Biden Is Failing the Israel Test

National Review Online

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

 

When President Biden took a solidarity trip to Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks, we gave him credit while cautioning that his vow to stand with Israelis would be put to the test in the ensuing months. Five months later, Biden is failing that test.

 

As Israel’s defensive war against Hamas enters a critical phase, Biden’s hostile turn, made under left-wing pressure in an election year, is setting the stage for one of the biggest crises in the history of American relations with our steadfast ally.

 

Over the course of several decades, Israel has become a difficult wedge issue for Democratic politicians. While, for Republicans, there’s no fear of declaring unqualified support for Israel, Democrats are torn between the traditional wing of their party and the influential Left, which despises the Jewish state.

 

From the get-go, Biden tried to balance his support for Israel with lectures about protecting civilian lives and ensuring more humanitarian aid be let into Gaza. Israel has taken extraordinary pains to limit the toll on innocent bystanders and increase the amount of aid allowed in, which has been especially difficult in a crowded urban environment against an enemy that hides behind civilians and diverts the food and supplies intended for the Palestinian people.

 

The lectures and warnings by Biden and administration officials, as well as the stream of leaks in which officials complain about Israel, have been constant from the start of the war. They delayed the onset of the ground invasion in Gaza and have complicated Israel’s war efforts. Nonetheless, Israel has still been able to proceed and make major gains — seizing control of much of the Strip, decimating Hamas, and limiting its ability to launch rockets into Israel. Israel has now killed thousands of Hamas terrorists (12,000 of an estimated 30,000 fighters if you believe Israel, or 6,000 if you believe Hamas). Thousands more have been wounded and are unable to fight.

 

In the midst of this progress, the calendar turned to a presidential-election year and Democrats became spooked by the excessively hyped idea that Biden could lose the election over Arab-American opposition to his Gaza policy (as if this group of voters is going to help elect the much more pro-Israel Donald Trump). These days, Biden is singing a much different tune.

 

When asked about the death toll in Gaza last fall, Biden responded that he had “no confidence” that the Palestinians were telling the truth. He said, reasonably, “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”

 

But now, Biden has called Israel’s response in Gaza “over the top” and routinely and uncritically cites the dubious Hamas claim that 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, often without even distinguishing between terrorists and civilians or noting that it is Hamas’s strategy to increase the civilian death toll to turn world opinion against Israel. At the outset of the war, Biden said he agreed that Hamas needed to be “eliminated.” Now, he has downgraded that to saying that “Israel has a right to go after Hamas.”

 

The question is, go after them where?

 

The major remaining Hamas fighters are located in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. But Biden declared that Israel would be crossing a “red line” by going into the city to finish the job, even if Israel provides a process for evacuating civilians first. He has signaled that were Israel to cross this line he would consider cutting off some forms of military aid or at least conditioning aid to Israel.

 

At the same time Biden is sending out these signals on aid to Israel, he has taken the risky move of ordering the U.S. military to build a pier off the coast of Gaza for delivering humanitarian aid, thus putting hundreds of American troops within a few miles of an Iranian proxy group. Just over 40 years ago, a suicide bombing by Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy, killed 241 U.S. service members on a peacekeeping mission during the Lebanese civil war.

 

When asked about the risk of Hamas firing on American troops, Air Force Major General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said, “I mean, that’s certainly a risk, again, but if Hamas truly does care about the Palestinian people, then again, one would hope that this international mission to deliver aid to people who need it would be able to happen unhindered.” Forgive us for not being too comforted by the idea that the Biden administration is risking the lives of American service members on the hope that Hamas cares about the well-being of civilians.

 

While Biden has tried his best to try to blame the push toward a Rafah invasion on an intransigent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the operation is supported by an overwhelming majority of Israelis who recognize the move as necessary to defeating Hamas. Even Biden, in a moment of candor, recognized that Hamas was trying to hold out for a permanent cease-fire “because then they see they have a better chance to survive and rebuild.”

 

Israeli leaders aren’t going to put Biden’s political calculations in Michigan over their obligation to prevent Hamas terrorists from following through on their vow to keep carrying out massacres on the scale of October 7 over and over again.

 

“We’re going to stand with you,” Biden promised Israelis in his October visit. “We’ll walk beside you in those dark days, and we’ll walk beside you in the good days to come.”

 

If the U.S. abandons Israel as it finishes off a defensive war in response to the worst terrorist attack in its history, it would not only break Biden’s promise but represent a historic break in America’s relationship with one of its strongest allies.