VP Biden to American Jews: Rely Only on Israel for Safety, not America!

At a Rosh Hashana event last year, US Vice President Joe Biden appeared to insinuate that should the American Jewish community be in danger, it cannot fully rely on America for its safety.

A recent article by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has been making waves. In his article in The Atlantic titled, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” Goldberg recounts how in September, during a Rosh Hashana event hosted at US Vice-President Joe Biden’s home, the American dignitary told political supporters, leaders of Jewish organizations, members of Congress and Jewish officials in the Obama administration that Israel – and not the US – was the only guarantee for their safety.

Biden talked about the Holocaust and about the many contributions that Jews have made to American life, as well as discussing his first encounter with late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

“I had the great pleasure of knowing every prime minister since Golda Meir, when I was a young man in the Senate, and I’ll never forget talking to her in her office with her assistant—a guy named [late Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin—about the Six-Day War,” he said. “The end of the meeting, we get up and walk out, the doors are open, and…the press is taking photos…. She looked straight ahead and said, ‘Senator, don’t look so sad…. Don’t worry. We Jews have a secret weapon.’ ”

Biden said he asked Meir what the weapon was, noting, “I thought she was going to tell me something about a nuclear program.

“She looked straight ahead and she said, ‘We have no place else to go.’ ”

Biden paused while recounting this event, and repeated, “ ‘We have no place else to go.’ ”

“Folks,” Biden continued, “there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones. You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States…there’s only one guarantee. There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the State of Israel. And so I just want to assure you, for all the talk, and I know sometimes my guy”—President Obama—“gets beat up a little bit, but I guarantee you: he shares the exact same commitment to the security of Israel.”

Goldberg admits to having been “confused by Biden’s understanding of the relationship between America and its Jewish citizens.”

By: United with Israel Staff
(With files from The Atlantic)