One must question the administration’s understanding of Israel’s security obligations and, more broadly, of America’s.
By and large, Biden administration officials have said all the right things about Israel’s obligation to neutralize the intolerable threat posed by the Iranian proxy groups on its borders. But that resolve dissipated rapidly when Israel embarked on its mission to destroy Hamas, which suggests the Biden administration supported it only in theory.
Axios reported on Sunday that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin rang his Israeli counterpart to convey the “growing anxiety” in the White House that Israel’s calibrated response to Hezbollah’s provocations along the Israeli-Lebanese border risks “escalating tensions.” Worse, the administration appears to have internalized the idea that Israel is responsible for those tensions — a conclusion that inverts the sequence of events.
Some in the Biden administration are concerned Israel is trying to provoke Hezbollah and create a pretext for a wider war in Lebanon that could draw the U.S. and other countries further into the conflict, according to sources briefed on the issue. Israeli officials flatly deny it.
This is such a bizarre and convoluted conspiracy theory that it is sufficient to provoke a crisis of confidence in the administration’s understanding of Israel’s security obligations and, more broadly, of America’s.
Since the 10/7 massacre, Hezbollah operatives have periodically fired rockets and artillery shells into Israel and shot surface-to-air missiles at Israeli surveillance drones. Israel has responded to these attacks with retaliatory strikes and evacuating the residents of 42 communities, including an entire city, near the border with Lebanon. Reports suggest Israel has maintained a significant reserve capable of responding to a broader attack on Israel by Hezbollah, and Jerusalem’s fine-tuned response indicates how wary the Israeli government is of avoiding that conflict. The Netanyahu government doesn’t need to be hectored by the White House into doing what it’s already doing. Still, the administration cannot help but communicate its lack of faith in Israel’s capacity for rationality.
That’s the conclusion we must draw from National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s remarks in a Sunday morning appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation. “It’s an active conversation, but the bottom line is that we do not want to see firefights in hospitals,” Sullivan said. He noted that Israel faces a bit of a challenge insofar as it is confronted with an adversary that is operating “outside the bounds of any civilized concept of how you would think about using a hospital.” Nevertheless, the risk that innocents would be “caught in the crossfire” is one that America isn’t willing to sanction.
The sanctimony is matched only by the hypocrisy. Sullivan was safely ensconced in the private sector when the outgoing Obama administration, abiding by all the established laws of armed conflict, executed a strike on a hospital in Mosul that ISIS militants were using as a military headquarters. But he’s undoubtedly aware of that event. What’s more, Sullivan has probably encountered the extensive reporting on the sprawling network of tunnels Hamas maintains under the Shifa Hospital, among many other civilian facilities. He surely knows that Israel called on Hamas to evacuate the civilian-occupied facilities the terror group uses as cover over one month ago. By acknowledging the existence of a military command facility under the hospital but objecting to the collateral damage Hamas is encouraging, Sullivan’s remarks all but ratify the wisdom of positioning military targets in and around civilians.
Sullivan’s comments only legitimize the use of human shields, ensuring that other terrorist networks aspiring to infamy will continue to employ similar tactics. But Sullivan wasn’t freelancing. On Monday, President Joe Biden called for a “less intrusive” approach to rooting out Hamas militants from the hospital under which they have embedded themselves. The intruders here aren’t the Israel Defense Forces but the terrorists who have made a hospital into a legitimate target of war and are playing their naïve Western sympathizers for fools. Observers are left to wonder if Biden’s preference is for Israel to forgo its defensive operation entirely.
The administration’s remarks are not constructive. They serve only to validate the Western media’s demonstrable willingness to abandon skepticism when retailing Hamas’s dubious claims relating to civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.
It was predictable (and, indeed, predicted) that media and the Democratic officials sensitive to the press’s verdicts would collapse into an emotional puddle when Israel set its sights on the critical command post that Hamas situated beneath the Shifa Hospital. Israel is neither the aggressor in this conflict nor the party responsible for the human-rights violations this war produces. Everything that has followed the Hamas regime’s slaughter of Israeli civilians is a consequence of that attack. That undeniable fact bears repeating only because the Biden administration seems desperate to forget it.