By Jim Geraghty
Friday, April 19, 2024
Israel wasn’t willing to just “take the win,” as President Biden urged.
Last weekend, Iran, along with proxies based in Iraq,
Syria, and Yemen, fired 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than
120 ballistic missiles at Israel. Because so few of the projectiles reached
their intended targets, some figures, including our president, believed that
Israel should treat its own successful air defense as a military victory and
declare the conflict resolved. This would mean that there would be no
counterstrike or other visible consequence for the Iranian decision to launch more
than 300 drones and missiles at Israel.
Unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was
unpersuaded by that logic. (Netanyahu
has been preparing to fight the enemies of Israel since before the Jets
won the Super Bowl.) But the military response may well have been more
limited because of Biden’s declaration that the U.S. would not assist in any
retaliation.
Explosions echoed over an Iranian
city on Friday in what sources described as an Israeli attack, but Tehran
played down the incident and indicated it had no plans for retaliation – a
response that appeared gauged towards averting region-wide war.
The limited scale of the attack and
Iran’s muted response appeared to signal a successful effort by diplomats who
have been working to avert all-out war since an Iranian drone and
missile attack on Israel last Saturday.
Iranian media and officials
described a small number of explosions, which they said resulted from air
defences hitting three drones over the city of Isfahan in central Iran.
Notably, they referred to the incident as an attack by “infiltrators”, rather
than by Israel, obviating the need for retaliation.
A senior Iranian official told
Reuters there were no plans to respond against Israel for the incident.
“The foreign source of the incident
has not been confirmed. We have not received any external attack, and the
discussion leans more towards infiltration than attack,” the official said.
The New York Times reported that “three Iranian officials confirmed that
a strike had hit a military air base near the city of Isfahan, in central
Iran.”
In the early morning hours, the International Atomic
Energy Agency issued a statement declaring, “IAEA can confirm
that there is no damage to Iran’s nuclear sites. [Director-General Rafael
Grossi] continues to call for extreme restraint from everybody and reiterates
that nuclear facilities should never be a target in military conflicts. IAEA is
monitoring the situation very closely.”
Israel may well have wanted to tell the Iranians, “We’re
not going to hit your nuclear facilities . . . but we could if we wanted to,
and you wouldn’t be able to stop us.”
A senior U.S. official told CNN that the U.S. did not
“endorse” the Israeli response.
The G-7 is meeting in Italy this week, and the leaders
issued the typical zero-impact statement that is almost obligated at moments
like this:
Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio
Tajani, said the G7 foreign ministers meeting in Capri, Italy, had changed
their Friday morning agenda to “address the Iran issue and put priority
attention on the Middle East.” He told reporters that “the political goal of
the G7 is de-escalation,” adding that the group had reaffirmed its support for
a cease-fire in Gaza “to ensure the release of the hostages and to ensure the
provison of goods and food to the civilian population.”
Calls for a cease-fire these days are pointless because
Hamas refuses to cease fire. It doesn’t matter how generous the offer on the
table is. Don’t take it from me, take it from CIA director William Burns, who’s been leading
the U.S. effort to get Hamas to release the hostages:
Earlier this month, William J.
Burns, C.I.A. director and lead American negotiator, traveled to Cairo and
pushed what he called “a far-reaching proposal” that Egyptian and Qatari
negotiators took to Hamas. The proposal contained an offer to allow some Gazans
to return to the northern part of the enclave, a key Hamas demand.
While Mr. Burns did not describe
the details of that proposal, he said that so far Hamas has not accepted it.
“It was a deep disappointment to
get a negative reaction from Hamas,” said Mr. Burns, speaking at the George W.
Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. “Right now, it’s that negative reaction
that really is standing in the way of innocent civilians in Gaza getting
humanitarian relief that they so desperately need.”
(For those wondering why the CIA director is taking this
role, the Arabic-speaking Burns was a diplomat for more than 30 years,
assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2001 to 2005, and
ambassador to Jordan from 1998 to 2001. He knows the region and its players
about as well as anyone in the U.S. government.)
To be an international diplomat, you must pretend that
the remaining leaders of Hamas are reasonable, rational, good-faith negotiators
and can be talked into a good deal if the Israelis and other countries will
just pile on more carrots and take away more sticks.
You also have to avert your eyes from the evidence that many of the hostages are dead, or that Hamas
has lost track of where the hostages are. The Israelis believe there are 129 Israeli hostages remaining in Hamas custody; five are dual U.S.–Israeli citizens. Hamas reportedly told
negotiators that it does not have 40 living women and sick and elderly men in custody. Hamas
remains unwilling, or unable, to tell negotiators how many hostages are still
alive.
International diplomats start from the supposition that
Israel just hasn’t been willing to bend over backward enough to placate forces
that have sworn to kill Israelis. And that if they just apply more pressure to
Israel, and gather around tables in fancy hotels in places such as Cairo
and Paris, suddenly Hamas will come to its senses and a deal
will appear.
Earlier this month, Israel offered to release “hundreds
of Palestinian prisoners” but Hamas responded, “The [Israeli] position remains stubborn and has
not responded to any of the demands of our people and our resistance.”
Meanwhile, on the U.S. home front, there are signs that
mainstream American institutions are starting to get tired of the Hamas
apologists.
At Google headquarters, 28 staffers
— or “Googlers,” as they are called — were fired after orchestrating an anti-Israel sit-in
inside of their bosses’ offices.
The keffiyeh-wearing bunch, which
organized the “No Tech for Apartheid” group, were protesting a $1.2 billion
deal Google recently made with the State of Israel. Specifically, they were
protesting Project Nimbus, a joint contract with Amazon that provides
cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence services to one of America’s
firmest and longest-standing allies.
Y’all know your job at work is to . . . you know, work,
not organize sit-ins to protest your bosses’ decisions, right?
You might say, “Ah, those Google employees thought they
were still in college.” But apparently even the Ivy Leagues are getting tired
of lawbreaking in the name of cutting Hamas some slack. Our Zach Kessel reports:
Isra Hirsi, the daughter of
Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), was handcuffed and led away from the
site of an anti-Israel encampment on Columbia University’s campus by New York
Police Department officers on Thursday, photographs show. . . .
Before police escorted her from the
quad, Hirsi announced on social media Thursday that she had been suspended from
Barnard College as a result of her involvement with anti-Israel protests. . . .
Noting that the students who set up
the tents “violated a long list of rules and policies,” [Columbia president
Minouche] Safik wrote that the students received warnings that they would face
suspension if they remained on the lawn.
“I regret that all of these
attempts to resolve the situation were rejected by the students involved. As a
result, NYPD officers are now on campus and the process of clearing the
encampment is underway,” she wrote in the statement.
Over at the Dispatch, Nick Catoggio
wondered when, if ever, President Biden will be willing to have a
“Sistah Souljah moment” with the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel left. Donald Trump
is telling the pro-life community they’ll get half a loaf and like it, but the
incumbent Democratic president can’t bring himself to tell young lefties to
stop blocking bridges and the roads to the airport.
Think about it. You can find plenty of examples of Biden
and Kamala Harris and just about every major Democratic elected official
expressing visible anger about the laws proposed and passed by pro-lifers.
They’re outraged by the idea of restricting abortion, even late in a pregnancy.
They seethe about it. The effort to restrict abortion infuriates them as much
as anything else they encounter in public life.
But when Michigan protesters chanted, “Death to America,” we
got a brief statement from a campaign spokesman that Biden “denounces these
disgusting and antisemitic remarks.” No, Biden doesn’t support that sort of
literally anti-American perspective . . . but he’s not going to call any
additional attention to it.
Our Noah Rothman concludes that Biden and the
Democratic establishment clearly fear unhinged and irate students blocking
traffic and harassing donors outside party fundraisers more than they fear
alienating the American mainstream:
It’s simply not good enough for
Biden and his fellow Democrats to gently chide the anti-American left and move
on. Throw them under the bus. Pick one — any will do, as this is a target-rich
environment — and make an example of him or her. Democrats are clearly afraid
of how America’s restive students would react to that sort of banal
majoritarianism.
Forget standing up for Israel. Does any Democrat want to
stand up for America? Or have the Democrats convinced themselves that as goes
Dearborn, so goes America?
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