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| Gaza around the turn of the 20th century, via Palestine Remembered. |
Jonathan Capehart was on my radio yesterday morning, talking about his NBC interview last week of President Biden, and they came to this exceptionally fraught moment:
Jonathan Capehart (06:22):
Some have suggested you should go back to Israel and address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Is that something you would do?
President Joe Biden (06:31):
Yes.
Jonathan Capehart (06:35):
Would that have to be at the invitation of the Prime Minister or could that be at the invitation of the President?
President Joe Biden (06:42 [after a pretty substantial pause]):
I’d rather not discuss it more.
Biden didn't mind saying he might address the Knesset, but he didn't want to say who might be inviting him. Or rather, since you wouldn't expect it to happen other than by an invitation from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is by definition the head of the government in the Knesset, and runs the things that happen there, he didn't want to say that it might be from somebody else, such as President Herzog, the head of state (whose only direct interaction with the Knesset is when he's accepting the resignation of a prime minister, or inviting a politician to try to form a new government). Or he couldn't or at least didn't want to deny that he might have an invitation from President Herzog, let's say, so he preferred to drop the subject and let Capehart make of it what he would.
Brian Lehrer, the host of the radio show, was suitably gobsmacked, and expressed himself, as people so often do, with a "can you imagine" scenario, like "Can you imagine if some foreign leader came to Washington and addressed Congress over the head of President Biden?"
