Biden is conciliating, rather than confronting, pro-Hamas Democrats

JONATHAN S. TOBIN

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U.S. President Joe Biden signs the guestbook at the Israeli president’s residence in Jerusalem on July 14, 2022. Credit: Adam Schultz/White House.

Democrats don’t have “Sister Souljah moments” anymore. That political metaphor refers to a moment in the 1992 presidential campaign when Bill Clinton established himself as a credible centrist candidate by blasting a radical who advocated for the murder of police officers. President Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination primarily because he was embraced as a centrist alternative to Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). But he has governed as if avoiding the wrath of the political left is his priority.

That’s the context for Biden’s decision to blow up the U.S.-Israel alliance with a series of statements about the war against Hamas and then an abstention on a vote on Monday in the U.N. Security Council that confirmed a pivot away from support for the terrorists’ elimination to a more equivocal stand. It also demonstrates that the assumption that his support for Israel is in his “kishkes” or instinctive, and therefore worthy of trust, is equally shaky.

That Biden has governed as if he is in thrall to the left has been obvious throughout his presidency as his executive orders implementing the woke diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) catechism in government; open-border policies on illegal immigration; and out-of-control spending that fueled inflation have shown. But it’s been particularly evident in recent months. His willingness to kowtow to pro-Hamas Arab-American politicians in Michigan might have made some political sense before the primary in that state, in which he wanted to undermine an effort to elect an “uncommitted” slate of convention delegates rather than one that supported Biden’s re-election, even though his place on the ballot in November was not in any real doubt. But now that Biden has locked up the 2024 nomination, this would traditionally be a moment for a candidate to pivot to the center. Yet he is still acting as if locking up the support of the most extreme voters in his coalition is the key to victory.

Sympathy for Israel-haters

That’s the only way to explain why Biden seems so intent on not having his own “Sister Souljah moment” with those who are calling him “genocide Joe” and who are hounding him on the campaign trail. As The New York Times reported this week, despite the attempts of his staff to insulate the 81-year-old president from critical voices and potentially embarrassing situations, he simply can’t seem to avoid anti-Israel activists.

At one stop in Raleigh, N.C., Biden’s attempt to speak about his support for Obamacare was interrupted by a dozen protesters who began shouting about the lack of health care in the Gaza Strip, and that hospitals were being “bombed” by Israel and he was complicit in those crimes. Biden could have ignored them or pointed out that the problems there are the responsibility of the Hamas terrorists who governed Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name for the past 16 years. He could have pointed out that it was Hamas that launched a genocidal war against Israel on Oct. 7 and that caused all the casualties suffered in the current conflict. It was also a moment to remind the world that not only were the accusations of Israel bombing hospitals a big lie, but that health-care facilities in Gaza have been—and are still being, as the recent Shifa Hospital military operation proved—used as Hamas command centers, as well as places where Israeli hostages were held captive.

Biden didn’t say anything like that. Instead, he told the crowd in Raleigh that those chanting against Israel and calling for a ceasefire that would crown Hamas as the victors of the war deserved to be treated with deference. “They have a point. We need to get a lot more care into Gaza,” said the president, doubling down on his administration’s stand that Palestinian civilian needs were more important than ensuring that the terrorists who started the war—and are still holding Israeli men, women and children captive—were eliminated.

Just as telling was his response to being heckled in Virginia in January when he was trying to talk about his efforts to defend legal abortions. As the Times noted, after that episode, he met privately with a small group of supporters and urged them not to view the protesters as political enemies, saying that they deserved sympathy and that their cause was “really important.”

This doesn’t just explain the decision of the administration to escalate tensions with Israel. It goes beyond Biden’s efforts to stop Israel from finishing off Hamas by attacking its remaining stronghold in Rafah. He is openly planning not just to open up more daylight between the two countries over the war against Hamas but to abandon Israel diplomatically, slow down the flow of arms and even sanction Israeli politicians as part of a campaign to force Jerusalem to bow to his will.

Using aid as leverage

Democrats may have impeached former President Donald Trump because of what they claimed was his desire to use aid as leverage to gain some domestic political points. But they are now threatening aid hold-ups and sanctions in order to force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the war in order to shore up Biden’s ties with his left-wing critics. The administration’s decision this week to let the U.N. Security Council pass a ceasefire resolution that mandated that the war against Hamas stop without linking it to the release of the hostages the terrorist group still holds captive is part of this effort.

That was a clear betrayal as well as a demonstration of how Biden’s skewed political priorities have led him to betray the alliance with Israel. It also shows that the effort to spin the breach in that alliance as being caused by Netanyahu’s overreaction to the U.N. vote is pure bunk motivated by partisan motives.

Netanyahu is getting blasted not just by Democrats but by some left-wing Israelis for having the temerity to denounce Biden’s betrayal. They say that he should be swallowing this shift in American policy instead of calling it out.

This discussion isn’t new. The same things were said about Netanyahu’s stands that earned him the opprobrium of President Barack Obama and his media “echo chamber.” They labeled the Israeli responses to Obama’s efforts to force Israel back to the 1967 armistice lines, surrender part of Jerusalem and then acquiesce to Washington’s appeasement of Iran’s nuclear ambitions as evidence that Netanyahu was needlessly confrontational. His refusal to play the part of a loyal vassal to Israel’s superpower ally was considered arrogant.

That was unfair to Netanyahu. He had done his best to defer to Obama but couldn’t be silent when his country’s vital interests were being sold down the river by a president eager for the applause of those in the Muslim world who hated America and its Israeli ally.

It could be argued that his decision to challenge Obama on the Iran nuclear deal in his address to a joint meeting of Congress in 2015 made it easier for Democrats to go along with his tilt toward Tehran by interpreting his defiance as an insult to the president. But by speaking up in this manner, Netanyahu didn’t just rally Americans to oppose the pact. He was also sending a signal to Arab states that feared Iran more than Israel that they should look upon the Jewish state as a potential ally and not merely a meek client state for the Americans. That not only helped persuade Trump to withdraw from Obama’s dangerously weak agreement but led directly to the 2020 Abraham Accords.

Don’t blame it on Bibi

But today, the stakes in the argument with Biden are even higher than those with Obama. Israel is currently locked in an existential struggle with Hamas and its Iranian allies. Israel must win the war against Hamas to ensure that no more Oct. 7 atrocities ever occur, and also to allow the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who were forced to flee their homes in the south and the north because of the fighting to go home in safety. If Biden gets his way and Hamas is able to emerge from the war as its victors, then Israeli deterrence and security are finished. And the fallout from the U.N. vote will only fuel efforts to isolate Israel and harm its economy through lawfare.

The claim that Netanyahu is speaking up only to shore up his right-wing/religious party coalition is a misunderstanding of the reality of post-Oct. 7 Israel. Netanyahu may remain controversial, but the war he is leading is supported by a broad consensus of Israelis who will not accept anything less than a complete victory over Hamas and who are equally unwilling to reward Palestinian terrorism with the offer of statehood.

The only leader playing politics in the war against Hamas is Biden. It is his craven response to antisemitic supporters of a Hamas victory that has caused the current impasse between Israel and the United States. He could have carved out a space in the center of American politics where support for Israel is widespread; instead, he is obsessed with not angering left-wing intersectional activists who hate Israel and falsely think it is a settler/colonial state of “white” oppressors. Blaming the gap that this shift has opened up between Washington’s stand and Israeli positions that would be maintained no matter who was in power in Jerusalem on Netanyahu, is just political spin.

The current crisis in the U.S.-Israel alliance isn’t Netanyahu’s fault. It’s the product of the belief among Democrats that Israel is always in the wrong. And the more that Biden validates those smears, the more evident it is that the claim that support for Israel is in his “kishkes”—and thus to be trusted—is a dangerous supposition.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

Former US Senator Joe Lieberman, First Jew on Major Party Presidential Ticket, Dies at 82

Reuters and Algemeiner Staff

Former US Senator Joe Lieberman speaks at an event in Ashraf-3 camp, which is a base for the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) in Manza, Albania, July 13, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Florion Goga

Former US Senator and Democratic Party vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman died on Wednesday at age 82 in New York City after suffering complications from a fall, his family said.

“His beloved wife, Hadassah, and members of his family were with him when he passed,” the statement said. “Senator Lieberman‘s love of God, his family, and America endured throughout his life of service in the public interest.”

Lieberman was the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee in the 2000 election, which was won by Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore. Lieberman was the first Jewish candidate on a major party presidential ticket in the US. He was an ardent supporter of both Israel and Iranian opposition groups seeking to overthrow the Islamist regime in Tehran.

The former senator failed in a bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, hurt by his support for the Iraq War.

A centrist, Lieberman was first elected to the US Senate in 1988. He lost the state’s Democratic primary in 2006, but retained his seat by winning the general election as an independent candidate.

In a further break from the Democratic Party, Lieberman endorsed Republican Senator John McCain for president in a speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008.

But Lieberman would later back Democrats Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 in their bids for the presidency.

Lieberman retired from the Senate in 2013 after four six-year terms.

“Joe was as fine an American as they come and one of the most decent people I met during my time in Washington,” Republican former President George W. Bush said in a statement.

Most recently, Lieberman was leading No Labels, a centrist group that hopes to launch an outsider bid for the White House.

In a recent Reuters interview, Lieberman discussed the effort and how it at times felt like building a plane in midair.

“We’re doing something that I think hasn’t been done before. We are on the ground getting on the ballot and going to let a candidate emerge and take on the rest,” Lieberman said.

“That’s quite different. So, frankly, there was no choice but to build a plane and fly it while it was being built. And I’m very grateful to how far we’ve come under those circumstances,” he said.

Lieberman, who held a law degree from Yale Law School, was a member of the Connecticut State Senate and then attorney general of Connecticut before becoming a US senator.

Lieberman had three children from two marriages; his first marriage ended in divorce.

Lieberman‘s funeral was set for Friday in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut.

Widok granicy z Gazą od strony izraelskiej, 5 październik 2018r. (Źródło: Wikipedkia)

Wojna hybrydowa: od bariery granicznej Gaza-Izrael po ulice i mosty w Stanach Zjednoczonych

Daled Amos
Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Od marca 2018 r. do grudnia 2019 r. media donosiły o Wielkim Marszu Powrotu.

W każdy piątek palestyńscy Arabowie z Gazy zbliżali się do bariery oddzielającej Gazę od Izraela w „spontanicznych”, „pokojowych” protestach, żądając prawa do powrotu do swoich domów w „Palestynie”. Hamasowi nie zajęło dużo czasu dokooptowanie protestów. Wkrótce, pośród dymu płonących opon i pod osłoną nocy, Gazańczycy podejmowali próby przedarcia się przez płot do Izraela.

Marsz był przydatny dla Hamasu. Wywarł presję na Izrael, by uporać się z masami Gazańczyków przy barierze, z których wielu próbowało się przedrzeć i przedostać się do Izraela. Zabici lub ranni Gazańczycy trafiali na pierwsze strony gazet, wywołując ogólnoświatowe potępienie Izraela.

Pod koniec 2019 roku Hamas „odroczył” cotygodniowe zamieszki.

Ale 7 października 2023 roku Hamas przekroczył tę barierę, mordując, gwałcąc i porywając izraelskich cywilów.

Teraz w wiadomościach ponownie pojawiają się informacje o zamieszkach przeciwko Izraelowi, ale tym razem na całym świecie. Są to zamieszki propalestyńskie i nie mają one charakteru pokojowego, ale to nie powstrzymuje mediów od nazywania ich „protestami”, także kiedy opisują powodowane przez nie zniszczenia. Przecież nikt nie chce przyznać, że rząd traci kontrolę:

o  NBC: Budynki zdewastowane podczas propalestyńskiego wiecu w West Hartford: policja
o   LA Daily News: Ustawodawcy wzywają Departament Sprawiedliwości do wszczęcia śledztwa w sprawie propalestyńskiego wandalizmu na cmentarzu weteranów Los Angeles
o   ABC News: Propalestyńscy protestujący niszczą fasadę Biblioteki Publicznej w Nowym Jorku
o   Axios: W wielu biurach Kongresu doszło do propalestyńskiego wandalizmu

o   Washington Times:  Propalestyńscy demonstranci przedzierają się przez płot Białego Domu i niszczą pomniki narodowe podczas protestów  

Oprócz zniszczenia kolejnym celem zamieszek jest zakłócanie porządku:

o   Reuters: Setki propalestyńskich demonstrantów aresztowano po zablokowaniu mostów i tunelu w Nowym Jorku
o   Haaretz: Pro-palestyńscy protestujący blokują dostęp do redakcji New York Timesa, oskarżają personel o „współudział w ludobójstwie”
o   NBC: Tysiące propalestyńskich demonstrantów blokuje ulice w centrum miasta Los Angeles, wzywają do zawieszenia broni

o   AP:  Protestujący propalestyńscy blokują drogi dojazdowe do lotnisk w Nowym Jorku i Los Angeles

o   ABC: Protesty propalestyńskie blokują mosty w Nowym Jorku i tunel Holland; aresztowano ponad 300 osób

Niektórzy kwestionują metody uczestników zamieszek. W końcu jak mogą mieć nadzieję, że zmienią zdanie ludzi, uciekając się do przemocy i sprawiania ludziom kłopotu? To mija się z celem. Uczestnicy zamieszek i ich organizatorzy nie są zainteresowani argumentami i dialogiem. Forsują własne cele.

Wykorzystują zakłócenia porządku publicznego jako dźwignię.

To nie jest nowa forma protestu. Jest to zastosowanie, a nawet udoskonalenie wojny hybrydowej. NATO Review wyjaśnia tę koncepcję:

Konflikty zwalcza się na nowe, innowacyjne i radykalnie odmienne sposoby. Wraz z pojawieniem się nowoczesnej wojny hybrydowej coraz mniej chodzi o siłę śmiercionośną lub kinetyczną.

Należy tutaj zauważyć, że koncepcja wojny hybrydowej może nie być całkowicie nowa. Wielu praktyków twierdzi, że jest tak stara jak sama wojna. Niemniej w ostatnich latach zyskała na popularności i znaczeniu, ponieważ państwa wykorzystują podmioty niepaństwowe i technologię informatyczną do ujarzmiania swoich przeciwników w trakcie lub – co ważniejsze – w przypadku braku bezpośredniego konfliktu zbrojnego. [podkreślenie dodane]

W 2018 roku, podczas Marszu, Centrum Studiów Strategicznych Begin-Sadat powiązało zamieszki inspirowane przez Hamas z tym, jak inne kraje również wykorzystywały nieuzbrojoną ludność cywilną jako broń. Przykładowo podczas kampanii rosyjskiej w Gruzji:

W kampaniach tych celowo i skutecznie wykorzystano połączenie siły militarnej i działalności cywilnej. Na przykład podczas walk w Gruzji siły pancerne mogły przedostać się na północ kraju dzięki wysiłkom ludności cywilnej gruzińsko-abchaskiej, sympatyzującej z Rosją, która w ruchu przygotowawczym zajęła tunele i mosty drogi ekspresowej prowadzącej do stolicy Tbilisi.

Nie ogranicza się to do Rosji i nie musi obejmować elementu wojskowego: „Podobnie Pekin wykorzystuje tysiące cywilnych łodzi rybackich w swoich wysiłkach na rzecz rozszerzenia suwerenności na Morzu Południowochińskim”.

Według „The NATO Review” wojna hybrydowa nie wymaga kontekstu pełnej wojny:

Centralne miejsce zajmuje tutaj rola ludności cywilnej: sposób, w jaki myślą i działają w stosunku do państwa. Współczesne platformy cyfrowe i media społecznościowe pozwalają aktorom hybrydowym ze znaczną łatwością wpływać na sytuację ze szkodą dla państwa przeciwnika. Dobrym tego przykładem są rosyjskie kampanie dezinformacyjne w Internecie, niektóre z nich są bardzo subtelne, acz poważne, skierowane przeciwko niektórym państwom zachodnim. [podkreślenie dodane]

Zamieszki, które obserwujemy, nie są spontaniczne. Stanowią sposób na forsowanie programu wymagającego od Bidena i Partii Demokratycznej poparcia zawieszenia broni w Gazie. Alternatywą jest zakłócenie kampanii prezydenckiej Bidena.

Te zamieszki nie przypominają antyizraelskich protestów, do jakich jesteśmy przyzwyczajeni. „Toronto Sun” zwraca uwagę, że zamiast mniejszych, mniej zorganizowanych protestów antyizraelskich, do jakich jesteśmy przyzwyczajeni, obecnie:

Uczestniczą w nich setki, a czasem tysiące ludzi. Mają profesjonalnie wyprodukowane plakaty i banery. Mają transport, jedzenie i napoje. Mają też organizatorów, którzy noszą mundury i kontrolują tłumy.

Jest w tym coś więcej niż tylko lepsza organizacja; jest też lepsze finansowanie. Pieniądze przeznaczone są jednak na coś więcej niż tylko personel i zaopatrzenie. Ludziom płaci się za uczestnictwo w zamieszkach:

pro-palestyńskim – i coraz częściej pro-Hamasowskim – protestującym płaci się za protesty. Za blokowanie autostrad i dróg. Za zastraszanie i grożenie Żydom i nie-Żydom. Za wywoływanie chaosu.

Z programu Autonomii Palestyńskiej „pieniądze za zabijanie” doszliśmy teraz do programu „pieniądze za zamieszki”. Decydują ludzie, którzy dają pieniądze. Ponieważ organizatorzy nadal płacą pomimo zamieszek, wandalizmu i chaosu, wydaje się, że zamieszki, wandalizm i chaos są właśnie tym, czego chcą organizatorzy.

Według Franceski Block piszącej dla The Free Press jedną z osób finansujących ten chaos na ulicach USA jest urodzony w Ameryce przedsiębiorca z branży technologicznej, Neville Roy Singham. Jest założycielem i jednym z głównych zwolenników The People’s Forum. Grupa pomogła zorganizować co najmniej cztery protesty po 7 października i na 14 listopada. Jeden z nich miał miejsce 8 października, zanim Izrael podjął jakiekolwiek działania w Gazie:

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Daled Amos – (Bennet Ruda) Izraelski bloger piszący o historii i problemach Bliskiego Wschodu, a w szczególności Izraela. http://daledamos.blogspot.com/

Biden’s UN betrayal of Israel is a victory for Hamas

JONATHAN S. TOBIN

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The U.N. Security Council adopts Resolution 2728 (2024) 14-0, demanding an immediate ceasefire to Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip during Ramadan and immediate release of all hostages taken from Israel and being held in Gaza, with Washington abstaining, March 25, 2024. Credit: Loey Felipe/U.N. Photo.

Don’t believe the Biden administration’s claim that it hasn’t changed its stance on Israel’s war on Hamas. The U.S. abstention on the vote in the U.N. Security Council for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza isn’t just a routine political or diplomatic maneuver. It’s a fundamental betrayal of the U.S.-Israel alliance, whose consequences go far beyond the immediate circumstances in which the White House believes that its political interests require it to force the Jewish state to give up its goal of eliminating Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

Rather than merely sacrificing Israel’s security, it is also handing a major victory to both Hamas and its Iranian allies. With the United Nations demanding an end to the war, there is no reason for Hamas to stop trying to hold onto those parts of Gaza it still controls. Nor is there any reason for it to release the hostages it still holds captive except for a deal that will force Israel to acquiesce to a return, in one form or another, to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. That will ensure that it gets away with having committed the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, as well as asserting its primacy over Palestinian politics in the foreseeable future.

That doesn’t just expose the administration’s supposed quest for Middle East peace as a sham, since it is essentially anointing an organization pledged to Israel’s destruction and Jewish genocide as the primary voice of Palestinian nationalism. It also sends a signal to the region and the rest of the world that the United States is no longer interested in defeating Islamist terrorism or in keeping faith with allies.

A two-faced strategy

Security Council resolutions have the force of international law, and if Israel continues its operations to eliminate Hamas—as its government has rightly said it must—this resolution could be used as a basis for international sanctions against the Jewish state. Yet the Biden administration claimed that the resolution, which called for a cessation of fighting for the remaining two weeks of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (though the world body had nothing to say about Muslim attacks on Jewish holidays like Simchat Torah, the day of the Oct. 7 atrocities), as well as the release of the hostages and for the free flow of aid into Gaza, is “non-binding.” In this way, it continues to try and talk out of both sides of its mouth about the war—on the one hand seeking to stop Israel from winning while claiming on the other that it’s still a faithful ally.

Given that Hamas has not ceased its violence and continues to hold Israeli hostages, it can be argued that Israel has a legal right to continue its battle. But Israel’s enemies around the world—at the United Nations and in the United States—aren’t interested in the fine points of international law. What they want is for the fighting to conclude with Hamas still standing with the ability to regroup and rearm, and make good on its promises to keep killing Jews.

While the U.N. vote must be considered a turning point in the history of relations between the United States and Israel, it cannot be considered a surprise. President Joe Biden has been steadily walking away from his initial pledges of support for Israel after the Oct. 7 massacre. At the time, Biden didn’t just condemn the barbaric terrorist attacks on 22 Israeli communities in southern Israel that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead, with thousands wounded and more than 250 others dragged into captivity in Gaza. He agreed with Israel’s government that Hamas, which had governed Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name since 2007, must be eliminated.

Letting Hamas get away with murder

Ever since then, Biden and his foreign-policy team have shown themselves to be more worried about conforming to a narrative in which the suffering that the Palestinians brought upon themselves by starting a war that included rape, torture and firebombing homes, in addition to killing and kidnapping, invalidates Israel’s right of self-defense or any accountability for barbaric crimes.

The notion that Israel’s counter-offensive into Gaza was “over the top,” as Biden mischaracterized it (let alone the big lie put forward by Hamas propagandists and their Western dupes that it was “genocide”) remains contrary to the facts. Though many Palestinians have died, Israel’s efforts have been more measured than those of any other modern army faced with similar issues related to urban warfare and resulted in historically low levels of civilian casualties relative to those of enemy combatants.

If Hamas is to be defeated—and it must be if justice is to be served and the security of Israelis assured—then the Israel Defense Forces must be allowed to finish the job it started after Oct. 7. The Israeli government is right to assert that it has a moral obligation to root it out of its remaining stronghold in Rafah, as well as guarantee that it doesn’t use its tunnel network to reassert control in other parts of Gaza.

But unlike any other war that has been waged by Western forces against Islamist terrorists, the international community appears to be unwilling to tolerate an Israeli victory if it means the elimination of Hamas. The reason why Israel is treated in this way has nothing to do with the graphic pictures of Palestinian suffering or even the inflated statistics about deaths in Gaza supplied by Hamas to its willing accomplices in the corporate media. 

At the heart of this betrayal is a belief that Israel and its genocidal Islamist opponents are somehow morally equivalent. Were Biden trying to maintain the alliance with Israel, then he would have continued to assert that Hamas must be defeated before any ceasefire and that any aid going into Gaza—most of which has been stolen by Hamas for use by its remaining forces hidden in the tunnels with the hostages they are holding—must be kept out of its hands.

A morally serious American government would assert that any and all casualties in Gaza are the responsibility of Hamas, not Israel, and that the only way to save the Palestinian people from more suffering is the immediate and unconditional surrender of the terrorists. But for Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the rest of the chorus of Democrat officeholders and liberal media outlets clamoring for a ceasefire are not interested in Hamas’s surrender. They insist that the impact of the war on the Palestinians is more important than ensuring that Gaza is no longer controlled by people who are intent on using it as a platform to carry on a century-old war on the Jews.

Escalating pressure on Israel

Nor is this resolution the end point of a pressure campaign not on the Palestinian murderers who remain in Rafah, but on Israel to cease a war of self-defense. As The New York Times reported, the abandonment of Israel in the United Nations is just one prong of a multifaceted plan of action being employed by the White House to force Israel to tolerate a Hamas victory in the war. It is prepared, as the Times aptly put it, to “coerce” Israel to give up the war by starting to stop weapons shipments that enable Israel to continue fighting effectively. If that doesn’t work, the article, based on calculated leaks from the administration, said that Biden will then proceed to enact sanctions on Israeli officials.

In plain terms, Biden is contemplating applying measures to Israel that it has used against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. And it is thinking of doing that at the same time that it continues to waive sanctions on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror in Iran, in which it has gifted Tehran billions of dollars of much-needed aid to that despotic regime.

This turn against Israel won’t help the Palestinians. Allowing the ceasefire resolution to pass will only deepen Hamas’s resolve to keep fighting and to hold onto the hostages. They deliberately created a situation in which their human shields are being killed or enduring privations precisely in order to orchestrate international pressure against Israel. The more the Palestinians are hurt by the war, the better it is for Hamas.

Nor will it speed the release of the hostages since the resolution encourages Hamas to refuse to give in, secure in the knowledge that support from the international community gives them the leverage to hold them in captivity indefinitely until Israel not only pays an exorbitant price in ransom but also acknowledges that Gaza will remain in the terrorists’ hands.

Biden’s political motives

A rational U.S. policy would have been one in which the U.N. Security Council would not be allowed to become a forum in which Hamas terrorism was effectively endorsed and Israeli self-defense treated as a war crime. It would have continued to insist that any resolution about a ceasefire must be dependent on the release of hostages and the demand that Hamas be labeled as a terrorist group that must lay down its arms.

But Biden and his advisers are obsessed with the idea that criticism of his early support for the war will cost him the election because left-wing activists and Arab-Americans—cheered on by liberal media—think that Israel, and not Hamas, is the villain of the war. They have tried to have it both ways for months, simultaneously genuflecting to leftist critics of Israel by validating the smears of its conduct in Gaza while maintaining both support in the United Nations and the flow of arms. They orchestrated a campaign of defamation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as if he were continuing the war for his own purposes rather than following the will of the Israeli people to ensure their security and rights.

This development can be considered worse than the similar betrayal of the Obama administration at the United Nations during its last days in office in 2016, when it let the Security Council pass a resolution that essentially labeled the presence of every Jew in Judea and Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem, as illegal. That happened only weeks before everyone knew that the incoming administration led by Donald Trump would reverse this stand, as it did. 

This vote happened at a moment when Biden has, at a minimum, another 10 months left in office during which he can implement his plan to render Israel defenseless and to acquiesce in a U.N. campaign of delegitimization that could have a devastating impact on the Jewish state’s ability to go on functioning in the world economy. This shift in policy means that if Israel is to defeat Hamas, it will have to do so alone with its sole superpower ally increasingly determined to force it to give up and let the terrorists reconstitute their state. 

Liberal Jews fail to speak up

This is also a moment when friends of Israel throughout the American political spectrum ought to be working together to apply the sort of pressure on Biden that will cause him to return to a position of support for Israel’s war of survival. But Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer regard solidifying the liberal base behind Biden’s re-election campaign as a priority. Mainstream liberal Jewish organizations are equally unwilling to use their political capital with the same ruthless determination that Israel’s intersectional leftist foes have employed to force Biden to bend to their will.

If Jewish Democrats and liberal Jewish groups are prepared to tolerate this betrayal or are willing to endorse the administration’s gaslighting about it all being Israel’s fault, then that will be just one more nail in the coffin of the bipartisan consensus that they have long touted. Biden will not unreasonably conclude that he will pay no political price for undermining the Jewish state’s security. Or at least none until he finds that there are more votes to be lost in the political center by abandoning Israel to the jackals at the United Nations than on the left from those who think he was insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state.

This is one more signal to America’s Arab allies that they are kidding themselves if they think that Washington would ever defend them against Iran. Worse than that, a world in which Hamas is allowed to win the war it started with atrocities on Oct. 7 is one in which no one, including Americans, should consider themselves safe from terrorism.

Yet as ominous as those consequences may be, the singling out of Israel in this manner must also be viewed as part of the surge in antisemitism since the war began. Jew-hatred from the left has been legitimized in ways that right-wing antisemitism never has been. A policy that lets a terrorist movement bent on Jewish genocide win can only be seen as part of this.

Biden’s feckless behavior has created a long list of disasters, including out-of-control inflation, the rout in Afghanistan and the collapse of the border that let in as many as 10 million illegal immigrants. But by extending a lifeline to one of the planet’s most vicious terrorist groups, the president has set in motion a series of events that could undermine American security just as much as he is harming Israel.

Jonathan S. Tobin – is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.