WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden told American Jewish leaders Israel “fully” backs Israel’s right to defend itself against Iranl as Israel’s government prepares to respond to last week’s Iranian missile barrage on its territory and has pushed its allies to join in.
Biden’s call Wednesday afternoon was timed to the High Holiday season, and was focused mostly on the challenges Israel and American Jews have faced since Hamas, an Iran-backed terror group, launched its war on Israel last year on Oct. 7.
The call was supposed to have taken place before Rosh Hashanah, on Oct. 1, but Iran barraged Israel with close to 200 ballistic missiles that day, prompting Biden to delay it as U.S. forces assisted Israel in repelling the vast majority of the missiles. The call ended up taking place on Wednesday, Oct. 9, and came shortly after Biden had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an hour about the conflict with Iran.
“As you saw just last week, the United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran and all its proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis,” Biden said on the call marking the High Holidays, which had 5,000 attendees. The call was organized by the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and included rabbis from all major streams.
Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have explicitly urged the United States to become more involved in the battle against Iran, and has indicated that he is ready to retaliate.
“There is only one force in the world fighting Iran right now,” Netanyahu said Wednesday to a delegation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “There’s only one force in the world that stands in Iran’s way to conquest. And that force is Israel. If we don’t fight, we die. But it’s not only our fight, it’s the free world’s fight, and I would say the civilized world’s fight.”
The last time Netanyahu retaliated against a direct Iranian attack, in April, Biden was opposed to an expansive strike, and told him to “take the win” of having repelled all but one of the missiles, assisted at the time by a U.S.-led alliance.
This time around Biden, at least on the record, is not pressing Israel to stand down. Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East who was also on the call, described the conversation between the president and prime minister, and did not mention seeking a diplomatic offramp from the conflict, something U.S. officials have mentioned in the past.
“We are committed to the defense of Israel,” said McGurk. “We’re also committed to holding Iran fully accountable for that attack, and we will continue to do so.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running in next month’s presidential election to succeed Biden, was on the call with Netanyahu. In an interview with CBS this week, Harris answered that Iran was an “obvious” choice as the United States’ chief adversary — though she did not say the U.S. military would join an attack on the country.
“Iran has American blood on their hands,” she said. “And what we saw in terms of just this attack on Israel, 200 ballistic missiles, what we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power, that is one of my highest priorities.”
McGurk noted the military resources Biden has deployed to the region since last October, and said Iran threatens U.S. forces as well.
“Things come in and out, but we make sure that we have a very strong deterrent posture, because we know that Iran is behind this network of terror that is very focused, not only on U.S. personnel, but particularly on Israel,” he said. “So I can assure you — as you heard directly from the President and the Vice President as well, who was on the call this morning — this has our full complete attention.”
Biden has said his father’s sympathy for the Jews during the Holocaust, and for Israel, shaped his political outlook. He told the listeners, as he has in the past, that he sends his children and grandchildren to see Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp, to absorb its horrors. What he saw when he visited Israel in the immediate wake of the Hamas invasion that killed 1,200 people and abducted more than 250, he said, was a “second, smaller Holocaust.”
“I wanted to let the world know where I stood and where America stood,” Biden said.
Rabbis on the call asked questions about the U.S.-Israel relationship, about antisemitism and about reproductive rights. A focus was on the proliferation of student protests against U.S. backing for Israel, which have at times devolved into hostility toward Jewish students. Neera Tanden, Biden’s top domestic policy adviser, said the administration was committed to inhibiting the attacks.
“The Department of Homeland Security has approved and provided resources to train campus law enforcement administrators on how to ensure Jewish students are safe on campus, and we’re going to keep working to ensure that Jewish students can get their education freed of intimidation and harassment,” said Tanden, who encouraged those on the call to report any harassment.
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