Lib Protest. Fossil Availability. Cost of Obama's Foreign Policy. How Hunter Operated.

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Fossil availability is a function of the demand for almost everything else which will require a significant amount of mining for all kind of other material. So demand for fossil fuel will continue. and the price will continue to climb.

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Israel vs. Islamic Jihad: Media Outlets Are Getting It Wrong as Terrorist Rockets Rain Down

By Rachel O'Donoghue

Gaza-based terrorists continued to pound Israel with rockets on Thursday as Operation Shield and Arrow — Israel’s defensive strike against Islamic Jihad — entered its third day.

The recent conflagration began with Islamic Jihad terrorists firing a barrage of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel last week following the death of one of its senior leaders, Khader Adnan in prison as a result of a protracted hunger strike that saw him refuse medical treatment.

Early on Tuesday, the IDF launched precision strikes in the coastal territory, which took out Khalil Bahtini, who commands Islamic Jihad in northern Gaza, Jihad Ghanem, a key official in the group’s military council, and Tareq Izz ed-Din, who directs Islamic Jihad terror activities in the West Bank.

In the 48 hours that followed, more than 500 rockets were launched at Israeli towns and cities, with over 100 over those projectiles falling short and landing in Gaza.

Unfortunately, some media outlets can always be counted on for a botched job when it comes to their coverage.

The New York Times was among the outlets that failed in its effort to provide readers with context and background information about the conflict in a fact-box about Islamic Jihad.

HonestReporting called out the publication after it opted to sanitize its description of the Iran-funded organization — merely labeling them an “armed group” that was founded to “fight Israeli occupation, rather than an Islamist terror network that was established with a goal of destroying Israel through a holy war:

Related reading: Once Again, New York Times Whitewashes Islamic Jihad

Meanwhile, the Washington Post appeared to be confused about the very nature of Israeli airstrikes and suggested the pinpoint operations — which are designed to neutralize singular terrorists while minimizing civilian casualties — were akin to the indiscriminate rocket attacks emanating from Gaza:

Haven’t you got this backward, @washingtonpost?

It’s the Palestinian rockets that could and do land anywhere (including misfiring onto Gazans).

Israeli strikes are pinpointed & targeted at terrorists who fire their rockets from within populated areas.

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) 

Voice of America, which receives tens of millions of dollars of funding from US taxpayers, was simply careless in its report on Israel’s striking of terrorist infrastructure in the Hamas-controlled territory, which the organization claimed was part of a pattern of “near-daily raids in the Gaza Strip.”

Of course, the IDF does not carry out frequent raids on the Strip, and it seems more than likely VOA confused the area with the West Bank, where counter-terrorism operations are frequently in effect.

No, @VOANews, Israel has not carried out “near-daily raids in the Gaza Strip.”

It has, however, carried out frequent counter-terror operations in the West Bank.

CNN interviewed former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, with some viewers calling out the misguided line of questioning.

If reporters covering the conflict imputed agency to Palestinians, the normal question would be: "Doesn't Palestinian Islamic Jihad have an obligation not to use human shields"? https://t.co/zFcxtGsZnj

— Adam Levick  

The Wall Street Journal’s headline drew a moral equivalency between the actions of the IDF and Islamic Jihad, despite the latter being a proscribed terror group by the entirety of the Western world.

Responding to the newspaper’s claims that Palestinian “militants” and Israel were “trading fire,” we noted the woefully inadequate way to describe terrorists bombarding Israel with rockets and the IDF stopping said attacks with precision strikes.

No, @WSJ. Israel and Palestinian “militants” are not “trading fire.”

One side is indiscriminately firing rockets in an attempt to kill civilians. The other is trying to stop the rockets by targeting terrorists.

There is no moral equivalence.https://t.co/4bIxFreypA pic.twitter.com/U7CwkUkTUI

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) 

Social media’s favorite terror apologist, Gaza Strip-based Palestinian author and Twitter activist Muhammad Shehada, used his platform on Newsweek to place the blame, not on Islamic Jihad or the hundreds of rockets, but on the Israeli government and specifically internal Israeli politics.

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The Cost of Obama’s Foreign Policy 

By Mike Watson

Posted By Ruth King

His worldview conduced to American decline

As the GOP primary season gets under way, the foreign-policy conversation in Washington has dwelt on how long Republicans will support Ukraine’s attempts to defend itself against Russian aggression. But there are too many hot spots for Ukraine to continue to dominate the news — and lawmakers’ attention — for long: China’s ongoing military buildup threatens to upset the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. It is also making inroads in the Middle East, where Iran has nearly attained weapons-grade uranium and its terrorist allies are stepping up their rocket attacks on Israel. The United States faces the prospect of simultaneous major conflicts in several strategically important theaters.

The brewing crisis for the American-led international order is readily apparent, but its roots are more obscure. Fifteen years ago, the prospects of a major war in Europe and of the U.S. military’s losing control of the Western Pacific were remote; today, one has materialized, and the other may be close at hand. How did a country as dominant as the United States let events slip out of its control so quickly?

Much of the blame must lie with the Obama administration for initiating a series of disastrous policies and the Biden administration for continuing them. Toward the end of his presidency, Barack Obama articulated many of his foreign-policy views to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic. Reexamining them now, one is struck by the many ways in which he was wrong, with great consequence.

As Obama saw it, the United States had been obsessed with the wrong issues. Unlike ISIS, which was “not an existential threat to the United States” but had nonetheless fixed the country’s attention, “climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.” And Obama feared that by focusing on terrorism instead of on the plights and aspirations of young people in the developing world, the United States was “missing the boat.” At a time when rival powers were on the prowl, the White House focused on nebulous issues such as the climate and global development.

Obama partly acknowledged great-power challenges, of course. He thought “the relationship between the United States and China” was “going to be the most critical” in the ensuing years. Former defense secretary Ash Carter said Obama believed that Asia was “the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American future,” and that “no president can take his eye off of this.” Hence the signature foreign-policy slogan of Obama’s first term, the “pivot to Asia.”

This did not make him a hawk by any means. Rather, he said we had “more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China.” China, Obama repeated, was “on a peaceful rise.” In Beijing, Washington could find “a partner that is growing in capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of maintaining an international order.”

Obama patted himself on the back for having curbed unhelpful behavior by China such as building and then militarizing islands in the South China Sea, an important artery of global commerce. But this must have been news to Xi Jinping, who turned those islands into military bases after promising Obama that he wouldn’t. Obama thought that his response to Xi’s island-building campaign was a triumph of American diplomacy, but former chief of naval operations and retired admiral Jonathan Greenert recalled that his Chinese counterparts were surprised that the United States was so slow to merely object to their maritime territorial expansion, let alone push back against it. The U.S. response — mainly, sending American forces through disputed waterways in “freedom of navigation” patrols — did not change Chinese policy. The Obama administration even canceled some of the patrols to “lower the temperature” in waters that the Philippines, a treaty ally, was defending from Chinese encroachment. China was not diplomatically isolated but rather recruited close U.S. allies, including Britain and Australia, into the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and other international economic projects, over strenuous American objections.

While Obama considered China important, he thought Russia was in rapid and irreversible decline. He claimed that Putin was “constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as working with us, because he’s not completely stupid” and because he “understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished.” Obama dismissed Putin’s military forays as unimportant, sniffing that “the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player.” In fact, Obama reassured Goldberg, “there’s not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important.”

As Obama saw it, Russia’s military forays demonstrated failure, not strength. Ukraine and Syria had been Russian “client states” that were slipping out of Moscow’s orbit until Putin’s interventions. “Real power,” Obama theorized, “means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.” Indeed, “Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that [Putin] could pull the strings on.” Obama also said that the Russians in Syria are overextended and “they’re bleeding.”

Attempting to counter even a weakened Russia was a fool’s errand, however. According to Obama, Ukraine was “going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” On the other hand, “if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it.” Any step between acquiescence and war, such as arming Ukraine with Javelin missiles (as the Trump administration did), he does not seem to have even considered.

Obama led the country so badly astray largely because he mistook half-truths for the whole, as in his view of Russian military adventurism. It’s true that wars are costly and unpredictable, so most countries employ violence only when their other options have failed; Russia would surely have preferred that Ukraine align with it peacefully. But Obama did not understand that violence can also empower. Far from bleeding Russia dry, the Syrian intervention strengthened Moscow’s regional position. Moscow and Riyadh now set the price in the global oil market together through OPEC+, and Israel has remained neutral regarding Ukraine in part to avoid antagonizing the great power Obama allowed into its neighborhood. Even a glance at Obama’s preferred barometer of power — agenda-setting in G-20 meetings — reveals America’s diminishing international heft vis-à-vis Russia. India and Indonesia, among other countries, oppose Biden’s attempts to address the Ukraine war in that forum.

Fortunately, Obama found a way to avoid war in the Middle East: Saudi–Iranian competition, which had spilled over into Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, “requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood,” he concluded. The alternative was to confront Iran militarily. The Iran nuclear deal was a step on the way to making pesky allies such as the Saudi monarchy and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel fend for themselves.

Obama also failed to understand how important American consistency and credibility are to our partners and allies. Although he acknowledged that, for most of his desiderata, “if we don’t set the agenda, it doesn’t happen,” he underestimated the importance of American security guarantees. This was crystallized in the “red line” debacle: When he warned Syria’s Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons against his own people, and Assad did anyway, Obama told Putin that if Russia were to force Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that would eliminate the need for a U.S. military response. Putin happily obliged and further entrenched himself in Syria. Allies worldwide were dismayed: Diplomats from countries far from the Middle East still bring up that red-line blunder today, nearly a decade later.

“I’m very proud of this moment,” Obama recounted. The notion that U.S. credibility was at stake he found to be utterly unconvincing. “The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision-making of Russia or China,” he claimed, “is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.” And yet he lamented that “nobody remembers” the killing of bin Laden and other military actions he undertook, such as “ordering 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan,” when evaluating his foreign-policy toughness. Unfortunately for him, countries that depend on American red lines care about whether the president enforces them.

Donald Trump ran on undoing some of Obama’s policies, but his actions in office only partly reversed, and in some respects hastened, the decline. By sending weapons to Ukraine and withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, Trump at least demonstrated that there can be plenty of foreign-policy options between appeasement and war. And he forced Washington to focus on the rivalry with China (although he cared more about increasing exports to China than any of Beijing’s attempts to undermine America’s global position). However, his arrival in the Oval Office made our adversaries believe that the American political system was approaching a meltdown, and his erratic behavior convinced many of our partners that they can no longer rely on the U.S. The Japanese are desperately trying to shore up the American-led order, but the Saudis and others are heading for the exits.

Biden, meanwhile, has mostly followed in Obama’s footsteps and is leading America and its allies to the same destination. At the beginning of his presidency, he decided to ignore Russia, or, in his administration’s parlance, to “park” it. He has since cast the Ukraine war as part of a global struggle between democracy and autocracy, but his actions at the beginning of the war demonstrated that he agreed with Obama that Russian domination of Ukraine was a foregone conclusion. As the Russians prepared to attack, Biden underscored his and his allies’ lack of resolve, noting that he might be willing to tolerate a “minor incursion” by the Russians into Ukrainian territory. The State Department evacuated the Kyiv embassy as the invasion loomed, but unlike our braver allies who stayed in western Ukraine, the Americans retreated all the way to Poland. It was the Ukrainians who eventually stiffened Biden’s spine, not the other way around.

Biden has also tried to revive Obama’s trademark second-term foreign-policy initiative, the Iran nuclear deal. But halfway through his term, Biden’s many attempts to cajole and entice Tehran back into the accords have all failed, perhaps in part because the Iranians have wangled limited sanctions relief out of the negotiations without giving up anything themselves. Now that Iran is enriching uranium of up to 84 percent purity — just shy of the 90 percent typically used in a nuclear weapon — Biden is trying to talk U.S. allies into offering Iran another deal.

The pivot to Asia is, similarly, on ice. Obama, who believed that America’s foreign policy had been too militaristic, placed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal at the center of his Asia strategy, but he failed to get it ratified by the Senate before leaving office, after which Trump withdrew from the agreement. Biden has no trade policy to speak of and seems content to let Asia be drawn into Beijing’s economic orbit, much to Japan’s consternation and other Asian countries’ disappointment. Meanwhile, America’s Asian allies view Biden’s ballyhooed democracy summits and human-rights crusades with polite dismay. Instead of having the U.S. lecture neutral countries about their internal affairs, they would rather focus on the preservation of international norms — such as respect for territorial sovereignty and the peaceful resolution of disputes — or, in other words, the enforcement of red lines.

Biden is tougher on China than Obama was, at least rhetorically, but it is not clear that he is willing to back up his talk. This is the second year in a row that Biden has tried to cut the defense budget in inflation-adjusted terms. Last year, Congress overruled him, and it must do so again if we are to keep pace with China’s military buildup.

At the outset of the Obama presidency, Charles Krauthammer — who years before had urged U.S. policy-makers not to squander the country’s post–Cold War moment of global hegemony — warned that “decline is a choice,” and that Obama and his allies in government and the Washington elite had set us on a course toward it. But Krauthammer also counseled: “Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written.”

Yet.

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 A House report shows how Hunter and relatives profited while Joe was Vice President.

The Editorial Board 

House Oversight Chair James Comer’s staff report shows in detail that Hunter had extensive dealings with unsavory foreign actors. This yielded millions of dollars for Biden family members via a web of shell companies that would be hard to untangle without subpoena power. Why so much complexity?

The 36-page report shows Biden family members and business associates created nearly 20 separate entities shortly before and during Joe Biden’s Vice Presidency. The entities with obscure names—Hudson West III, Hudson West V, Owascu, JBB SR INC—transferred cash from foreign entities. Bank records show that more than $10 million was delivered to Biden family members, associates and companies from these foreign entities, and in curious ways.

In some cases “Biden associates would receive significant deposits from foreign sources,” then “transfer smaller, incremental payments to Biden bank accounts,” the report says. These “complicated and seemingly unnecessary” transactions appeared to be an “effort to conceal the source and total amount received from the foreign companies.”

Some payments came from such shady characters as Chinese national Ye Jianming, his associates, and his company CEFC. Mr. Ye had a background in Chinese military intelligence and used CEFC to promote President Xi Jinping’s agenda globally. One of Mr. Ye’s deputies, Patrick Ho, was convicted in the U.S. in 2018 on international bribery and money laundering.

Mr. Ye’s emissary to the U.S., Gongwen Dong, in 2017 established a corporate entity with Hunter—each with 50% ownership. Over 14 months the entity dispersed more than $4 million to Hunter-related companies and another $75,000 to companies related to the President’s brother, James Biden. Mr. Dong used a separate set of complex corporate entities and transfers to send Hunter another $100,000 payment.

In 2017 another Ye-related company—State Energy HK—paid some $3 million to Hunter’s business associates. At least $1 million was then funneled in 16 separate payments over three months to five different bank accounts, all related to the Biden name. They included companies associated with Hunter and James Biden, an unknown bank account identified simply as “Biden” and a payment to Hallie Biden—the widow of Hunter’s deceased brother Beau and later Hunter’s girlfriend.

The report lays out a similarly complex web of payments to Hunter and associates from an entity that appears to be connected to a Romanian businessman who has been convicted of bribery. In total, Mr. Comer says the committee has identified at least nine Biden family members that received foreign income, including Hunter, James, James’s wife Sara, Hallie, Hunter’s ex-wife (Kathleen Buhle), Hunter’s current wife (Melissa Cohen), and three children or grandchildren of Joe or James.

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The Bidens have a right to make a living, but one important question is what Hunter did to earn these payments. Hunter’s spokespersons aren’t saying, and his attorney scorned the Comer report as “repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens.” But a fair conclusion is that these foreigners were buying influence with a powerful family.

Emails and text messages made public in 2020 by former Hunter business partner Tony Bobulinski—related to a separate attempted deal with CEFC—quote Hunter demanding more because CEFC is “coming to be MY partner to be partners with the Bidens,” and noting that “I’m the only one putting an entire family legacy on the line.” In another email reported by the New York Post, Hunter boasted that Mr. Ye would pay him millions for “introductions alone.”

The press is mostly dismissing the report because it reveals no evidence that President Biden received any money. But the committee has already exposed that Joe Biden dissembled in 2020 when he claimed that “my son has not made money in terms of this thing about—what are you talking about—China. I have not had it. The only guy that made money from China is this guy,” referring to Donald Trump. Mr. Comer isn’t done, and we shall see where the money trail leads.

The report shows the Biden family profiting from Joe Biden’s political power. Payments from Chinese nationals are also a familiar way that the Communist Party has tried to compromise America’s political class. There may not be a smoking gun, but there’s plenty of suspicious smoke worth investigating.

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Iran’s Multifront Strategy Against Israel

By Jonathan Schanzer 

Rockets from Gaza flew toward Tel Aviv on May 10, only a few weeks after Israel celebrated its 75th anniversary. Against all odds, the country has survived despite multiple wars with its neighbors, a dearth of natural resources, and countless other challenges. But the rockets are a reminder that there are no permanent victories in the Middle East. Only permanent battles. There is a real possibility that Israel will be facing a serious war with enemies coming at it from various sides for the first time in nearly half a century—one coordinated out of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but fought along Israel’s borders by Tehran’s terror proxies. Indeed, just a day before the rocket barrage, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly spoke of “an attempt by Iran to start a multi-front campaign against us.”

Israel has forestalled this war for a decade by waging a so-called gray-zone campaign—a wide range of operations against Iran and its proxies just below the threshold of war. But after a particularly tense month of Ramadan in 2023, during which dozens of rockets pierced Israeli airspace from both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, Israeli military officials are now openly warning that Israel’s first multi-front war since the 1973 Yom Kippur War may be imminent.

Israel’s “Campaign Between Wars” began in 2013, though its origins can be traced to the destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 and the deployment of the powerful Stuxnet computer worm that targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010. Both operations were carried out without retribution; neither triggered an open conflict. But it was in 2013 that Israel adopted a formal policy of consistently operating in the gray zone against Iran with the goal of forestalling a major war.

Some in Israel describe the Campaign Between Wars as a limited advance against Iranian activity in war-torn Syria, where thousands of Israeli air strikes have destroyed valuable regime assets over the course of a decade. Others take a wider view. They point to foreign press reports suggesting a sprawling campaign targeting Iranian capabilities (with only rare instances of Iranian retaliation) on the high seas, in cyberspace, in the financial and psychological spheres, in Syria, inside Iran, and beyond.

Israel has scored significant successes in Syria. Efforts by the Israel Defense Forces have thwarted Iranian designs to create a new Hezbollah-like terror proxy on the Golan Heights. The Syrian regime has repeatedly tried to move assets and personnel to the border. Israel has repeatedly destroyed most, if not all of it. Iran-backed militias still operate in Syria, but they are generally deterred.

Concurrently, Israel has been working to prevent Iran from arming Hezbollah (which operates in Lebanon) with what the IDF calls “game-changing weapons.” Over the past decade, Iran has been smuggling advanced-weapons parts and even entire systems into Syria en route to Hezbollah bases in Lebanon. These are precision-guided munitions (PGMs), and no non-state actor ever possessed them in the past. Tehran and Hezbollah are willing to suffer significant losses (transporting anything in the middle of a shooting war is hazardous stuff) to acquire even small quantities of these weapons. Unlike the “dumb” or unguided rockets that Hezbollah and Hamas have fired at Israel in the past, these rockets are equipped with navigation systems. They can strike an intended target with a 10-meter margin of error.

Fears of a successful precision strike on the Dimona nuclear facility or the chemical plant in Haifa have kept the Israelis busy. The IDF has done a remarkable job using its vast intelligence resources to destroy nearly all the PGMs and PGM parts that Iran has tried to sneak into Lebanon. The problem for Israel is that “nearly” is not “all.” Israeli officials quietly cede that Hezbollah now possesses “several hundred” PGMs. The group’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, openly boasts of his arsenal. New reports suggest that Hezbollah has at least one PGM production facility. The PGMs will augment Hezbollah’s existing arsenal of well over 150,000 rockets (despite UN resolutions explicitly prohibiting this), with the aim of overwhelming Israel’s defenses in a coming conflict.

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Precision-guided munitions are not the only challenge in Lebanon. Hamas, primarily based in Gaza, recently demonstrated that it has both the personnel and the capability to attack Israel from the north as well. In 2017 and 2018, Israel lodged formal complaints with the United Nations, noting that “Hamas has been colluding with Hezbollah and its sponsor in Tehran to expand its malicious activities…within Lebanon.” For several years, there was little evidence to support this claim. However, during the 11-day war between Hamas and Israel in 2021, unknown “Palestinian radicals” fired a total of 13 rockets at Israel on three separate occasions. The rockets were either neutralized by Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system or fell into the Mediterranean Sea, and the culprit was never named.

Earlier this year, amid flaring tensions during the Ramadan holiday in April, Hamas brazenly shot more than 30 rockets at Israel, wounding three. The IDF fired artillery at the positions from which the rockets had flown, but stopped there. Admittedly, if Hamas’s goal was to draw Israel into a two-front war, it failed. But some security hawks in Israel were dismayed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to hold Hezbollah to account.

Days later, on April 9, the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah met in Beirut to discuss their joint strategy against Israel. They released photos depicting their conversations held beneath photos of former Iranian supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini and current supreme leader Ali Khamenei. The message was unmistakable: the Iran-led axis is preparing for a multi-front war with Israel.

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Releasing the photo was an audacious message to send to the Israelis, who have an impressive track record of removing threat actors from the battlefield. But the photo served a deeper purpose. It confirmed to Israel that the Iranian proxy threat has evolved. For several years, sporadic reports have pointed to the existence of a “nerve center” in Beirut. Participants include senior figures from Iran’s IRGC—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—as well as Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other groups. The nerve center is reportedly designed to coordinate the activities of the Iran-backed terrorist groups, to target Israel more efficiently.

Hints of this nerve center’s existence were first apparent during the 2021 rocket war between Israel and Hamas. Violence simultaneously erupted in several Arab-Israeli towns, suggesting a modicum of coordination. After the war’s end, Israeli officials began noting an uptick in West Bank violence. New terrorist groups, including one called the Lions’ Den, suddenly announced themselves. Concurrently, pockets of the West Bank, including in major towns such as Jenin and Nablus, were growing lawless. Palestinian Authority security forces failed to gain control, forcing the Israeli army to operate with greater frequency.

The combination of PA fecklessness and West Bank lawlessness put Israel in a lose-lose situation. If Israeli forces did not operate in these areas, the threat would metastasize. At the same time, the presence of Israeli forces in these places inspired greater radicalization among rank-and-file Palestinians. According to data collected by Foundation for Defense of Democracies, more than 1,500 terrorist attacks have targeted Israelis in the West Bank and over the Green Line since March of last year alone.

Israeli security services believe that Hezbollah (by way of Iran) is the primary source for the weapons flooding the West Bank. But there may be others. In April, a Jordanian parliamentarian was caught at the Allenby Bridge, between Jordan and the West Bank, with a jaw-dropping amount of weaponry along with more than $6 million in gold. The Hashemite Kingdom has been a fount of anti-Israel vitriol in recent years, and even an opponent of the Abraham Accords, but it is unlikely Amman would back such an audacious attempt to arm the Palestinians.

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The Gaza Strip has been the source of horrific violence ever since the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas took it by force in the Palestinian civil war of 2007. The coastal Mediterranean enclave has witnessed pitched battles between Israel and Hamas in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, with sporadic flare-ups between. Over the last two years, however, Hamas has demonstrated rare restraint.

Israeli security officials told me in October 2022 that this relative calm is the result of a new Hamas strategy. The group seeks to export violence to the West Bank, rather than sustain its regular beatings by Israel on home turf. It’s a logical strategy. Using the West Bank in this fashion weakens Hamas’s political rival, the Palestinian Authority, while also destabilizing Israel. This likely explains why only a few dozen rockets were fired out of Gaza during Ramadan this year.

However, it would be a mistake to view Hamas as more pragmatic. First, it is clearly taking the quiet as an opportunity to rebuild its military assets from the 2021 war and wars prior. Moreover, as we’ve seen, the Iran-backed group now has assets in the West Bank and Lebanon. From all appearances, it could touch off a three-front conflict at will. In this scenario, Hezbollah would join the battle from Lebanon, Shiite militias could join from Syria, and Iran could fire its own rockets from afar.

Once a group that was widely viewed as merely a tactical threat to Israel, Hamas has evolved into a transnational threat. It could not have achieved this without the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed, Hamas leaders have become willing tools in Iran’s plans for war with Israel. It’s likely that several of them could soon pay the ultimate price.

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The American role in this unfolding drama is fuzzy. On the one hand, amid the rockets of Ramadan, the Pentagon dispatched the USS Florida to the region. A nuclear submarine equipped with more than 150 tomahawk missiles, the Florida’s very presence in the waters off Iran sent an unmistakable message of deterrence. In January, the United States also conducted the Juniper Oak 23 exercise with Israel—the largest in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Here, too, the intended audience was Tehran.

At the same time, however, the Biden administration continues to twist itself into knots trying to convince the regime in Iran to reach a new nuclear agreement to succeed the 2015 deal brokered by Barack Obama and cancelled by Donald Trump two years later. What is reportedly on the table now is a “less for more” deal that makes Israeli officials decidedly nervous. Such an agreement would place fewer restrictions on Iran’s increasingly bold nuclear advances in exchange for more Western concessions. Such an arrangement could very well enable an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Israel continues to plead with the White House to step away from the negotiating table. Other regional actors see the pleading as a fool’s errand. Some have given up on Washington. The Saudis went so far as to ink an agreement with their nearly nuclear Iranian arch-rivals. That deal sent shock waves through Washington, primarily because the Chinese government brokered it.

The Israelis were concerned for other reasons. Saudi-Iran rapprochement could stymie Israel’s quest for normalization with the Saudis. The Biden administration’s ugly rhetoric toward Riyadh (some deserved and some utterly gratuitous) had already rendered such a deal highly unlikely. Beijing’s diplomatic triumph may have been a death knell.

The Israelis refuse to give up on Riyadh, though. A deal with the custodian of Islam’s two holiest mosques could trigger a domino normalization effect for other Muslim nations that have been fence-sitting about their ties with the Jewish state. Some Israelis even believe that the Saudis are attempting to draw their likely opponents closer in advance of a normalization deal. But this may be wishful thinking. Several Arab countries (notably, the UAE and Jordan) have followed the Saudi lead in engaging with the Islamic Republic. Exactly what this means for Israel is not yet known. But when key regional American allies start hedging with a uranium-enriching rogue state that has vowed repeatedly to annihilate Israel, it’s hard to find the silver lining. The question Israelis are asking: Has America lost the Middle East?

Benjamin Netanyahu returned as Israel’s premier in December 2022 with unfinished business. He was prime minister when Iran began to pursue its illicit nuclear program. He was the toughest critic of Barack Obama’s wrong-headed 2015 deal. And he presided over some of the most daring Mossad operations against the regime, including the aforementioned Stuxnet worm but also several high-profile assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and the 2018 warehouse raid that exfiltrated hundreds of thousands of secret Iranian nuclear files. The files proved that Iran was lying about its genocidal intentions.

Upon reassuming office, however, Netanyahu set the Iran file aside to pursue a different agenda: judicial overhaul. The Israeli left and center erupted in protest. Thousands took to the streets for weeks, snarling traffic and causing chaos. The government refused to bend, prompting some in Israel to threaten to refuse to serve in the military. In the days just before Ramadan began, with the threat matrix blinking red, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant called upon Netanyahu to pump the brakes. “The legislative process should be halted” for several weeks, he said, noting that Israel was facing “great threats—both near and far.” His comments were reportedly informed by officials from Israeli military intelligence.

Netanyahu promptly announced that Gallant was fired for breaking ranks. Within a few hours, hundreds of thousands of angry Israelis flooded the streets. In an effort to defuse the unprecedented domestic crisis, Netanyahu agreed to halt the reform process and to engage in talks aimed at compromise. He even reversed his decision to fire Gallant. Soon after, rockets began to fly out of Gaza and Lebanon. Iran and its proxies believed they were exploiting the chaos in Israel, perhaps even hastening the demise of the Jewish state.

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Somehow, Israel escaped a Ramadan war in 2023. The month-long holiday ended with only minor skirmishes. But the regime and its proxies have flashed their cards. A multi-front war potentially looms.

In the meantime, Israel’s campaign between wars continues nearly every night. And Iran continues to position assets around Israel’s borders, pursuing its strategy of encirclement, with the ultimate goal of “turning Tel Aviv into Seoul”—a reference to North Korea’s strategy toward its southern neighbor. None of this has crossed the threshold into outright conflict. But that cannot last forever. Iran continues to prepare for Israel’s destruction. Israel will not wait for the regime to make the first move.

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