On the menu today: It turns out that Biden’s off-the-cuff response to the heckler at his campaign fundraiser on Wednesday wasn’t just him spouting off; the policy of the Biden administration is that Israel must now “pause” its offensive against Hamas inside the Gaza Strip. Biden and his team would probably tell you that a “pause” is completely different from a “cease-fire,” but this is semantics.
Biden Cares More about Poll Numbers Than about Israelis
For the first few weeks after the Hamas massacre, President Biden emphasized, over and over again, that he and his administration stood with Israel, that Israel had every right to defend itself from terrorist attacks, and that he and his administration would stand by Israel as long as it takes.
And then, this week, Biden decided, “Okay, that’s enough.”
First, let’s recall Biden’s sweeping statements of unqualified support for Israel in the weeks immediately after the Hamas massacre.
In this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack. . . . Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond — indeed has a duty to respond — to these vicious attacks. I just got off the phone with — the third call with Prime Minister Netanyahu. And I told him if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.
President Biden in his remarks in Israel, October 19:
The State of Israel was born to be a safe place for the Jewish people of the world. That’s why it was born. I have long said: If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. And while it may not feel that way today, Israel must again be a safe place for the Jewish people. And I promise you: We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that it will be. . . . My administration has been in close touch with your leadership from the first moments of this attack, and we are going to make sure we have — you have what you need to protect your people, to defend your nation.
President Biden, the following day, in his prime-time address upon returning from Israel:
In Israel, we must make sure that they have what they need to protect their people today and always. The security package I’m sending to Congress and asking Congress to do is an unprecedented commitment to Israel’s security that will sharpen Israel’s qualitative military edge, which we’ve committed to — the qualitative military edge.
But the Biden stance is now, “Eh, that’s enough. You guys have to pause now that you have Gaza City surrounded.” As discussed yesterday, Hamas and its allies, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, have a long history of breaking cease-fires, and there is no way for the Israel Defense Forces to pause without putting its soldiers at extreme risk of an ambush or counterattack. It’s one thing to halt long-range bombing, artillery, and air missions when a significant amount of territory separates the two sides. It’s another thing to halt men in tanks and armored personnel carriers who have traveled deep into enemy territory.
And yet, the Biden team’s message to Israel is that it must call a “time-out”:
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will urge the Israeli government to agree to a series of brief cessations of military operations in Gaza to allow for hostages to be released safely and for humanitarian aid to be distributed, White House officials said on Thursday. . . .
White House officials said the request for pauses was far different from an overall cease-fire, which the Biden administration believes would benefit Hamas by allowing it to recover from Israel’s intense bombardment.
How much time separates a “pause” or “a series of brief cessations of military operations” from a “cease-fire”? If it goes for a few hours, it’s a pause, but if lasts a day it’s a cease-fire?
It’s not just Biden. A little less than a month ago, Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut emphasized that Israel had every right to defend itself, even though Palestinian civilian casualties were an inevitable consequence of Israeli military action:
The shocking attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War are unconscionable. The U.S. stands firmly with the Israeli people and supports the government of Israel’s right to defend itself from this horrific violence. Many innocent people on both sides will suffer as a result of Hamas’s orchestrated attacks, which will only cause more chaos and misery. My every thought is with the grieving families and the wounded, and I am continuing to closely monitor developments on the ground.
But yesterday, Murphy — who has never served in the military, and who was first elected to office at age 24, as a member of the Southington, Conn., Planning and Zoning Commission — declared that the Israel Defense Forces were fighting Hamas the wrong way:
I share Israel’s desire to destroy the threat from Hamas. And I know Israel cares about the impact of this war on innocent Palestinians, even as they track Hamas’s hideouts inside and below mosques, apartment buildings, and schools. But the way in which the current campaign is being waged — most recently evidenced by the terribly high human cost of the strikes on the Jabalya refugee camp — suggests that they have not struck the right balance between military necessity and proportionality.
The current rate of civilian death inside Gaza is unacceptable and unsustainable. I urge Israel to immediately reconsider its approach and shift to a more deliberate and proportionate counterterrorism campaign, surgically targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and terrorist infrastructure while more highly prioritizing the safety of civilians in accordance with the law of armed conflict.
But there is no “light touch” approach to eliminating a threat on the scale of Hamas. You don’t need a top-secret security clearance to know that Hamas is a de facto terrorist army, not just a small cell of operatives. Reuters painted a clear picture recently:
“They are a mini-army,” said a source close to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. He said the group had a military academy training a range of specializations including cyber security and boasts a naval commando unit among its 40,000-strong military wing.
By contrast, in the 1990s Hamas had less than 10,000 fighters, according to the globalsecurity.org website.
Since the early 2000s the group has built a tunnel network under Gaza to help fighters melt away, house weapons factories and bring in weapons from abroad, according to a regional security source, who also declined to be named. The group has acquired a range of bombs, mortars, rockets, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, Hamas officials have said.
The expanding capabilities have produced increasingly lethal results over the years. Israel lost nine soldiers during its incursion in 2008. In 2014, the number jumped to 66.
H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, said Israel was capable of destroying Hamas in its expected attack on the densely populated enclave.
“The question isn’t whether it’s possible or not. The question is what sort of price will be exacted on the rest of the population, because Hamas does not live on an island in the ocean or in a cave in the desert.”
Got that? There are only two options here. Israel can destroy Hamas, but along the way it will inflict a terrible price on the Palestinian civilians around the terrorist group (and often in front of them). Or Israel can do the job halfway and leave part of Hamas intact to plot another massacre for another day. There is no happy “option C” where Hamas gets destroyed, but the Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip emerge unscathed.
A high number of civilian casualties are inevitable, even if Hamas authorities do inflate the numbers. (The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, at the end of a detailed analysis of the evidence from that hospital explosion: “This evidence, in turn, suggests that the Gaza Ministry of Health, controlled by Hamas, has deliberately told the world a false story. U.S. officials believe that the health ministry also inflated the toll when it announced 500 deaths; the actual number appears to be closer to 100.”)
Israel cannot eliminate the threat of Hamas with some sort of small-scale commando mission like the operation against Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. It’s not just taking on a small number of guys; it’s taking on an army that is fully intertwined with all the critical infrastructure in Gaza City, and that uses human shields every chance it gets.
There is no “nice” way to fight Hamas. The “surgical targeting” that Murphy is calling for does not exist, at least not in a way that would really address the threat the group presents. You either accept Palestinian civilian casualties as a tragic but inevitable consequence of fighting Hamas, or you don’t fight Hamas. And if the deaths and injuries among those innocent civilians outrage you — and they ought to — you blame Hamas for hiding behind and beneath them, not the Israelis for deciding to hit Hamas targets.
So why have Biden and Murphy and other Democrats suddenly shifted from, “We will stand with Israel, as long as it takes” to “That’s enough, Israelis, time to give Hamas a breather”? The newest Quinnipiac poll makes the answer abundantly clear:
Half of voters (50 percent) approve of the way Israel is responding to the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack, while 35 percent disapprove, and 15 percent did not offer an opinion.
There are wide gaps among party and age groups. Republicans (75 percent to 14 percent) and independents (46 percent to 39 percent) approve, while Democrats (49 percent to 33 percent) disapprove.
Nearly half of self-identified Democrats don’t approve of Israel’s war on Hamas, and only a third approve of it. Democratic lawmakers who are traditionally pro-Israel are on the other side of their party’s grassroots on this one. And unsurprisingly, they are adding caveats to their past statements of support — “We said you had every right and in fact a duty to respond to these attacks, but not like that!”
When a guy like Biden declares he’ll stand with Israel as long as it takes, what he means is he’ll stand with Israel for as long as the public-opinion polls tell him it’s advantageous to do so.
ADDENDUM: National Review has published the posters of all the kidnapped Israelis; anyone who wishes can print them out and post them in their own community. Yesterday, I was up in Manhattan to speak at a National Review Institute event, and I’m happy to report I saw both black-and-white and color versions of those posters that had not (yet) been torn down or defaced. Maybe the supporters of Israel, who don’t want those hostages to be forgotten, are moving faster than the poster-tearing antisemitic denialist jerks.