Blinken’s stunning confession
Whenever there has been public daylight between the U.S. and
Israel, Hamas has pulled back from a ceasefire and release of hostages,
the secretary said. Blinken described how he compelled Israel to resupply Hamas from
day one of the war.
By Caroline Glick
JNS
Jan 5, 2025
Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) admits that U.S. pressure on Israel began immediately after Oct. 7, 2023, and
became a central feature of U.S. policy in relation to the war from its
very earliest days.
Liri Albag,
one of five female IDF soldiers still being held hostage in Gaza, was
the subject of Hamas’s most recently released video. The video of Liri
alive was filmed on Jan. 1. Available online on pro-Hamas websites, it
shows the 19-year-old in emotional distress, shaking at times, as she
begged for her life.
The hostages have been held in Gaza for
457 days. And the question of why they are still there, why has Israel
been unable to bring them home, gets asked with increased frustration
and alarm every day from all quarters.
On Saturday, we received an answer to that question. Shortly after news broke of the release of the video of Liri Albag, The New York Times
published an interview with outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Tony
Blinken. Blinken said that Hamas has refused to agree to release the
hostages in exchange for a ceasefire for two reasons.
In his words, “There have been two major
impediments, and they both go to what drives Hamas. One has been
whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and
Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we’ve
seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the
release of hostages.
“The other thing that got Hamas to pull
back was their belief, their hope that there would be a wider conflict,
that Hezbollah would attack Israel, that Iran would attack Israel, that
other actors would attack Israel, and that Israel would have its hands
full and Hamas could continue what it was doing.”
Under harsh questioning from the Times’
anti-Israel reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Blinken revealed that U.S.
pressure on Israel began immediately after Oct. 7, 2023, and became a
central feature of U.S. policy in relation to the war from its very
earliest days. From the outset, the provision of unlimited supplies to
Gaza—euphemistically referred to as humanitarian aid—has been the
constant focus of U.S. pressure on Israel.
Almost immediately after the Oct. 7
invasion, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a siege of Gaza.
The move was self-explanatory. The Gazans had taken 256 Israelis hostage
to Gaza. So long as they weren’t released, Gaza would remain under
siege. Siege warfare has long been considered one of the most humane,
least destructive forms of warfare, and it is legal under the laws of
war.
The Biden administration would have none
of it. Blinken described how he compelled Israel to resupply Hamas from
day one of the war.
“We’ve said from Day 1 that how Israel
does that matters. And throughout, starting on Day 1, we tried to
ensure that people had what they needed to get by. The very first trip
that I made to Israel five days after Oct. 7, I spent with my team nine
hours in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground
with the Israeli government, including the prime minister, including
arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the
humanitarian assistance needed to get to Palestinians in Gaza.
“And that was an argument that took place,
because you had in Israel in the days after Oct. 7 a totally
traumatized society. This wasn’t just the prime minister or a given
leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any
assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza. I argued that for
nine hours.
“President Biden was planning to come to
Israel a few days later. And in the course of that argument, when I was
getting resistance to the proposition of humanitarian assistance getting
in, I told the prime minister, I’m going to call the president and tell
him not to come if you don’t allow this assistance to start flowing.
And I called the president to make sure that he agreed with that, and he
fully did. We got the agreement to begin assistance through Rafah,
which we expanded to Kerem Shalom and many other places.”
So, to fend off an assault from an
anti-Israel reporter, Blinken explained that President Joe Biden
wouldn’t visit Israel until Israel capitulated to Blinken’s demand that
it feed and water the people of Gaza who supported Hamas’s decision to
take 256 Israeli children, babies, women and men hostage. Blinken also
admitted that the reason that the 100 hostages are still in Gaza is that
Hamas perceives the administration as pressuring Israel to capitulate
to Hamas.
Blinken could have added that by demanding
that Israel feed the people of Gaza, he and Biden removed any fear
Hamas leaders might have had that the people would overthrow them.
Unconcerned with that prospect, Hamas felt no pressure to release the
hostages.
It bears noting that when Blinken arrived
on Oct. 12, 2023, Israel still didn’t know how many of its citizens had
been taken hostage. It still didn’t have a clear assessment of how many
people were dead. Hundreds of victims had yet to be identified due to
Hamas’s mutilation and destruction of their bodies. Just last week,
Israelis learned that half of the 1,200 Israelis butchered that day were
beheaded.
What was most notable about Blinken’s
admission is that he didn’t appear to believe that there was anything
wrong with the policies he imposed on Israel. Many military leaders have
argued persuasively that had Blinken and Biden left Israel to pursue
its siege strategy, combined with airstrikes, Israel could have fomented
Hamas’s capitulation, or at least its surrender of the hostages, by the
end of 2024. While Blinken’s statements indicated that he is at least
in partial agreement with that assessment, he gave no indication that he
felt remorse for the devastating impact his policies have had on the
hostages or for the fact that those policies are a primary reason that
the war is still ongoing.
The question is whether his assessment will impact his actions in his last two weeks in office.
Last week, Michael Doran, senior fellow
and director at the Hudson Institute and a former member of the U.S.
National Security Council, told Dr. Gadi Taub on their Israeli Update
podcast that the Biden administration intends to use its allegation that
Israel is not providing sufficient supplies to Gaza to permanently
undermine Israel’s international position. Doran explained that the
administration intends to use Section 620(i) of the Foreign Assistance
Act, which asserts “that any country that is blocking U.S. humanitarian
aid will have its military assistance cut off,” against Israel.
Seemingly backing up Doran, in his interview with the New York Times,
Blinken alluded to a letter that he and Secretary of Defense Lloyd
Austin sent their Israeli interlocutors in early October alleging that
Israel was in violation of Section 620(i).
Doran said, “The January surprise is that
there will be an official finding by the State Department that Israel is
in violation of 620(i). It’s blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, and
then what will happen is that the president will waive the penalties for
blocking of the humanitarian aid, but there will have been an official
American finding.”
That finding, Doran explained, will be
used as the basis of a U.N. Security Council resolution put forward by
Algeria or Slovenia. It will also be used by the International Criminal
Court, the European Union and other bodies to strike out at Israel.
Later last week, Channel 14
reported that the administration is enabling a resolution to be put
forward at the U.N. Security Council that would require Israel to
withdraw from Gaza, and perhaps from Lebanon and Syria. The idea is that
other Security Council members would put forward the resolution and the
U.S. will permit it to pass by abstaining, as the Obama administration
abstained from Resolution 2234, which passed in the Security Council in
December 2016, after President-elect Donald Trump was elected to his
first term in office. That resolution declared all Israeli communities
in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria illegal.
Doran shared that there are two camps in
the administration regarding the planned move. Many senior officials
support moving forward. But several senior officials oppose the move. He
said that the ultimate decision will be made by Blinken.
Towards the end of his interview with the Times,
Blinken lashed out at the international forces that have not held Hamas
responsible for the suffering it has caused and continues to cause.
In his words, “One of the things that I
found a little astounding throughout is that for all of the
understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza,
you hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas. Why
there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put
down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender—I don’t know
what the answer is to that. Israel, on various occasions, has offered
safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is
the world? Where is the world, saying, ‘Yeah, do that! End this! Stop
the suffering of people that you brought on!’”
The obvious answer is because Blinken himself has devoted most of his energies to pressuring and castigating Israel.
Perhaps Blinken’s interview was a signal
that he will not go forward with the plan that his subordinates have
developed to subject Israel to a Security Council resolution and to
further criminalization it at The Hague. Perhaps it was nothing more
than an effort to rebuild his ties to the anti-Israel camp as he leaves
office. Time will tell.
In the meantime, and not knowing how
Blinken will act, the only way to avoid what Doran referred to as a
“January surprise,” and facilitate the speedy release of Liri Albag and
the other 99 hostages, is for the incoming Trump administration to apply
massive pressure on Britain and France to veto any such resolution in
the Security Council and to threaten Slovenia and Algeria with sanction
if they advance the resolution in question.
Liri Albag’s video, like others that Hamas
has released in recent weeks, is a reminder (if one was necessary) of
why Hamas must be eradicated. Blinken’s interview was proof that the
Biden administration has been the single greatest obstacle to the
hostages’ release and to Hamas’s eradication.
