By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — Who were the parties most damaged by a series of brilliant operations carried out by Israel against its terrorist enemies? At the top of the list are the terrorists and their sponsors. By killing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif in Gaza and Hezbollah chief of staff Fuad Shukr in Beirut, the Jewish state not only exacted retribution for the rivers of Jewish blood this trio had shed over the years. It also dealt powerful blows to the collective terrorist organizations’ ability to operate, and most of all, undermined the power and image of their chief sponsor and instigators: the Islamist regime of Iran.
Their discomfort ought to be a cause for rejoicing among Israel’s friends and allies, as well as the governments and peoples of the West, against whom these Islamist killers are also waging war. But it isn’t. Or at least that isn’t the reaction of the Biden-Harris administration and its leading press cheerleaders. On the contrary, Washington is acting as if it was the chief victim of the slaying of terrorists who were, at least in theory, among those designated by the U.S. government as wanted men.
Their discomfort goes beyond fears initially voiced in the aftermath of the Israeli strikes about an all-out war being ignited between Israel and Iran, and its proxies. To listen to and read the statements coming out of the administration, it’s clear that their anguish is about something more fundamental than the understandable uncertainty about what might happen next.
The subtext to all of their comments centers on two clear concerns.
Embarrassing those in the White House
One is that Israel’s actions are interfering with Washington’s desire to end the current conflicts with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon as soon as possible and on terms that will not unduly discomfort Iran. When asked to comment on the killings of these terrorists, all President Joe Biden could muster in response was to say, in a rare live comment, that “it has not helped” his push for a ceasefire in Gaza that would save Hamas.
The other is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is embarrassing the Americans.
His willingness to move decisively in this manner is not merely shining a light on the administration’s weakness when dealing on the international stage. It’s also having the effect of highlighting the fact that the United States is currently led by a person whose physical and mental fitness is very much in question, causing both friends and foes to wonder who, if anyone, is truly in charge in Washington right now?
This is causing much consternation among the foreign-policy establishment with its leading mouthpieces, like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, lamenting that Netanyahu isn’t prioritizing the administration’s interests. But even in his latest broadside against Netanyahu, Friedman acknowledged that the United States is being forced to choose what to do about an Iran that has, thanks to the appeasement policies of Biden and former President Barack Obama, not only become a threshold nuclear power. It’s also now an “imperial power” in the Middle East that is dominating the region and forcing conflicts with Israel that most Arabs want no part of.
This goes beyond the “daylight” between Israel and the United States that Obama sought and that has also been a key element of the relationship between the two countries under Biden. Simply put, while Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris never tire of saying that they support Israel’s right to defend itself, what they really mean by this is that they want Jerusalem to do as little as possible to stop its enemies from killing its people.
An Israeli policy that aims at decisively defeating Hamas in Gaza, forcing Hezbollah to stop firing on northern Israel, and, above all, making it clear to Iran that the price of their war to eliminate the Jewish state is one they cannot pay would seem to completely align with American interests. But not with those of Biden and Harris.
What they want from Netanyahu is peace and quiet. And an end to the war on Hamas on virtually any terms — and the ones that Harris sketched out last week that call for a complete Israeli retreat from Gaza would essentially hand a victory to the group that committed the mass murder of 1,200 people on Oct. 7 — would largely stifle the complaints of the left-wing of the Democratic Party about their being insufficiently hostile to Israel. That, as well as the dubious claim that this would be a triumph for American diplomacy, would help her to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.
A power vacuum
When Biden spoke of Israel not being helpful, he wasn’t so much speaking about the claim that an Israeli surrender of its interests would free the more than 100 hostages still being held by Hamas. Rather, he was referring to the administration’s ongoing efforts to pose as a decisive actor on the global stage when, in fact, it is anything but that.
According to the new conventional wisdom of the day being peddled by the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, Netanyahu is playing the role of an American foe seeking to take advantage of the chaos at the White House. With Biden’s condition and status uncertain in the wake of the coup that was executed against him by his party’s leaders, including Obama — and now Harris seeking — with the eager assistance of a compliant liberal corporate mainstream media to transform her image from one of a colossal failure to that of a great leader, the talk of a power vacuum in Washington is not metaphorical.
That is why ardent Israel-bashers like Johns Hopkins professor Vali Nasr are being quoted in the Times claiming that Netanyahu is the moral equivalent of “Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un” for having the temerity to kill terrorists. In the same piece, J Street co-founder Daniel Levy argued that Israel was “humiliating” Iran in a manner that was “another crossing of multiple lines” and was, by extension, hurting Biden and Harris’s efforts to improve their relationship with Tehran.
The argument is that doing this is making it seem as if, in Nasr’s words, “America is not in control.” But that formulation has it backwards. The whole point of the Middle East policies pursued first by Obama — then Biden and now by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken or Harris — is that it is Iran that is in control, not the United States.
It is true that there is widespread doubt about American leadership right now. But that has nothing to do with what Netanyahu does or doesn’t do. With a president so feeble that he was forced to end his re-election campaign weeks before his party was about to renominate him and an equally weak-willed replacement like Harris now standing in for him, it’s little wonder that the international community cannot trust or rely on the United States to play a coherent, let alone a decisive, role on the world stage.
That didn’t begin with Biden’s obvious decline in the last year. From the moment he took office in January 2021, his foreign policy was one that inspired contempt among America’s foes and concern on the part of its allies. His feckless pursuit of another round of appeasement of Iran, and then the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, marked his presidency as one whose hallmark was defeat and disgrace — something that directly led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and ultimately, to Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel.
Since then, the American policy has been to slow-walk aid to Israel in such a manner as to force it to give up its justified quest to remove Hamas from control of Gaza. While the administration is willing to help defend Israel against attacks from Iran, the price it wants Israel to pay for that assistance is to do little or nothing to pre-empt future assaults. Were Netanyahu to comply — both by agreeing to the humiliating ceasefire terms outlined by Harris and by ending all efforts to substantially harm the terrorist groups by killing the criminals that lead them — it would make life easier for Washington and, no doubt, aid Harris’s election campaign. But it would also substantially damage Israel’s security while also enhancing Iran’s quest to gain regional hegemony. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that, to Jerusalem’s consternation, the administration has essentially conceded that it will not prevent Tehran from achieving its nuclear ambitions — something that is an existential threat to Israel as well as a terrible blow to U.S. and Western interests.
Doing America’s dirty work
There is genuine uncertainty about what will happen in the coming days, weeks and months until November, and then the inauguration of a new American president next January. Still, the assumption that an assertion of Israeli strength and a demonstration of Iran’s inability to protect its terrorist minions will make the world more dangerous is misguided. The more the Islamist foes of the West and Israel fear for their lives, the more likely it is that they will be deterred from further mayhem, allowing both Israelis and Americans to be safer. By killing Fukr, Deif and Haniyeh — and giving the mullahs in Tehran reason to worry about their own security — Israel was defending its people against Islamist murderers and doing a job that Americans needed done, whether or not it served the political and policy interests of Biden or Harris.
While Israeli leaders must always seek to stay as close as they can to their American counterparts, that is an impossible task for Netanyahu right now and one that could harm his own country’s security. As long as American policy is dedicated to appeasing the mullahs in Tehran and propping up their terrorist allies, coupled with a leadership vacuum in Washington, Israel cannot just sit back and watch as its enemies grow more powerful and bolder in their efforts to kill Jews.
It isn’t Netanyahu’s job to bolster an American administration that is determined to project weakness rather than strength. If America now appears weak or not in control, the blame rests on Biden, Harris and their Washington cheerleaders. Rather than attacking Netanyahu for doing his job, Americans who care about their country’s security should be cheering Israel for doing their country’s dirty work for it twhat a failed administration either won’t or cannot do.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).