By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, May 22, 2024
The Biden administration has spent the last several
months contorting itself into logical pretzels to communicate to observers that
its post-10/7 dalliance with the Israeli government has come to an end.
The administration established contradictory conditions for an Israeli incursion into
Rafah that were unmeetable, which only make sense if they’re viewed as an
effort to prevent Israel from executing an operation aimed at clearing Hamas
from its final holdout in the Gaza Strip. It betrayed the Jewish State by
allowing the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution calling for an
“immediate ceasefire” while Hamas remains the nominal authority in Gaza. It castigated Israel for following its own advice, the result
of which was to allow Hamas to reconstitute in the territories the Israel
Defense Forces evacuated. Its officials have called on Israel to “get out of Gaza” even as it insists it has not abandoned
support for our “shared objective to defeat Hamas.”
Biden’s confused approach to maintaining America’s
wartime relationship with Israel lacks strategic and moral clarity because it
is driven not by battlefield conditions but domestic political concerns. The
Biden team is alarmed by the polls that show the president losing to Donald
Trump in November, and its members attribute their political misfortunes to the
handful of left-wing malcontents who would prefer to see Israel lose its war of
self-defense. It has made itself and U.S. national interests hostage to the
shadows that danced across the walls of the impenetrable progressive bubble.
But the lay of the political landscape has become far
clearer in recent weeks. The data indicate that it is the Biden
administration’s effort to court the noxious anti-Israel elements in the
streets, not its support for the Jewish State’s existential campaign against a
U.S.-designated terrorist group, that’s the real political liability. We cannot be sure that this
realization has dawned on the Biden administration, but the administration’s
pivot back to something resembling a rational foreign policy suggests that it
has.
It’s reasonable to assume that the administration’s
shifting and unrealizable conditions for an Israeli incursion into Rafah were
designed to mollify the Arab states opposed to such an operation — Egypt, in
particular. Cairo maintains a border crossing into Gaza through Rafah, and it
is believed that the Egyptian government hoped to prevent the exposure of the tunnel network beneath
it, through which contraband has flowed for years. But as CNN reported this week, Biden’s
efforts to appease his Egyptian partners seem to have left administration
officials with a bad taste in their mouths.
“We were all duped,” said one of CNN’s sources close to
ongoing negotiations involving Egypt. Cairo is alleged to have altered the
terms of a proposed cease-fire arrangement on the fly to assuage Hamas’s
concerns, without informing Jerusalem, Doha, or Washington. CNN’s report
describes the outrage the administration’s sandbagged officials directed toward
their Egyptian counterparts in a level of detail that suggests its sources are
well-placed — perhaps even authorized to undermine Cairo. That would comport
with statements Biden officials are retailing to other outlets.
“What should be going into Kerem Shalom is the UN
assistance, which is now in Egypt,” one unnamed official in the Biden
administration told the Times of Israel. “Egypt is holding that back until
the Rafah crossing situation settles out.” This, the official said, is
unacceptable. “Kerem Shalom is open. The Israelis have it open,” The Times’
source added. “And that aid should be going through Kerem Shalom.”
If the administration is growing increasingly frustrated
with those who would hamstring Israel’s operations in Gaza, that frustration is
not limited to Egypt. Take, for example, the White House’s terse reaction to
the International Criminal Court’s desire to seek the arrest of
Israeli officials, including the prime minister and minister of defense.
“The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders
is outrageous,” it read. “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor
might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas. We will
always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”
The president has an incentive to withhold legitimacy
from the International Criminal Court, a body without jurisdiction that looks
askance at Western nations’ efforts to secure their own interests. But that
incentive alone doesn’t explain the president’s zeal in restating the position
on Israel’s war against Hamas that he has allowed to atrophy over the past six
months.
“Contrary to allegations against Israel made by the
International Court of Justice, what’s happening is not genocide,” Biden
averred. “We reject that.” In addition, the president insisted that
Israel’s strategic objectives are America’s, too. The United States “stands
with Israel in its efforts to take out Yahya Sinwar and the other butchers from
Hamas,” the president insisted. Statements like these are sure to irritate the
campus radicals Biden and his allies have tried so hard to mollify. Perhaps
that’s the point.
This definitive assessment must also perplex
international observers who paid close attention to a preliminary State
Department report purporting to establish a fact pattern consistent with the
claim that Israel had not behaved in ways “consistent with international humanitarian law.” The ICC
and its functionaries probably thought they were reading from the same hymnal.
In the interim, though, the incentive structure for the Biden White House
appears to have changed.
Something similar could be said of the governments of
Ireland, Norway, and Spain, which came out on Wednesday with a shock
announcement that they planned to reward those responsible for the 10/7 massacre with
statehood. Biden’s State Department spent much of this year toying with the idea of coupling U.S. recognition of
Palestinian statehood with incentives designed to compel Israel to ramp down
operations in the Strip. British foreign minister David Cameron even dangled
the prospect of standing aside while the United Nations does the dirty work.
“We — with allies — will look at the issue of recognizing a Palestinian state,
including at the United Nations,” he said. “That could be one of the things that helps to
make this process irreversible.”
Madrid, Dublin, and Oslo probably thought they were on
firm ground until they read the Biden White House’s reaction to their cynical
maneuver. “The President is a strong supporter of a two-state solution and has
been throughout his career,” the White
House said in a statement. “He believes a Palestinian
state should be realized through direct negotiations between the parties, not
through unilateral recognition.”
Given the White House’s mercurial approach to issues
relating to Israeli security, it’s unwise to invest too much confidence in the
notion that the shift in the administration’s rhetoric is strategic. By the
time you read this, the president and his officials might have already reverted
to their odious status quo ante. But if this shift proves to be real and
durable, it’s because the administration has realized that it pushed too many
chips in on a losing hand. It became convinced by progressives sympathetic to
the anti-Israel position that their minority outlook was much more popular than
it actually was.
If that is the conclusion Biden officials reached, they
are wise to pull a Crazy Ivan and reverse course — even if doing so frustrates
all the enemies of Israel on whom the White House placed so many bad bets. It
turns out they’re a lot more trouble than they’re worth.
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