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Joe Biden’s Empty ‘Ironclad’ Promises to Israel
President Biden is “pausing” US arms shipments to Israel because he does not want a full-scale pursuit of Hamas into Rafah. Too many civilians would be harmed, he warned. Hamas must be gleeful. The terror group hides among and under Gazan civilians precisely to generate international pressure on Israel. If Israel submits, Hamas will credibly claim victory. So will Iran, Hamas’ sponsor.
When Hamas started this war on October 7, President Biden declared, “We stand with Israel.” He promised US arms for Israel “to make sure that Israel does not run out of these critical assets to defend its cities and its citizens.” His commitment to Israel, Biden has said over and over again, is “ironclad.” Yet now he is withholding delivery of munitions.
There’s a lesson here: The promises of foreign officials are never entirely trustworthy. Moreover, those officials cannot always be counted on to protect even their own country’s interests, let alone those of others.
Israelis, like Americans, often have excessive faith in the trustworthiness of promises from abroad. This applies to arms-control and peacekeeping arrangements, diplomatic accords, mutual-defense agreements, and membership in multilateral organizations. There can be value in such things — and countries do have interests in their reputations for reliability — but one should be realistic. Commitments from foreign powers are never “ironclad.”
In this war’s early weeks, President Biden remained staunch. He sent two aircraft-carrier strike groups to the region and warned Iran not to broaden the war. When a rocket damaged a hospital in Gaza, he confirmed that the culprit was not Israel but local Arab terrorists. And he defended Israel at the United Nations.
But he has changed his tone. He now de-emphasizes Israel’s duty to defend itself and the necessity of preventing future October 7–type massacres. Civilians in Gaza are suffering because Hamas hides in their homes, schools, and hospitals, and in tunnels under them — but Biden blames their plight on Israel. On February 9, he said Israel’s response to Hamas has been “over the top.” On May 13, his national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, without demanding Hamas’ surrender, said, “Israel can and must do more” to ensure the well-being of the Gazans.
Defying President Biden’s warnings not to expand the war, Iran on April 13 fired more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel. With help from the United States and others, Israel prevented the attack from causing more than minor damage and one injury. Biden pressed Israel not to retaliate. Axios reported on April 14 that he told Israel’s prime minister, “Take the win,” as if it were obvious that a country on the receiving end of such a huge barrage, with missiles intercepted over its capital, should shrug it off and be satisfied that more damage was not done.
Now curtailing arms supplies, Biden wants American pro-Hamas activists to see that he does not “stand with Israel” after all. He emphasizes stopping the fighting and protecting Gazan civilians rather than destroying Hamas’ remaining military and governing capabilities. He is emboldening Israel’s enemies, which increases danger to Israeli civilians.
The president’s flip-flop on the war is a reminder that international commitments are only as strong as the character and the interests of the people who make them. In no event are they enforceable — even if written down or called “legally binding.”
Israelis should be attuned to this point, given what happened to the famous Balfour Declaration, the central political commitment in the history of Zionism. The 1917 declaration was Britain’s promise to support “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In 1922, when the League of Nations approved the British Mandate for Palestine, the territory having been a tiny shard of the vast near-east region the Ottoman Empire lost in World War I, the declaration was incorporated verbatim.
In 1939, however, Britain announced a cutoff of immigration by Jews into their “home,” leaving millions at the mercy of the Nazis. Winston Churchill (not yet prime minister) condemned the cutoff as a “violation” of Britain’s legal obligations and a “lamentable act of default,” but it remained British policy during and after World War II. The British are famous for exalting the virtue of doing one’s duty, but they violated the Mandate anyway.
There is a State of Israel now because Zionists grasped that no other country in the world would or could assign top priority to the safety of the Jewish people. That was true when the other country was Britain, and it’s true even when it is the United States, as singularly hospitable and friendly to its own Jewish citizens as America has been. This is not because of antisemitism, but human nature. Sovereign states take care, first and foremost, of their own people. And sometimes, as President Biden is showing by catering to pro-Palestinian sentiment in ways that benefit Iran, they do not succeed even in rightly identifying and protecting their own national interests.
For 2,000 years, Jews had no choice but to depend on others for refuge, tolerance, and security. As a result, they suffered centuries of maltreatment, including murders and massacres, expropriation, and expulsion. Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940), the namesake grandfather of one of us, was an influential advocate for a Zionist remedy to this long-running humanitarian disaster known as “the Jewish question”: sovereignty in the Land of Israel for a democratic Jewish-majority state that would enjoy the dignity of defending itself.
Israel should, of course, maintain and cultivate connections with the United States and other powers. But Zionism is, in essence, about the Jewish people taking responsibility for their own fate. That people’s survival is top priority in only one country because the Jews (unlike the Arabs and other nationalities) are the majority in only one country.
Alliances can be useful, but history warns that, when life-and-death issues are at stake, endangered countries should rely no more than is necessary on foreigners. That remains the case when promises of support from abroad come from serious-minded officials, let alone from ordinary politicians who oversell such promises as “ironclad” and then feel free to breach them.
Douglas J. Feith, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, served as under secretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a senior software architect, served as a pilot in the Israeli Air Force. A version of this article appeared originally online in National Review.
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A pro-Israel rally at the University of Toronto was headlined by Columbia University professor Shai Davidai
Around 200 people gathered for a pro-Israel demonstration at University of Toronto’s downtown campus at King’s College Circle—which was the site of one of Canada’s largest pro-Palestinian encampments during May […]
The post A pro-Israel rally at the University of Toronto was headlined by Columbia University professor Shai Davidai appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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‘Not Welcome’: New Pro-Hamas Campaign Aims to Abolish Hillel Campus Chapters
A statue of George Washington tied with a Palestinian flag and a keffiyeh inside a pro-Hamas encampment is pictured at George Washington University in Washington, DC, US, May 2, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Craig Hudson
The campus group National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) is waging a campaign to gut Jewish life in academia, calling for the abolition of Hillel International campus chapters, the largest collegiate organization for Jewish students in the world.
“Over the past several decades, Hillel has monopolized for Jewish campus life into a pipeline for pro-Israel indoctrination, genocide-apologia, and material support to the Zionist project and its crimes,” a social media account operating the campaign, titled #DropHillel, said in a manifesto published last week. “Across the country, Hillel chapters have invited Israeli soldiers to their campuses; promoted propaganda trips such as birthright; and organized charity drives for the Israeli military.”
It continued, “Such actions reveal Hillel’s ideological and material investment in Zionism, despite the organization’s facade as being simply a ‘Jewish cultural space.’”
DropHillel claims to be “Jewish-led,” although only a small minority of Jews oppose Zionism, and the group has been linked to and promoted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters.
Hillel International has provided Jewish students a home away from home during the academic year. However, NSJP says it wants to “weaken” it and “dismantle oppression.”
The idea has already been picked up by pro-Hamas student groups at one college, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to The Daily Tar Heel, the school’s official student newspaper. On Oct. 9, it reported, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) unveiled the idea for “no more Hillel” during a rally which, among other things, demanded removing Israel from UNC’s study abroad program and adopting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Addressing the comments to the paper days later, SJP, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, proclaimed that shuttering Hillel is a coveted goal of the anti-Zionist movement.
“Zionism is a racist supremacist ideology advocating for the creation and sustenance of an ethnostate through the expulsion and annihilation of native people,” the group told the paper. “Therefore, any group that advocates for a supremacist ideology — be it the KKK, the Proud Boys, Hillel, or Heels for Israel — should not be welcome on campus.”
The #DropHillel campaign came amid an unprecedented surge in anti-Israel incidents on college campuses, which, according to a report published last month by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have reached crisis levels.
Revealing a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena, the report — titled “Anti-Israel Activism on US Campuses, 2023-2024” — painted a bleak picture of America’s higher education system poisoned by political extremism and hate.
“As the year progressed, Jewish students and Jewish groups on campus came under unrelenting scrutiny for any association, actual or perceived, with Israel or Zionism,” the report said. “This often led to the harassment of Jewish members of campus communities and vandalism of Jewish institutions. In some cases, it led to assault. These developments were underpinned by a steady stream of rhetoric from anti-Israel activists expressing explicit support for US-designated terrorists organizations, such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and others.”
The report added that 10 campuses accounted for 16 percent of all incidents tracked by ADL researchers, with Columbia University and the University of Michigan combining for 90 anti-Israel incidents — 52 and 38, respectively. Harvard University, the University of California – Los Angeles, Rutgers University New Brunswick, Stanford University, Cornell University, and others filled out the rest of the top 10. Violence, it continued, was most common at universities in the state of California, where anti-Zionist activists punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘Muslim for Trump’ Launches Initiatives in Key Battleground States, Says Candidate Will Bring ‘Peace’ to Gaza
Former US President Donald Trump is seen at a campaign event in South Carolina. Photo: Reuters/Sam Wolfe
The “Muslims for Trump” organization has officially launched initiatives to help elect Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to the White House, arguing that he would be more likely to end the war in Gaza than Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
In a statement released on Monday, the group said it will focus on recruiting Muslim voters in key battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. The organization both praised Trump for his supposed “peace-focused” approach to ending the war in Gaza and condemned Harris for helping facilitate a so-called “genocide.”
“After meeting with President Trump, it was clear to me he is the right leader for Muslims to get behind,” Rabiul Chowdhury, co-founder of Muslims for Trump and former co-chair of the “Abandon Harris Movement,” said in a statement.
Chowdhury added that during his discussions with Trump, the former president vowed to “ending the escalation of wars and bringing peace to war-torn regions.” In contrast to Trump’s promise to stop the “bloodshed” in Gaza, he claimed, Harris has “recklessly pushed us toward World War III.”
Chowdhury, a self-described “peace advocate,” urged the Muslim community not to fall victim to supposed “misinformation” campaigns by the media and Democrats that paint the former president as hostile to immigrants. He claimed that the former president’s focus is on “ending war, not dividing families through false immigration claims.”
Samra Luqman, chair of the Michigan chapter of Muslims for Trump, underscored the need to punish the Biden administration for what he described as supporting a “genocide” in Gaza.
“The goal of this election is to hold the Biden administration accountable for a genocide. No amount of fear mongering or scare tactics will persuade my community into forgiving the mutilation, live-burning, and genocide of over 200,000 people,” he said.
According to data produced by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, roughly 40,000 people have died in Gaza since the war began last October. Israel has said that its forces have killed about 20,000 Hamas terrorists during its military campaign.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
On the organization Muslims for Trump’s official website, it claims that the Abraham Accords, a series of historic, Trump administration-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several countries in the Arab world, helped stabilize the Middle East. It also says that had Trump not lost the 2020 presidential race, the so-called “genocide” could have been prevented.
“Under Trump’s leadership, the Abraham Accords were brokered, fostering peaceful relations between Israel and several Arab countries. Supporters might argue that Trump’s diplomacy prioritized peace and stability in the Middle East, reducing the likelihood of large-scale conflicts like genocide,” the group wrote.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump has repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his singular term in office. Trump has boasted about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume efforts to strengthen them if he were to win November’s US presidential election.
Harsh US sanctions levied on Iran under Trump crippled the Iranian economy and led its foreign exchange reserves to plummet. Trump and his Republican supporters in the US Congress have criticized the Biden administration for renewing billions of dollars in US sanctions waivers, which had the effect of unlocking frozen funds and allowing the country to access previously inaccessible hard currency.
Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and also moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
Despite Harris’s repeated efforts to woo Muslim voters, polling data indicates that the demographic has made a dramatic swing away from the Democratic Party. Polling data from the Arab American Institute reveals that Trump slightly edges Harris among Muslim voters by a margin of 42 to 41 percent. A report from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) shows that Green Party candidate Jill Stein leads Harris and Trump with Muslim voters in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
The post ‘Muslim for Trump’ Launches Initiatives in Key Battleground States, Says Candidate Will Bring ‘Peace’ to Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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