WILL BIDEN FOLLOW IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF OBAMA BY STABBING ISRAEL IN THE BACK ON THE WAY OUT OF THE OVAL OFFICE?

Bracing for hostility after the election

Will the Biden administration use its remaining time in office to hamstring Israel, following in the Obama administration's footsteps? 

 

By Asher Daniels

 

JNS

Nov 4, 2024

 

 

A sharp knife in the back of the Jewish state was a memorable sign-off by the Obama administration upon its departure from the Oval Office in 2016. 

 

There is great concern in Israel about the diplomatic maneuvers to undermine Israel in the international community likely to be taken by the American administration on its way out following the U.S. elections on Tuesday—and for good reason.

A sharp knife in the back of the Jewish state was a memorable sign-off by the Obama administration upon its departure from the Oval Office in 2016. Shortly before he left office, President Barack Obama instructed his U.N. ambassador to abstain from a vote on U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which claimed Israeli communities in areas liberated in 1967 are illegal, abandoning Israel and allowing the measure to pass 14-0 in what the Palestinian Authority hailed as a “day of victory” less than one month before the handover of the reigns to Donald Trump.

This was on top of the $400 million ransom payment approved and delivered to Iran in exchange for four American hostages only several months earlier as part of Obama’s desperate and failed attempt to appease the mullahs who chant “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” in their national legislature and across the country.

Now, following four years of Biden-Harris appeasement of those same mullahs, which have culminated in the Iranian regime’s decision to execute its strategy to remove Israel from the map by unleashing its terror proxies and, in a historically dangerous escalation, targeting the Jewish state with ballistic missiles, $100 million per hostage seems like a bargain. This is in light of the Biden-Harris administration’s mind-blowing payout of $6 billion to the Iranian regime for five American hostages in September 2023, just weeks before the cataclysmic events of Oct. 7. President Joe Biden’s foreign-policy stooges, led by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, wasted little time in rolling out pathetic excuses about how the ransom payout had not been dispersed by Iran to Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack. A friend compared this to a professional athlete who has signed a mega-contract and proceeds to buy a house or car before the paycheck hits his account. Sure, he may not have used the precise bills delivered to his account, but his knowledge of their impending arrival gave him the security to make the purchase.

Iran has since rejected claims that it orchestrated or ordered the Oct. 7 attack while simultaneously funneling materiel to Hezbollah and responding to Israel’s elimination of its terror master, Hassan Nasrallah, by launching hundreds of lethal projectiles at the Jewish state in two separate volleys.

These attacks were stymied by Israel’s air defenses, along with assistance from the United States and Mideast regional partners in what would normally be a historic opportunity for further rapprochement and integration between Israel and her erstwhile Arab enemies. However, with a lack of leadership on the part of the U.S. administration and a fail-safe pattern of American efforts to hamstring Israel’s war and prevent a strategic victory on any front that would shift the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor, these joint military efforts have failed to translate to a single diplomatic accomplishment.

Given the Biden-Harris administration’s rhetoric, especially leading up to the Nov. 5 presidential elections, about America’s “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s security and its ludicrous claim that it is the most pro-Israel administration in history (a title that by most accounts belongs to the Trump administration that preceded it), one could be forgiven for thinking the administration might desire a pro-Western peace in the Middle East built on the unprecedented achievement of the 2020 Abraham Accords. If that is the case, it has proven to be populated with miserable incompetents.

The alternative proposed by many is that the American left does not view Iran as a threat to the United States. Rather, this portion of society sees its commitment to annihilating Israel as an inconvenience to be managed and views the tyrannical regime and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a counterbalance to the Sunni Arab states and Israel that can be somehow played to America’s advantage. In this worldview, Israel is best kept dependent on America and on a tight leash, to be ordered around as a U.S. proxy force and only allowed to defend against genocidal enemies on its borders at the pleasure of its American patrons. This model has apparently “worked” for the U.S. State Department in various places around the world, but it affords no respect to Israel as a sovereign nation—much less as the sole state on Earth charged with defending the ever-pursued Jewish people. If America will not act to prevent another genocide of the Jews, one might expect it to at least allow the powerful Israel Defense Forces to do so without impeding it at every turn.

However, that is exactly what the Biden-Harris administration has done since the Hamas onslaught of Oct. 7 and the supplementary Hezbollah crusade that commenced on Oct. 8, which cleared Israel’s northern residents out of their homes for more than a year. Since the start of Israel’s defensive campaign, Biden and his foreign-policy team, which includes Vice President Kamala Harris and any number of holdovers from the hostile Obama administration, have epitomized what it means to speak out of both sides of one’s mouth. They have claimed to be Israel’s protectors while simultaneously echoing the rhetoric of Hamas about a genocide in Gaza in a despicable effort to shore up the support of the far-left progressives whose votes they are counting on if they have a prayer to win the upcoming U.S. elections.

Aside from the unwarranted, false and backward condemnatory rhetoric of Israel, the administration has pursued policies that would handicap Israel’s ability to win this war for its very survival. They opposed and sought to prevent the Israeli military’s actions in Rafah, where Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar was finally discovered and killed. (Without Sinwar’s death or capture, there could be no end to this war on the Gaza front.) They opposed Israel’s masterful decapitation of Hezbollah—considered the most well-organized and equipped terror army in the world thanks to Iranian sponsorship—by urging Israel not to target Beirut, where terror chief Nasrallah and most of his high command were hiding. The Biden administration went so far as to threaten Israel with arms embargoes—the likes of which have already been implemented on a partial or complete scale by other European “allies” such as Italy and the United Kingdom—that could potentially cripple Israel’s war effort and endanger its existence. And they have cravenly prevented Israel from exacting an appropriate cost from Iran following their firing a second round of lethal ballistic missiles into Israel in October, instead demanding a limited “proportional” response in another servile gesture to cling to their electoral hopes rather than defend the interests of America and its allies.

The Biden-Harris administration pulled the Obama card out of its hat back in March when it abandoned Israel at the U.N. Security Council by abstaining and allowing Resolution 2728, which called for a ceasefire in Gaza, to pass. The resolution goes against Israel’s existential interest of defeating the butchers who perpetrated the attacks on Oct. 7 and who threaten to do so over and over if given the chance— and does not even condemn Hamas. The administration rolled out the usual mealy-mouthed excuses as it throughout the war. While Harris is currently pinned to hollow pro-Israel talking points for the sake of her electoral chances, there is no telling what drastic and devastating actions the departing Biden-Harris administration may take after the election results are in, given how Israel has bucked the administration’s overbearing hand in the war and given its general and well-documented disdain for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

There is speculation about any number of travesties already being bandied about, including allowing the International Criminal Court in The Hague to pursue its perverse criminal charges against Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant or recognizing a state of Palestine at the United Nations. Trump acted concretely with an iron fist against international bodies that treated Israel unfairly, threatening (and following through) to withhold funding to such organizations and denying visas to their representatives to attend the U.N. proceedings. But all these policies, such as the defunding of Hamas-linked UNWRA which participated in Oct. 7 and may have been intimately tied to Sinwar, were reversed at no cost by the Biden-Harris team.

Suffice it to say that if the escalation from Obama’s $400 million payout to Iran to the Biden-Harris ransom payment of $6 billion is any indication, there is no telling what new depths the outgoing U.S. administration will plummet to in its petty punishments of Israel on its way out the door. Harmful actions of some sort are all but guaranteed. The only question remaining is if the policies they pursue will be the opening salvo of a Kamala Harris administration onslaught against the Jewish state, or if they will be shameful hiccups that can be undone by the Trump administration as it did in following Obama’s betrayals.