Biden's War on Israel

In principle, Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords were a triumph of diplomacy. Trump shared the glory with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Cheers and hosannas.

Now that the Biden administration is doing its best to destroy those accords, it is worth recalling what they were about. The Trump administration negotiated a peace deal between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors. The deal involved commercial and cultural ties, not to mention the possibility of military cooperation. Nations that had previously been hostile were now acting like adults, forging commercial ties, engaging in trade agreements and even tourism.

Muslim states decided that the Palestinian cause was a lost cause, not only a waste of resource but a blot on the reputation of Islam around the world. Gulf Arab states ceased financing the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, leaving that task to the mad mullahs in Tehran.

And yet, the problem was: the Abraham Accords were a stark repudiation of decades worth of American foreign policy wisdom. The received wisdom among the foreign policy illiterati was that the Palestinian issue needed to be decided first. This group will never forgive the Trump administration for ignoring the Palestinian cause and achieved real progress.

Obviously, the foreign policy establishment, now in charge of Joe Biden’s brain, was undeterred. It could not admit to being wrong. It could not accept the triumph of Benjamin Netanyahu, but denounced him as a populist totalitarian dictator.

I am not merely talking about mini minds like John Kerry. Yesterday the eminent Financial Times columnist, Edward Luce, wrote a column blaming the current conflagration on Netanyahu. (Link unavailable) After all, the Israeli prime minister was cut from the same cloth as populist demagogues like Trump.

According to Luce, the Israeli prime minister, the leader of an occupying power was responsible for the righteous anger of the Palestinian people. They could apparently only express their righteous anger by attacking Israel with 4,000 rockets.

Anti-Semitism dies hard. The foreign policy elite will go to any end, sacrifice as many lives as need be, to show itself to have been right. These elites have been out in force declaring that they were right all along, that the Abraham Accords were dead, and that the Palestinian issue was the only issue that needed to be solved.

It was not just Jen Psaki who revelled in the death of the Abraham Accords. Add the unfortunate Max Boot, a leading Never Trumper:

“We felt there was not a constructive action by the prior administration, aside from putting forward a peace proposal that was dead on arrival. We don’t think they did anything constructive really to bring it into the long-standing conflict in the Middle East.”

Psaki appears to be channeling Washington Post columnist Max Boot. “The clashes in recent days between Israelis and Palestinians make clear that there is no ‘peace’ and no ‘new Middle East.’ It remains the same blood-soaked mess as ever. The Abraham Accords were nice, but they did nothing to resolve underlying conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Libya—or the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

Note the lack of nuance. Note the rhetorical extremism. Nothing was done. Nothing was accomplished. Nothing constructive was done. This means, for those who require clarity, that the only issue in the Middle East was the Palestinian issue, and that meant ridding the region of the state of Israel. It was the issue because they said it was the issue, but it was the issue because it fit the narrative. 

As I have mentioned, the issue fit the narrative of the rebellion against oppression. Now the Israelis are the oppressors and the Palestinians are the righteous victims of oppression. They are right to rebel against an evil apartheid state. They are, effectively, the vanguard of a new revolution.

Better yet, some members of the anti-Semitic left declare that Israel is a usurping power because it has taken over "Arab land." Since when did land belong inalienably to one ethnic group? The reasoning is completely lame, but it is tossed around as though it is a higher truth. Besides, the Israelites were there first, around the time of Moses!

In truth, Obama administration policy was markedly opposed to Israel, but Obama was more circumspect. He did fund terrorism in the Middle East and he paved the way for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

And the problem, by Obama's lights and by the lights of the Congressional Black Caucus was--- you guessed it-- Benjamin Netanyahu. Recall that when Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress the Obama administration denounced the event and the Congressional Black Caucus boycotted it. It's not the way you treat a valued ally.

Even that pathetic excuse for a legislator, one Jerry Nadler, has declared that criticizing Netanyahu was perfectly acceptable and did not make him, as it had many of his Democratic colleagues, anti-Israeli. In truth, Nadler is wrong. When thousands of rockets are being fired at a country, criticizing the prime minister is a way to deflect blame, away from the perpetrators.

Worse yet, he unhinged anti-Israeli left has asserted that the the casualties were disproportionate, that more Palestinians died than Israelis. Where they got this brainless calculation I have no idea. Some would say that the only way to end war is to make its exercise too costly. If someone outguns you at that level, a minimum of intelligence would tell you not to pick a fight. Hamas is obviously incapable of thinking at all.

The interesting part is to reflect that the Hamas regime that is running Gaza has been spending all of its money for years building terror tunnels and amassing rockets. They have no interest in building a functioning economy that might be able to sustain a better life for their subjects. 

Now, of course, the Biden administration is going to send a plane load of cash to Gaza in order to allow the Hamas authorities to rebuild the territory. Biden says that the money will not be used to rearm Hamas, but what kind of an idiot is he? Hamas controls all the money and all of the administrative authority in the territory. It will use the money as it wishes, senile Joe notwithstanding.

The Biden administrations, filled with Obama administration retreads, and with pro-Palestinian activists, has become far more overt in its hostility to Israel and especially to the Abraham Accords. In many ways Jen Psaki spoke the truth when she declared the Abraham Accords dead on arrival. The recent fighting was instigated by the Biden administration. It advanced the Biden administration policy of empowering Iran and disempowering Israel and the Gulf Arab states. 

By the terms of today’s identity politics, Israel counts among the white supremacist regimes. Hamas and Iran are oppressed people of color. Ergo….

In a fascinating column on Bari Weiss’s Substack page, one Peter Savodnik explains that identity politics, the boundless and mindless rage against white supremacism and white privilege has magically, and rather obviously, morphed into anti-Semitism. In truth, it was inevitable. Hatred of Donald Trump has always contained an element of anti-Semitism. Whether or not you believe that Trump was our first Jewish president, he was certainly our most pro-Israeli president.

Savodnik wrote:

Now we are confronted with the spectacle of members of Congress droning on on the House floor about how the Israeli army is somehow guilty of systemic racism and superimposing complicated ideas concocted by a French philosopher they’ve never read onto a conflict they barely comprehend.

They are an embarrassment and a disgrace and they are enabled by the cowards in their own party who are reluctant to criticize them for fear of being called racist or, God forbid, being primaried.

That is not the worst that can be said. The worst that can be said is that, by squeezing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the Procrustean Bed of left-wing identitarianism, the new progressives have alienated the Jew, who, for the most part, remains attached to the Jewish State, from the American body politic. By transforming the Jewish State into a force for evil, they have forced the Jew to defend that attachment. They have created a space separating the Jew from America, and, in that space, they have legitimized violence against the Jew for defending the indefensible: “apartheid,” “colonialism,” “white supremacy,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide.”  

In other words, once you have convinced young people, even young Jews, to embrace the narrative of systemic racism, to declare war against apartheid and white supremacy, you will trap them into a corner where they cannot express their wholehearted support for the state of Israel, something for which they should feel proud, but which they now, thanks to identity politics, feel shame.

I recall, as I have said before, that the Palestinian cause, beyond wanting to kill Jews, wants to punish Jews for making the Palestinians look bad. The success of the state of Israel makes the Palestinian failure look self-inflicted. As happens when peoples fail, they attack those who do better, who overachieve. They shift the blame for their failures. They might attack Asians in America or Israelis in the Middle East.

The rationale is the same-- those who do better must have cheated. They must have rigged the game. They lied and they stole and they exploited others. Anything but accepting that they might have won in a fair competition. And that you failed.