Don’t confuse Washington’s Netanyahu-bashing with those of Israeli critics
By pressuring Israel rather than Hamas and their enablers, the Biden-Harris administration has given aid and comfort to the hostages’ murderers.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Sep 4, 2024
Biden and Harris are sticking to Obama’s failed formula for the Middle East that has already cost so many lives in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen.
After 11 months of second-guessing, sabotaging and undermining the Israeli effort to defeat Hamas, President Joe Biden doubled down on his administration’s policy that has been so beneficial to the terrorists. His declaration that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not doing enough to secure a deal to release the remaining hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 was very much in line with the entire tenor of Washington’s approach to the conflict. Coming in the wake of the announcement that six of the remaining hostages had been murdered, including one American, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, in cold blood by Hamas, the implication pointed to Netanyahu’s supposedly tough stance in the negotiations as the cause of their deaths and not the diabolical intentions of their Hamas captors.
This is entirely outrageous. Blaming Netanyahu for the murders of the hostages, whether implicitly or directly, is giving Hamas a pass for its latest act of barbarism. Hamas is a genocidal criminal organization that has rejected every ceasefire proposal since the initial pause last fall. The idea that Netanyahu is somehow responsible for their crimes because he hasn’t abandoned the effort to ensure that Oct. 7 cannot be repeated—as it most certainly would be if conditions like an Israeli withdrawal from crucial points in the Gaza Strip like the Philadelphi corridor along the border with Egypt—is sheer madness.
Yet in understanding the pressure campaign being mounted on the Israeli leader by the administration, it’s important to grasp one key fact about this controversy. Though liberal corporate mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN conflate Washington’s anti-Bibi campaign with Israeli protests against the prime minister, that is a deliberate misreading of the situation.
The Israeli protests have gotten considerable publicity and are supported by the country’s left-wing establishment that still resents Netanyahu, and his nationalist/religious and Mizrachi supporters. They want a hostage deal apparently at any price, even if it wouldn’t mean freedom for all of the captives. And they also want Netanyahu out of office.
Washington’s political motivations
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris share the latter objective and, in principle, they want the hostages freed. But their motivations are very different from those of most of Netanyahu’s domestic critics. What they want is an end to the war against Hamas. And they want it for two reasons.
Part of the impetus for U.S. pressure on Netanyahu is purely political.
Since the opening weeks of the war, the Democratic Party has been badly split on both the issue of support for Israel and the objective of eradicating Hamas, which Biden initially endorsed after Oct. 7 and from which he has been gradually backing away ever since. Both when they were promoting Biden’s since dropped bid for re-election and the coup that replaced him with Harris, the leadership of the Democratic Party has behaved as if unifying their party is the primary goal.
By that, they mean keeping their intersectional anti-Israel left wing on the reservation rather than opposing the ticket because of what they perceive as the administration’s insufficient hostility to Israel. To that end, they have expended considerable effort to appease the antisemitic pro-Hamas Arab voting bloc in the swing state of Michigan. They have also signaled left-wingers elsewhere, including the pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses that in Biden’s words “have a point” and according to Harris should be “heard.”
Pro-Israel Democrats have made their peace with this because they share the objective of defeating former President Donald Trump in November and can point to the continuing flow of U.S. military aid to Israel, even if it is being slow-walked rather than expedited.
That notwithstanding, above all, the goal for Washington is to end the fighting in Gaza and preclude the outbreak of full-scale war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, at almost any cost. The sooner the guns are silenced, the quicker they can put the whole issue behind them and preclude losing the far more numerous pro-Israel voters in the American political center in the election.
But their motives are not entirely about the November election. The position of Biden and Harris is just as much a function of the guiding ideology of the foreign policy pursued by former President Barack Obama.
An obstacle to appeasing Iran
Obama clashed with Netanyahu because he was an obstacle to his most important foreign-policy goal: appeasement of Iran and a realignment of the Middle East away from America’s traditional allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia. That was the chief reason for the decision to bow to Tehran’s demands and conclude the 2015 nuclear deal that guaranteed that Iran would eventually get a nuclear bomb.
The same policies were behind Biden’s efforts to revive that deal, which Trump abandoned in 2018 exert a “maximum pressure” campaign on the Iranians to force them to abandon their nuclear ambitions. That was cut short by the election of Biden in 2020. Even when Biden’s effort to revive it failed—since the Islamist regime felt it could get closer to its objective by not signing an even weaker deal than the one Obama had embraced—the Obama alumni who ran American policy since January 2021 still stuck to the same theme. That’s why they pressured Israel (then under the administration of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid) to appease Hezbollah by surrendering natural gas fields along the border with Lebanon. They also removed the Houthis in Yemen from the list of foreign terrorist organizations and forced the Saudis to abandon their war against them. That’s a decision that has come back to haunt the West in the form of the Houthis successful interdiction of international shipping in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.
And they are now prepared to allow northern Israel to be depopulated by Hezbollah’s incessant firing of rockets and missiles rather than take action that might offend the terrorist group’s masters in Tehran.
On top of that, they are still holding onto the myth of the two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That would repeat the catastrophic mistakes that led to the creation of a Hamas terrorist state in Gaza by replicating the situation in Judea and Samaria, directly endangering the existence of what would be left of Israel after a repartition of the country to create yet another Palestinian state.
What the Israeli protesters want
Though the vitriol being spewed against Netanyahu and his domestic opponents may seem in sync with Biden-Harris policies, it’s easy to see that the American objectives are not shared by the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including many, if not most of those demonstrating against the prime minister.
Many Israelis have taken to the streets in the wake of the discovery of the bodies of six hostages murdered by Hamas. They are demanding a hostage deal “now” and blaming the lack of one on Netanyahu. It may seem as if they are operating from the same talking points as Biden and Harris, but that assumption is entirely misleading.
What Israelis want
At this point, Netanyahu’s domestic opponents fall into two categories.
On the one hand are hostage families who are desperate for Israel’s government to do anything to retrieve their loved ones. It should be understood that those who have spoken out against Netanyahu do not represent all of the families. Some of them have supported the prime minister’s stand in which he seeks to balance the obligation to ransom the hostages with the need to protect the country’s security and, by extension the lives of 8 million people, in addition to those who remain in the hands of the Oct. 7 murderers. But the latter has gotten little attention from the leftist-dominated Israeli press or the international media.
The hostage families are entitled to say what they want, no matter how over the top their rhetoric. Who among us wouldn’t trade the world, let alone a victory for Hamas, to secure the return of our loved ones?
But what must be understood is that Netanyahu’s political opponents have essentially hijacked the demonstrations. Their goal is simple: ousting Netanyahu from office and reversing the outcome of the November 2022 Knesset elections. Their disingenuous complaints about the government’s since-abandoned plans for judicial reform, responsibility for the Oct. 7 disaster or simply being too concerned about preventing Hamas from surviving and striking again to agree to a hostage deal at any price were all a pretext to their wanted result.
That doesn’t mean that even many of those demonstrating against Netanyahu share Biden’s and Harris’ worries about offending antisemites in Michigan, or their goal of appeasing Iran and creating a Palestinian state.
As even The New York Times conceded in an article last week, these positions are utterly rejected by mainstream Israeli opinion, including many of Netanyahu’s political foes at home.
Outside of the long-since marginalized far left, even those Israelis who loathe Netanyahu oppose the Biden administration’s positions on ending the conflict in such a way as to enable Hamas to reconstitute and resupply (via the crucial border with Egypt) itself after a ceasefire.
Most Israelis understand that had Biden stuck to his initial position of strong support, the defeat of Hamas would have been made possible and accomplished faster, and at the cost of fewer lives on both sides. And they also realize that pressuring Netanyahu—and not Hamas and its enablers in Qatar and elsewhere—is part of the problem.
By pursuing its vendetta against Netanyahu rather than supporting Israel, the administration has undermined U.S. interests in the region and given aid and comfort to the terrorists. Rather than supporting Israelis or the hostages, Biden and Harris are sticking to Obama’s failed formula for the Middle East that has already cost so many lives in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen. In doing so, they may think they are bolstering their party’s election prospects and achieving Obama’s long-sought ambition for a realignment in the Middle East. But that has nothing to do with saving the hostages or bringing peace to the region.
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