Biden Could be the ‘Last Zionist President,’ Former Israeli Diplomat Says

By Jacob Kamaras

DENVER — Joe Biden could be the “last Zionist president” of the United States, former Israeli diplomat Ido Aharoni Aronoff said in a session at the Jewish National Fund-USA Global Conference for Israel in Denver on Sunday.

That is because Biden is “part of that generation that understands the time when Israel was clearly the underdog,” and “remembers the days before the dramatic reversal of roles” which has taken hold in today’s perceptions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, explained Israel’s consul general in New York City from 2010-2016.

This also counters the commonly expressed notion in the Jewish community that Israel has “bad PR.”

“The problem is our positioning. We are not the underdog anymore,” said Aharoni, who also recently spoke in San Diego. “That’s the root cause of what you may think, mistakenly, is our PR problem…We have a positioning problem that cannot be fixed unless we do something on a policy level.”

Aharoni’s session came after conference attendees heard from another former diplomat, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. from 2009-2013.

Oren said at a plenary session that it is Israel’s sovereign duty to finish the job of eliminating Hamas, but simultaneously to keep searching for “a responsible Palestinian leadership” and peace.

“Peace is a strategic and moral imperative for the sovereign Jewish state,” he said.

Israel is “the nation-state of all the Jewish people,” said Oren, including the Jews who are being threatened or attacked on American college campuses.

Now, it is time for world Jewry to “embrace this moment of Jewish unity that brought us to Denver,” noting the significance of initiatives such as JNF-USA’s Israel Resilience Campaign and its World Zionist Village project.

“You are rolling up your sleeves and getting to work, just like you have the past 122 years,” Oren said of JNF-USA. “You’ve been there, overcoming sadness, beating out the odds.”