Israel Needs to Make Up Joe Biden’s Mind for Him

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 03, 2024

 

The Biden administration wants you to know that, despite its many public disagreements with the way Israel has prosecuted its defensive war against Iran and its terrorist proxies, it has been fully supportive of Israel’s counter-terror campaign in private. At least, that’s what it wants you to believe now that the parade of horribles it feared Israel’s vigorous defensive operations would unleash has failed to materialize.

 

Sure, Politico recently reported, there were internal dissenters against this secret pro-Israeli consensus, U.S. officials “urged caution,” and the White House still believes that “the only way to end the conflict was through a negotiated diplomatic agreement.” But “behind the scenes,” some of the administration’s point-people on the crisis in the region welcomed the decimation of Iran’s terror networks. Those contingencies “could offer an opportunity to reduce Iran’s influence” and “reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.”

 

That’s quite an attempt at revisionism, and the president himself doesn’t seem to be playing along. This week, Joe Biden was asked if Israel should respond to the unprecedented ballistic-missile attack on its territory from Iran by targeting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. “The answer is no,” the president replied. In addition, Biden insisted that “the response must be proportionate” to the Iranian attack, which consisted of a volley of medium-range missiles carrying powerful payloads aimed at civilian and military targets alike. Presumably, the Biden administration would react in horror to something resembling reciprocity, just as it apparently would to a calibrated but overwhelming display of force aimed at neutralizing the Iranian missile and nuclear threat.

 

Despite the post hoc satisfaction the Biden administration allegedly took in Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah positions, the president and his senior aides are strenuously advising Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to underreact to Tuesday’s unprecedented attack. Per Politico, the “Biden administration is settling for limiting Israel’s response rather than discourage it entirely, according to two administration officials.” And yet, that dispatch concedes that the White House’s influence on events in the Middle East has deteriorated precipitously in recent weeks, and its admonitions may fall on deaf ears.

 

If the president’s allies resent their diminished authority among the region’s combatants, they have only themselves to blame. Biden and his party have long indulged the fantasy that a different Israeli government — one led by anyone other than Netanyahu — would prosecute the wars imposed on Israel by the 10/7 massacre in a less aggressive fashion. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to call for the ouster of Netanyahu’s government — a desire no doubt shared by other leaders of the Democratic Party. But recent events have revealed the idea that a different leader would wage a different war to be a fantasy.

 

If former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett is indicative of what a plausible alternative to a Likud-led government would look like, we have no indication that such a government would be any more receptive to Biden’s rebukes. Indeed, if Bennett’s recent remarks are any indication, such a government might be even more likely to court risk. “That’s exactly what we need to do,” Bennett told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when asked if Jerusalem should strike Iranian nuclear sites. “You know, sometimes history knocks on your door, and you’ve got to seize the moment,” he continued. “If we don’t do it now, I don’t see it ever happening.”

 

Bennett is right. “Iran is fully vulnerable,” he observed, with the two pillars of its deterrent strategy in the Middle East — Hamas and Hezbollah — “temporarily paralyzed.” Whether an operation aimed at kinetically disabling Iran’s well-fortified nuclear-research and -development sites would succeed is an open question, but a terrible Iranian retaliation for such an attack has never been more unlikely. If successful, such an operation would forestall indefinitely the threat posed by an Iranian nuclear weapon.

 

Iran’s two ballistic-missile attacks on Israel demonstrate that it has the means to deliver a fissionable warhead over Israeli population centers, and the October 7 massacre indicates that it has the genocidal will to slaughter millions of Jews. Jerusalem cannot accept an Iranian breakout. If there ever was a time to put that threat to bed, this is it. As Bennett made clear, Netanyahu would have the support of a broad political majority in Israel for such an action. And, if past is prologue, we can presume that the Biden White House would revise the record of its opposition to that operation to claim some credit for its success.

 

When it comes to Israel’s defensive war, the Biden administration doesn’t know its own mind. But we have repeatedly seen now that Israel can make up the White House’s mind for it by creating conditions on the ground favorable to U.S. interests that Biden administration officials lack the creativity to envision for themselves. Israel did that with Hamas in Gaza. It did that with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It may be time for Israel to do that again at Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, and Bushehr. The only outstanding question is whether the Biden administration will get out of the way.