Normally, writing a column just before an election which will be published two days after, I should start by saying that by the time you read this you’ll already know whom the new President is, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. But I can say with certainty that by the time you read this you will not know whom the President is, even though you’ll have voted 48 hours before. It’s going to be days (weeks?), I predict, until we have some resolution on whom our new Chief Executive is. But one thing is certain: It will not be Joe Biden.
And as he leaves the world stage after a half-century in politics, it behoves me as an American Jew to recognize one undeniable truth: While Donald Trump as President 45 turned out to be the best friend Israel ever had in the Oval Office, Joe Biden came through when historically Israel needed it most. Biden overtakes even Harry Truman who recognized Israel just eleven minutes after its declaration, against the threats to resign of his legendary Secretary of State George Marshall, and Richard Nixon who armed Israel when it was almost destroyed in the Yom Kippur War, against the delaying tactics of his Jewish Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who died earlier this year.
Against the wishes of at least half his own party, Biden stuck to the guns he sent Israel literally and armed the Jewish state while it’s been engaged in the greatest battle the Jewish people have ever fought since the destruction of the Second Temple 2000 years ago.
And if action matters even more than words, why is Trump still ahead of Biden as Israel’s greatest-ever friend? Because Trump took the most decisive action against Israel’s greatest enemy and enabler of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran, by seeking to destroy them economically and killing their foremost terrorist commander Qassam Soleimani. Indeed, had Biden not had the embarrassing Obama Iran deal as part of his VP resume in the last year of the Barack Administration, he might have overtaken Trump as Israel’s greatest-ever friend in the White House.
But Donald Trump’s moral clarity on Iran, for which he is being severely punished by the terrorist regime which is seeking to engineer his assassination, and his Administration’s worldwide efforts to delegitimize any government that sough to delegitimize Israel, makes him the platinum standard of Israel’s friends.
A big thank you to Biden
But what Biden has done is still none too shabby and we Jews all owe him our eternal gratitude.
Yes, I’m well aware that Anthony Blinken (America’s third Jewish Secretary of State) and Sec Def Lloyd Austin just wrote Prime Minister Netanyahu a letter threatening to significantly cut off American arms supplies to Israel unless there is tangible evidence of humanitarian relief. Press reports say that Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs, my former Oxford student Ron Dermer will be responding to this fraudulent charge against Israel with the real numbers of the vast humanitarian relief that Israel has provided to residents of Gaza which Hamas continues to steal. I’m also aware that Biden has already enforced a partial arms embargo on Israel with 2000-pound bombs for a few weeks.
But for all of that, the sheer supply of essential armaments provided by Biden to prevent a second holocaust is staggering. To give you a quick idea of the magnitude of Biden’s support, since Israel’s founding 76 years ago, the United States has provided some $158 billion in economic and military aid, making the Jewish state the largest recipient of aid in American history. (And herein lies the tragedy of the Iran deal, where President Obama released $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets to be given to the Mullahs, money that was not theirs but rather belonged to the people of Iran, thereby matching everything Israel received since its founding.) But Biden alone accounts for nearly $18 billion in one year, since the October 7th attacks, pledging that Israel would get “whatever it needs” to defeat the terrorist enemy.
How many shipments of arms does that entail? We have to go back to March of 2024, when shipments first crossed the 100 markers, according to the Washington Post, to extrapolate at what the numbers are some 8 months later.
Yes, Biden has huffed and puffed and threatened and condemned Israel and at times used words that were overblown and overdone. But the essential spigot of arms to the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state, fighting a seven-front war against unqualified evil, never stopped and never waivered.
If that isn’t political and moral heroism on the part of a President who was condemned for doing so by tens of millions of Jew-haters in America and hundreds of millions worldwide, then the word heroism has no meaning.
The young Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts came to national prominence with his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles In Courage where he told the stories of members of the Senate who stood up for principle and against political interests to do what was morally right.
We don’t really have a similar book on the Presidency, which is a great shame. But when it comes to Israel, four great moments would certainly stand out. Harry Truman recognized Israel when the most celebrated American alive, Marshall, told him he’d vote for his opponent if he did so. Nixon, who in speech when certainly an antisemite, rose to save Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War after even Moshe Dayan nearly collapsed with the words "This is the destruction of the Third Temple.” Donald Trump for moving the American Embassy when his own first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told him the world would erupt in anger for doing so and all of Europe condemned his actions and taking a match to dynamite. And Joe Biden arming Israel in its greatest eve fight for survival as so many unrepentant Jew-haters in his own party, like AOC and Rashida Tlaib, and angry mobs of progressive students at America’s foremost universities, condemned him for doing so.
No one is perfect. And I hope that Biden will not tarnish his well-earned and not just self-declared reputation as “a great friend of Israel” by following through on this newest and most ignominious of all threats of an arms embargo that we’ve heard during the war, just as Israel is cleaning up the monsters of Hezbollah on its northern border. But assuming he does not do so, even after the election is over, the Jewish people must declare in unison, from the shores of the Kinneret to the blue waters of Bondi Beach, Australia where my wife grew up, President Biden, you have been our friend and champion. Your Jewish grandchildren salute you. Your Jewish daughter-in-law, Batya Cohen Biden salutes you. And we the Jewish people who are living through the horrors of October 7th and beyond will forever be grateful and never forget you.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” is the international best-selling author of the newly published guide to fighting for Israel “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.