Biden’s timidity in the face of Israel’s just war puts the entire free world in peril

By Conrad Black

At the end of last week, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled a ceasefire deal, which he claimed was Israel’s proposal, though it’s unclear whether it was explicitly approved by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It provides for a three-stage exchange of hostages leading to a complete Israeli withdrawal and appears to be supported by some members of the Israeli government. Netanyahu will come to the United States to address a joint session of Congress next month. Biden is making a strong push for both sides to accept the deal, largely owing to domestic political considerations. The Biden administration is in full panic mode because of its relatively low polling numbers five months before the election and the apparent failure of the spurious perversion of the justice system, reduced to an arm of the dirty tricks division of the Democratic National Committee, to evaporate Donald Trump’s lead. Practically the entire population has a smaller disposable after-tax income today than it did when the Biden took office 3½ years ago, and approximately 10 million illegal migrants have flooded into the country, while the international situation has darkened steadily as the Russians have been emboldened to invade Ukraine and Hamas to conduct a massacre of Israelis.

This and other failings, including allegations that Biden’s son operated an intercontinental influence peddling operation for years and the visible physical and cognitive deterioration of this president while in office, have eroded his support to the point where much of it comes from the ultra-woke far left that wishes to tear down traditional America. In these circumstances, the traditional Democratic party broad coalition of interests and regions is in danger of fragmenting if the president cannot get the traditional moderate liberals of his party and the hard-core left to coexist reasonably smoothly. Suddenly he is largely dependent on those who represent the massacre of over 1,000 Israelis, including many women and children and the elderly, as a justified assault upon an illicit Jewish “occupation,” rather than a heinous terrorist attack on the sovereign state that is the homeland of the Jews who have been present in what we now call Israel for 4,000 years, much longer than the Arabs and going back approximately 2,500 years before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad and the founding of Islam.

No one can dispute that Hamas committed an act of war on October 7 and that it ardently desires the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Israel’s war goal has been to eliminate the mortal threat of Hamas and avenge an unusually barbarous provocation: the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the liberation of the last of the Nazi death camps. From the beginning, Biden has played a devious game of claiming that Israel has “the right to defend itself” but purporting to counsel and guide it on how strenuously it can counterattack Hamas and retain its status in conducting a righteous war.

As usually happens when anyone tries to straddle between parties so violently hostile to each other as Israel and Hamas, no one is satisfied. For those who favour Hamas, the United States is sending extensive aid to Israel and is much more favourably disposed to the Jewish state than to its terrorist adversary. But from the Israeli perspective, the most basic foundation of sovereignty is a state’s right and ability to defend itself from aggression, and when its right to self-defence is compromised, it is in danger of ceasing to be a sovereign state. American efforts to micro-manage the Israeli war effort are understandably annoying. The U.S administration seems to have attempted to get in the middle of Saudi-Israeli normalization talks while trying to dissuade Israel from taking effective action to prevent Iran from gaining a deliverable nuclear warhead. Despite insinuations from Washington and violent allegations from more hostile quarters that Israel is flagrantly disregarding the safety of Palestinian civilians, the majority of evidence, as distinguished historian Lord Andrew Roberts has declared, indicates that Israel is achieving the smallest ratio of civilian-to-military casualties in the history of modern urban warfare, a particularly distinguished feat given Hamas’s practice of hiding its forces in hospitals and mosques and schools, behind human shields of the vulnerable.

The United States has come perilously close to siding with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israel, though it rejects the attempt to treat Netanyahu and his defence minister as war criminals. It was shocking when, late last month, the U.S. did a 180-degree turn on the comments of a few days before by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the administration supports a bill in Congress excoriating the ICC for advancing an unlawful prosecution of Israeli leaders. Biden’s effort to transfer the post-war Gaza government to the decrepit Palestinian Authority has rightly been declined by Netanyahu, who said that Israel will not replace “Hamastan with Fatahstan.” Any such outcome as the U.S. proposes would be seen everywhere as a defeat for Israel, which apart from being a disaster in itself, certainly does not reflect the facts on the ground where Israel appears to have eliminated many of Hamas’s warriors and destroyed a great deal of its tunnel network and supplies. One of the accomplishments of the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan that the Trump administration sponsored was that it ended the effective Palestinian veto over improvements in relations between Israel and the Arab states. The Biden administration is now promising the reestablishment of that veto, which would be a tragic step backwards in the progress toward Arab-Israeli normalization. Perhaps most seriously of all, the Biden administration is attempting to dissuade Israel from any action to eliminate or seriously retard Iran’s ability to deploy nuclear weapons. The stance that Democratic presidents have taken towards Iran, from Jimmy Carter’s disgraceful treatment of the shah to Barack Obama’s shameful acquiescence to Iran becoming a fully armed nuclear power and Biden’s continued appeasement of that evil theocracy, has been a consistent and unmitigated failure.

The entire nonproliferation process will collapse and the world will be living on a hair-trigger if Iran becomes a nuclear military power. It is unlikely at this late date that the Biden administration will come to its senses, but presumably the American voters will. In the meantime, we should all remember that Hamas started this war and is fanatically determined to the point of martyrdom to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. The fact that the ineptitude of the current American administration has caused it to equivocate between the heroic State of Israel and the terrorist satellites of Iran is one of the most chilling and worrisome elements of the deterioration in international relations that has occurred during the Biden presidency. We are not entitled to any confidence at all that the Canadian government will act differently from the United States in these matters. Israel is winning a battle for all civilized states and we should all be grateful for that.

First published in the National Post