Israel Must Not Trust Biden

Biden prides himself on being a longstanding supporter of Israel, but his recent decision to withhold weapons from the IDF — bombs and artillery shells — in an attempt to pressure Israel not to invade Rafah in order to dismantle the last four Hamas battalions that remain intact, is a startling reminder that he is not to be trusted. For should he have succeeded in his effort to keep the IDF out of Rafah, and hence unable to destroy Hamas as a military force, that would have allowed Hamas to present itself as the victor in the Gaza War, still standing despite everything that Israel could throw at it. Hamas could regroup, and then do as it has threatened, to repeat the attack of October 7 “again and again.”

More on Biden’s history of dealings with Israel can be found here: “Still trust Biden on Israel? Don’t – opinion,” by Martin Oliner, Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2024:

US President Joe Biden has told his story about his conversation with Golda Meir five weeks ahead of the 1973 Yom Kippur War countless times. 

Meir told the young senator from Delaware not to cast doubt on Israel’s future, even in times of great peril for the Jewish state.

“Don’t worry, senator,” she said. “We Jews have a secret weapon in our fight: We have no place else to go.”

But a different conversation with an Israeli prime minister has become more relevant since Biden’s shockingly disturbing announcement to CNN last week that he would halt shipments of American weapons to Israel for the first time if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a major invasion of Rafah.

At a closed-door meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1982, Biden warned then-prime minister Menachem Begin that military aid for Israel’s war in Lebanon could be cut off. Begin responded furiously.

“Don’t threaten us with cutting off aid to give up our principles,” Begin said. “I’m not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”

Biden has always painted himself as pro-Israel, but it should have surprised no one that he merely carried out the threat that he issued to the Jewish state 42 years ago.

The response in Israel has been to blame Netanyahu for harming relations with the US, the IDF for not defeating Hamas fast enough, or decades of Israeli policies of outsourcing making munitions to America, in part because hey, it’s free.

Don’t.

Blame falls on Biden

The buck stops with the president of the United States, who has made a strategic decision to abandon his country’s top ally at a time of its greatest need. He has insisted that Israel act only defensively even though wars are always won offensively. He has decided to try to prevent Israel from achieving its important goals of defeating Hamas, preventing further attacks from Gaza, and bringing the hostages home. 

Yes, those same hostages whose families have been to the White House. The American citizens Biden spoke about as if they were family.

Biden knew he was betraying them. He knows Israel has enough armaments to defeat the final four Hamas brigades in Rafah without a new shipment, but it has a severe shortage of leverage in hostage talks with Hamas.

Whatever leverage Israel had was taken away in a couple of sentences the Arab world saw Biden utter on CNN. It’s no wonder the negotiations once again ended in failure, following the sabotage. 

In his interview with Erin Burnett on CNN on May 8, just a day after he had declared yet again his undying and “ironclad” commitment to Israel before a Jewish audience, he threatened to withhold weapons from Israel if it ignored his demand to halt its advance at the perimeter of Rafah. Biden was convinced that Israel would be unable to persuaded more than a few hundred thousand Gazans to leave Rafah. He was wrong; in just two weeks Israel managed to convince 950,000 Gazans to leave Rafah for places farther north, to the town of Al-Mawasi and other sites in central Gaza.

Imagine if Biden had used that interview to threaten Qatar with becoming an international outcast instead of threatening Israel. He could have announced that if Qatar did not bring the hostages home, America would remove its military base from the country and bar American universities from having campuses in a state that sponsors terror groups like Hamas.

Qatar plays a double game, hosting a large American airbase at Al-Udeid, while it continues to prop up Hamas financially and to keep close ties to Iran. The Americans have turned a blind eye to Qatar’s connections to Iran and also to its support for Hamas, which means the emirate is hardly the honest broker that it has presented itself to be, promoting itself as the key intermediary in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over an exchange of hostages for prisoners.

.Biden’s complete reversal of policy – that “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s security. on May 7 becoming a halt to the transfer of bombs and artillery shells to the IDF on May 8. There is still time for Biden to backtrack on his policy of withholding weapons to Israel. He could declare, for example, that Israel has now shown the Americans that its plan for Rafah is working, because — contrary to all expectations — it has managed, and in only two weeks, to convince 950,000 Gazans to evacuate the city. Some 300,000 others have now squeezed themselves into the Al-Turan. Now the battlefield, largely emptied of civilians, has been prepared. Or he could announce that with Iran now believed to be able to produce a nuclear weapon “within a matter of weeks” this is no time to give Tehran reason to believe there is daylight between Washington and Jerusalem.