By CHRIS MEGERIAN Associated Press
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Joe Biden had been to Dachau, the infamous concentration camp in Germany, several times before, but he sensed changes when he visited as vice president with a teenaged granddaughter.

“It seemed as though things had been rearranged to make visitors less uncomfortable,” he recalled in a memoir published two years after the 2015 visit. “They had softened the cruel edges over the years.”

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Unwilling to settle for what he believed was a more sanitized experience, Biden asked the guides to bring them to the gas chamber, where they “slammed the door behind us with a frightening clank.”

For Biden, it’s a direct line from there to the Hamas attacks on Israel, which caused the largest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.In a searing speech from the White House, Biden said the bloodshed “brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and genocide of the Jewish people.”

The massacres and kidnappings have sparked a crisis that threatens to engulf more of the Middle East. They’ve also resonated deeply for the U.S. president, whose devotion to Israel is rooted in a childhood that saw the birth of the Jewish state and in a political career that parallels repeated threats to destroy it.

“He’s using all the knowledge of the people and the issues that he’s gathered over the last 50 years to handle what’s going on right now,” said Ted Kaufman, a longtime friend and adviser.

Biden’s support for Israel has remained solid over the years even as some corners of his Democratic Party have urged a more critical approach toward the country and its decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory, which is widely viewed as illegal by the international community.

“He’s a politician of a generation that probably doesn’t exist anymore,” said Aaron David Miller, who has advised both Democratic and Republican administrations on the Middle East.

Biden’s commitment could be tested if Israel launches an incursion into Gaza, where Hamas is headquartered, in a military operation that would compound the suffering already experienced by Palestinians facing waves of retaliatory bombardment.

For now, Biden has offered only vague admonitions that Israel should follow the rules of war, which United Nations officials say are being violated by its siege tactics leading to dwindling supplies of food, medicine and electricity.

Instead, Biden’s focus has been on demonstrating “unshakable” solidarity with Israel, including his remarks during a White House meeting Wednesday with Jewish leaders to talk about combating antisemitism.

“Were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe,” Biden said. “It’s the only ultimate guarantee.”

During Biden’s remarks, he recalled his visits to Dachau, saying some doubted whether it was appropriate to bring his grandchildren, and his children before them, to the concentration camp when they were young. It was important, he said, to demonstrate not only the cruelty of the Holocaust but the apathy that allowed it to take place.

“I wanted them to see,” Biden said, his voice rising, his fist rapping on the lectern, “that you could not not know what was going on.”

Amy Spitalnick, a leader of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs who attended the Wednesday meeting, said it’s clear that Biden “feels it in his kishkes, as my grandmother would have said,” using a Yiddish word for gut.

“There was deep appreciation for the moral clarity that the president has had,” she said.