President Biden raised eyebrows Friday when he compared the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland — a remark many saw as a swipe at two key US allies, Israel and the United Kingdom.
“My background — the background of my family is Irish American,” Biden said near the beginning of his remarks at the Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem.
“And we have a long history not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people, with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish Catholics over the years, for 400 years,” the president continued.
Biden — who has long touted his Irish heritage and Catholic beliefs — then quoted a verse from an adaptation of the ancient Greek poet Sophocles by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
“History teaches us not to hope/On this side of the grave./But then, once in a lifetime/That longed-for tidal wave/Of justice rises up,/And hope and history rhyme.”
Biden said the stanzas were “classically Irish, but it also could fit Palestinians” and added that “it is my prayer that we’re reaching one of those moments where hope and history rhyme.”
Many social media users slammed the president over the implied criticism of America’s longtime friends, while others accused him of trying to co-opt the experiences of the “Troubles.”
At the height of both conflicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization provided weapons and training to members of the Irish Republican Army. Even today, Israeli and Palestinian flags can still be seen in Northern Ireland as proxy signals of support for either the Loyalist or Republican cause.
“This analogy is absurd and pathetic,” wrote Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
“Biden is saying the ‘Palestinian people’ are indigenous and the Jews, with ties to the land of Israel going back three thousand years across multiple sovereign kingdoms, are foreign colonists,” tweeted former Capitol Hill staffer Boris Ryvkin. “Stuff you’d hear from the PLO or US English professors rather than the POTUS.”
“There goes the post Brexit ‘special relationship’,” wrote author Ali Shihabi.
“I’ve had arguments with British colleagues in the Conservative Party for years about whether Biden had a tinge of deep-rooted anti-British animus to do with his Irish roots. To be clear, he does,” GOP communications consultant Liz Mair tweeted.
“Nothing to see here, just our ‘foreign policy expert’ president insulting two of our closest allies, Britain and Israel, in an effort to buddy up to a group of people led by terrorists,” John Cooper of the Heritage Foundation said.
“One of Biden’s many rhetorical challenges is his desire to suggest he understands everyone’s pain because he experienced something similar … which ends up not actually being similar,” Republican Matt Whitlock wrote.
“[F]eeble old grandpa reminisces on porch angrily about ‘no dogs or Irish allowed’ except it’s actually an open mic and he’s the President of the United States and now the UK is side-eyeing him as they work through revising the Good Friday Accords to conform to Brexit,” riffed attorney and podcast host Jeff Blehar.
“I’m not sure that Irish-Americans who have lived relatively comfortable lives should run around saying ‘we’ have suffered terrible pain because of the Troubles,” tweeted National Review political correspondent Jim Geraghty. “It’s like blurring the line between empathy and stolen valor…”
Biden made the controversial comments one day after receiving Israel’s Medal of Honor — the Jewish state’s highest civilian award — from the country’s president, Isaac Herzog.
In a Friday meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Biden emphasized the importance of negotiations to create an “independent, sovereign, viable and contiguous Palestinian state,” according to the White House.
However, Biden admitted to reporters shortly after that “the ground is not ripe at this moment to restart negotiations.”
