
Caroline Glick, columnist and director of the Israeli Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, spoke recently at the Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend, held November 10-13, 2022 at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, AZ.
Glick warned about how the Biden administration’s policies for the Middle East, South Asia, and Afghanistan are destabilizing the region and ultimately threatening Israeli and American interests.
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Caroline Glick – Israel’s Security in a Biden World” from DHFC on Vimeo.
Transcript:
Caroline Glick: Thank you, all. It’s really wonderful to be back here at Restoration Weekend. I think it’s been a while. I think last time I came, my sons were very small, and now they’re schoolboys and driving me crazy, so — as in not doing their homework, but — so it’s really a pleasure to be back with the gang. And I know that you guys had mixed results in your elections, but we didn’t; we won, which was a very good thing, because the subject of my remarks today is the Biden Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East and how Israel is coping with it, and so I just want to give a brief sort of explanation of the Biden Administration’s Middle East policy and then go to how Israel is and how it has been and how it must be responding to this.
So the Biden Administration doesn’t necessarily have a set foreign policy doctrine. Like, if you look at Russia, it’s — they consider everything to do with Russia to be very threatening and they’re willing to do just about anything to fight Russians, including things that are dangerous for the United States and don’t seem all that well thought through, but it goes up and it goes down. And in China, vis-à-vis China, you can talk a lot about the China threat, but if you look at the Biden Administration’s actual policies regarding China and the rising threat that it poses to the United States, basically on every level, it’s actually a pretty complacent policy. So it’s not that they have one, we will fight America’s enemies wherever they stand and stand with America’s allies — there’s not a clear doctrine.
But if you look at the Biden Administration’s policy for the Middle East and South Asia, and I include in that Afghanistan, you see a very rigid, very rigid foreign policy doctrine that’s based upon a couple of concepts. The first one is that there are no major threats to the United States emanating from the Middle East except for one, which is America’s allies. And you saw that with the withdrawal from Afghanistan last year that the Biden Administration was perfectly happy to just give up and walk away under the justification that really, there’s no threat any longer to the United States because Obama killed Bin Laden and everything’s fine. And so you have that kind of strategic collapse in Afghanistan, and that was fine because the doctrine is that America’s enemies are not threats to the United States, and therefore the United States doesn’t have to fight them.
And on the other hand, the threats that do emanate from the Middle East towards the United States do emanate from America’s allies, because if America’s allies — Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, others — actually stand up for themselves against enemies, who also happen to be America’s enemies, first and foremost Iran, but also the Palestinians and others, Taliban obviously — then that actually poses a threat to the United States.
And I think John Kerry actually said it fairly well in — when he was Secretary of State in 2016. He said that Israel was too wealthy to care about peace, and the concept was that the power of America’s allies was really what was making them a problem for the United States, that having weaker allies in the region was really going to be helpful to the United States because all the problems that come from the Middle East emanate from the power of America’s allies, first and foremost Israel.
And so we see how this is playing out with the Biden Administration’s treatment of Iran, how they treat the Palestinians, and how they respond to both vis-à-vis Israel. So in the lead-up to the election, and actually really in 2018, when — was it 2018 when Donald Trump walked away from the Iran nuclear deal that served as a gateway for Iran to become a nuclear-armed state and wealthy due to American sanctions, relief and legitimization of Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program, when he walked away from that, the Democratic Party passed a resolution saying that the next Democrat who would be coming into the White House would be obligated to return the United States to the Iran nuclear deal, and I saw that my friend Lee Smith came in here, and I think he was one of the first people to point out that the Iran nuclear deal was actually a means for the United States to realign itself strategically away from its principal Middle Eastern allies — Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — and towards Iran and towards the Muslim Brotherhood at the expense of America’s traditional alliance structure, both in the Arab world and vis-à-vis the state of Israel.
And so that was the principal concept, and Rhodes laid it out in an interview when — during the Obama years that framed Obama’s second term in office, and that was what they were working towards, from, very openly, from 2013 through the end of the Obama presidency, was to realign the United States using the screen of nuclear nonproliferation in order to enable nuclear proliferation by Iran, and Iran’s enrichment through sanctions relief, transformation of Iran into a regional hegemonic state, at the expense of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Israel, because again, the concept was that it was the power of America’s allies, that they were angering American enemies like Iran, or the Palestinians for that matter, and that was what was causing all the problems in the Middle East.
John Kerry’s concept that Israel was too rich to make peace was really a guiding idea for both the Obama Administration and now for the Biden Administration, that what we really have to do is cut America’s allies down to size because by fighting for themselves, by defending themselves against their enemies, they’re sucking the United States into their wars. And so they wanted to realign.
And this concept is based on a guiding assumption that Iran is a reasonable, rational actor, that the Palestinians are rational actors, and that the thing that has to happen in order to bring peace to the Middle East is to appease them, and they are appeasable. So it’s also based upon a complete denial of what makes the Ayatollahs tick, of what makes the Palestinians tick, because both of their ideologies are inherently and necessarily anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Jewish, anti-moderate Arabs. The Palestinian guiding concept from the inception of what is now considered the Palestinian national movement is a politicide of the Jewish national movement, or the Jewish national state, Israel, that it cannot coexist side by side with the state of Israel.
This is why the Palestinians will not recognize Israel’s right to exist, because their whole concept is based on denying Israel’s right to exist. The same is the case with the Ayatollahs in Iran. The regime in Iran is inherently and necessarily annihilationist towards Israel and towards the United States of America, and by the way, towards women and girls in Iran. This is their guiding concept of what it means to be an Islamic regime, an Islamic revolutionary regime, and it cannot ever be canceled, so that they are, by their very nature, unappeasable. But the smart set in Washington refuses to accept this reality. They simply will not accept this reality. They cannot accept that there are enemies in the world that, because of their very nature, cannot be appeased.
And since they reject this — they say they can be appeased and the people who have to appease them are America’s allies, and America’s job in the Middle East is to force its enemies to heel, to not defend themselves, so that during the Obama Administration, the thing that most frightened Obama was not that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons but that Israel would attack Iran’s nuclear installations to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed state, because that would mean that Israel was too powerful. And that would mean that everything would just go to hell in a handbasket because you can’t have U.S. allies actually be capable of defending themselves and undermining the foes of the United States that American Middle Eastern policy is directed towards appeasing.
So that was the guidepost of the Obama Administration. It’s a guiding light of the Biden Administration as well. The problem is America’s allies; the solution is to empower America’s enemies.
And so during the Obama years, Israel was being led by Benjamin Netanyahu, and the idea that Netanyahu had at the core of his management of Israeli ties with the United States and Israel’s handling of the twin threats of the Palestinians on the one hand and the Iranians on the other hand, was to try to get by, to speak modestly towards the United States, to be flattering towards the administration even when it was at its most hostile points against Israel, and to massively increase Israel’s national power, economically, diplomatically and strategically. And so the economics was the driver of Israel’s capacity to expand its military force and to attract additional investment into Israel to then once again expand our economic power, so that it was a virtuous circle, and the idea was, the more powerful we become, the more likely we are to attract alliances, to build alliances, to develop the means to defend ourselves, to deter our enemies or to defeat them in the event that we actually have to go to war.
So Netanyahu met American hostility with, first of all, a domestic policy of massively expanding Israel’s economic capacity. Today, Israel’s GDP per capita is actually higher than Germany’s. We’re at, I think, 52,000 GDP per capita, and Germany is at 50. So we’ve passed Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Japan; now we’ve passed Germany. We’re one of the — yeah. We’re a wealthy country now, and we attract an enormous amount of foreign investment because — and I was just listening to Stephen Moore, and Israel has reduced our debts, so we haven’t expanded them, even during COVID. So I think that we’ve done pretty well. We’ve weathered a lot of storms, thanks to Netanyahu’s concept of massively expanding national power. And in terms of the Biden Administration and the Obama Administration before that, when it came to the Palestinians, it was — the idea was to give as little as possible, to make no permanent concessions of any kind, so that everything that you did was to bide more time, bide more time, bide more time.
So for instance, Netanyahu did something that I massively criticized him for — rightly, but under the circumstances, if you read his book, and you should, Bibi, the biography, came out a couple of weeks ago — it’s absolutely excellent — but the Obama Administration was demanding Israel hand its head on a platter to the PLO, and what they ended up coming up with was a temporary freeze in property rights for Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines in Judea and Samaria, but only for 10 months. So it was a temporary concession that you make in order to bide time, in order to continue doing the things that you need to do to build up your national power and strength. And that was his concept for dealing with the Obama Administration, and I daresay that’ll be his concept for dealing with the Biden Administration, but a little bit more on that in a second.
And on the other hand, the outgoing Israeli government that will hopefully be replaced — and Netanyahu hopes to have his new government sworn in already next week, but if it’s not next week, it’ll be shortly thereafter — the outgoing government saw what was happening with the Biden Administration, both with Iran and with the Palestinians, and they came to a very different conclusion. They came to the conclusion that Israel has to try to work with the Biden Administration and basically just lie down and do anything that they tell us to do. And then in that way, we were going to be able to gin up support or sympathy for Israel because we were doing what the Americans told us to do.
And just one more thing I should have said at the outset when I was talking about the Biden Administration: I said that they have a very rigid Middle East policy, and it used to be, when the Bush Administration was in power, you had the Condoleezza Rice wing of the administration that was anti-Israel and the Don Rumsfeld-Dick Cheney wing of the administration that was more pro-Israel, and so it was always a question of which side of the administration was up and which side was down.
That disparity of views inside of the U.S. administration disappeared with the Obama Administration because in the Obama Administration you had nobody who was pro-Israel, and so it wasn’t that you could talk to Samantha Power to get around Rahm Emanuel or John Kerry and whoever else it was, that there was — Tony Blinken could balance it — no, all of them were of the same mind, that Israel was a problem, Saudi Arabia was a problem and Egypt was a problem; the Muslim Brotherhood was the solution; Iran was a solution; the PLO Hamas was a solution — there was nobody to talk to.
And the same is very much the case in the Biden Administration, and even, to a degree, more so because the most extreme people in the Obama Administration have been promoted to positions of even greater authority under the Biden Administration. There is literally nobody in the Biden Administration that is pro-Israel at all. And — or anti-Iranian or anti-Palestinians. To the exact contrary, you have people who are pro-Hamas in the Biden Administration, so in positions to actually impact events. So it’s a very different situation.
And so when you look at the outgoing Lapid-Bennett-Gantz government, how they responded to the Biden Administration’s hostility was as follows: they, on Iran, gave up Israel’s strategic independence for undermining Iran’s efforts to gain nuclear capabilities. Right at the outset, before the government was even formed in June of 2021, all three of them — Bennett, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz — all came separately to Washington and told the United States that Israel would not surprise the Biden Administration with its operations in Iran, and when you have an administration that is completely committed to empowering Iran at your expense, when you give up your right to surprise Washington — that is, to independently operate in Iran without American prior approval — then what you’re going to do is you’re going to sabotage your own capacity to operate. So they probably thought that by giving America veto power of Israel’s sabotage operations in Iran, that we would be able to bring the Americans on board those operations.
But obviously, the opposite happened, so that when Netanyahu was prime minister, you would have, certainly, weekly reports in the news about mysterious explosions and various nuclear installations in Iran or Iranian nuclear scientists showing up dead or whatever, every day — not every day, but very, very often. And under the Biden Administration, or in this government that now thankfully was roundly defeated at the polls on November 1, those reports continued but at a much lower tempo, so that I would say that reports of Israeli sabotage operations in these Iranian nuclear installations were immediately reduced by around 85%. And that is because if you give veto power to an administration that’s pro-Iranian, you can’t expect that you’re going to get much permission to go after Iran’s nuclear installations, and that is, in fact, what happened.
Vis-à-vis the Palestinians, you have people in the administration like the person — the director of intelligence of the National Security Council, Maher Bitar; you have Rob Malley; you have Antony Blinken and others in the administration that follow Obama’s view that the most pernicious thing in the Middle East is the presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria and in unified Jerusalem, and that the way to solve all the problems of the world is to deny Jews any right to be present in these areas under any circumstances, whether military or civilian.
And this Israeli government essentially went along, to a certain degree, with that concept. They massively curtailed property rights for Jews in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, and Benny Gantz, working as Defense Minister, increased unlawful land seizures, theft, by Palestinians in areas adjacent to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, by my house in Efrat, for instance, in Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem, by 85% over the past year, according to a study that came out last month.
So we had an explosion in land theft by the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria in a manner that endangers Israel’s military installations, our eastern frontier with Jordan along the Jordan Valley, and the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, including the major population centers in the areas like Gush Etzion, Ma’ale Adumim, the city of Ariel, which, by most standards, were supposed to remain perpetually under Israeli control, but they’re trying to turn all of these very important, both strategically and nationally significant areas of Jewish communities into isolated enclaves that you have to go through sort of a shooting gallery when you’re on your way to work on access roads to major highways, and also on the highways themselves.
So this is what has happened, just basically laying down and doing what the Americans say. In fact, there have been several reports over the past couple of months that the American penetration of Israel’s decision-making loop in Judea and Samaria has gotten so profound that they’re interfering on company-level decision-making, squad-level decision-making of IDF units operating in Judea and Samaria. This is something that’s just unprecedented and very, very dangerous, obviously, in terms of Iran or Lebanon, which is controlled by Iran’s Shiite Lebanese proxy Hezbollah.
Just a week before the elections, acting under massive pressure from the Biden Administration, Yair Lapid signed an agreement that surrenders Israel’s economic waters and part of our territorial waters to Lebanon, including the natural resources and natural gas deposits that lay beneath Israel’s economic waters and the Qana gas field in the Mediterranean to Hezbollah. These are actions that are arguably illegal under Israeli law but our legal fraternity is in the tank for the left, so they didn’t care. So he signed that deal a week before the elections, or just days before the elections.
So on all of these things, the concept of the outgoing government was that the way to deal with America’s realignment against Israel was to go along to get along, but it didn’t limit or mitigate the hostility of the Biden Administration towards Israel one iota, and the more that Israel caved, the more expansive the administration’s demands on Israel became.
And then this brings us to Netanyahu, who is going to be forming a government next week, thank god, and I think that — we got a miracle. We really did. I mean, I can’t tell you how terrified I was beforehand. But it worked. And the thing is that we can expect from Netanyahu essentially what we had from him in the past. Again, rebuilding our economy, lowering inflation — we are also suffering from inflation, largely also because of what’s happening in Ukraine, but other things as well that have increased food prices, increased energy prices, building material prices, things like that. But I think that — luckily, not our energy prices, because thanks to Netanyahu, we are now energy-independent with our gas.
But I think what we’re seeing, what we’re going to see, what we’re likely to see, is a very strong push by Israel to expand our regional ties with our Arab allies, which is something that I haven’t mentioned yet. The last thing that Netanyahu did in his last tour of office wasn’t just the Abraham Accords, which came at the end of the Trump Administration, but what preceded the Abraham Accords; that is, the normalization of accords with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, was that when the Arabs of the Gulf saw Israel standing up to the Obama Administration, they recognized that they could actually work with Israel to get out from under Obama’s animosity, hostility and pro-Iranian policies, and they began working in sort of an operational alliance with Israel beginning as early as 2013 and 2014.
And so the Abraham Accords were basically an expression of those ties that had already begun, beginning in 2010, 2011 and 2012, and really came into full blossom in 2014. So you can expect that now, under a new Netanyahu Administration, that we’ll have a lot more cooperation, whether under the table or above the table, between Israel and Saudi Arabia vis-à-vis Iran and the UAE as well, and hopefully that will, first and foremost, come to — come into full view with significant support to the Iranian revolutionaries on the ground in Iran to help them overthrow this regime, because the most significant thing that could happen, arguably, since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, would be the downfall of the Iranian regime.
So I think that would be a very important thing that would happen almost immediately, would be expanding Israeli operational cooperation with the Saudis and assistance for the Iranians to just hold out for a little bit longer; help is on the way.
And the other thing that you’re going to see is an expansion of the Abraham Accord alliance to more Arab states. Again, this is a way around America and a way to mitigate things. And looking at this as an American, I think that people have to see that you have, unfortunately, this situation in the United States where every time that you have a different party in power, you get a completely different foreign policy, and that puts America’s allies in a real disadvantage because you’re not dealing with one America anymore; you’re dealing with two completely separate countries that have totally different foreign policies, and when the Democrats come in, they completely undercut the United States as an alliance, and when a Republican, whenever it is, comes back into the White House, is going to be dealing with a completely torn apart alliance structure in the Middle East that — and so what Trump did, and I think what every Republican is going to have to do going forward, is not to try to return to the way things were under Reagan or Bush or whatever, where the United States is the 500-pound gorilla, but rather the entire American alliance structure is going to have to be based upon empowering America’s allies to stand up for themselves, or the exact opposite of the Obama-Biden concept that the problem for the United States in the Middle East is America’s allies and their power, and that the way to rebuild American credibility in the Middle East is actually to stand with America’s allies and enable them to fight the threats posed against them, and that, of course, redounds to America’s strategic benefit because those enemies are shared, and that’s why allies are allies to begin with.
So I think that, looking forward, America, Americans, Republicans, should be wanting to see Israel as powerful as possible, Saudi Arabia under MBS as powerful as possible, Egypt under el-Sisi as powerful as possible, because the more powerful we are and the more able we are to work together, the less Americans are going to have to do, the less wars the United States, the Americans are going to have to fight.
So those are my thoughts. I don’t know if we have time — all right, I’m sorry. I saw Mike, and I just sort of ignored you and pretended I didn’t see you. But thank you.
Thanks Caroline!
My 2 cents worth is that the radical left has implacable hatred for Israel, in part because Israel is more rational and functional and intelligent than they are. Implacable, unalterable hatred, which some may not realize.
For example, more than half the world chess champions were Jewish. Why is that? To the losers, it seems like cheating, it must be cheating, according to their perception. It can’t be that they are more intelligent.
And without those Antifa bottom feeders to try and storm the stage and shout her down
Ms Glock hits the mail on the head .American foreign policy in the Middle East is driven by appeasement of Uran snd desertion of Its allies such as Israel s and the Saudis
This woman is brilliant.
One can’t look at individual countries anymore without an acute awareness
that there is the force of Technocracy known as Globalism attempting to
enslave the entire planet – into a one-world government of smothering
digital control over each individual life. And Israel is most definitely
ensnared in this.
Two months ago in October, the United Nations – that bastion of Agenda 21
Globalist Technocracy and friend & supporter of Klaus Schwab of the World
Economic Forum and his international rich and powerful cohorts – issued the
report from the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian
Territory Including East Jerusalem.
The report emphasized how Israel has violated international law by occupying
‘the land of the Palestinian people’ and by Israeli settlements upon such land –
which indicates their intent to maintain permanent control of the land (West
Bank). The report also emphasizes so much silent harm and psychological
trauma to Palestinians when their homes are demolished and they are
displaced for Israeli settlement purposes. This extremely one-sided report
recommends a referral to the UN International Court of Justice for, among
other things, war crimes.
In any trial in which Israel finds herself embroiled – the fix is already in.
With the election of Netanyahu, the Israelis evidently want to stay free. If
only that flame could ignite in American hearts as well.
The reason the left hates Israel is because the left has forsaken God; and God created Israel both originally and now.
Biden keeps the gate open to brin in more Future Democrat Voters and Supporters we once called Illegal Aliens/Wetbacks
The Biden administration does not state a clear foreign policy on anything because it is so crazy and disgusting, few people would support it.