As Israel headed to war, its best friend, the United States of America, showed strong support for the Jewish state. From shipping war material to diplomatic protection at the United Nations, America truly stepped up for Israel. President Biden gave two speeches immediately following the attacks on Israel. Both speeches were full of emotion, and it was clear that he took the attacks to heart.
Even if the speeches didn’t demonstrate President Biden’s strong feelings toward Israel, his personal visit to Israel during the war – the first American President to do so – was an unprecedented demonstration of both his personal and America’s commitment to Israel’s safety and security.
President Biden’s strong feelings toward Israel weren’t coincidental, they were borne of an emotive American Zionism that only someone of President Biden’s age and time can truly understand. By examining President Biden’s actions toward Israel – to the exclusion of all politics and partisanship – Zionists today can understand early American Zionism.
What is early American Zionism?
It’s strange that, unlike any previous president, when articles mention President Biden, they usually mention his age, as in this article by the AFP, “As Biden, 80, climbed the steps of Air Force One… .” While the president’s age has nothing to do with the article it does teach us about Zionism.
President Biden’s age is also important to help us understand who he is as a person. Born in 1942, his formative years were different from most people reading this column. When he was developing his global awareness in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Holocaust was a very recent event. The evidence of German atrocities was only then becoming widely known, and he would have been aghast that the civilized world could have allowed it to go on.
The State of Israel would’ve been in its infancy, having recently won the War of Independence. It was also facing an existential threat – akin to another Holocaust – by surrounding Arab countries and Fedayeen terrorist attacks. At 25, in 1967, Biden was beginning his foray into politics and watched as Israel came close to being wiped out in The Six Day War.
From President Biden’s writings, speeches, and personal life choices, it is clear the Holocaust played an important role in the life of this Irish Catholic man from Pennsylvania. Only President Biden can explain why preventing another Holocaust by ensuring the survival, safety, and security of the State of Israel became a priority in his life.
Very few Irish Catholic grandfathers on a Senate-sized salary committed to taking annual trips with each of their grandchildren when they reached 14. Of those few Irish Catholic grandfathers in America who did take their 14-year-old grandchildren on a trip, Senator Joe Biden was the only one to take them to Nazi camps. It is the strangest of choices and can only be explained by understanding that the Holocaust and preventing the next one, is a significant priority for President Biden.
PRESIDENT BIDEN has also suffered significant personal tragedy in his own life. He lost his wife and child in his first year in the Senate – at only 29 years old – and only a few years ago, he lost another son to cancer. These experiences have shaped him into a truly empathetic human being. The stories of President Biden’s raw emotion while comforting suffering families are well known. He is a very emotional man when he meets tragedy.
Arguably, for the last few decades, Israel hasn’t faced an existential threat. Only Hamas’s recent attacks come close to the nightmare that people of President Biden’s age have spent their lives trying to prevent by strengthening the Jewish state.
President Biden isn’t approaching the war in Israel purely from an American national security standpoint, or a political perspective. It is clear from his policies and his raw speeches that he is extremely emotional right now. He knows that he is one of the few non-Israelis who can stop Israel from taking any more losses. His multiple emotional speeches on Israel, his sending in two aircraft carrier groups, and his trip to Israel make little sense from a purely political or national security perspective.
When Zionism took off in the early 1900s in Europe, it wasn’t a popular movement among American Jews. American gentiles, especially Christians, gravitated much closer to the new Zionist movement than American Jews. Barely 10% of American Jews identified as Zionists in the movement’s early years.
After the Holocaust, American Jews’ attitudes toward Zionism took a seismic shift. Almost 90% of American Jews identified and paid membership dues to a Zionist organization. For the generation of the Holocaust and their children, the only guarantee that the Jewish people would never face another Holocaust was the State of Israel.
Today’s Zionism is focused more on rights of self-determination in the Jewish people’s historic homeland, than on ensuring there is a Jewish state to protect the Jewish people from the next Holocaust. The last few generations of Jews matured in an era when the Jewish state was the dominant force in the region.
Nightmares of a Holocaust seemed like an unrealistic worry for these generations – including this one – as they came of age. It takes someone of President Biden’s stature and age to remind today’s Zionists what motivated early Zionists to create the Jewish state.
The writer is a senior educator at numerous educational institutions. He is the author of three books and teaches Torah, Zionism, and Israeli studies around the world.