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Joe Biden recently spoke out on the terrorist violence afflicting Israel, particularly in the refugee camp in Jenin, currently controlled by Iranian surrogates. Sourcing the violence to vague “extremists”––the West’s go-to euphemism for hiding the widespread popularity of such attacks among Palestinian Arabs––our titular president then pulled out another duplicitous evasion by blaming Israel’s political “extremists” on the right. At the same time, he refused to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington until he was pressured to do so. These are just a small sampling of Biden’s hostility to Israel.
The implied moral equivalence between murderers and their victims has for decades been a sign of the West’s shameful moral idiocy and cowardice when it comes to Israel. Biden’s latest commentary follows his school-marmish scolding of Israel for its ruling party’s attempts to reform the overpowerful judiciary. This sort of intrusion into an ally’s domestic politics is common when it comes to Israel, but seldom expressed by the administration with the same rudeness when it comes to calling out our sworn enemies like Iran and China.
Once again, we see the wages of decades of a fossilized foreign policy with its stale narratives and serial failures. Only now the stakes for Israel and the region are much higher: Iran, an enemy sworn to “wiping Israel off the map,” is dangerously close to possessing nuclear weapons. In addition, they continue to transfer missiles and drones to Israel’s enemies like Hezbollah, hosted by hostile neighboring Lebanon.
Indeed, just a few days ago, Israel’s IDF estimated that Hezbollah could fire 6000 missiles in the first few days of a conflict, and even after Israel’s retaliation, could still rain down 1500 a day––existential risks facilitated by the Democrats’ feckless obsession with returning to Obama’s disastrous “nuclear deal” with the mullahs, and its danegeld they’ve used to finance these weapons.
But the failures of our foreign policy in the region go back to Israel’s violent birth in 1948, when Harry Truman had to override the foreign policy establishment–– “those stripe-pants boys, the boys with the Ha-vud accents,” as he sneered at the time–– in order to recognize the new state.
One of the biggest failed solutions, and the most thoroughly repudiated by history, has been the “two states living side-by-side in peace” diplomatic magical thinking.
Just give the Palestinians their own state, we’ve been told decade after decade, which would require removing the Israeli “settlers” (a sly slur evoking the Boers of apartheid South Africa) from historically Jewish Judea and Samaria, now camouflaged as the West Bank, and peace will bloom throughout the region. But extremists on both sides, the narrative goes, and especially Israeli policies are preventing this solution from being implemented.
This clichéd interpretation of the conflict and its solution is dangerously deluded. It assumes that a majority of the Palestinian Arabs really want a Palestinian state––something that could have been created before 1967, when the West Bank was illegally occupied by Jordan, or with the five subsequent offers of a state, all summarily rejected. And don’t forget, Israel evacuated Gaza and turned it over to the genocidal Hamas in 2005. Instead of peace, Israel reaped thousands of missiles attacking its civilians.
But facts cannot shift the tottering paradigm, so the diplomatic farce continues, as does the billions in taxpayer money––over $1 billion just in Biden’s two-and-a-half years––transferred to the corrupt PA or to UN agencies that at best are corrupt, at worse anti-Semitic.
No, Israel is not hated because it thwarts the yearning for a “national self-determination,” a Western idea alien to traditional Islam. Israel is hated for what it is: a cultural and civilizational outpost of the infidel West that for a 1000 years cowered before Allah’s warriors. And it is a nation that succeeded in creating a free and prosperous state in a “desolate country . . . given over wholly to weeds,” as Mark Twain observed in 1867. As such, it is a constant and bitter reproach to Middle Eastern Islamic civilization’s failure to adapt to the modern world despite its abundant oil wealth and long history of imperial and colonial success as one of history’s biggest empires.
Thus nothing Israel does or concedes will change the Islamic need for it quite simply to disappear “from the river to the sea,” the phrase denoting the Arab’s longing to leave the disputed territories between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Judenrein, and to restore them to the faith that conquered and occupied them for centuries.
Indeed, as Robert Spencer reported, this eliminationist goal was recently confirmed by Sami al-Arian, an ex-professor and notorious “hysterical” critic of Israel, who confessed that the “goal of the Palestinian jihad is not a Palestinian state, but the demise of the Jewish state”––a purpose enshrined in the founding charter of the terrorist gang Hamas. Nor is this sentiment an outlier. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Executive Council of the PLO member Zouhair Muhsin said, “Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”
The agitation for a Palestinian state, then, is merely a tactic, like terrorism or “ceasefires” or “road maps” or “summits” or “agreements” to be selectively employed for achieving that long-term strategic goal, which is sanctioned by traditional Islam’s doctrine that any territory conquered by Muslims is part of the umma in perpetuity, and the faithful are enjoined to wage jihad to recover such a territory should it ever be reconquered by infidels.
And so Israel for nearly 80 years has been the front line of the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, a struggle that started 1400 years ago when Arab armies swept away the Greco-Roman, Christian, and Hebraic civilizations that had existed in the Near East for centuries––a wave of war that subjugated Christian Spain to seven centuries of occupation, and did not begin to ebb until 1683, when the Ottoman Turks were turned back at Vienna.
Moreover, the current political, social, and economic backwardness of most Middle Eastern states renders them incapable of challenging the West militarily––as Israel has shown in three victorious defensive wars against larger coalitions of Muslim states. Given that record of futility, terrorism, along with duplicitous negotiation, and “parchment barriers” like the 1993 Oslo Accords, has become the weapon of choice for exploiting the West’s fatal flaw: its willingness to sacrifice its principles and historical truth in a futile effort to placate oil-rich Arab states and mollify terrorists.
Our foreign policy, then, is based on compelling Israel to make suicidal concessions––or as England told the doomed Czechoslovakians in 1939, “go forthwith to the very limit of concession”–– and then demonizing our ally for refusing to commit national suicide and accept the mendacious, appeasing narrative that the West endorses in order to serve its own interests.
The Western media’s reporting on Israel has been equally unfair, if not malevolent. For example, the corporate media regularly report casualty figures from Israeli defensive operations to stop terrorist violence against their civilians. The coverage always suggests that a “disproportionate” number of Palestinian Arabs have died compared to Israeli casualties––with the implication that the latter are needlessly callous and brutal with no regard for Arab lives, while ignoring the difficult conditions of fighting terrorists who willfully target civilians and sacrifice their own people as human shields
But as Alan Dershowitz explained in his 2003 The Case for Israel, the media rarely discriminate between combatant and non-combatant deaths. Reporting on the Second Intifada in September 2000, the media said that through the end of November, 2497 Palestinians had died compared to 874 Israelis. But according to a statistical analysis by the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism (www.ict.org.il), 911 Palestinian non-combatants had died compared to 679 Israeli: that is, 27% of Palestinian deaths were non-combatants, whereas 77% of Israeli dead were.
Equally preposterous is the specious excuse that Arab terrorist violence is an understandable reaction to the creation of Israel and its alleged subsequent “ethnic cleansing” of “Palestinians” from their “homeland.” Dershowitz surveys the history of Arab assaults and terrorism against Jews decades before Israel existed––including the massacre of 60 Jewish women, children, and other unarmed civilians in Hebron in 1929; and the chronic cross-border raids that murdered thousands of Jews before 1948, to name just a few. Such violence has continued down to the present, committed by terrorist armed not just with bombs, cars, knives, and guns, but with multiple thousands of missiles.
Dershowitz rightly concludes that even taking into account the rare Jewish terrorist attacks, the conflict is remarkable not for Israeli callous indifference to civilian casualties, but for its restraint in the face of a century of attacks on its people by those willing to hide in ambulances, use mosques for armories, sacrifice their own families, indoctrinate their children in Jew-hatred, and dress up as women in order to kill Jews. Indeed, the specious charge of “genocide” regularly made against Israel more accurately describes the incessant, publicly sanctioned, and celebrated attempts to destroy the Israelis.
A typical example of Israeli restraint is its incursion into Jenin in April 2002 after hundreds of suicide bombings. As Dershowitz points out, Israel did not bomb from the air, thereby killing civilians along with combatants. Rather, infantrymen entered the city on foot, searching house by house for terrorists and bomb-making factories. The cost? Fifty-two Palestinians, many of them combatants, were killed, while 23 Israeli soldiers died––a tally that could have been reduced to zero if Israel had simply bombed from the air, as the Allies did in World War II.
Yet the head of the United Nations Relief Agency at the time, Peter Hansen, a long-time shill for terrorists, characterized this restraint that led to those 23 dead as a “human rights catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history.” To this day, the “Jenin massacre” is a staple of Palestinian propaganda like the “documentary” Jenin, Jenin.
The fact is, as Dershowitz shows in his discussion of the remarkable restrictions Israeli forces operate under, no other nation in history before the post-9/11 wars against terrorism has fought against vicious murderers while operating under similar self-imposed restraints. Yet this willingness to risk its own people to reduce non-combatant deaths is ignored, or worse, in Orwellian Newspeak transformed into “massacres” and “genocide.”
For Biden, like his former boss Barack Obama, along with anti-Semitic members of Congress, to demonize with lies our critical ally is a stain on this country’s honor. It took the “racist” and “fascist” Donald Trump to push back against this sorry tradition of Israel-bashing. He cut off funding to the United Nations Relief Works Agency, a long-time apologist for terrorist violence, and a UN hotbed of anti-Americanism. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized the strategically critical Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory, and brokered peace-deals between Israel and several Arab states. The Biden administration undid much of this progress, and the result has been the worst violence in decades.
Finally, this anti-Israel policy comes at a time when a totalitarian axis comprising Russia, China, and Iran is working to weaken the U.S. and its influence. As Walter Russell Mead, recently wrote,
“This summer we’ve seen the geopolitical equivalent of a record heat wave. The war in Ukraine escalated as Russia stepped up its missile attacks and withdrew from the grain-shipping deal that limited the cost of the war to poor countries in the Middle East and beyond. Iran’s threats to Gulf oil shipping are so serious that the administration has been forced to plan for Marines to be deployed to protect oil tankers. Russia is deepening its economic ties with North Korea and engaging in joint naval maneuvers with China around both Japan and Alaska. And in the Sahel, the overthrow of the pro-Western president of Niger by an apparently pro-Russian junta has led the Biden administration to back moves by neighboring nations that could lead to armed conflict with American troops at risk.”
In these dangerous times, the U.S. needs all the allies it can get, and should not be demonizing one of our closest––an island of political freedom and rights-based governance in a sea of illiberal, if not totalitarian regimes in a geostrategically important region.
This is not the time to be alienating Israel, or abandoning it to our mutual enemies.
Besides Israel our so called foreign policy experts are also incredibly stupid and weak towards communism.
That’s because the UN wants worldwide communism that they can get right this time, definitely. /sarc
They are not at all stupid and weak towards communism. In fact, they are very much in favor of it, being as most of them are of the card-carrying variety.
100% for this Excellent Article, Truth on all Points; in addition to which I wonder what is it that allows American Jews to continue to support this Hostile Biden Regime which is built on Lies,Corruption, and Disinformation. The split between the Diaspora and Israel is very worrying.
The split between Israel and diaspora Jews probably worries the diaspora Jews more than it worries Israeli Jews. But it will continue, and deepen, as long as diaspora Jews insist on expecting Israelis to think like diaspora Jews. Our reality is very different, and the Jews who don’t live, or have never lived , in Israel, simply don’t get it. Frankly, this Israeli doesn’t care. I have a harsh message for anyone who tells us how to live: Walk a mile or two in our shoes, otherwise, shove it. Enough. Stop telling us what we have to do to survive.. we will manage well enough without you.
Israelis should take no heed to those of us in diaspora. I served in the IDF and do understand what those in Israel have withstood.
I too have been critical toward the Israel, but not for the same reasons as others. I think that Israel has been way to complacent toward the constant genocidal actions of the Islamofascist colonists
You’re thoroughly obnoxious. There’s not a scintilla of difference between you and the Magian females of “the squad”— and for the same reason.
Think of the diaspora Jews and their great yeshivas as an insurance policy that Torah study and its accompanying way of life will continue in case catastrophe again strikes Israel, as it did in
approximately 70 CE, when Rabban Yohannan ben Zakkai requested of Vespasian, “Give me Yavneh and its sages”. That was the beginning of the trek outward from the flames of Jerusalem and into the rest of the known world.
Had Bavel not had such a strong diaspora community it is questionable that Jewish scholarship would have had a sufficient infrastructure to support Rabban Yohannan’s students and their colleagues in Israel. As it is, the Talmud Yerushalmi is studied to some extent by scholars, but every religious boy spends his youth acquiring the skills to analyze the Talmud Bavli so that he can spend the rest of his life learning it.
The purpose of the Jewish people is the Torah, its study and practice. While most of us would no doubt rather live in Israel than in, say, the corrupt, crumbling, and increasingly anti-Semitic American Empire, I for one made life choices that prevent me from living there now. It saddens me that my children also made life choices that shackle them to the United States, a country that I love passionately but that appears to be moribund now. I wish that they would get out while their children are still young enough to become Israeli, rather than emigres, but they make no indication of wanting to do so. If they wait long enough, they’ll get there as refugees and I’ll probably have to wait until Techiyas HaMeisim to get there. In any case, whether they live in Israel or in the US or on Mars, they will remain Litvish Yeshivish just like so many the world over.
Now dear Sister, may I make a recommendation from a simple old woman to a surely better educated and younger one? It is the beginning of Elul and the Yomim Norayim come apace. Perhaps during the davening on these holy days, you might want to meditate on the mitzvah of ahavas Yisroel. It is a very difficult one to keep, as not all of your fellow-Jews are entirely lovable. But we all need to try. In a hostile world, we must love one another. There are times and places during and in which we have few to turn to but one another. May it be done with love.
BTW, I’m sure that you know all of this historical material, but if you want to brush up with a superficial little article, check it out:
Sorry, the URL address didn’t come through, just the article’s title. It was published by the Orthodox Union, 19 July 2011 title line grammatical error and all.
I’m afraid it seems that America’s Jews prefer the love of money to Zionism. They have long lost any love for an independent Jewish state, preferring the confines of New York, Chicago and other cities where comfort is king and the land of their heritage is all but forgotten.
Many of us stay here for other reasons, such as advanced age or infirmity. My feeling is that Israel has enough old cripples of its own and doesn’t need me, and I’d have a hell of a time at my age learning a new language. (Modern, spoken Hebrew is somewhat different from the Classical and Rabbinic that I use in prayer, and even in that I am not very literate.) Others who stay here do so for other, equally good reasons and I cannot fault them,
Unfortunately poverty is usually a more compelling reason than wealth, and if you could come here to Appalachia where poverty is endemic, you would find that the Jews are no better off than others. Yes, we are much richer in our strong, loving families, our love for the Lord, and our Biblical values, but many are rich people who have not much money. I know this because I am one of those who has always made at least a modest living and feel that it’s never enough to help support those who do not, but I keep in close contact with the various small, local, religious charitable organizations and hear a lot of pretty awful stories, about a job lost to downsizing or COVID closures, or a young mother ir father stricken with a debilitating illness, and I wish I made more so that my tithe could go further.
As to your own opinions, I have tried to educate you above, but I doubt that it will get through. So let me leave you with this last thought: You are an anti-Semitic fool and no respectable person will have anything to do with you. If I weren’t a lady I would call you worse, more scatological things that you might find far more familiar to your social milieu.
A poignant article, but I would change the headline by one word: substitute DEMOCRAT’S for WEST’s.
“In these dangerous times, the U.S. needs all the allies it can get, and should not be demonizing one of our closest––an island of political freedom and rights-based governance in a sea of illiberal, if not totalitarian regimes in a geostrategically important region.” You’re right, of course. Proving that they’re no longer your grandparents Democrat party by “cutting off their nose to spite their face” with every totalitarian viewpoint and edict.
To understand why “political freedom and rights-based governance” is a problem for Democrats and the left side of the UniParty is to understand the modern totalitarian Democrat a little better. They don’t support EITHER, CAN’T.,,and therein lies the rub. If they did, there would’ve been no J6 committee or political prisoners. There would be no circumventing of the Supreme Court. There would be no attempts at the destruction of the Constitution at every turn, especially the 2nd Amendment.
Frankly, to expect some other viewpoint on Israel from the modern Democrat is to expect snow in July. Freedom and rights cannot be tolerated. Anyone not adhering to this viewpoint is an “extremest”.
A very good comment, NAVY ET1. Yours are always worth reading.
One thing I would like to add, and that is the gratitude that the Jewish people have, or (in the case of brainwashed Democrats) ought have, toward all true Christians. The help of Christian Zionists both in England and the U.S. has been a crucial factor in the formation and continuation of the modern State of Israel. Evangelical and other serious Christians of all sorts have been enormously helpful to the Jewish people since long before that, when you consider Founding Father John Adams’s efforts on their behalf and George Washington’s excoriation of bigotry, reassuring the Jews that they had a solid place in this Republic from its very birth. And our dear Donald J. Trump is a true son of Cyrus the Great in his support of Israel.
Now it’s up to the Jews all over the world, all perhaps fifteen million of us (not very many, is it?), to pray and behave in such a manner that we show G0d that we are worthy of our own state again, because we have sinned and erred in the past and lost it. I see sin and error in myself (less prayer and attention to kashruth and Sabbath observance than ought to be the case) and in others, including in Israel (think “pride” parades) and cringe in fear that we might lose Israel again. It’s entirely up to us, and G0d judges us by our behavior. But the prayers and love of our Christian brothers and sisters is more than appreciated, and very valuable. G0d listens to all of His children.
This is an insightful and informative article but when he discusses the particular venom that is felt toward Israel I think he leaves out perhaps the most important factor: Israel is a Jewish state.
That seems to be a point that many commentators seem to either forget or take for granted that it is generally known. Sadly, there are many who seek to deny this truth.
The belief that “Anti-Zionism” is distinct from antisemitism (rather than the most common contemporary manifestation of it) is one of the Left’s more fatuous dogmas, along with the belief that biological sex is a “social construct”.
While Barack Hussein Obama no doubt is aware that it is antisemitism (and thus embraces it all the more), Joe Biden is probably too stupid (like a wokeling freshperson who takes Gender Studies 101 and thinks “they” discovered a new world) to realize he’s espousing the oldest hatred.
Anti-semitism, the worlds oldest hatred, as told by Norman Podhoretz in his book Why Are Jews Liberal, had a bit of a respite in the wake of WWII as the camps were opened up and a lot of the top Nazis were brought to Nuremburg for trial. Almost all were convicted and some were executed.
The Six Day War changed all of that. The world could not have those plucky Jews kicking Arab tail so efficiently. Very slowly the infection began to grow again. The BBC is now openly hostile to Israel. Muslims are attacking Jews in France. The U.S. Congress has three openly anti Semitic members in the House (thanks Barack for those wonderful Muslim importation policies) and we have had two openly anti-semitic Presidents since 2009. They don’t even try to hide it. But it was Trump who took heat for being an Israel hater.
So we are stuck with the Squad and the rest of the Jew hating reprobates in congress and the Senate until we actually grow a pair and start deporting the Muslims
And it is Trump who had the spine to recognise and openly embrace the facts on the ground regarding Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, not to mention Judea and Samaria. No other president had the courage to do this..
This is sloppy. While I sympathize with Israel, I don’t see the point about pushing that position with falsehoods. E.g., when was this millennium when “the infidel West that for a 1000 years cowered before Allah’s warriors?” That didn’t happen, they fought back throughout history. Nor is it true that “a wave of war that subjugated Christian Spain to seven centuries of occupation, and did not begin to ebb until 1683, when the Ottoman Turks were turned back at Vienna.” They were expelled from Spain in 1492, you know, where their power was ebbing since Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
Again, I am solidly pro Israel. I do not, however, care for Thornton’s apparent belief that the West “cowered” and retreated before Islam until Israel was founded.
Good points. The author is a hysterical 🐩
Cowardice is the correct word. The West is scared of muslim terrorists.
They mistakenly think by appeasing the islamists they will be safe. And they are very stupid for thinking so, not knowing the very same mulims who want to destroy Israel hate all non-muslim nations as much if not more and will destroy them.
They are already destroying the West from within.
It is either a world wide war against ALL muslims, or the civilized world will end, after muslims are done with their never ending genocides.
The West must adopt the war mentality if it wants to survive.
Churchill described it as believing that by appeasing the crocodile, you can convince him to eat you last. He was wise and understood the Muslims very well, long before he encountered their European ally Hitler, whom he also understood very well.
Israel is the end game for those that want to wipe her off the map. She always has been. Social media platforms also spread Holocaust denials. Nearly two-thirds of young American adults had no clue that 6 million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jewish people caused the Holocaust. Social media’s version of Holocaust education often opposes the truth. If you’re a born again Christian you should understand the danger of anti-semetism, and take a stand against hatred of the Jewish people because God loves his Chosen people, and He will love them forever. One day there will be a New Jerusalem, a place of peace, justice, love, unity, and Godliness. A remnant of Israel will always exist, its the rest of the world that is going to perish under judgment.
We are late in this game., or the prophesies of the New Testament. The World’s Godless power brokers and global elite can think of only one thing: Global government. They will use any pawn in their game.
The West has a long, sordid history of antisemitism. Devout Muslims believe that anyone who does not embrace Allah is an unbeliever. Those groups must voluntarily convert or be forcibly converted or subjugated.
The West has a long, sordid history of antisemitism. Perhaps it’s the missionary complex of the West that compels us to accept the violence of the Muslim religion in the hope of proving that the West will accept Muslim customs.
However, this does not mean that the West, particularly the present administration or any government, should conduct policies that violate the sovereign rights and security issues of Israel or any individual who is Jewish.
The Biden foreign policy regarding Israel and the ‘Palestinians’ rewards terrorists and embraces the most prominent supporter of terrorism is absurd and dangerous. However, the Department of State, which itself has a history of antisemitism, is the point agency in this catastrophe that needs to wake up and recognize the idiocy of the path we are pursuing.
The Department of State used to be the bastion of East Coast elitists and now is the bastion of the Left. Neither group much likes Israel or Jews (except, in the latter’s instance, those of the J Street type).
The Department of State has been lousy with communists since the 1930’s, as an undertaking of our first communist president, the widely beloved Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It will not change any time soon unless somebody comes along with a very big broom to sweep it clean.
The rogue regimes will want to invade Israel for her resources and wealth. Its a given, especially Russia, China, and Iran. Its all in the bible Ezekiel 38 and 39. The goal is to remove the United States from helping Israel, and that is well into the process.
unfortunately jews are their own worst enemy . they generally vote for democrats both in the u.s. and in israel the latest demonstrations in israel a case in point . after having themselves almost obliterated in the death camps you would think that the idea that the west are altruists and that they have the best motives towards them . the west only gives lip service and in a heartbeat would light the flame for the gas chambers along with the lefts romance with islam who would provide the transport . the jews will finally wake up when the antichrist signs a peace deal and then betrays them . another holocaust will ensue with the return of Christ to rescue another remnant . it is only going to get worse and with feckless lying joe it will hasten their demise .
The United States is Israel’s fair-weather friends but acts as if Israel is its 51th state. The problem is that Israel is clueless in understanding what sovereignty means and it allows the US to stick its long nose into its affairs and does very little to stop it. More so, the US could care less if Iran carries out its threats, if it becomes a nuclear power, if it finance constant terror against Israel in the region. Bottom line, the US is a very pretentious ally of Israel who I believe that in time of need will not be the first one to come and help Israel.
Israel must rely on G-d to be its only real and reliable protector. Every time I see information about a “gay pride” event even in Jerusalem I shudder with fear for its future. Israel can be a “modern Western democracy” or it can be the Jewish State, which comes with a whole library full of rules. They must decide.
The diplomatic farce of the west with Israel is a display of its pure dislike for the Jews!
Did George Soros donate to Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign? Seems like theres many agendas that have been hidden by the Rinos who are debating tonight. Who are enemies of Israel?