe Biden, but the fact is that he’s already been told — by Begin himself. In 1982, at a closed-door meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden had threatened Begin with cutting off military aid for Israel’s offensive campaign in Lebanon. As Tevi Troy noted in the Wall Street Journal, the story went that Begin responded in fiery outrage:
Don’t threaten us with cutting off aid to give up our principles. I’m not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.
Forty-two years later, Joe Biden has learned nothing.
Joe Biden: real good at Betrayal, something learned in his long career as a civil servant. By the way, we knew about this from the book by Justice Clarence Thomas. He tells the story of how he’s going to Senate confirmation hearing the next day, and is worried about how the issue of Anita Hill is going to hurt him. Joe assures him that there’s no problem. The next day, leading the Senate questions, Joe the Betrayer leads off by attacking Thomas over the Anita Hill issue (of which, for the record, he was found innocent).
Joe has only honed his betrayal over the years. He now does it on a bigger stage. Afghanistan. Ukraine. Israel.
