Hamas’s rejection of a two-month ceasefire in Gaza is doing nothing to silence the rote “ceasefire-now” crowd. Bravo to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) who, when confronted by a gaggle of anti-Israel dopes on Capitol Hill, told them Hamas was 100% to blame for the violence; Harvard students, please take note.
By ceasefire, Hamas and its useful idiots in the West mean only that there should be an end of Israel Defense Forces operations to expunge the Islamist death cult from Gaza. The terrorists want to be left there in peace to plan their next promised pogrom. This has wide implications for American policy.
The first is that President Joe Biden should not now be touting a “two-state solution.” What would that look like when Palestinian leaders shout from the rooftops that their state would not live in peace with Israel? They intend to wipe all Jews and the Jewish nation off the map. The West Bank, governed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, cannot be distinguished in the long run from Gaza because any Palestinian state would be controlled by the worst Jew-hating nihilists. When a former intelligence officer I know suggested the PLO wouldn’t last three months against Hamas without Israeli protection, a PLO official corrected him saying, “No, two weeks.”
Almost no one in Israel, Left or Right, thinks a two-state solution is possible, especially in the short and medium term; perhaps after a couple of generations during which Palestinian children are no longer raised to murder Jews. So Biden’s policy is a nonstarter. Benjamin Netanyahu’s national cross-party administration is willing to compromise more than its mortal enemy, for example by contemplating a self-governing Palestinian territory short of an independent state. This is reasonable because Jerusalem recognizes an existential and moral obligation after Oct. 7 to control security from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which means independent Palestinian statehood would be a step too far.
When Biden’s administration intones the same non-solution that’s been on rinse and repeat for half a century, especially now, it evokes unimaginative leadership and unrealistic American drift. It bespeaks the president’s inability to do anything other than cling to the policies of his former boss, Barack Obama, who still apparently exercises some control through his minions over the current administration.
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It is the same with Biden’s apparent unwillingness to abandon official hope of reviving Obama’s nuke deal with Iran. Tehran keeps making it plain in words and deeds that it is our committed enemy. Its officials are in Yemen now helping train Houthis to attack U.S. shipping in the Red Sea. Americans, including two Navy SEALs, have been killed fighting Iranian and Iranian-proxy operations intended to boost the mullahs’ regional power, cow our allies, and rearrange matters in the Middle East to the disadvantage of the U.S., its allies including Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the civilized world.
Obama’s former Defense Secretary Robert Gates notoriously said that despite his supposed expertise in foreign affairs, Biden had been on the wrong side of every issue for the past four decades. Looking at Middle East policy now, Biden appears determined to make it a cool half-century.
