Is 81-year-old Joe Biden too old to serve another full term as president of the United States?
I don't have the answer to that question – nor to the just-as-relevant one regarding 78-year-old Donald Trump. This will be decided by American voters in November's presidential election.
But as an Israeli journalist who writes regularly about the U.S.-Israel relationship, one thing is clear: Biden's understanding of Israeli politics is incredibly outdated and belongs to the 1980s, not the current moment. For Israel, and for the United States, that's a problem.
Following the October 7 massacre, which was the biggest failure in the history of the State of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister in name only. He had lost the trust of the public, was facing incredible anger and his government had failed at fulfilling its most basic tasks – not just in failing to protect citizens along the Gaza border on that horrid day, but also by disappearing from sight when the survivors needed urgent help and found it only from civil society groups like Brothers and Sisters in Arms.
Biden made the right move by standing with Israel after the attack, warning Iran not to get involved, sending two aircraft carriers to the region in order to reinforce that message, and flooding Israel's military with the weapons it needed to fight Hamas and Hezbollah on two fronts simultaneously.
But he made a fatal mistake, already in those early days: He treated Netanyahu as an ally and a friend, even though decades of experience should have made him aware that the man is like the scorpion in the famous fable – he will always sting the frog helping him reach the other side of the river.
Netanyahu has been working against Biden for months now, attacking his administration in English and briefing journalists that he is to blame for the Israeli government's lack of a real war strategy. He is also trying to create a schism between the president and his pro-Israel supporters, at a time when Biden is bleeding support from the far left due to his support of the Jewish state.
And how does Biden respond to that? He invites Netanyahu to meet him in the White House in two weeks' time, during a visit to deliver his intended-to-help-Trump political speech in the U.S. Congress. This reflects a perception of Netanyahu, and the U.S.-Israel relationship as long as he's in office, that is outdated and damaging.
In a poll released this weekend by Israel's top-rated news broadcast, 54 percent of Israelis said they believe Netanyahu is prolonging the Gaza war for political reasons, while less than a third said they had any trust in his leadership. A majority of American Jews feel the same about the man who has spat in their face time-and again in order to accommodate his ultra-Orthodox governing coalition partners.
But Biden wants a photo-op with him in the Oval Office, as if the year is 1998 and none of what we've been through this year actually happened.