Former Vice President Joe Biden attempted to take partial credit for the historic peace deal announced Thursday by President Donald Trump between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saying he laid the groundwork for the agreement.
In a statement, Biden praised the agreement, under which Israel and the UAE will achieve full normalization of relations. He promised that he and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) would build on the deal if they are elected to office in November.
But Biden also tried to claim that he, and former President Barack Obama, deserved some of the credit for the peace deal:
The coming together of Israel and Arab states builds on the efforts of multiple administrations to foster a broader Arab-Israeli opening, including the efforts of the Obama-Biden administration to build on the Arab Peace Initiative. I personally spent time with leaders of both Israel and UAE during our administration building the case for cooperation and broader engagement and the benefits it could deliver to both nations, and I am gratified by today’s announcement.
In fact, the Israel-UAE peace deal was impossible during the Obama-Biden administration, for two reasons. The first was that Obama and Biden insisted on criticizing and condemning Israel, creating “distance” between the U.S. and the Israeli government. Biden himself was the administration’s point man in attacking Israel over its housing policy in Jerusalem.
The second reason was the Iran nuclear deal. The “agreement” — which was never signed by anyone — allowed Iran to become a nuclear power after a decade or so, and did nothing to stop Iran from threatening the Sunni Arab states. The U.S. lost leverage with the Sunni Arab states as a result. To the extent Israel and the UAE moved closer during the Obama-Biden administration, that was because the U.S. allowed the Iranian regime to become a greater threat to both.
The Trump administration reversed the Obama-Biden administration’s anti-Israel policies and withdrew from the Iran deal, building a new regional alliance that united the Sunni Arab states against Iran — and that made room for Israel.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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