Biden talks to his hands, stumbles over names during Israeli sitdown

WASHINGTON — President Biden leaned heavily on his notes Tuesday while welcoming Israeli President Isaac Herzog to the Oval Office — as left-wing Democrats lined up to boycott Herzog’s scheduled speech at the Capitol in protest of the Jewish state’s policies toward Palestinians.

“This is a friendship, I believe, that is just simply unbreakable — unbreakable,” said Biden, who read from notecards on his lap rather than look Herzog in the face for much of his roughly one-minute of public remarks before journalists were removed from the room.

“And together working to bring more security and integration to the Middle East. And a lot of hard work — we’ve got a lot more to do, but there’s progress.”

The 80-year-old president then described some of his administration’s initiatives, including supporting an Israeli-Lebanese maritime boundary deal and backing Saudi and Omani decisions to allow Israeli flights over their territory.

Biden struggled to pronounce the cities of Aqaba, Jordan, and Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt — where Israeli and Palestinian leaders recently met with the involvement of the US and Middle Eastern governments.

“As I affirmed with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu yesterday, America’s commitment to Israel is firm and it is iron-clad and we’re committed as well to assure that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon,” the president added at his only public event of the day, at which he took no reporter questions.

The White House has repeatedly criticized Netanyahu’s conservative government for its efforts to reform the Israeli court system — an idea advanced by religious and nationalistic politicians allied with Netanyahu that has triggered large protests by both secular Israelis and opponents of West Bank settlements.

Herzog told Biden, who did not mention the judicial reform legislation in his own remarks, that “there are some enemies of ours that sometimes [have] mistaken the fact that we may have some differences as impacting our unbreakable bond.”

The Israeli president will speak to a joint meeting of Congress Wednesday to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Israel’s independence — though members of the left-wing “Squad” have lined up to boycott the event.

At least five Democrats are expected to skip Herzog’s remarks — Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York.

Close Biden ally Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said Saturday at a political conference in Chicago that “we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us, that it does not even feel possible.”

After a group of seven Jewish House Democrats circulated a letter denouncing Jayapal, she partially retracted her remarks.

“I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist. I do, however, believe that Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government,” Jayapal said.