During his speech to the the AIPAC Policy Conference, Joe Biden told a story about meeting Golda Meir as a young senator in 1973. He said that he was worried about Israel’s future at that time, but Meir comforted him by saying, “Senator don’t worry. We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle, we have no place else to go.”
Biden continued:
And it was for me, at that moment, her comments crystallized for me everything I’d learned at my father’s table, and everything about the basic responsibility of the United States to be a partner in ensuring that there will always, always be a place for Jews of the world to go — (applause) — and that place always must be Israel. (Applause.) It’s real. It’s serious. It’s compelling. It’s the only certainty, the only certainty. (Applause.)
You can watch and read his entire remarks on the AIPAC website. Does this not strike you as odd? The Vice President of the United States telling a room full primarily of American Jews that Israel is Jews’ only certain place of refuge? This was especially ironic as stories from the Holocaust reverberated throughout the conference, including the story of the St. Louis, an ocean liner full of Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany that was not allowed to dock in the US. Was Biden implying this scenario could happen again?
I know he wasn’t, but the passage (and the thunderous applause it received) was a microcosm of the strange state of denial that the AIPAC conference took place in. The convention seemed to unfold in a suspended 1939-like atmosphere with the barbarians clamoring at the gate. This anxiety was in total contradiction to the success and power on display during the convention itself. The AIPAC conference both celebrated this power and access, while also warning it could disappear at any moment. Biden’s remarks reinforced the belief seemingly pervasive in the crowd that this success is fleeting and we must stay on the offensive to protect it.
Biden was playing to the crowd, and their (I would say irrational) fear
that another disaster is right around the corner for the Jewish
people. Jewish success in the United States has shown that Jews did, and do,
have somewhere else to go, and I’m incredibly thankful for it. But when the Jewish community, like the audience at AIPAC, is constantly steeped in the horrors of our darkest hour, it becomes more difficult to see the reality of our position more clearly. When everyone (Ahmadinejad, Hamas, etc.) is an embodiment of Hitler, then of course the only answer is to fight. But this way of looking at the world is not only divorced from reality, but a recipe for perpetual violence. As Avraham Burg has said in his wise book, the holocaust is over, we must rise from its ashes. Until we do, we are not protecting the next generation from harm, but only promising them a future of conflict. It’s the only certainty.
