Et tu, Biden?
The backstabber-in-chief strikes again.
The past months have seen a slow, but steady turn against Israel in the White House. Criticism of Israeli policy and warfighting has increased, the already-soft treatment of Iran and its regional proxies has somehow grown even limper, and fruitless negotiations meant to stall Israeli advances have helped entrench Hamas behind Gazan civilians in Rafah. The Biden team has floated sanctions against IDF units, legally penalized individual Israeli settlers for stoking violence in the West Bank – most of which has been driven by Palestinian terrorism – and stated that a necessary Israeli advance into Rafah to defeat Hamas would be a ‘red line’ not to be crossed. None of these actions have been applied to Hamas, the terrorist entity that caused this war, nor to its sponsor in Iran, which just a few weeks ago launched a direct barrage of ballistic missiles and suicide drones at Israel proper. The White House forced Israel into a mere symbolic strike in response, which does nothing to truly deter Iranian belligerence and further endangers both Israeli and American lives. In short, Israel is treated like an adversary, while Hamas and Iran are dealt with as akin to allies.
Rhetorically, the Biden administration is sounding more and more like Bernie Sanders or the Squad every single day; it would be unsurprising to hear the president use the genocide smear in the coming weeks. Its spokespeople have lambasted Israel for everything under the sun, including failing to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, which is not only false, but demonstrably so. Almost nothing, however, has been said about Hamas’s blatant theft of that aid for its own use. Israel has been told to ensure civilian populations have safe areas to evacuate to, but the White House has treated Egypt – the nation that ran Gaza for decades and has plenty of space for a temporary influx of Gazan refugees into the Sinai – with kid gloves. Hamas is assumed, against all extant evidence, to care deeply for the Palestinian people under its charge, while Israel is deemed to care so little about its hostages in Gaza that it would sacrifice their potential release for Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future.
Whether it is a response to rampant leftist protests on college campuses, the potential for Israel to actually win the war it is fighting – something America seems desperately allergic to – or Biden’s flagging poll numbers ahead of the November election, the outcome is the same: turning on our closest regional ally.
The backstabbing was turned up to 11 this past week, as the Biden administration betrayed Israel in multiple ways, while still trying to retain a patina of deniability about its true feelings towards the Jewish state. The disgrace began with the president himself declared, on national television, no less:
I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem.
To translate that word salad, Biden stated that he would be conditioning critical military aid to Israel – cutting off precision-guided munitions, ending the transfer of the large bombs that are necessary to destroy Hamas’s underground infrastructure, and leaving our ally high and dry when it is facing down threats from multiple Iranian proxies – if it does what is needed to destroy Hamas by going into Rafah. Israel’s prosecution of this urban war against an irregular terrorist army that deliberately endangers civilians has, according to America’s top urban warfare expert, set a new standard in the field. It has done far less collateral damage, measured either in civilian deaths or the destruction of non-military infrastructure, than any comparable army in recorded history. And it is on the verge of finishing the job by raiding Hamas’s final stronghold, where it has cornered the terror regime’s leadership and final intact combat battalions.
The Rafah operation is vital to Israeli war aims, as leaving it be would allow further Hamas resupply from its tunnels running into Egypt, let the perpetrators and organizers of the 10/7 massacre live in security, and open the door for future such barbarities. Of course, that makes the Biden administration – which seems to be more aligned with Iran than Israel – deeply uncomfortable. Not only is it allergic to victory, but it is very concerned about losing the votes of its far-left progressive/Islamist flank come November. And a bloody, successful Israeli operation to destroy Hamas would – in the minds of the people advising the White House – make the president’s already-tenuous position even more precarious. Predictably, this absurd posturing is winning ‘Genocide Joe’ no friends among the radical chic set and has alienated many pro-Israel and Jewish voters who see his waffling on a morally clear issue as disqualifying.
(Sidebar: Is this whole debacle not directly comparable to the facts regarding Ukraine that led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment in early 2020? Trump was impeached for his “perfect phone call” to Ukrainian president Zelenskyy where he essentially stated that he would withhold congressionally-appropriated military aid if Ukraine did not investigate Biden family corruption in the country. Biden has now threatened – publicly – that he would withhold congressionally-appropriated military aid to Israel if it does not sign a profoundly bad deal with Hamas and end its just war. The Biden backers would argue that his version of this is about policy differences and human rights, while Trump’s was nakedly political. But the rationale behind Biden’s supposed “policy difference” is itself nakedly political, in that it is purely meant to appease a domestic constituency.)
What made this slap in Jerusalem’s face even more insulting and despicable was what immediately preceded and then followed it. The day before the White House announced a “pause” (read: cessation) of critical military aid, it waived congressionally-passed sanctions to allow weapons transfers to the Iranian-aligned regimes in Qatar and Lebanon. Qatar, a nation that Biden recently labeled a “major non-NATO ally,” is host to Hamas’s leadership, funds terrorism across the region, runs the anti-American propaganda network Al Jazeera, and aids Iran in skirting international sanctions. Lebanon is functionally run by Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist entity that has been waging a low-intensity war against Israel since October 8; arms sales to that nation will be directly used to attack our ally. But Israel isn’t allowed to get critical weapons it needs to avoid civilian deaths in Rafah because of bogus concerns about human rights. It would be humorous if it wasn’t so deadly-serious.
Directly after the president’s horrible CNN interview where he altered American policy to favor Hamas over Israel, the White House comms shop had to do some cleanup. But, as usual, they made the situation even worse through their silly rhetorical games. The most ridiculous claim is that this betrayal doesn’t invalidate Biden’s “ironclad” commitment to Israeli defense. According to Jewish Insider, a Biden official stated:
It’s ironclad to Israel’s security, right, like, I mean, they need Iron Dome defense systems. You can argue that they don’t need a 2,000-pound unguided munition in order to defend themselves. He is drawing a distinction in the interview between defensive weapons, which he will always support, and some types of offensive weapons, for instance, the 500-pound, 1,000-pound unguided munitions that Israel would use in a Rafah operation if they decided to move forward with that.
This parsing of offensive versus defensive weaponry is completely ludicrous when Israel is involved in a multi-front war for its very existence – if Hamas remains in power in Gaza, Iran and its proxies will only increase their assault on Israel with the intention of wiping it out. Also, the weapons the administration is holding back would make the inevitable Rafah operation less deadly to civilians; in this way, the White House can be blamed if civilian deaths are higher than would have otherwise been the case.
Just days later, the State Department rubbed salt in the wound. In a report that the New York Times called “the administration’s most detailed assessment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza,” they tried to play it both ways yet again, while in reality throwing Israel under the bus. The report smeared Israel as “most likely violating international standards” against harming civilians, while providing absolutely no proof of said violations. It uses Hamas numbers to claim that Israel has caused “high levels of civilian casualties” even though those figures have been largely debunked. Still, the report admits that none of this is based on concrete evidence and that what it has found does not reach the level of denying Israel munitions. And yet, the Biden policy of withholding weapons remains in place. The whole thing is an utter farce, written and promoted by people who simply do not have America’s best interests at heart.
Backstabbing has been a consistent feature of this White House, culminating in the current anti-Israel treachery. It began in earnest with the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, where the president backstabbed our Afghan allies, hundreds of American citizens, and the 13 American servicemembers who were unnecessarily killed in a preventable terrorist attack. We left people behind, while saying we didn’t. We botched the whole operation, while promoting the people who led it. We turned Afghanistan over to the Taliban and the terrorists, while claiming that everything turned out fine.
In Ukraine, we’ve claimed that America is with Kyiv for “as long as it takes,” but have withheld much-needed weaponry, forbade the use of long-range fires, and slow-walked aid that could have made a battlefield impact. Instead of giving Ukraine everything it needed when it needed it, the Biden team has trickled aid slowly, leading to battlefield stasis and a frozen conflict – exactly what Vladimir Putin is looking for. Now, the administration has expressly told Ukrainian leadership that it must not attack Russian oil infrastructure for fear of raising gasoline prices before the presidential election in November. Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s biggest export commodity and source of funds are the best possible way to turn the tide of this conflict, but the White House puts its own political survival ahead of the national interest and the very survival of our friends. Shameful.
President Biden and his administration have completely overturned American foreign policy, creating and abetting global chaos. They have subsumed the national interest to political considerations, turning on our friends and allies along the way. They have put knives in the backs of Afghans, Ukrainians, and, worst of all, Israelis repeatedly over the years. This is betrayal as policy. And just as with Dante’s vision of the men who assassinated Julius Caesar, the Biden foreign policy team will rightfully be relegated to the lowest circles of statesmanship Hell. At least Brutus and Cassius betrayed their friend for something more than a few thousand votes.