If America Was in Israel’s Shoes
What would the U.S. administration’s Gaza “policy” look like?
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Please note: This is not the first time I have been critical of U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration, and some readers have accused me that critiquing Biden’s administration automatically makes me a supporter of Donald Trump.
While I fully understand that the U.S. has a two-party system, one should be able to be respectfully critical of its sitting president — and one of the world’s most significant leaders — without the misguided implication that reasonable disapproval of Biden’s policies and decisions surely means support for someone else. So let me be clear: It does not.
Additionally, I have never attacked Biden’s character or blanketed his entire presidency with overly simplistic criticism, nor do I plan to. For all I know, he might be a terrific president in other areas, but I do not write about those other areas. This platform is called “Future of Jewish” — where we write about Judaism, the Jewish world, and Israel.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Amid reports of growing frustration in the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, NBC News reported on Monday that Biden has been expressing his exasperation with the prime minister in private conversations.
The report said that Biden is frustrated over his “inability to persuade Israel to change its military tactics in Gaza” — even as the IDF has transitioned to “lower intensity” fighting within a densely populated environment incredibly unique to combat (both urban and underground) which probably does not allow for too much wiggle room to “change” military tactics.
Last week, the White House said it would not support major Israeli operations in the south of Gaza, where many Palestinian terrorists are hiding, without due consideration for the Palestinian civilians there. (Obviously Israel would provide a strategy and plan of action to minimize civilian casualties — have you not been following Israel’s unworldly humanitarian conduct throughout this entire war?)
Biden also called Israel’s military campaign against Hamas “over the top.” Mind you, he was one of 77 U.S. senators who gave President George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq in 2002 after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Now, my only question is: If Biden was in Netanyahu’s shoes, what would the U.S. administration’s Gaza “policy” look like?
If the U.S. was in place of Israel right now, would anyone be remotely surprised if there were four times as many Palestinian deaths and twice as much destruction in Gaza?
In 2014, then-U.S. President Barack Obama felt that the Americans were causing too many civilian casualties in the Syrian civil war, so he sent the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Israel for what was called the “Lessons Learned” program: to study how Israel habitually keeps civilian casualties as low as it does — including in densely populated urban areas, where civilians are almost always used by terrorists as human shields.1
Just a couple of week ago, a White House spokesperson suggested that the steps Israel’s military has taken to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza might go further than what the U.S. would have done if it was in Israel’s place.
“There are very few modern militaries in the world that would do that,” said John Kirby. “I don’t know that we would do that.”
Then, yesterday, Kirby suddenly flipped the script and did his best virtue-signaling impression, when he said that “the proper number of civilian casualties is zero.” That has got to be one of the dumbest things that anyone has said about a country which was invaded and massacred just a few months ago, and is now defending itself in one of the most challenging combat arenas, against an opponent that has zero morality and flagrantly commits war crimes on an hourly basis.
Of course, if the U.S. wants to play the virtue-signaling game, I am not so sure that it would reflect favorably on much of U.S. history, just as it wouldn’t on most countries.
Plus, the Biden administration never mentions that they essentially lit up the Middle East by funding Iran, Hamas (via Qatar and UNRWA), Hezbollah, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (“the largest, wealthiest, and most politically connected terrorist organization in the world” according to Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet defector during the Cold War).
“Again, Biden places all the pressure on Israel,” wrote bestselling author Mark Levin. “He undermines Israel’s efforts to take the last Hamas stronghold in southern Gaza, knowing damn well Israel already announced that they will help move citizens from the stronghold to limit casualties.”2
Israel, for its part, is on the cusp of one of the greatest achievements in modern warfare: less than a two-to-one civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio, far below the nine-to-one international average (according to the UN) while facing a cowardly enemy that routinely hides behind civilians in the name of Islam.
But don’t tell that to Biden, who was just blasted with a Special Counsel report claiming that it would be difficult to convict the president of improper handling of files because “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In a statement earlier by the White House, Biden said his memory was off because he sat for a total of five hours of interviews on October 8th and 9th, “even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.” That is right, Biden found the gall to blame his increasingly imperfect memory on the terror attacks in Israel. For goodness sake.
If Biden’s team was not busy meeting with Arab and Muslim American “activists” in Dearborn, Michigan (which the Wall Street Journal recently called “America’s Jihad Capital”) — “activists” who openly praise Hamas and Hezbollah — we in Israel would cut the Bidenites some slack.
But with an 81-year-old president playing dangerous domestic politics while Israel is in the middle of an existential war, it is hard to get onboard with an “enduring” ceasefire that Biden thinks is “a win” for Israel, since it might come with Saudi normalization. Only one catch: There needs to be movement toward a Palestinian state.
Before October 7th, Israeli-Saudi normalization likely would have ensued without “movement toward a Palestinian state,” so now Biden is asking us to accept an obviously hostile Palestinian country on our borders precisely after Palestinians unleashed the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
Thanks, but no thanks.
In a phone call on Sunday, Biden told Netanyahu that Israel should not go ahead with a military operation in the densely populated Gaza town of Rafah, which borders Egypt, without a “credible” plan to protect the more than one million civilians who are reportedly sheltering there.
I would love to see America’s “credible” plan to protect civilians in Iraq when the U.S. and its allies were pounding ISIS.
I would love to see a “credible” plan for proper, sustainable deterrence and isolation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is directly (and spinelessly) behind the Israel-Hamas war.
I would love to see a “credible” plan for making sure the Qataris know, loud and clear, what’s good for them if they continue to harbor and finance terrorism in the Middle East.
And I would love to see a “credible” plan for Biden’s advisors who have proven themselves to be utterly incompetent by aiming to foolishly apply “Western conventional wisdom” to the quicksand realities of the Middle East. (Relentless attempts to will the Middle East’s realities to Western conventional wisdom was compared by professor Elie Kedourie, a leading historian of the region, to trying to make water run uphill.)
For now, the Israelis told their Egyptian counterparts that Israel would not make any unilateral moves in Rafah, and that they would work in coordination with Egypt. Regardless, the Rafah campaign is crucial in the war for Israel, since it serves as a smuggling haven for the enclave’s terror groups.
As one person put it: “Telling Israel not to invade Rafah would be like telling the Allies not to invade Berlin at the end of World War Two.”3
Had Israel listened to Biden’s request that no move be made on Rafah, the Israelis would not have rescued two hostages — Fernando Simon Marman, 61, and Norberto Louis Har, 70 — as they did earlier this week, during a daring nighttime operation in Rafah. Make no mistake: This operation was as much a message to the U.S. as it was to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
“Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice,” said Moshe Dayan, the legendary Israeli defense minister. “We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.”
It is probably only the beginning of what’s to come in Rafah, but as the first true hostage rescue operation after October 7th that succeeded, it is moral triumph for Israel. After previous missteps, there was serious hesitation over this particular operation. The intelligence was clearly there, but Rafah was unknown territory and no one wanted to fail again.
Still, Biden’s administration keeps hammering home the notion that the only way to free the hostages is to cut a deal with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But cutting deals with terrorists just leads to more dead bodies and more hostages. Exhibit A: all the previous ceasefires between Israel and Palestinian terror groups in Gaza before October 7th, 2023.
“While Western conventional wisdom assumes that ceasefire agreements advance the cause of peace, and peace accords end hostilities and the state of war, Islam considers ceasefires (especially with ‘infidels’) as an opportunity to regroup for the next phase of a perpetual war until submission of the enemy,” according to Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli ambassador. “Peace accords are viewed (especially with ‘infidels’) as temporary ceasefires, serving the cause of the Muslim party, to be abrogated upon amassing sufficient power to bring adversaries to submission.”4
“In order to advance its well-intentioned assumptions,” added Ettinger, “Western conventional wisdom has consistently overlooked the 1,400-year-old shifty, unpredictable, violent, totalitarian, intolerant, anti-‘infidel’ (Islam versus the West), anti-‘apostate’ (Shiite versus Sunni), fragmented, volcanic, and frustrating nature of Middle East (intra-Arab and intra-Muslim) reality.”
“It has also overlooked the supremacy of fanatical ideologies over financial benefits in shaping the policy of Iran’s Ayatollahs, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority, as reflected in their school curriculum, mosque sermons, and constitutions and charters.”
Two days ago, Biden said Washington was working with allies in the region on a deal “to find the means to bring all the hostages home, to ease the humanitarian crisis, to end the terror threat, and to bring peace to Gaza and Israel through a two-state solution.”
Raphaël Jerusalmy is a tad more cynical than Biden’s administration — and for good reason. As a former IDF intelligence officer, he knows the enemy as well as anyone.
“I do not believe one bit that Mr. Yahya Sinwar (Hamas’ leader in Gaza) has any intentions of liberating all the hostages,” said Jerusalmy. “He will keep 30 or 40 of them as his personal guard, meaning as a human shield, or life insurance for himself. The only hope is a partial hostage release solution.”5
In his remarks Tuesday, Biden said that the U.S. shares Israel’s goal of defeating Hamas, whose terrorists hide in tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure, “including schools, playgrounds, and neighborhoods” while acknowledging that Gazans “have also suffered unimaginable pain and loss.”
But what about the Israeli people? What about our unimaginable pain and loss? Or does Palestinian pain and loss override the Israeli kinds?
War is certainly a zero-sum game. My victory is your loss, and vice versa. For decades, the Arabs have started and lost war after war after war to the Israelis — and then they cry about it every time, as if they are the victims of someone else’s doing. When will someone tell them that if they do not want to suffer, they should cut it out with waging wars? It really is that simple.
In an Israeli war cabinet meeting on November 4th, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli leaders that they must do more to ensure noncombatants in Gaza are not harmed by the fighting between Israel and Palestinian terrorists.
According to a report, Israeli military chief Herzi Halevi countered by telling Blinken there would be even more casualties if the military took the advice of U.S. generals sent to advise Israel on the operation in Gaza.
That is all you need to know about what a Biden administration Gaza “policy” would look like if the U.S. was in Israel’s shoes. Thank goodness, for all parties involved, it is not.
Daniel Pomerantz on i24NEWS
Mark R. Levin on X
Andreas Fagerbakke on X
“Conventional Western Wisdom vs. Middle East Reality.” The Jewish Press.
i24NEWS on X
I notice that Westerners, particularly Americans, seem incapable of understanding the mindset of groups like Hamas, nor the cultural trends and psychological traits that motivate Islamists and their leaders. They keep offering what they would want (resources, assurances) as if its regular political tit for tat.
They keep blabbing on about a 2 state solution, despite Hamas explicitly stating in their charter that “peace treaties are a waste of time.” Hamas was always focused on hating Jews as subhuman “dogs” and only recently started acting aggrieved about “ethnic cleansing,” “colonization” and “genocide.” If you compare the original 1980s charter with the 2017 “update,” it’s so obvious that they erased the parts that admit they want to take over the world and for all Jews to die. Though I have a feeling the aid money would flow just the same, cause ppl apparently ignore this fact altogether or, for some reason, don’t care. It is so bizarre to me.
The USA is already in Israel’s shoes. It’s just that ordinary Americans, by and large, haven’t realized it yet. For example, I am an older, white, male Christian. If I am jumped by several criminals and killed, it’s a non-event outside of my family (sound familiar?) If, alternatively, in the process of being jumped I produce a firearm and shoot three of my attackers, killing one, and the attackers all turn out to belong to an oppressed or colonized group, all elite groups in my society will go to extreme ends to paint me into the “criminal” category (are you starting to see the pattern?)
This dynamic is why I am huge booster of Israel right now. I don’t live in the Middle East, I am not Jewish, I am not even related to any Jews by marriage. But I see clearly that what is being done to Israel is in store for me SOON.