Joe Biden promised to veto any standalone aid bill for Israel, and Hakeem Jeffries and most House Democrats voted against one. The administration maintains that Israel’s security is so “sacred,” it must be tied to a doomed legislative package containing entirely unrelated issues that deal with border security and Ukrainian aid.
Which, of course, makes absolutely zero sense.
Does anyone believe that the president would veto a standalone bill for Ukrainian aid? Or what about a standalone bill for “humanitarian” aid to Palestinians? Color me skeptical. Now, a standalone border security bill? That he’d definitely veto. Priorities, you see.
In the years before Barack Obama, a vote to help a longtime ally against a proxy terror army that — not incidentally — murdered 30-plus American citizens would have been a no-brainer. Today, a Democrat who takes an unrepentantly pro-Israel position puts himself in a precarious position. Biden is free to play games with Israeli aid because there will be no political repercussions. Most Democrats don’t really care anymore. And those who do are in the pro-Hamas wing — whether openly or functionally.
“Forget No Labels. Biden’s Third-Party Peril is on the Left,” warns Politico. Numerous polls, writes Jonathan Martin, find that young leftists are angry about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not the mass rape and murder of civilians, mind you, but Israel’s efforts to root out the attackers. Many of these people are socialist ideologues, many are identitarian dimwits, and others are just antisemites. Some, like members of the “squad,” are all of the above. Whatever the case, they are always “angry” at Israel. These are the people who were demanding “ceasefires” before Israel had even begun retaliating for Oct 7.
Still, the situation remains something of a balancing act for Biden. There are still enough Jewish Democrats and independents who feel a historic kinship with Israel. Enough that the president doesn’t attack Israel unequivocally. Like Obama before him, Biden uses Benjamin Netanyahu as a strawman, framing the prime minister as some kind of warmongering fascist.
Here’s a little-known reality: Right or left, Netanyahu or someone else, no Israeli prime minister would act any differently in Gaza. Israeli voters rightly demand it. Just as it would have been impossible to lead the United States after 9/11 on a plank that gave al Qaeda a pass, it would be impossible to hold power in Israel and allow Hamas to continue to operate next door.
Moreover, though Netanyahu might be a ruthless politician, he is an ideological moderate with a long record of liberal reforms in Israel. His biggest failure wasn’t acting too bellicose or authoritarian, but rather underestimating his country’s mortal enemies.
In any event, Biden acts like a statesman in public but simultaneously leaks angry quotes about Netanyahu to placate the growing anti-Israel left. Recently, for example, we learned that Biden supposedly called Israel’s prime minister a “bad f-cking guy.” (Notice that Democrats have tougher words for Israelis than they ever do for mullahs who murder Americans.)
This leak reminded me of the time in 2014 when Obama’s stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg “reported” that White House officials referred to Netanyahu as “chickensh-t.” Now I don’t mean to demean people like Ben Rhodes, who survived a creative writing MFA program at NYU, but Netanyahu did serve in the IDF, saw combat, and led a special force unit that specialized in freeing hijacked planes. Netanyahu was shot in one of these operations. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s less of a coward than anonymous White House officials. Certainly, he is a better “guy” than the gaggle of Rob Malley types the president surrounds himself with.
A few weeks ago, good guy Biden was accusing Israel of engaging in “indiscriminate bombing,” which he knows is a lie. “Like everyone in the administration and any Democrat with a pulse,” Politico explains, Biden is “deeply suspicious of Benjamin Netanyahu.” The president’s “deep-seated fear,” we learn, is that Netanyahu “is eager to drag the U.S. into a wider war in the Middle East.”
This is the favorite blood libel of radical Democrats and far-right influencers. They must be quite excited to hear that the president is no longer “hypnotized” by Israel’s evil, as Ilhan Omar might say. Then again, not one American soldier has ever died, much less fought, for Israel (something we can’t say about Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Afghans, or the French, for that matter.) If anything, the U.S., especially during the Obama years, often restrained Israel from preemptively acting to weaken its enemies.
That said, the United States has no obligation to assist any nation — not even a longtime ally that shares our objectives and values. I suspect Democrats are probably a couple of presidential cycles away from turning entirely against Israel. Still, it is peculiar that the same people who are purportedly terrified of being dragged into a Middle East war by Israel have no deep-seated fears about the perils of funding a war against a nuclear power in Europe. On the contrary, Volodymyr Zelensky, who runs a country far more authoritarian (not to mention corrupt) than Netanyahu’s Israel, is treated as the sainted defender of democracy by Washington and the media.
It’s almost as if the arguments being used by Democrats to distance themselves from Israel don’t really make any sense.
