Posted on 12/12/20
| News Source: Jewish Press
In the summer of 1973, the junior senator from Delaware Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. visited Egypt and met with local officials – not the first tier ones: the highest-ranking among them were the country’s Minister of Propaganda, alongside Hassanein Heikal, editor of the semi-official daily Al-Ahram.
Following his Cairo visit, Biden, who had just been elected the previous year, met in Israel with then Prime Minister Golda Meir and passed on the Egyptian disinformation. Biden told the Israeli prime minister that of all the Egyptian VIPs he had met, not one denied Israel’s absolute military superiority, and they all reassured him that it would be impossible for Egypt to go to war against Israel now. We all know how that turned out.
This week, Israeli historian Yigal Kipnis told News 12 about that meeting, which probably did not have a serious impact on Israel’s catastrophic decision-making regarding the possibility of an Egyptian attack in the Sinai a few months later. The meeting and its disinformation were probably another layer in the consensus of the Golda government that refused to recognize the imminence of war with Egypt.
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“Golda did not need Biden to help her presume that the Egyptians would not go to war and that if they did then the result would be clear,” Kipnis put things in proportion, adding that it is difficult to know how much Biden’s report to Golda helped the Egyptian pre-war fraud scheme, if at all.
The report on the meeting that appears in Kipnis’s book, “1973: The Road to War” (Just World Books, 2013) was sent to then Israel’s ambassador to Washington Simcha Dinitz, most likely to be added to the senator’s file. Dinitz, by the way, was a sworn Golda loyalist whose appointment had been forced by the PM on then Foreign Minister Abba Eban.
“I was not aware that the incident that happened 50 years ago and about which I wrote it in my book, is related to Biden who has become President of the United States,” Kipnis told News 12, explaining: “After I had been notified about it, I went back to the book to see what else had been written, and to the relevant documents.”
The document is fascinating both as a piece of history and as a reflection of the particular give-and-take between Israel and officials in Washington, which has not changed in 50 years.
Read more at Jewish Press