CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed Wednesday he was invited to Israel as a “liaison” to Egypt during the Six Day War.
VERDICT: FALSE. Biden was a law student during the Six Day War in 1967. He visited Israel six years later, in 1973.
President Biden tried to impress his audience at the annual White House menorah lighting ceremony, telling the kind of tall tale that has become his trademark, claiming to have been invited to Israel by Prime Minister Golda Meir in the Six Day War.
From the White House transcript:
I was saying to a couple of younger members of my staff, before I came over, about the many times I’ve been to Israel. I said — and then, all of a sudden, I realized, “God, you’re getting old, Biden.” (Laughter.)
I have known every — every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir. (Applause.) And during the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to — she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez, and so on and so forth.
And I sat in front of her desk, Chuck. And she had a guy — her staff member — to my right. His name was Rabin. (Laughter.) And she kept flipping those maps up and down. She had that bevy of maps — sort of kept it — and it was — it was so depressing what she was — about what happened. She gave me every detail.
There are several factual inaccuracies in Biden’s claim, including the following:
- The Six Day War took place in 1967. Biden was a law student; he was only elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972.
- Golda Meir was not the prime minister of Israel in 1967; that was Levi Eshkol. She was only elected in 1969.
- Biden’s first visit to Israel as a U.S. Senator took place in 1973 (he has told the story several times before).
- Biden was not a “liaison” between Israel and Egypt; if he was, he was a poor one, because war broke out weeks later.
Biden does not mention any work as a “liaison” between Israel and Egypt in his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep.
One meeting with an Israeli leader that Biden does not want to talk about is a clash that took place behind closed doors in 1982, when he tried to threaten Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin with a cutoff of U.S. aid. Begin was not impressed.
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). He is the author of the new e-book, The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it). His recent 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.