Joe Biden has shown a steady hand in the Gaza crisis
Joe Biden has a temper. He vents it sometimes on aides when he is unhappy with their work, and occasionally even on voters who have the nerve to criticise him.
But when it comes to building relationships to achieve his goals over the long term, whether with a wayward legislator or an oppositional foreign leader, Mr Biden has long demonstrated unusual patience and forbearance. So it was in 2010 when, as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he landed in Israel only to be blindsided by an announcement from the government of Binyamin Netanyahu that, contrary to the wishes of the Americans, it intended to expand Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.
This seemed a deliberate humiliation, and some of President Obama’s aides thought Mr Biden should turn around and head home in protest. But Mr Biden had begun developing a relationship with Mr Netanyahu in the 1980s, when he arrived in Washington to serve at the Israeli embassy, and the vice-president had his own ideas of how to manage matters.
Mr Biden issued a statement criticising the move, then put together a joint working group with Mr Netanyahu to contain the fallout. Then he and his wife Jill went to dinner with the Netanyahus.
According to Mr Netanyahu’s own grateful account, Mr Biden spoke that night about deeply personal matters, about how hard it had been to overcome the deaths of his first wife and their daughter in a car crash. Mr Biden later gave the prime minister a photograph, scrawling a message on it that might serve as an epigram for much of the US-Israel relationship: “Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love ya." Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, Americans have got the steady leadership most of them voted for in 2020, and they have been
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