The Americans are screwing Israel, again.
The Americans are screwing Israel, again.
By sending mixed messages to the Middle East since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, the U.S. might just be making the situation worse.
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In May 1948, as David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders were preparing to declare Israel’s independence, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall strongly objected to the move, predicting the entire Jewish population would be massacred.
President Harry then Truman declared an arms embargo on the emerging Jewish state.
Similarly, in the Suez Crisis of 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower denounced Israel’s decision to join the UK and France in eliminating the threat of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, and tried to punish Israel with sanctions.
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson repeatedly warned that, if it preemptively struck the Arab armies, Israel would not receive U.S. support. And twice, Israel destroyed enemy nuclear reactors — in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 — despite Washington’s resistance.
In true fashion, the U.S. now seems to be working against Israel completing its goal of eradicating Hamas from Gaza — a goal that the Americans, just a couple of months ago, openly supported, and Israelis very much appreciated.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the U.S. is “pushing for a ceasefire deal that could stop the war in Gaza long enough to stall Israel’s military momentum and potentially set the stage for a more lasting truce.”1
Despite Israel’s extraordinary efforts to avoid causing civilian casualties, U.S. administration officials have been complaining that Israelis are not doing enough.
“Far too many Palestinians have been killed,” declared Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that Israel has failed to abide by international humanitarian law. Biden, himself, complained to American Jewish donors that Israel was losing international support due to its “indiscriminate bombing.”
The Americans are again expressing fear of escalating conflicts in the Middle East, and appear to be stopping their allies from winning decisively over terror. In 2021, the Biden Administration cut off its support for Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, and Washington later removed the Houthis from its list of terrorist organizations.
Starting in 2006 with Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and then repeatedly — in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 — in clashes between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the U.S. worked to impose a ceasefire.
“American policy-makers, for many years now, have refused to understand that ignoring aggression and broadcasting fear in the Middle East is the surest way to encourage aggression and realize that fear,” according to Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.2
The Americans have seemingly failed to grasp that there are societies which, unlike the West, favor religious ideology, and financial incentives to curb ideology do not tend to work. If anything, they can backfire. Additionally, the Americans still have not learned that thwarting mini wars, before their allies have won, results in larger wars that can engulf the region, if not the world.
Americans often think they “know better” than the rest of the world, and they probably do in many ways, but when it comes to the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy has been nothing short of dismal since World War II. And I’m not just talking about Israel. The Americans deserted Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, and Gaddafi in Libya. For many Arab leaders and on the so-called Arab street, Russia and China are now much more trustworthy than is the United States.
In Israel, we are starting to cast serious doubt over whether the Americans have our country’s best interests at heart. This week the Biden administration rebuffed a temporary buffer zone the IDF is establishing on the Gaza side of the border with Israel, until Hamas is completely removed from power, even though a buffer zone is actually what is needed after attacks such as those on October 7th.
The U.S. has also pressured Israel to refrain from dealing a lethal blow to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, so that Israeli residents in the country’s north can feel safe and secure in their homes. For Israel, already engaged in a complicated struggle with Hamas, degrading Hezbollah is a matter of national survival.
Instead, the Americans are opting for diplomatic negotiations to enforce UN Resolution 1701, which was passed in 2006 and instructed Hezbollah to move its forces several kilometers north of the Israeli border. Hezbollah, of course, immediately ignored the resolution and proceeded to mass on the border. Thus, negotiating with terrorists is only an invitation for more terrorism, which you would think the U.S. knows after some 20 years of recent wars in the region.
To add insult to injury, American leaders during the last few weeks have been asking Israel, a country tremendously traumatized by the October 7th savagery, to contemplate a neighboring state for a people who overwhelmingly support the Palestinian terror attacks on October 7th, according to multiple polls.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland three weeks ago, Antony Blinken said: “The question now is, is Israeli society prepared to engage on these questions? Is it prepared to have that mindset?”
Biden’s administration is thus honing in on a new doctrine involving an unprecedented push to immediately advance the creation of a demilitarized but viable Palestinian state.3
There’s only one problem: The Palestinian Authority that U.S. Democrats want to “revitalize” is profoundly unpopular in Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank, continues to lose literal ground to terror cells, and still pays terrorists to murder people in Israel. The worse the terror attack, the more they pay.
What’s more, all of the current “two-state solution” proposals do not acknowledge, much less overcome, the obstacles which have historically hampered such an arrangement.
And lastly, any inkling of a Palestinian state will be a serious threat to Israel because, right now, the very mention of a Palestinian state, against the backdrop of October 7th, signals to the Palestinians that terrorism is an acceptable means of pursuing “liberation” and “human rights.” Thus, all a Palestinian state will ultimately mean is more dead Jews and an increase in antisemitism across the world.
“There are some words missing in all the calls for a Palestinian state — words like democracy, human rights, and liberty,” wrote Elliot Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It seems the state on the west side of the Jordan River, Israel, must be democratic but not the new state on the east bank, Palestine. Why the distinction? Because no one thinks the Palestinian state will be a democratic state — or seems much to care.”4
“But there’s a much deeper problem: No one is explaining how that state will live in ‘peace and security’ with Israel if its people would prefer war with Israel,” added Abrams. “What if, to use Blinken’s language, ‘what the Palestinian people want’ is mostly to destroy Israel?”
Then, yesterday, Biden signed an “executive order” to slap sanctions on Israeli extremists, a sort of twisted moral equivalency between Hamas and Jewish attacks. I have zero tolerance for settler violence, but this ridiculous decision shows gross mismanagement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the White House.
As Ritchie Torres, a U.S. congressman who knows better than to conflate Hamas and Israeli extremists, courageously reminded us: “I feel no need to be balanced between Israel and Hamas. One is a democratic ally of the U.S. The other is a genocidal terrorist organization oppressing both Israelis and Palestinians. Better to be right than to be balanced.”5
Of course, Biden issued this executive order just before his trip to the state of Michigan, home to America’s largest Muslim population, and an important “swing state” that could be a game-changer for the U.S. presidential election this November.
A politically cheap, short-sighted move, Biden’s executive order sends a dangerous message to the world, one that will unfortunately embolden terrorism, since these directives are highly unfavorable to Israel and utterly meaningless to the real issues of war and peace.
The Middle East is aflame because of Hamas, an Iranian proxy, and instead of forcefully dealing with Iran’s Islamic regime, Biden is continuing Obama’s unfruitful practice to effectively appease the Iranians at the expense of Israel and even Saudi Arabia, both of which are supposed to be key American allies in the region.
Thus, Biden and Obama’s “settler violence” campaign is nothing more than an antisemitic exaggeration propagated by Israel’s enemies, with the aim of vilifying the Zionist enterprise and thereby discrediting the entire State of Israel.
There are some 600,000 Israeli settlers who share roads and other parts of the West Bank with the Palestinians there. The vast majority of them are peaceful and just want to live their lives. Every country has a few bad apples, the U.S. notwithstanding.
But just like the Jews eradicated malaria from British-era Palestine in the 1920s, which led to a surge in the local Arab population, today’s Jewish presence in the West Bank adds more economic opportunities for the Palestinians, whose local economy is overflowing with corruption, nepotism, and kleptocracy.
As one Palestinian from Gaza City recently said: “Zionists are an inevitable part of the solution.”6
Someone might want to share that sentiment with the Americans.
“U.S. Presses for Long Cease-Fire to Pave Way for End of Gaza War.” The Wall Street Journal.
“When will America Learn?” Clarity With Michael Oren.
“A Biden Doctrine for the Middle East Is Forming. And It’s Big.” The New York Times.
“The Two-State Delusion.” Tablet.
Ritchie Torres on X
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib on X
I’m not following the news so closely. So, I only have what I read on Israel as it’s published by you, Joshua. What did Biden mean when he said “Israeli extremists”?
Current American leaders should read Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. While we are destroying ourselves from within we may ultimately be destroyed from without.