Netanyahu's prediction of Biden presidency - 25 years ago

Netanyahu and Biden first met when the future prime minister was a diplomat at Israel's embassy in Washington.

By GIL STERN STERN HOFFMAN
Updated: MARCH 10, 2016 00:36
Joe and Jill Biden are greeted by Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu (photo credit: AMOS BEN GERSHOM, GPO)
Joe and Jill Biden are greeted by Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu
(photo credit: AMOS BEN GERSHOM, GPO)
There has been talk in Washington that if the FBI investigation of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton bears fruit, Vice President Joe Biden would replace her as the party’s candidate for president.
If that happens and Biden is elected, people will ask who predicted it first.
The answer: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The prediction was revealed by Biden himself on his first visit to Israel as vice president in March 2010.
A source close to Netanyahu revealed that in a section of the Prime Minister’s Residence guest book that is meant to be kept private, Biden wrote to Netanyahu, “Your prophesy came half true,” referring to a prediction he made nearly 20 years before in Washington that Biden would one day be president while he was prime minister.
As Biden recalled Wednesday, Netanyahu and Biden first met when the future prime minister was a diplomat at Israel’s embassy in Washington.
The prediction was likely made when Netanyahu was deputy foreign minister or when he was a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office under then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.
“It wasn’t a political analysis of their situation but niceties between two ambitious politicians who wanted to go far,” said a former Netanyahu adviser.
Netanyahu takes pride in the success of his predictions.
When planes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Netanyahu called a press conference at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, where he distributed proof that he had predicted the attack in one of his books.
A former Netanyahu adviser said he also predicted that Bill Clinton would become president at the start of the 1992 presidential race when he fell to fifth place, and he wrote Shamir in 1984 that the government needed to prepare for the fall of the Iron Curtain and the absorption of a million Russian immigrants.
Biden did not recall the prediction Wednesday but he did speak about what he wrote to Netanyahu when he once gave him an autographed picture.
“I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love you,” he wrote.