She deserves having "The Book" thrown at her.
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Radical Democrats, using Marxist tactics, have knowingly orchestrated the arrest of protesters in order to incarcerate and intimidate them, blame Trump for creating an
insurrection "and to violate citizen' constitutional rights it would seem.
insurrection "and to violate citizen' constitutional rights it would seem.
These 2 videos were sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader, with the attached comment:
I ADDED TWO OF MY VIDEOS THAT I POSTED TO TWITTER WITH 18,000 VIEWS A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO! IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COUNTRY!!!
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Biden's stupidity is forcing Europe into Russia's' arms allowing Putin to finance his evil foreign policies.
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Republicans are on board with the expanded child tax credit, a handout dating to 1997.
By Kimberley Strassel
Four months after decapitating their own speaker for a supposed lack of conservative principle, House Republicans this week celebrated by collaborating with Democrats to pass a welfare blowout. Kevin McCarthy, we hardly knew ye.
Proving again that Congress is incapable of anything beyond redistributing other people's money, 357 representatives passed another $78 billion spending bill. Add it to the pantheon of Nancy Pelosi-era bipartisan binges—the "infrastructure" bill, the semiconductor-welfare transfer, the $1,400 Covid checks. New GOP leadership, same debt-fueled status quo.
Don't go looking for "reform" or "spending discipline" or any of the usual GOP catchwords in this blob. The beating heart of Wednesday's package is two longtime Democratic priorities—increasing the size of the child tax credit and its availability to parents who don't pay income tax. The left accomplished both during Covid and have worked fervently to resurrect them since they expired in 2021. Republicans granted their wish.
Democrats built this Trojan Horse in 1997, when Bill Clinton won a $500 child tax credit. Their goal since has been to increase its size and expand eligibility, making it the basis of a future universal basic income. Republicans went from understanding the perfidy of government handouts to hoping they cadge a bit of credit for said income redistribution.
We're all for "families" now—and that's the justification for robbing the paychecks of productive childless taxpayers and rerouting their earnings to nonworking parents. This bill would further discourage work, leaving more parents and children dependent on government largess. It's of a piece with the Republican lurch toward bills that micromanage industrial policy or penalize the free market. Today's MAGA populism amounts to little more than warmed-over big-government Rockefeller Republicanism.
In return for this huge win, House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith got Democrats to support three business-related tax provisions that many already supported. That includes allowing corporations to deduct more of their interest expenses, which reverses a reform Republicans worked hard to include in the 2017 tax reform. Mr. Smith complains that critics of the bill care more about "Wall Street" than "Main Street." He should look in the mirror.
It gets worse. Tucked in the bill are "low-income housing" credits, disaster dollars, budget gimmicks. And in an attempt to buy off a few hostage-taking Northeastern Republicans, Speaker Mike Johnson is apparently open to blowing up another hard-won GOP tax reform, the limit on deductions for state and local taxes. The SALT deduction is a sop to high earners, and forces taxpayers in low-tax states to subsidize the soaring progressive tax rates of New York, New Jersey and California. Yet there is talk of a bill that would double the current $10,000 cap for married couples.
In the final tally, 47 Republicans and 23 Democrats voted against the bill. That shows which side felt it was getting the better deal. And while most of the 47 GOP naysayers hailed from the House Freedom Caucus, note the lack of any real public tantrum over the cost of this boondoggle, or the expansion of the welfare state, or the backtracking on reform. No one had the guts to expose the "pro-family" charade.
These are lawmakers who last spring lost their minds when Mr. McCarthy negotiated a debt-ceiling agreement. They claimed the deal's billions in clawbacks of unspent Covid funds and Internal Revenue Service dollars was pitifully inadequate to address today's spending problem. Mr. Smith's child tax credit handout blows through those savings, yet the dissenters could summon little more than polite criticism.
While a few were brave enough to voice the "welfare" problem, others tiptoed around their reasons for opposition—fearful of dissing a tax credit that Donald Trump once signed. Some seized on the corporate breaks, while other invented straw men. The best expression of carefully calibrated disapproval came from Florida's Rep. Matt Gaetz. He predictably lambasted "business welfare," but aimed his criticism of the child tax credit portion at the possibility that some might flow to "illegal aliens," even though the credit is limited to U.S. citizen children. Notably, nobody threatened to blow up the House or take out Mr. Johnson.
The bill may yet die in the Senate, where some Republicans have been more forthright about the policy and strategy mistakes of the bill. Sen. Chuck Grassley wondered why on earth the GOP was giving Democrats a win now, rather than waiting to bargain over a full extension of the 2017 tax cuts. Sen. John Cornyn called the bill's price "pretty outrageous."
A new favorite MAGA taunt is to decry the Washington "uniparty." Mr. Trump's acolytes are leading the charge for zero distinction between sides when it comes to welfare and spending. Who's the uni-party now?
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America and Britain - blind stupidity or malevolence?
America and Britain have crossed. a treacherous red line. Their unhinged obsession with the “two-state solution” threatens to incentivize Hamas. Opinion.
ByMelanie Phillips
Melanie is,a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS.
Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) Fears that the Biden administration’s bear hug of embattled Israel is the prelude to eating it alive were dramatically enhanced this week.
On Wednesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the administration was “actively pursuing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with real security guarantees for Israel.”
He was confirming a report on the Hebrew-language news site Walla that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had ordered officials to examine the possibility of American and international recognition of a “state of Palestine” the day after the war in Gaza.
A senior U.S. official told the site that elements within the Biden administration are recommending a move towards recognizing an Arab Palestinian state as a first step in a renewed peace process and not as the result of negotiations between the parties.
These “elements within the Biden administration” appear to be in lockstep with the British government. Two days before the report, at a reception in London, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron stunned observers by declaring that the British government was considering formal recognition of a “state of Palestine,” including at the U.N.
“This could be one of the things that will help make this process irreversible,” he said.
It’s been clear from the start of the war in Gaza that both Britain and America are seizing on the turmoil to advance their obsession with a “two-state solution.” However, it’s one thing to press for movement towards an "Palestine" state. Unilaterally recognizing it crosses a red line.
Official recognition of a “Palestine” that doesn’t exist is part of the strategy of diplomatic warfare against Israel promoted by those who want to see the Jewish state destroyed.
Conceptually ridiculous, since it involves recognizing a “state” that has no physical form and no boundaries, it would remove at a stroke the necessity for the Palestinian Arabs to agree to live in peace alongside Israel. Instead, it would incentivize still further their rejection of Israel’s right to exist.
How exactly would such a state be demilitarized? Who would ensure that it had no access to weaponry that could threaten Israeli civilians? What exactly does the U.S. mean by “real security guarantees” for Israel?
Is it suggesting these would be enforced by the Hamas-collaborating United Nations, perhaps? “Real security guarantees” like U.N. resolution 1701 in 2006? The one that called for the area between the Israel-Lebanon border and the Litani River to be cleared of all armed forces other than the Lebanese army and U.N. peacekeepers? The area where, instead, Hezbollah has sited 150,000 missiles, which it may unleash upon Israel any moment now, and from where it is launching daily attacks?
Until now, Britain and America have rightfully opposed unilateral recognition of a Palestinian Arab state as an act of malicious aggression against Israel. Now they are proposing to join in.
And what a time to announce this, when Israel is in the throes of a war for its existence after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. While the IDF is making painful progress towards dismantling Hamas, Britain and America have now given the terror outfit an enormous incentive to keep fighting.
Other remarks by Cameron were equally preposterous. He said that recognizing a “state of Palestine” would pressure Israel, which he blamed for the absence of such a state. The last 30 years, he asserted, have been a story of Israel’s failure to provide security to its citizens by preventing a “state of Palestine.”
This denies reality. The Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been offered a state of their own, either by Israel or with its agreement, but have always turned it down and resorted instead to terrorism and war.
The reason Israel has no security is because the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union have mischaracterized the war of extermination against Israel as a conflict over territory. They have accordingly pressured Israel to make endless concessions that undermined its security.
They have also continued to fund the Palestinian Authority despite the genocidal agenda against Israel and Jews that it shares with Hamas, and with which it indoctrinates the Palestinian Arabs with murderous hatred of the kind that erupted in the Oct. 7 pogrom.
Piously, Cameron also intoned that Israel would need to see all hostages released, with a guarantee that Hamas can no longer launch attacks on Israel and with Hamas’s leadership gone from Gaza.
Such a guarantee depends upon the destruction of Hamas as a military force. Yet Britain and the U.S. are actively undermining this by their constant pressure on Israel to step up supplies of humanitarian aid to Gaza, some 66% of which—according to Israeli Security Agency director Ronen Bar—is being stolen by Hamas for its own use.
Both America and Britain have provided military aid to Israel. The resupply of weaponry from the United States is critical. The United Kingdom is sending an aircraft carrier to the region to replace the American one that is leaving. Both Britain and America spoke out against the vile South African “genocide” case at the International Court of Justice.
Yet in their obsession with the “two-state solution” as the path to peace in the Middle East, both Washington and London display quite staggering political blindness and stupidity.
They propose to declare the existence of a Palestine state that the Palestinian Arabs have always refused to accept. They treat Hamas and a Palestinian state as if they are unrelated to each other. Get rid of Hamas and presto, a Palestinian Arab state will end this hundred-year war.
But Hamas are Palestinian Arabs. They were joined in their atrocities on Oct. 7 by hundreds of “ordinary” Palestinian Arabs from Gaza. The P.A.’s governing party, Fatah, supported the pogrom. A Palestinian Arab state would be a Hamastan on steroids and potentially run as such by Iran or Qatar.
In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, who is used as a conduit for the Biden administration’s anti-Israel trial balloons, wrote that the proposed recognition of “Palestine” signals an awareness that the United States “will never have the global legitimacy, the NATO allies and the Arab and Muslim allies it needs to take on Iran in a more aggressive manner unless we stop letting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold our policy hostage.”
This venomous distortion breathtakingly blames Netanyahu for fighting to defend Israel against genocidal Iran. Yet it was the appeasement of Iran by the Obama and Biden administrations that led to the Oct. 7 pogrom, the unleashing of Iranian war across the region and now three deaths and dozens of casualties among Americans.
To imply that the Iranian regime which screams “Death to America!” and aims to Islamize the world is only waging this war because of the absence of a Palestinian state is as unhinged as it is disgusting.
The Biden administration is riddled with vicious haters of Israel holding key Middle East policy positions. And, of course, Britain is the original cause of this conflict, having torn up its commitment under the Palestine Mandate to settle the Jews throughout Palestine and offering part of it to their Arab attackers instead—their original “two-state solution.”
In the 1930s, Britain’s response to Palestinian Arab pogroms against Palestinian Jews was to reward the Arabs with a proposed state of their own.
In 2024, Britain’s response to a Palestinian Arab pogrom against Israeli Jews is to reward the Arabs with a proposed state of their own.
The supercilious Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton resembles nothing so much as a British Colonial Office poohbah, busy selling the pass in Mandatory Palestine while looking down his nose at the uppity Jews.
While Israel is forced to sacrifice the flower of its youth as it fights for its life, its so-called allies are placing the West itself in increasing peril as they threaten to hang the Jewish state out to dry once again to conceal their own malevolent ineptitude.
And:
Is our state Department much better than the failed U.N?
Is our state Department much better than the failed U.N?
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The State Department Has Lost the Plot Noah Rothman
Posted By Ruth King
Since the October 7 attacks, the State Department has exposed for all to see a level of rot within the institution that was once apparent only to Republicans, who would inherit the agency from Democrats only to find their imperatives implemented with conspicuous lethargy — if they were implemented at all.
Like so many agencies within Joe Biden’s administration — up to and including the White House itself — the State Department is struggling to navigate a mutiny among the lower-level functionaries who are beside themselves over the president’s support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. Unlike most of those other executive agencies, Foggy Bottom has tried to appease the insurrectionaries under its roof. The latest example of that foolhardy impulse is apparent in its reported commitment to fast-track American recognition of a Palestinian state.
Axios reporter Barak Ravid has the details:
The Biden administration is linking possible normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia to the creation of a pathway for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of its post-war strategy. This initiative is based on the administration’s efforts prior to Oct. 7 to negotiate a mega-deal with Saudi Arabia that included a peace agreement between the kingdom and Israel.
Ravid adds that the U.S. could pursue this strategy either passively, by declining to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution admitting the territories as full member states, or actively by recognizing Palestine directly and encouraging its allies to do the same. Either way, it is an ideologically blinkered enterprise.
It is not as though there is no rationale for supporting Palestinian statehood today, even within the context of Israel’s anti-Hamas campaign. As Ravid notes, it could serve as an inducement to accelerate Saudi Arabia’s recognition of Israel. Past presidencies, Trump’s included, have paid lip service to the desirability of a Palestinian state as an aspirational objective as part of a broader regional normalization strategy. But to consent to that approach today would be to reward terrorism.
As many have rationally speculated, including Joe Biden himself, the impetus that led Hamas to execute the October 7 massacre was to advance the interests of the terrorist group’s Iranian benefactors by derailing the ongoing normalization process between Israel and its Sunni neighbors. Simply deeming Palestine a state as a direct result of Hamas’s attack will not impose sobriety on the Palestinian Authority, which the White House seems to regard as the only viable alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza. It would only create incentives for more terrorism — conduct in which the party in control of the Palestinian Authority is more than capable of engaging in, too.
The second, most intractable obstacle before Palestinian statehood is that “Palestine” is a fiction. No rational observer looks at the two noncontiguous territories in the West Bank and Gaza — two places with distinct governments (which, by the way, hate each other), disparate economies and foreign policies, and wildly divergent social contracts — and sees the Westphalian ideal. It’s especially telling that the State Department is evincing so much frustration with the uncooperative world that it appears inclined to simply impose statehood on the Palestinian territories in the absence of any reliable Palestinian negotiating partner. The whole initiative is an outgrowth of a variety of narratives to which America’s diplomatic class is beholden but do not much reflect the world it is tasked with understanding.
For these reasons, I expect this trial balloon to land with a thud. But those who floated it won’t stop trying. For at least a decade, it has been obvious that the absence of a “peace process” is no obstacle to peace in the region. Indeed, the peace process itself — and the processors committed to it — undermine their own objectives by insisting on a resolution to the Palestinian question as a prerequisite for the normalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors.
It is monomaniacal in the extreme to attempt to exhume the unresolved Palestinian issue from its internment now, in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on the Jewish state in its history. But if the State Department has any enduring convictions at all, one of them is to that peculiar monomania.
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More radical in cahoots
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Why are Anti-Trump Prosecutors Visiting the Biden White House?
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton appeared on Newsmax TV with Dr. Sebastian Gorka to discuss the latest on Trump's criminal prosecutions, and more!
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The Two-State Delusion
The Biden administration is leading a push to recognize a Palestinian state that will be a danger to the security of Israel
BY ELLIOTT ABRAMS
Everyone knows what to do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Arrange the “two-state solution.” That has been a commonplace for decades, going back to the Oslo Accords, all the international conferences, the “Roadmap,” and the efforts by a series of American presidents and their staffs of ardent peace processors.
In the West, the call for a “two-state solution” is mostly a magical incantation these days. Diplomats and politicians want the Gaza war to stop. They want a way out that seems fair and just to voters and makes for good speeches. But they are not even beginning to grapple with the issues that negotiating a “two-state solution” raises, and they are not seriously asking what kind of state “Palestine” would be. Instead they simply imagine a peaceful, well-ordered place called “Palestine” and assure everyone that it is just around the corner. By doing so they avoid asking the most important question: Would not an autocratic, revanchist Palestinian state be a threat to peace?
No matter: The belief in the “two-state solution” is as fervent today as ever. The German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said it’s the “only solution” and Britain’s defense minister chimed in that “I don’t think we get to a solution unless we have a two-state solution.” Not to be outdone, U.N. Secretary General Guterres said, “The refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people, are unacceptable.” The EU’s Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said recently, “I don’t think we should talk about the Middle East peace process anymore. We should start talking specifically about the two-state-solution implementation process.” What if Israel does not agree, and views a Palestinian state as an unacceptable security threat? Borrell’s answer was that “One thing is clear—Israel cannot have the veto right to the self-determination of the Palestinian people. The United Nations recognizes and has recognized many times the self-determination right of the Palestinian people. Nobody can veto it.”
In the United States, 49 Senate Democrats (out of 51) just joined to support a resolution that, according to Sen. Brian Schatz, is “a message to the world that the only path forward is a two-state solution.” Biden administration officials have been a bit more circumspect in public. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, Secretary of State Blinken told his interviewer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, that regional integration “has to include a pathway to a Palestinian state.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called for “a two-state solution with Israel’s security guaranteed.” And President Biden meandered around an important security point: “there are a number of types of two-state solutions. There’s a number of countries that are members of the U.N. that … don’t have their own military; a number of states that have limitations, and so I think there’s ways in which this can work.”
What if ‘what the Palestinian people want’ is mostly to destroy Israel?
The Biden administration, then, joins all enlightened opinion in saying there must be a Palestinian state, but adds that it must not have an army. No other precondition seems to exist for the creation of that state once the Palestinian Authority has been “revamped” or “revitalized” so that it becomes “effective.” And most recently, Blinken has asked his staff for policy options that include formal recognition of a Palestinian state as soon as the war in Gaza ends. This would be a massive change in U.S. policy, which for decades has insisted that a Palestinian state can only emerge from direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But the pressure is growing, it seems, to skip niceties like negotiations and move quickly to implement the “two-state solution.”
There are three things wrong with this picture. First, none of the current proposals even acknowledges, much less overcomes, the obstacles that have always prevented the “two-state solution.” Second, the “effective governance” reforms fall very far short of creating a decent state in which Palestinians can live freely. And most important, any imaginable Palestinian state will be a dangerous threat to Israel.
Start with the issues—beyond violence and terror—that negotiations to create a Palestinian state must resolve and are being ignored. Take borders, for instance: Where are they? In the round of negotiations in 2008, after the 2007 Annapolis Conference, Palestinian representatives demanded that Israel get out of the West Bank towns of Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim—populations 20,000 and 38,000, respectively. Are those still Palestinian demands? How many of the Israelis living in the West Bank must leave? Must the new state of Palestine must be judenrein?
But those are the simpler border issues; the tough one is Jerusalem. Will East Jerusalem be the capital of a Palestinian state? If so, what does that mean? The old Arab Quarter only, or the Christian and Armenian quarters too? Do their residents have any say in this? Is it actually being proposed that the Western Wall would be the Israeli border, and if you stand there and look up you are looking at another country? Or that David’s Citadel and the Tower of David would be in Palestine? A look at the map of Jerusalem shows how impractical is the division of Jerusalem again if the city is to thrive, but what about politics? Which Israeli politicians of the left or center are going to be in favor of dividing Jerusalem again, going back to the pre-1967 days—and doing it in the aftermath of the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7?
The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 is sometimes suggested as the basis for negotiations, but it demands “Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.” More border troubles! Especially since the U.S. has recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which includes areas claimed by the Lebanese.
And what about the issue of “refugees?” UNRWA, the U.N.’s discredited but powerful Palestinian refugee agency, says there are 5.9 million “Palestinian refugees,” using its definition that includes generation after generation no matter what citizenship they have. Will there be a “right of return?” In the negotiations in 2008, the private Palestinian demand was much smaller—in the range of 10,000 or 15,000. But Israeli negotiators rejected those numbers, taking a position of principle against the “right of return” but also noting the impossible problem of deciding who would qualify for it. Will Palestinian politicians agree to abandon it once and for all? If not, how will negotiations succeed?
Second, suppose negotiations do succeed and the borders of a Palestinian state are drawn. Does anyone care what is going on inside those borders? In January Secretary Blinken said, “It’s I think very important for the Palestinian people that they have governance that can be effective. ...” They need a Palestinian Authority, he said, that can “actually deliver what the Palestinian people want and need. ...”
There are some words missing in all the calls for a Palestinian state—words like democracy, human rights, and liberty. EU Foreign Minister Borrell said in 2022 that “our message to the incoming Israeli government, which we hope will confirm the country’s full commitment to the shared values of democracy and rule of law, and with which we hope to engage in serious conversation on the conflict and the need to re-open the political horizon for the Palestinian population.” This is not new: In his speech in Israel in 2013, President Obama called for “Two states for two peoples. … [T]he only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.”
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It’s Biden who’s playing politics with the Gaza war, not Bibi
Netanyahu is trying to defeat Hamas. The administration’s efforts—and its fictional “doctrine”—seek to depose the Israeli prime minister and re-elect the president.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a master political schemer and a cynical seeker of power is so deeply embedded in the public consciousness that there is literally nothing he can do without being accused of acting only to seek some sort of advantage over his opponents. Yet in the current crisis as he seeks to lead his wobbly unity government to achieve what may well be two mutually exclusive objectives—the elimination of Hamas and the freeing of the remaining hostages still being kept captive in Gaza—while being besieged by criticism at home and abroad, it may be that Netanyahu is not the one who is really playing politics.
While no one should ever underestimate the prime minister’s capacity for maneuvering even at a time when, after the Oct. 7 disaster, the end of his career would seem to be in sight, it’s not he who is cynically using the hostage negotiations or the talk about what would follow the end of the war in Gaza to score political points. Whatever one may think of Netanyahu’s character or policies, or whether he should be forced out of office because of the catastrophe that occurred on his watch, the person who is playing politics with the security of Israel and the fate of its citizens is President Joe Biden.
Netanyahu probably still hopes to salvage his reputation and serve out the rest of his term after being returned to office in November 2022. But the widespread characterizations in both the Israeli and the international press of his stand on the hostage negotiations, the conduct of the war and what will happen in Gaza once the fighting ends, as merely another example of his desperate attempts to cling to office is largely inaccurate. He may be pursuing two goals that cannot both be achieved as well as clinging to his pre-war strategic objective of getting Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. Yet the real scheming going on right now is in Washington, not Jerusalem. It is Biden who is playing a double game in which he seems willing to ensure Hamas’s survival in power in order to settle scores with Netanyahu, as well as to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.
A hostage deal trap
That’s the context for the discussions about the latest proposal for a ceasefire and the release of 136 hostages—some living and some presumed dead—in which the double-dealing government of Qatar is playing a central role. Whether or not this effort, like previous ones, will be shot down by Hamas, Netanyahu will continue to face enormous pressure from both the families of the hostages and the United States to either pause or end the war.
Netanyahu’s government is currently beset by a host of domestic and foreign critics. The hostage families understandably want it to do anything to save their loved ones and will—like anyone in that awful position—demand concessions in the form of freeing terrorists or halting the Gaza campaign, whether or not it’s in the country’s best interests. They are being boosted by Netanyahu’s political foes. Most of the Israelis who spent the months before Oct. 7 demonstrating for Netanyahu’s ouster and against judicial reform have put politics aside in the name of a unified effort to defeat Hamas. But the hard-core anti-Bibi resistance has shown that, if given the opportunity, it will try to return to the streets with the aim of forcing the prime minister out of office.
At the same time, Netanyahu is also under fire from those Israelis who fault him for not prosecuting the war against Hamas more vigorously. In particular, they blame the prime minister for bowing to American and international pressure to allow aid to flow into parts of Gaza still under Hamas control, which, though ostensibly a humanitarian gesture, is almost certainly sustaining the terrorist forces and enabling them to continue to hold on. His right-wing critics are correct that the hostage deal is a trap for both Israel and Netanyahu.
Biden’s recycled doctrine
But looming over his domestic troubles is an even bigger problem. Biden and his foreign-policy team may still be sticking to their promise of supporting Israel in the war and the goal of eliminating Hamas. Still, as the war heads towards its fifth month, Biden’s practice of talking out of both sides of his mouth on the conflict—backing Israel while also bashing and pressuring it to scale down its military campaign—has escalated to the point where a tipping point may soon be reached. American involvement in the hostage talks seem not so much to be focused on freeing the captives as they are on hamstringing the Israeli war effort and wrong-footing Netanyahu.
While Washington’s focus on demands for the creation of a Palestinian state as part of a far-reaching postwar deal involving Saudi normalization may be wildly unrealistic, it is only understandable if seen in the context of a gambit to topple the Israeli coalition while winning Biden back the favor of left-wing and Arab-American voters whose anger over his supporting Israel’s right to self-defense has imperiled his re-election campaign.
There may be some credulous observers who take seriously the so-called “Biden doctrine” being touted by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that will supposedly solve all the problems of the Middle East. Friedman has achieved new relevance in the last year because he has served as the administration’s faithful mouthpiece, using his perch at the paper to promote the Biden administration’s pathetic weakness and incompetent maneuvers as brilliant policy-making. He also shares the same bitter feelings toward Netanyahu as the Biden team of Obama administration alumni, who will never forgive. him for opposing their destructive policies on the Palestinians and especially their appeasement of Iran. Their ideas are—like everything else that emanates from Friedman—merely a tired rehashing of unsuccessful policies of the past that sensible people stopped paying much attention to a long time ago.
It would be a mistake to waste too much time unpacking this “doctrine,” whose particulars are also being put forward by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Democrats, but suffice it to say that its Palestinian state proposal is dead-on-arrival for the same reasons that similar ideas have failed before: Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis want one. The Palestinians have rejected numerous deals that would have given them an independent state because they would have required them to live in peace with Israel. And neither the supposed “moderates” of Fatah that run the Palestinian Authority or Hamas will accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.
The majority of Israelis were ready to welcome a Palestinian state if it meant peace during the period of post-Oslo Accords euphoria in the 1990s. That foolish optimism died in the violence of the Second Intifada that followed Yasser Arafat’s rejection of statehood offers in 2000 and 2001.
More to the point, Israelis know that former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disastrous withdrawal of every soldier, settler and settlement from Gaza in the summer of 2005 led to the creation of an independent Palestinian state in all but name ruled by Hamas. That allowed the terrorists to build a subterranean terrorist fortress from which they fired missiles and rockets on Israel for years, and eventually to launch the terrorist pogroms of Oct. 7.
Can Israelis be fooled?
After that, the Israeli constituency for allowing the Palestinians sovereignty and the freedom of action to repeat those atrocities from either a rebuilt Gaza or a state in Judea and Samaria that would likely also fall under Hamas rule became nearly nonexistent.
Nor should many Israelis, including Netanyahu, be fooled into thinking that a Palestinian state will convince the Saudis to normalize relations and join them in a grand alliance against Iran. No matter what they say publicly, the Saudis aren’t going to risk the wrath of the Muslim world by making a deal with Israel in the foreseeable future and are perfectly satisfied with the close under-the-table relations, including on security, they have with the Jewish state now.
Nor is it likely that anything that Biden does will undo the damage he did in his first three years in office during which he tried to resurrect former President Barack Obama’s dangerous Iran nuclear deal, while distancing the United States from both the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia. This strengthened and emboldened Iran, reviving the threat of Iranian-backed terrorism from the Houthis and other forces that Biden can no longer ignore after the deaths of three U.S. servicemen in Jordan this past week.
It’s also clear that Biden’s attempts to balance his support for Israel and not stopping the flow of arms resupply that enable the continuation of the war (which he has threatened to halt) with talk of a Palestinian state and gestures like sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence against Arabs are nothing more than cheap political maneuvers.
The narrative about “settler violence” is largely fictional since—although a few residents of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria have broken the law in confrontations with local Arabs—the overwhelming majority of the violence taking place comes from the other direction: the routine daily violent attacks on Jews in the territories. Those Arab attacks have escalated since Oct. 7 as Hamas cells have sought to create a second front against Israel. Yet Biden ignores this and instead talks about relatively rare incidents of Jewish violence.
Biden’s sanctions—a case of legal overkill against four insignificant people—was an attempt to change the conversation about him in Michigan among Arab-American voters. And the floating of Palestinian statehood is similarly a way to convince his party’s intersectional left-wing activist base that hates Israel (and which is in open revolt against his policies) to calm down and return to the fold in order to beat Trump.
Toppling Netanyahu
The only part of the Biden plan that is at all realistic is its impact on Israeli politics. Ending the war on Hamas prior to its complete defeat would topple the coalition of nationalist and religious parties that won a 64-seat majority in the last election. The idea is to try to make Netanyahu choose between the war aims that he has pledged himself to and the freedom of the hostages, and to tempt him with talk of Saudi diplomatic recognition. It also sets up the prime minister to be criticized for prioritizing keeping his government together, along with his hold on power over the fate of the hostages or even the theoretical possibility of normalization with the Saudis.
What that formulation doesn’t take into account is that the will to continue the war against Hamas until it is wiped out isn’t a matter of pleasing right-wing extremist voters or his coalition partners. It’s what the overwhelming majority of Israelis are demanding since they know that anything less than Hamas’s eradication will be a formula for more terrorist horrors in the future.
Netanyahu is in an impossible political position because he can’t both save the hostages and defeat Hamas. And it’s made it even harder by the kind of sniping at him from the military and security establishment, which is equally if not more responsible for the Oct. 7 disaster, and also preaching defeatism about the war in anonymous interviews given the Times. If he chooses to abandon the war effort in order to gain some cheap popularity by obtaining the freedom of the hostages—as he did in 2011 in the disastrous Gilad Shalit hostage-release deal—he might hold on to office for a while at the head of a coalition involving many of his opponents. But it would be a betrayal of his principles, his voters and the security of his country.
No matter how he navigates the current crisis or whether he survives in office, he seems not so much to be playing politics as his opponents claim as clinging to the only stand that makes any sense if Israel is to truly ensure that there will be no more Oct. 7 attacks. Biden, on the other hand, is doing nothing but playing to his party base, seeking to convince them that he shares their contempt for Israeli lives that is a key element in the calls for a ceasefire before Hamas is eliminated.
The president’s prioritizing the winning of Michigan and the seduction of his party’s many Israel-haters can’t be dignified by Friedman’s foolish talk of a doctrine that will supposedly solve the problems of the region with a Palestinian state that nobody really wants. His cynical tricks may or may not gain him votes, but the real loser in his politicization of Middle East policy is the security of a Jewish state that is being endangered by his vendetta against Netanyahu.
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