Reports are circulating that the Israelis are
planning an operation in Rafah to eliminate the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza.
If so, the Netanyahu government will be acting against the very public wishes
of the Biden administration, which has spent the last half year moving heaven
and earth to save a terrorist organization from destruction. Bizarrely, the
White House’s statements and actions show that Hamas’ survival is more
important than the security of a traditional American partner, Israel; more
crucial to American interests than the preservation of the U.S.-led order of
the Middle East; more precious than the dozens of American lives that Hamas
ended on Oct. 7; more valuable than however many Americans and Israelis are
still alive in the terror army’s tunnels.
Why? As the money and prestige
that the U.S. has invested month after month in protecting Hamas demonstrate,
the Biden administration sees the terror group as a valuable asset.
A day after the massacre,
before Israel’s campaign against Hamas even began, Secretary of State Antony
Blinken wrote that he was encouraging the Turkish government’s “advocacy for a
cease-fire.” It makes no difference that the tweet has since been deleted,
since the White House has produced no shortage of evidence since that its top
priority is to deter Israel from defeating Hamas, by increasing Israel’s
vulnerabilities at every turn, and conditioning aid on Israel adopting a purely
defensive posture.
The Biden administration has
stopped Israel from entering Rafah by demanding it produce plans to protect the
civilian population, piously insisting that “even one civilian death is too
many.” That would be a hard task in any military scenario, but given that Hamas
hides among noncombatants, the White House’s policy openly reinforces the
terror group’s political and military strategy.
The president abdicated
America’s historical role of vetoing anti-Israel activity at the U.N. Instead,
the U.S. delegation abstained from a key Security Council resolution in March
demanding an immediate cease-fire—thereby putting America’s diplomatic weight
behind Hamas’ demand that it should be allowed to keep its hostages and
continue ruling Gaza. The White House then sanctioned Israeli civilians on the
West Bank for crimes dreamed up by left-wing pro-Palestinian organizations,
while ignoring a Palestinian terror wave aimed at murdering Jewish civilians
who were guilty of crimes like stopping at a red light, buying gas, and herding
sheep. Much of the false reporting supporting the pro-Hamas offensive is
channeled through U.S. Army Gen. Michael Fenzel. The U.S. Security Coordinator
for Israel and the Palestinian Authority are spending taxpayer resources to
build a Palestinian terror army on
the West Bank that may soon be repurposed for Gaza, too.
By compelling Jerusalem to
“surge” food aid and energy to Gaza, the White House broke Israel’s siege, and
demanded an ally resupply its adversary at wartime. Whenever Israel goes on the
offensive, Biden and aides publicly threaten to stop resupplying arms. After
Iran’s massive missile and drone attack last month, administration officials
let on that if Israeli retaliatory strikes exceeded meager U.S. limits, the
White House would hobble Israel’s air defense systems. Thus, the Israelis were
forced to adopt the battle-tested American military strategy of bombing sand.
The White House has used CIA
Director William Burns as one of its main instruments of diplomatic deterrence.
He’s traveled to Egypt, Qatar, and elsewhere for endless hostage negotiations
with the Palestinian terrorist organization. That none of these negotiations
has gone anywhere is the point. Burns’ jawboning is designed to stall Israel’s
war while legitimizing the act of hostage-taking, even as it’s become
increasingly clear that many of the hostages whose release he is supposedly
negotiating for are dead.
To emphasize its evenhandedness in
the conflict between a key U.S. military ally and a designated foreign
terrorist organization, the White House has amplified Hamas propaganda that has
repeatedly been shown to be false. The president himself and the secretary of
state enthusiastically repeated accusations that Israel intentionally murdered
World Central Kitchen aid workers. Without evidence to support USAID head
Samantha Power’s claims of rampant famine in Gaza, the administration and its
validators began calling it a “reported famine.”
To fight the mythical famine,
Biden is sending thousands of U.S. troops to build a $320 million pier to
resupply Hamas—an arrangement that will turn American forces into human shields
to deter Israeli military operations against the terror organization. By
leaking fake news, most recently an internal State Department memo alleging
Israeli war crimes, that Israel was hindering aid to starve Gazans, the
administration laid the groundwork for arrest warrants likely to be issued by
the International Criminal Court. While the warrants reportedly target
Netanyahu and other members of Israel’s war cabinet, the action is likely to
set a precedent broad enough to justify arresting any Israeli who served in the
Gaza campaign.It’s useful to remember that
what distinguishes the Palestinians from other ethno-national groups born of
the breakup of the multiethnic empires of Europe and the Levant after World War
I is that their claim on the world’s attention issues largely from their
willingness to hire themselves out as terrorist mercenaries.
During the Cold War, the
Palestinians were used by the Soviets against the U.S. and American interests
and allies. Regional powers like Nasser’s Egypt, Assad’s Syria, Saddam’s Iraq,
and Ghaddafi’s Libya used the Palestinians to advance their own interests,
against the superpowers and/or each other. Not infrequently, Palestinian
factions fought each other on behalf of their Arab patrons.
It was through this nonstop
violence that the Palestinian cause flourished. The Palestinians won a place in
regional and then international forums not because of a world-historical
injustice done to an ad hoc confederacy of minor Levantine bloodlines. Rather,
it was because if you didn’t employ a mercenary gang of Palestinians against
your enemies, you would be exposed to a terror campaign waged by a rival band
of Palestinians, sponsored by your rivals.
What Middle East watchers call
the “Palestinian veto” refers to the ability of Palestinian terrorists to
destabilize any given regional order that doesn’t suit the ambitions of whoever
their dominant patron happens to be. For instance, the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace
treaty came about only because Egyptian President Anwar Sadat insisted on
keeping the Palestinians out. Unlike Jimmy Carter, Sadat didn’t care about a
comprehensive peace in the Holy Land with the Palestinians front and center—he
knew that giving the Palestinians a seat would give the Soviets and their Arab
allies an opening to derail an agreement he needed to advance Egyptian
interests.
On whose behalf were the
Palestinians acting when they destabilized the region with their gruesome Oct.
7 attack? Iran—but also the Biden administration. The two share an interest in
collapsing the traditional U.S.-led order of the Middle East that Donald Trump
had restored, after Barack Obama began the process of dismantling it.
Up until Obama, the pillars of
America’s security architecture were the Persian Gulf’s oil-rich Arab states,
led by Saudi Arabia, and, in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel and Egypt. Early
in his first term Obama signaled he intended to undo that order when he gave a
speech in Cairo and invited officials from the Muslim Brotherhood, existential
enemies of the military regime then led by Hosni Mubarak. Within two years, the
White House withdrew its support for Mubarak during the Arab Spring revolutions
and ushered in a Muslim Brotherhood government. Egypt became the first pillar
of the old U.S. security order to fall.
Obama’s aides made it clear
that his second term would be devoted to securing a nuclear deal with Iran. The
purpose of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA), was not to prevent an Iranian bomb—in fact, the agreement legalizes
the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons program. Rather it was to realign U.S.
interests with Tehran while stiffing traditional U.S. partners, especially
Riyadh and Jerusalem, the other regional pillars of the American order. To cap
off his eight years of dismantling the instruments of U.S. policy in the Middle
East, Obama’s final foreign affairs initiative was to push a U.N. Security
Council resolution adopting the Palestinian position that Israel was in
violation of international law by occupying, among other places, historic
Jewish holy sites.
Then came Donald Trump, who not
only reversed Obama’s realignment but reinforced Washington’s traditional
security architecture. Trump’s first official trip was to Saudi Arabia. He
explained that the U.S.-Saudi alliance was good for the U.S. because it meant
affordable oil, investment in America, and American jobs. Trump defended the
Saudis when retired U.S. spies, The Washington Post, Obama
operatives, and foreign intelligence services joined in an information
operation to isolate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the murder of
former Saudi intelligence official Jamal Khashoggi.
That was only the beginning, as
step by step Trump erased Obama’s legacy in the Middle East, and restored the
pillars of the American-led regional security order. He backed the military
regime in Cairo, and moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He
acknowledged Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, and
large parts of the West Bank. The Trump-brokered normalization agreements
between Israel and other regional states, known as the Abraham Accords,
reaffirmed the U.S.-led regional order by binding our allies to each other—and
thus to America.
Crucially, the Abraham Accords
also ignored the Palestinians. After all, the Palestinians could never
normalize relations without forfeiting their ability to project power and
demand tribute. Like Sadat, Trump and his diplomats understood that peace could
only be made by sidelining the Palestinians and whoever was sponsoring them, in
this case Iran.
Naturally, the Abraham Accords
were repugnant to the Obama faction. The normalization deals undid Obama’s
balance of power project—i.e., strengthen U.S. adversaries at the expense of
allies—and pushed the left’s longtime darlings, the Palestinians and the
Islamic Republic to the margins. Accordingly, the Biden administration unfroze
money to fill Iran’s war chest and undermined regional normalization under
cover of expanding it to Saudi Arabia. Any direct talks between Israel and
Saudi, the steward of Islam’s holy shrines, would, if only for the sake of
protocol, have to involve the Palestinian cause. Thus, the Biden administration
put the Palestinians at the center of the region again.
That’s how we got to Oct. 7.
Contrary to the Biden administration’s talking points, the Iranians didn’t see
Saudi-Israeli normalization talks as an existential threat; rather, they
correctly saw it, and other Biden moves, as an invitation to disrupt and destabilize
the regional order that Trump had rebuilt. Subsequently, in traditional
regional fashion, the Iranians mobilized their Palestinian proxy.
And yet for many good-faith
observers, it remains a mystery why Obama and then Biden sought to undo the
U.S. order of the Middle East, an arrangement that has kept a volatile and
strategically vital region relatively stable. Is it ego alone that requires
Obama and his party must be proven right, and that Trump’s successes must be
transformed into failures at America’s expense—and at the additional price of
destroying the prospects of a relatively hopeful future for Middle Easterners?
The key fact is this: The
regional order that Trump restored has long been part of the formula that
ensures continued U.S. domestic peace and prosperity. To put it another way,
the moves made by Obama and now Biden are not primarily about destabilizing the
Middle East. Rather, they are designed to destabilize the United States.
The Biden team’s moves to
shelter Hamas are best understood in the context of a revolutionary program of
domestic initiatives that aim to reconstitute American society on a new basis,
and which in turn require the outright rejection of the country’s history and
culture, its existing social arrangements, and constitutional order. The
current regime has weaponized the security state, labeled its opponents
“domestic terrorists,” and waged a third-world-style campaign against the
opposition candidate because it’s a revisionist faction. Its political and
cultural manifesto is a program for remaking America, whether through social
pressure, or censorship, or bureaucratic fiat, or threats of violence, or
actual violence. Among other devices to transform America, the Biden
administration has opened the border to at least 7 million illegal aliens (and
counting), many from places in the Middle East where Hamas is revered, and for
whom political violence means steady, well-paid work.
It’s not the traditional
U.S.-led order in the Middle East that the revisionist faction, Obama’s
faction, is most determined to dismantle but rather the existing order in the
U.S. And it’s not Israel that it’s most keen to grind into dust, but America. For
the party that Obama remade in his image to triumph at home, the Palestinians
must win.
On St. Crispin’s Day 1415, October 25, the real King Henry V led the undermanned English army against the overconfident French at the Battle of Agincourt. “The fewer men, the greater share of honor,” Shakepseare’s Henry V told his troops. “He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian.”
