“You need not be a Jew to be Zionist,” he said, recounting past comments to Prime Minister Yair Lapid cited in his remarks at Ben-Gurion Airport.
The two-day visit to Israel is Biden’s 10th, but his first as President. Reciting his first trip to Israel in 1973, during which he met then-prime minister Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, who later became prime minister, Biden said he had “the great honor of living part of the great history of this great country.”
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“Every chance to return to this great country, where the ancient roots of the Jewish people date back to biblical times, is a blessing,” he said. “The connection between the Israeli people and the American people is bone deep, and generation after generation that connection grows. We invest in each other. We dream together.”
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Biden spoke of the U.S. and Israel collaborating on “the most cutting-edge defense systems in the world,” briefly before he went to a presentation by the Defense Ministry that included an Iron Dome battery and the laser-based Iron Beam missile-defense system.
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“We will continue to advance Israel’s integration in the region [and] expand emerging forms and engagements, like the new I2U2 summit” of Israel, the US, India and the United Arab Emirates, whose leaders are set to convene via video link on Thursday “to deepen the economic cooperation between the Middle East and Indo-Pacific,” he said.
Biden said he would also address his “continued support – even though I know it’s not in the near term – [for] a two-state solution. That remains, in my view, the best way to ensure the future of equal measures of freedom, prosperity and democracy for Israelis and Palestinians.”
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Biden spoke of his firm connection to Israel and the Jewish people going back to his childhood, when his father, a “righteous Christian,” told him and his siblings about the Holocaust and “imbued in us a sense of obligation.”
During his visit to Yad Vashem, Biden said he would “honor the six million Jewish lives stolen in the genocide and continue what we must do every day, to bear witness... and honor those we lost so that we never forget that lesson.”
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Wearing a kippah, Biden later rekindled the Eternal Flame and laid a wreath at the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem. He became visibly emotional when he met with Holocaust survivors Rena Quint and Giselle “Gita” Cycowicz and kneeled in front of them so that they did not have to stand while they spoke for more than 10 minutes.
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Biden wrote in the Yad Vashem guest book: “We must never, ever, forget because hate is never defeated. It only hides. We must teach every successive generation that it can happen again unless we remember. That is what I teach my children and grandchildren. Never forget.”
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