On Israel, Biden Is No Reagan

Defenders of President Biden’s decision to halt weapons shipments to Israel amid its war against Hamas have invoked a Washington “gotcha”—Mr. Biden is simply doing what Ronald Reagan did on more than one occasion. The comparison doesn’t hold up. Superficially, the parallels between the U.S.-Israel relationship in the early 1980s and today may appear compelling. Reagan and Prime Minister Menachem Begin got along no better than Mr. Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu. Then as now, the deeper U.S.-Israeli differences were strategic. The Reagan administration fumed at Israeli actions, often taken with little advance notice to Washington, that it felt put U.S. interests in jeopardy by risking war and the revival of Soviet influence in the Arab world. Reagan suspended the delivery of F-16s twice in 1981 and again in early 1983, the last in response to Israel’s intervention in Lebanon, siege of Beirut, and rejection of the “Reagan plan” for Israeli-Palestinian peace...

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