By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, May 22, 2021
Israel has battled Hamas four times since the terror
organization seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Each battle unfolds the
same way: Hamas launches rockets at Israel’s civilian population,
Israel bombs Hamas targets, and the fighting continues until terrorist
infrastructure is sufficiently degraded so that the rocket fire stops for a few
years. Israelis call it “mowing the lawn.” The last major clash was in 2014. In
its origins, order of battle, and strategy and tactics, Operation Guardian of
the Walls, which began May 10, resembles these previous flareups.
So what’s different? Just about everything.
The region has changed. In 2014 the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, legitimizing the nuclear program of Israel’s
archenemy Iran, was a gleam in John Kerry’s eye. Its adoption the following
year, and America’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018, realigned the Middle
East along the axis of Iranian power. The result was an Arab–Israel détente
formalized in the 2020 Abraham Accords. From a regional perspective, the
Palestinian cause is less important than Iran’s ambitions.
Israel has changed. In 2014, Benjamin Netanyahu was at
the outset of his third term and led from a position of strength. His
indictment on corruption charges in 2019 initiated a political crisis that has
led to four elections (and most likely a fifth) in the space of two years. On
the eve of the latest violence, Israel’s bewildering politics became even more
surprising when two of Netanyahu’s rivals enticed an Arab Islamist party to
join a coalition government. That effort collapsed when the rockets blazed. The
subsequent outbreak of intercommunal violence in cities with large Arab-Israeli
populations is a reminder of Israel’s pressing domestic challenges. The
security issue unites Israel. Just about everything else divides it.
America has changed. In the summer of 2014, Barack Obama
was a lame duck, the Republicans controlled the House and were on the verge of
winning the Senate, and Donald Trump was the host of Celebrity
Apprentice. Obama’s dislike of Netanyahu and willingness to expose
“daylight” between the United States and Israel was no secret. But anti-Israel
invective was limited to the fringe. And anti-Israel media bias was nowhere
near as bad as it is today.
Then came the Great Awokening. The dialectic of Black
Lives Matter and Donald Trump drove the nation into its current obsession with
race, culminating in the protests, riots, vandalism, cancellations, and
iconoclasm that followed the murder of George Floyd one year ago. The Trump
years brought a revolutionary fervor to American politics, radicalizing the
Left and burdening the rest of us with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her
anti-Israel, socialist “Squad” of congressional Democrats.
The Squad shares an all-encompassing woke mindset that
collapses individuals and events into a reductive binary of oppressor and
oppressed. When the Squad looks at Israel and Hamas, it cannot see anything
other than critical race theory. And so this emboldened Left draws disgustingly
false equivalences between American racial minorities and Palestinians. It
slanders Israel as an apartheid state. It demands that America stop a planned
weapons sale to Israel in the middle of our ally’s offensive against terrorists
supplied by Iran. It says President Biden is “taking orders” from the Jewish
prime minister.
What the Squad lacks in numbers it makes up for in noise.
Its members exploit social media, show up on MSNBC, and amplify the hostility
to Israel already thick on college campuses and in progressive enclaves. Its
allies fill the op-ed pages with similar dreck, catering to the audience for
politically correct, left-wing clickbait. The polemical onslaught is false and
obnoxious. But it gets results, driving an Israel-shaped wedge into the
Democratic Party and forcing Biden to step up his calls for a ceasefire.
This unappeasable hostility is a problem for Israel, for
America, and for the Democratic Party. It makes me wonder if the head of the
DNC has checked in lately with his British counterpart. There hasn’t been a
Labour prime minister since 2010, and Labour just experienced another drubbing
in local elections. Labour’s current leader has been trying to salvage his
party’s reputation from the wreckage of his far-left anti-Semitic predecessor
Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a struggle.
Explanation? Under Corbyn, Labour went hard left,
abandoning its traditional working-class constituency for progressive social
and cultural issues that appeal to the university crowd and the Very Online but
turn off everyone else. Corbyn opposed Brexit, supported high levels of
immigration, embraced political correctness, and tolerated the worst sort of
anti-Semitism in his campaigns against Israel. The Socialist International
became the Socialist Intersectional (Jews excluded).
The same process is well under way here. Not content with
tearing down America, and energized by the cultural revolution of 2020,
the Jackal Bins turn their gaze on the Jewish State.
Anti-Semitism dogged the anti-Trump Women’s March and Black Lives Matter, which
recently tweeted its advocacy for “Palestinian liberation” — no
mention of Hamas’s genocidal intent — and supports the anti-Semitic boycott,
divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib require
no introduction. Comedian Trevor Noah irresponsibly likens Hamas to a powerless
four-year-old. The haters can’t believe their success.
Someone needs to disappoint them. As long as Hamas
remains in power, Israel will be forced to defend itself. The Jewish State’s
position in American politics can’t be allowed to deteriorate further. Not just
for Israel’s sake. For ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment