America will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, Biden says. Biden: Always Israel's friend

Vice President Joe Biden arrived at the annual J Street conference Monday with a firm message: The Obama administration may have revamped its approach to the Middle East in the past week, but its stance on Israel remains unchanged.

There’s a moral connection, Biden said, but there also are clear national security interests.


“If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved,” Biden said to the left-leaning pro-Israel group crowd that gave him several ovations in his half-hour speech at the Washington Convention Center.

( PHOTOS: Joe Biden over the years)

“America’s support for Israel’s security is unshakable, period. Period, period,” Biden said, pointing out several times the commitment that President Barack Obama has to Israel and his own long and deep connections to Israel — which stretch back to a trip to Jerusalem to meet with then-Prime Minister Golda Meir when he was a freshman senator, to the hours he spent meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.

Still, Biden warned, there are reasons to be concerned about the region, given the instability caused by Iran’s nuclear program, the Syrian civil war and the ongoing upheavals of the Arab Spring.

“The region has gone to the forced calm of dictatorship to the euphoria of revolution,” Biden said. “These changes in the Middle East affect both of our national security interests.”

( PHOTOS: Where Biden wears shades)

America will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, Biden said. And while the Obama administration remains wary of getting involved in internal conflicts, he said that what’s going on in Syria should cause everyone to think about what can be done to resolve Sunni-Shia tensions, which he said are, themselves, the root of much of the regional violence. He cited work he’s been involved with in Iraq as a model, and one that could be a catalyst for more.

“If Iraq can achieve reconciliation between Sunni, Shia and Kurd and integrate with the larger Arab world, it can be a linchpin,” Biden said. “Iraq has traveled the greatest distance in resolving these tensions.”

Key to any progress in the region, Biden said, is Israeli-Palestinian peace — and that means a two-state solution, he said to loud cheers in the room.

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Appearing to reference a famous rabbinic saying — “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” — Biden said the United States and J Street and others all have an obligation to press for a “just and lasting peace,” because “If not us, who?”

Biden closed with a quote from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney: “History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave, / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.”

The poem is about Ireland, but Biden said he’d decided the lines apply to Israel.

“It is our job to see that hope and history rhyme,” Biden said. “It is long past time.”