On the eve of Joe Biden’s very first Senate victory in 1972, a former member of his campaign came forward with a damaging story. According to this individual, Biden had months earlier at a staff meeting asked for his personal views to be left out of a Middle East position paper — like the view that Israel should return the land it had conquered five years earlier in the Six-Day War (land it still occupies to this day), and that Jerusalem should be internationalized. Biden felt making those views public would have meant “political suicide,” the individual recalled.

The candidate and his staff all denied the story, with Biden calling the man “stupid, emotionally mixed up, or a downright liar.” But then, they sort of didn’t.

They’d been “brainstorming” that day, one of his top staffers said, and all sorts of ideas had been thrown around. He had just been playing “devil’s advocate,” Biden insisted. And yeah, he admitted, he might’ve said “something like” what the man additionally accused him of saying: that the Israeli leadership were the world’s biggest arm-twisters, and that Jews were way too emotional about Israel. But “all great national leaders” were arm-twisters, he said! And of course Jews were too emotional about Israel — “so are the Irish too emotional about Ireland”!