Joe Biden's policies, positions, and persona — and how his track record and policies on Israel are still relevant four decades later

Photos: Flash90, AP Images

For close to four decades, Joe Biden has been climbing his way to the top of American politics, consummately skilled at being all things to all people. But that tends to obfuscate his real policies and positions, which require closer examination, especially as the Democratic nomination is all but sewed up for him

Some days are more memorable than others. Sunday, June 7, 1981, was one of them.

For Iraq, it is a day that will live in infamy. For Israel, it was a day of military daring, when Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered the preemptive air strike that destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, turning an existential threat against Israel to dust and ashes. For me, as a young journalist in Delaware, it afforded an up-front glimpse into Joe Biden’s true feelings on Israel, in his role as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Covering Biden soon became part of my steady beat as news director at WDOV Radio in Dover, the capital of Delaware. Little did I imagine at the time how both the nuclear threat to Israel and Joe Biden’s track record and policies on Israel would still be relevant four decades later.

News traveled slower in the 1980s, and Israel initially kept mum about its lethal strike on Iraq’s nuclear plant at Osirak. It was only a day later that the Associated Press teletype machine in our newsroom spewed out its initial reports of the surprise attack. But when it started clanging and clattering, it did so with great fanfare.

When the AP needed to alert subscribers to urgent bulletins, the machines were programmed to sound a chime of ten bells. Instinctively, when the bulletin bells sounded on Monday, June 8, my first reaction was, okay who got shot now?

The bells had been tolling off the hook in the first half of 1981 as newsmen got used to working on an emergency footing. On March 31, a lone Washington DC gunman shot and wounded President Reagan. Six weeks later, a Turkish militant tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II. To get breaking news on air promptly, I would run back and forth between the teletype machine and our broadcast studio, tearing the bulletins off a large roll of white paper (keeping a spare roll ready at all times), and interrupt regularly scheduled programming to update our listeners.

After Israel struck, pundits weighed in with a combination of shock and awe. Some analysts feared that Israel had just fired the first shots of World War III. More sober commentators contended Israel’s audacity forestalled the next Middle East war.

As the days passed, and the breaking news yielded to routine follow-ups, my responsibility shifted from bulletins to covering the local angle, which on this story revolved around the junior senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The committee launched hearings ten days after the attack to debate the broader geopolitical implications of the strike and to weigh recommending punitive action against Israel for using US-supplied arms, for what some perceived as non-defensive purposes. Caught off guard, the Reagan administration initially censured Israel, suspended delivery of four F-16 fighter jets, and supported a United Nations resolution condemning Israel.

In the Senate, fighting a bout of laryngitis, Biden hoarsely staked out his position. First, Biden quashed a suggestion by a colleague, Senator Charles Mathias (R-MD), that Israel’s act might embolden other countries, such as Tunisia, to strike Libya’s nuclear plant in retaliation for the armed revolt that Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi was fomenting against Tunisia’s rulers.

“To the best of my knowledge, Gaddafi has not announced to the world that he wants to move Tunisia into the Mediterranean Sea,” Biden said. “However, in the case of Israel, this was a nation that was told, retold, and told again by the alleged possessor, or soon to be possessor of a nuclear weapon, that its goal was the elimination of Israel as a nation-state.”

After delivering that defense of Israel, Biden went on the offensive, chiding Menachem Begin for what Biden termed the prime minister’s “well-known insensitivity to people around him, both on a personal and a national level.” He then reprimanded Begin for not informing America in advance of the attack. “I am not as disturbed with the action that was taken, but I was disturbed with the manner in which this was taken. I don’t forgive Begin but I can understand why he did it.”