Every day our ostensible leaders show us how incredibly inept they truly are.
Caroline Glick published what she claimed was a White House four-point program to undermine the government of Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu. Is the program real? Is that the goal of the US administration? We live in an age where one would be hard-pressed to simply write off such a suggestion as nonsense or fantasy.
President Biden spoke with Netanyahu this week and showed his complete lack of understanding of both the Israeli public as well as his own Democratic party. Whereas Biden’s initial response to the barbaric Hamas attack was definitely pro-Israel, the leaked details of the call suggest that the senile leader of the free world warned his Israeli counterpart that Israel has to do more to protect Gazan civilians, dramatically increase aid into the strip, and forget about Rafah after the unfortunate strike on the aid worker vehicles. Only Israel is forbidden from battlefield mistakes. The US blew up a wedding party in Afghanistan, hey but that was part of the fog of war. Biden and Blinken have for the past three months been browbeating Israel, while never saying very much about Hamas holding American hostages or their refusal to release women who must be going through a daily hell with the terrorist scum who are holding them.
Biden laying into Bibi and potentially working with the Israeli left to topple Netanyahu’s kosher government once again shows the complete ineptitude and foolishness of our supposed betters, the credentialed members of the press, entertainment, government and academic realms. Let’s look at the Israeli side. By providing aid, Israel might have stopped a famine which would have looked bad, but it has probably added months to this conflict. Desperate Gazans living alongside fat Hamas terrorists would eventually have brought about a revolt against Hamas. “Give us food!” they would have demanded. But Israel, once again, given rules never applied before in history, has to feed the people who beheaded its babies and raped and murdered its women. What Biden, Blinken, and the clowns of Foggy Bottom do not understand is the Israeli electorate. Israel no longer has a potential majority left government. After decades of failed peace promises and blood flowing in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israelis have simply given up on the peacenik left. The super-left party Meretz disappeared from the Knesset for the first time ever. Labor, whose predecessor Mapai once held all of the Knesset seats, could safely take a Volkswagen Beetle to work and have room to spare. The Bennet/Lapid government between two Bibi governments only came into being with the entry of an Islamist party to fill the missing seats that the left can no longer provide. The ultraorthodox and religious parties will not sit with any hard-left government, and if you remove the 15 or so Arab Knesset members, you do not have any path to put together the Bibi alternative government that Biden craves.
The fact that highly-paid State Department analysts and their bosses cannot fathom the mentality of the Israeli people shows once again, as with Covid, that our experts are clueless and make policy decisions completely divorced from reality. They do not understand their subjects and they huff and puff to cover their complete ignorance and failure. I do not believe that Bibi will be around as a leader for much longer, but the general trend of center-right and the lack of enough parties to make a new left has been known for two years now. Still, Biden apparently is set on getting Bibi out of office and replacing him with….what? Right wing firebrand Itamar Ben Gvir? Be careful what you wish for because post-10/7 Israelis are moving right on the political spectrum.
This lack of understanding is not only on subjects abroad but also at home. Biden’s change from in-your-corner to in-your-face for Israeli efforts to wipe out a terrorist cancer is ostensibly based on his bad polling and about a third of his party being Hamas fanboys. It’s easy to support a death cult when you are safely thousands of miles away. The problem Biden faces with this strident left-leaning branch of the Democratic Party is that nothing short of bombing Israel will appease them. Biden and his crack team think that by talking tough to Bibi, making ridiculous demands of Israel, and threatening US support, the keffiyeh crowd will come around to their doddering totem. But the reality is that the hatred of Israel and Jews that has been on display since October 7th of last year is so intense that no tweaking of policy will bring the young, Muslims and hard-left progressives back to loving their commander-in-chief. The talk-tough call with Bibi may have sounded great in the White House and State Department, but it will not impress someone who is demanding that Israel be replaced with “Palestine” or that Jews should face more 10/7 pogroms. Isn’t that the intention of the “intifada revolution” shouted out at Harvard and beyond?
Winston Churchill once commented that “America always does the right thing—after she has tried everything else.” The smart play, which of course would never make sense for Biden, et al., would have been to continue supporting Israel without the jawboning. The destruction of Hamas, the weakening of Hezbollah and the defanging of Iran are all in US interests. Destroying the most destructive and destabilizing elements in the Middle East is good for US allies like Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and it likewise is good for the US in making Iran less of a threat to world stability with its open support for terror groups and its march to the Bomb. The leftwing cannot be placated, so doing the right thing would be good for the US and also good for Biden. Jews who for decades have found their home in the Democratic Party and with leftwing causes like BLM would at least feel that their president was doing the right thing by Israel. Instead, by their ham-handed efforts to destabilize the Netanyahu government and appease the foaming-at-the-mouth left third of the party, Biden and his experts have lost Israel who will follow the path that promotes its own safety. They have also lost the progressive branch who will settle for nothing less than stopping all aid to Israel and helping the Palestinians set up a country in its place. You’ve got to give them credit. With all of the academic background and supposed years of experience, they have failed spectacularly. As others have said on these pages, our elite are garbage.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member