(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)
Any evaluation of Joe Biden’s meandering musings on current events in Israel and the Middle East must begin with former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ observation about Joe Biden in 2014: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” If even a broken clock is right twice a day, Biden’s consistent record of failure is a stupendous achievement for which he should receive acknowledgment for his longevity, less so his perspicacity. But from that standpoint, his wavering support for Israel, continued flirtation with Iran, and yearning to establish a Palestinian state, only add to his flawless run of diplomatic fiascos.
It is unfair and inaccurate to state that Biden and his minions “support” Hamas, a genocidal terrorist group, but it is fair and accurate to deduce from his recent statements and actions that Biden does not want Hamas to lose. If one of Israel’s war aims is the elimination of Hamas’ terror capability and any political control in Gaza, then clearly Biden is at odds with Israel, and we should recognize that and, politely, disavow his strategy and oppose it vigorously. Biden still perceives Hamas as a player in Middle East geo-politics, and even a partner in negotiations with Israel. He wants a stalemate. If so, he is guilty of “October 6” thinking – a failure to internalize and draw ramifications from Hamas’ genocidal, inhuman, savage attack on Israel and its continued incarceration of innocent Israeli civilians. And in his relentless desire to carve up the land of Israel and create an irredentist Palestinian state, he not only defies the will of the Israeli government and the overwhelming majority of our people. He is also guilty of “4 Iyar 1948” thinking – trying to turn back the clock almost 74 years to the day before Israel became an independent nation.
How can one man be so wrong, so frequently? A full answer is beyond my analysis – it perplexed Bob Gates as well – but there is one fundamental misconception under which Biden and his diplomats operate that Israelis often prefer to ignore and that we must begin to assert without hesitation or equivocation before once again, we win the war and lose the diplomacy.
When I first visited Israel as a child in the late 1960’s, I was warned not to pick up anything from the street. Back then, Arab terrorists would conceal bombs in coins, empty boxes, appliances, backpacks, and the like. In the 1970’s, Arab terrorists graduated to airplane hijackings, then assaults on schools and homes and public buses, and missiles and rockets from Lebanon. In the 1980’s, vehicle stoning and bombing became more popular, not that the previous methods of murdering Jews were abandoned. The 1990’s saw an intensification of the stoning and bombing, then accelerated into suicide bombings of buses and commercial establishments that became a staple of Israeli life in the 2000’s until Operation Defensive Shield.
After the expulsion of Jews from Gaza in 2005, the era began of rockets and missiles on the communities surrounding Gaza, the Negev, and parts of the coastal plain and the heartland, which prompted several brief forays into Gaza that ameliorated the situation but briefly and ineffectively. In the 2010’s, the Arabs popularized shooting at passengers in Jewish vehicles, stabbing random Jews on Israel’s streets, and vehicular ramming of pedestrians standing on street corners. We forget how prevalent that was in the last several years only because of the horrific invasion of Israel on Shemini Atzeret and its aftermath, which has snuffed out more than 1400 Jewish lives to date.
The inexorable conclusion that we tend to overlook is that we reside on this holy land adjacent to many people who wish to murder us in every which way they can conceive and whose lives are dedicated, it seems, to contriving new ways to murder Jews. They will never reconcile themselves to Israel’s existence, something that was discounted by the pointless purveyors of peace processes as well as the Oslo and Gaza Expulsions delusionists.
I cannot say that they all want to destroy us – the Arabs of the land of Israel and the Arab countries surrounding Israel – and certainly not all are working towards our demise. But it seems a reasonable conclusion that few would mourn our disappearance. That is the real problem facing Israeli society, even once the hostilities in Gaza and Lebanon conclude on what we hope is a victorious note. The real problem is that we will still be living with people – young and old, male and female – who dream of planting bombs on the roadside, shooting into Jewish homes and cars, stabbing shoppers, and ramming pedestrians – and getting handsomely rewarded for it by the very entity to which Joe Biden wants to award statehood. This is the real conundrum to which we will have to activate our creative minds in order to solve.
The sad reality is that the Arabs do not want us here. Period. A state will not satisfy their ambitions; it will only stoke their desire to destroy us completely and will be used accordingly, much like Hamas took the billions of dollars in foreign aid from Europe, the US, Qatar, and others, and used it largely to build a massive and diabolical underground terror network.
In the shorter term, because of our hopes and prayers for peace, we have failed to convey to Biden and company the daily hazards we face in living next to people who want to kill us and eliminate our national home. Antony Blinken can solemnly intone that the new Palestinian state will be “demilitarized” but all that means is either he is a fool or that he takes us for fools. After all, the Oslo Accords promised us a “demilitarized” Palestinian Authority, and then during the 2005 Expulsion, we were promised a “demilitarized” Gaza that would not dare to attack us (rockets, missiles, etc.) or it would pay a devastating price. Well, they are paying a devastating price, but so did we, because of our naïveté, gullibility, wishful thinking, and the ascription to our enemies of our own values and dreams.
They do not share those values and dreams. Contrary to Blinken’s pollyannish ramblings, Gazan mothers and fathers are not like us, and not like Americans. We do not incarcerate innocent hostages in our homes, do not allow our living room floors to conceal openings to tunnels, and do not use our cupboards to store bombs, bullets, rockets, and missiles. Gazan mothers and fathers do not want to build homes; they want to take our homes. Gazan parents send their children to schools where they learn to hate Jews, where they learn that murdering a Jew is admirable and a religious and national imperative. They are not like us. They voted for Hamas.
No friend of Israel could sensibly suggest that an independent Palestinian state is good for Israel and will benefit Israel’s security and the well being of our citizens. It will make us more unsafe and give an unimaginable boost to Iran, supporters of terror, and haters of Israel everywhere. It must be opposed regardless of what the US or UN scheme against us.
There is another reason a Palestinian state is perverse. We are a unique country to be sure – we are rated the fourth happiest country in the world, after all, even now! – but we do not have to constantly prove our uniqueness, especially not in irrational and destructive ways. This is the third time in recent history that we have fought and conquered Gaza. How many times must our soldiers die fighting over the same land? How many times must we be invaded from one territory, repel that invasion, conquer the land of the aggressors, and then be told we cannot keep the land from which we were attacked? That is literally an insane proposition and I am unable to find any historical precedent for such lunacy.
Certainly, the diplomats and striped pants set make much of the vaunted international legal principle declaring the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war or force,” a feature of UN Security Council Resolution 242. Surely that excludes territory acquired in a defensive war but, more pointedly, this proposition seems to apply only to Israel, and no other country, most of whom were directly created or expanded via “the acquisition of territory by war or force.”
The American example is illustrative. One of the fifty United States is the State of New Mexico, whose name should ring a bell. “New” Mexico, meaning that it was part of Mexico, but was ceded by Mexico to the United States after Mexico lost the Mexican American War in 1848. That is literally “the acquisition of territory by war or force,” with the utterly shameless addendum that New Mexico, in its very name, reflects what we are now told is a violation of international law. Nothing changes by adding the moniker “New.” And by most accounts, the Mexican American War was not even a defensive war but a bellicose invasion of Mexico by a US that wanted to expand its land mass and fulfill its “manifest destiny.” Yet, ironically, the only nation with an explicitly, manifest destiny emanating from the Bible is the nation of Israel dwelling on the land of Israel in the land that G-d gave us (Keepgodsland.com).
Almost every nation on earth was founded by “the acquisition of territory by war.” No nation on earth or in history (except for Israel) has repeatedly been attacked from the same territory, conquered it, and then returned it to the invaders to plant the seeds for the next invasion. The United States still retains troops and maintains army bases in Germany and Japan, eighty years after the end of World War II. It still retains New Mexico (and California) and territory it seized from Canada. Russia still retains land it seized after World War II, not to mention its recent adventures in Ukraine. France, Britain, China – all possess territory it conquered in war. And those are just the five members of the UN Security Council. There has to be a limit even to blatant, brazen hypocrisy; at the very least, we should take these claims less seriously than we do our own interests and rights, and talk the language of faith. Maybe it would help if we just renamed Gaza “New Gaza” and annexed it; call it the American way.
For all of the above, we must mount a forceful, uncompromising diplomatic drive rejecting any discussion of a Palestinian state. The incessant chatter in the United States about the dire need for such an entity, and now, not only rewards the terror of October 7 but also paves the way for even more ruinous terror in the future. It must be resisted at all costs.
We should bear in mind that regarding Joe Biden, it is far from certain that he will still be president in six months, much less a year from now. He is again wrong and misguided on yet another foreign policy issue. But we have returned to the land of our fathers, the land that G-d gave us, forever. The near united opposition in Israel today to creating a new terror entity within Israel reflects the steely determination of an eternal people not to be bamboozled again by the vain promises of temporal politicians but to embrace our destiny with enthusiasm and obvious self-sacrifice. We should base our statecraft on certainties, not on doubts, and plan for a long, prosperous, and redemptive future.
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