Democratic Politics Shift Toward the View That Hamas Should Win

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 05, 2024

 

Not even six full months have passed since the October 7 massacre, and already that act of unspeakable barbarity has been reduced to a passing aside in Democratic rhetorical assaults on Israeli perfidy — that is, when it is mentioned at all.

 

“Of course,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken began in remarks before reporters on Thursday, “what happened after October 7 could have ended immediately if Hamas had stopped hiding behind civilians, released the hostages, and put down its weapons.” Indeed. At any point in the war Hamas inaugurated, including the present moment, the conflict would end and a brighter day for the Palestinian people would dawn. Nothing else needed to be said. But Blinken continued.

 

Following a throat-clearing digression about the importance of drawing distinctions between Israeli democracy and a “terrorist organization,” he proceeded to mute those distinctions. “As has been said, whoever saves a life, saves the entire world. That’s our strength,” America’s chief diplomat mused wistfully. “It’s what distinguishes us from terrorists like Hamas. If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.”

 

The implication in this poetic digression is that it will be Israel’s fault when those who lack elementary powers of discretion discern no difference between the Jewish state and a nihilistic death cult that murdered, raped, and burned alive as many Jews as it could — including Americans. As a matter of fact, the observational deficiencies that would lead someone to endorse this hopeless moral equivalency are the observer’s problem. But the myopia Blinken described is increasingly endemic among his fellow Democrats.

 

President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that Israel must submit “without delay” to an “immediate cease-fire” with Hamas. His remarks demonstrate that the U.S. does, in fact, endorse the United Nations resolution it only declined to veto in March, which called for just that. Biden’s remarks confirm that American policy toward Israel’s war has shifted dramatically. Biden has previously said that he intends to use his leverage over Israel to “extend” a temporary cessation of hostilities into something permanent, and he has admitted that Hamas would use that reprieve to “survive and maybe rebuild.” What course is left to us but to reluctantly conclude that the administration’s preferred policy now is that Hamas should win the war it started on October 7?

 

A Hamas victory is precisely what Biden’s preferences would yield, after all. Israel’s stated objective in its defensive war is to neutralize Hamas for all time as a political and military force on the Gaza Strip. Any outcome short of that is a victory for Hamas. The terrorist group is clearly counting on the international community to intervene as they always have, pressure Israel to capitulate, and reconstitute itself in its former strongholds. Biden is now dutifully applying pressure on Israel to consent to defeat, and he is doing so in deference to the will of the activists in the political party he supposedly leads.

 

Biden is “feeling a ton of pressure from outside of his inner circle,” one unnamed House Democrat told Politico. “Most of us are fed up, and I think the bottom is going to fall out on support for additional Israel security funding, at least in the Democratic caucus.” The implication in these comments is that many Democrats will not accept even the conditioning of military support to Israel. Rather, their goal now is to tank further support for Israel’s military objectives regardless of the American priorities that are jeopardized in the process.

 

“About 20 Democrats are expected to oppose the House bill because of their concerns about the war, House Democratic aides predict,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Even if their opposition scuttles the provision of desperately needed munitions to Ukraine, some Democrats see that as a necessary sacrifice if it helps consign Israel to defeat. As progressive congressman Mark Pocan confessed, “There are a number of people who might have a hard time just voting for the Senate bill as is, especially given what just happened.”

 

What “just happened” was a tragedy, as all — including the Israeli government — confess. Pocan refers to a botched strike that inadvertently targeted aid workers operating in the Gaza Strip, a grievous and mortifying disaster that was only possible because Israel allows aid groups to operate in a war zone. Indeed, the IDF itself has presided over or directly overseen the distribution of over 388,000 tons of humanitarian assistance in Gaza to date, often at the risk of its soldiers. Those operations continue despite the lack of goodwill they produce for the Israelis.

 

In response not just to American pressure but its own embarrassment over the strike that killed seven aid workers, Israel reopened a crossing into the Strip from Israel proper that had been closed since 10/7 and unlocked the southern port of Ashdod to aid shipments. It went further than even Biden was willing to go following his own bloody debacles in Afghanistan by dismissing the fire-support commander and brigade chief responsible for the botched airstrike while reprimanding others. That’s not the first time Jerusalem has punished its battlefield commanders who violate protocol, inadvertently or otherwise, even absent international pressure.

 

That should be distinction enough for anyone who just cannot perceive any dissimilarities between Israel and the terrorists with which it is at war. Those disparities are only invisible to those who are committed to ignoring them — a description that now seems to capture the Democratic Party’s leadership.

 

No amount of appeasement will satisfy Israel’s critics, too many of whom seem committed to the notion that a tragic accident without obvious motive was deliberate, intentional, and indicative of a bloodlust equivalent to any Islamist terror sect. They will not be sated until Jerusalem is forced to accept the status quo ante — a life of fear that has compelled thousands of Israelis to evacuate their homes indefinitely, cower in shelters periodically, and await the next inevitable genocidal attack on themselves and their families.

 

That is unacceptable to Israelis — it’s probably unacceptable to most Americans — but it is increasingly clear that, for the Democratic Party’s leading lights, such an outcome is not just acceptable but desirable. Everyone else should proceed accordingly.