By Seth Mandel
Wednesday, April
03, 2024
The Wall Street Journal carries a story today
about how President Biden’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war increasingly
alienates the supporters of each side. What it doesn’t say is that a president
consumed with “both sides” of a war between our ally and a terrorist regime
holding American hostages is the underlying problem.
The president wants the votes of a segment of his base
who want him to intervene to save from extinction the barbaric terrorist
organization that murdered Americans in cold blood and took other Americans
hostage, using them as slaves, starving them, and sexually assaulting many of
the women. But Hamas’s extinction is the only possible way to end the ongoing
conflict, since the group exists to murder, kidnap, and
rape—and says so daily.
Thus, Biden wants these voters to know that he’s sorry
and he still loves them. But in order to please them, he would have to consign
the Jewish state to the fate Hamas wants for it. Since the president is not a
monster, he has thus far refused to do so.
At the same time, his sympathy for those with family in
Gaza is appropriate. There are many innocents in the Strip facing hardship. The
step he won’t take is to force Israel to lay down its arms before an enemy
sworn to destroy it. That, too, is appropriate. Trying to reconcile the two is
a fool’s errand.
On that note, Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the progressive
political lobby outfit J Street, has—stunningly, perhaps unintentionally—made a
decent point. “Polarization on these issues between these communities is
getting deeper,” Ben-Ami told the Journal. “Both sides deserve to
have their rights and security and ultimately their freedom—that’s what the
administration is trying to do—build a path towards that, and that’s not easy.”
When he says “both sides,” Ben-Ami is referring to
Israelis and Palestinians. The problem for Biden is that Palestinian rights and
security and freedom require the defeat of Hamas. The Palestinian Authority,
which governs the West Bank, will at the very least sit with negotiators in a
process designed to create a second state without eliminating an existing
state, Israel. That is not something Hamas is willing even to consider, which
is why at every stage of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts, Hamas acts as
the intentional saboteur. When the sides are even willing to envision a
coexisting future, Hamas begins shedding the blood of both Jews and
Palestinians. It is not acting in Palestinian interests but rather the
interests of its Iranian masters in Tehran.
When food is delivered to Gaza, Hamas or its hired guns
attempt to take it, often successfully, and often at the cost of the lives of
hungry Gazans. When Gazans try to access the food and other provisions
directly, Hamas executes them on the spot. Just today, Haaretz reveals that
the IDF has found extensive documentation of the torture and execution of
Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a Hamas commander killed by his own organization on suspicion
of being gay. There is no freedom for Palestinians under Hamas, no matter what
a bunch of American college kids say.
Yet Biden has increasingly been adopting the language of
his progressive dissenters about Israel. In his attempt to find balance, he has
lent credence to the idea that Israel is to blame for all the death and
destruction in Gaza and principally responsible for the humanitarian conditions
there. This has done nothing to placate his critics on the left; if he really
believed what he says about Israel, they argue, he wouldn’t still support the
mission in Gaza.
Which brings us, again, back to the central point: The
president’s rhetoric about Israel is unreconcilable with his policy of backing
the defeat of Hamas and the release of the hostages. He’s not going to be able
to make “both sides” happy because the freedom and security of both sides in
this conflict requires the president to support Israel’s operation in Gaza
until it is complete.
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