Over the past week President Biden and his administration have made it clear that they do not want Israel to win the war Hamas terrorists started on October 7.
But Israel has to win. To accept Biden’s position is to enable Hamas to survive in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Biden and Tony Blinken, his secretary of state, don’t want Israel to achieve its main objective which is to eliminate Hamas’s threat to its national existence. They want to tether Israel to a very short leash. Consider the following. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Israel Lost the Initiative)
Last week, Biden said that he would consider limits on aid to Israel dependent on its conduct of the war.
In a press conference in Israel on Thursday, Blinken said that Hamas cannot remain in control of the Gaza Strip and then went on to prescribe limits on Israeli military action that would have that exact result.
Both Biden and Blinken have been pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his war cabinet to extend the cease fire. On Thursday, Blinken said it was “imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south.” He added that Israel must take “more effective steps to protect the lives of civilians.”
Blinken said that the U.S. demands that Israel avoid further significant displacement of civilians inside of Gaza. To do that in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, Blinken said the Israelis should establish “safe zones” near the fighting.
Blinken would have to be an idiot to make that proposal. He obviously is either that or willfully ignorant of Hamas’s consistent tactics of launching missiles from schools, making operational headquarters in hospitals, and using innocent Palestinians as human shields.
Blinken doesn’t care if Hamas hides under hospitals. He said protecting civilians “means avoiding damage to life-critical infrastructure like hospitals. Intent matters, but so does the result.”
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Blinken and his boss want to limit the time Israel can take to destroy the Hamas terrorists. That report said that Blinken was told by Israel’s defense minister that, “The entire Israeli society is united behind the goal of dismantling Hamas, even if it takes months.” The report goes on to say that Mr. Blinken pushed back, replying, “I don’t think you have the credit for that.” (READ MORE: Biden Is Bankrolling the Ayatollahs)
The credit with whom? Biden.
Israel has withdrawn its negotiators from the Qatar talks aimed at releasing more of Hamas’s hostages, leaving Hamas and its friends — among whom we have to now count Biden — to their own devices.
Israel is back to war, as it must be. It will take many weeks and months before it can eliminate the threat that Hamas represents and which Biden is evidently hoping to preserve.
Israel is highly dependent on the United States for military aid. It cannot, for example, produce enough missiles for its Iron Dome system itself, so it relies on us to produce many of them. Israel has received about $264 billion in U.S. foreign aid from 1946 to 2023. That’s about $3.4 billion a year, vastly less than we pay to the United Nations every year.
Israel’s military budget was about $23.4 billion in 2022. That’s about 4.5 percent of its GDP. As much as 20 percent of that is in U.S. military aid.
Israel is, perhaps, too dependent on the United States. We have been its closest ally and it hasn’t made independent decisions on foreign policy and war. As Israel’s only ally, we have been consulted by Israel in its every major decision.
That era of close consultation has been ended by Biden who has placed Israel in an impossible position. Israel can defy Biden — and suffer whatever consequences he may impose — as it must fight to eliminate Hamas. Or it can choose to let Hamas win. Netanyahu, saying that Israel will fight to “total victory” has — with his war cabinet’s approval — apparently chosen to defy Biden and Blinken. Good for him.
Israel doesn’t want a long war because of the cost to it in lives and to its economy. Don’t forget that the three hundred thousand soldiers it mobilized to fight Hamas left their jobs to fight. In a nation of fewer than ten million people, that’s enough to slow Israel’s economy and eventually bring it to a stop.
But Israel has to win. To accept Biden’s position is to enable Hamas to survive in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Israel cannot do that without ensuring that Hamas will revive and renew its terrorist attacks.
Biden and Blinken, as well as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director Bob Burns, have been deluged with pro-Hamas disinformation and have apparently succumbed to it. Last week, Biden reportedly apologized to a group of U.S. Islamic leaders for questioning Hamas’s casualty figures. Those figures are notoriously exaggerated and the other disinformation Hamas is peddling is no less faulty.
Biden has held a grudge against Netanyahu since 2010 when Biden was in Israel and Netanyahu, in an ill-timed move, announced new settlements on the West Bank. Biden has, since the Hamas attack on October 7, been trying to convince Israeli politicians to dump Netanyahu. So far, he hasn’t succeeded.
On Friday, National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby, emphasizing that Biden doesn’t support Israeli operations in southern Gaza without protecting civilians said, “we certainly want to see them pursue these operations in a way that properly accounts for that civilian population, and [that], to the maximum degree that it can, inoculate[s] them from these combat operations, so that they’re not in harm’s way, that they’re not caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hamas.” (READ MORE: Israel Fights, Too Many Democrats Rage)
The only way that can happen is if Hamas suddenly chose to not use civilians as human shields, to not use schools and hospitals to launch their terrorist operations, to not fire rockets at Israeli civilians, to release all of its hostages and to otherwise abide by the law of war. That won’t happen, so Israel has to fight.
Israel will, as it has always done, abide by the law of war. If we are to remain Israel’s ally we can ask no more of it.
