Israel's wise and gutsy decision to ignore Biden/Harris' extortion and go for victory

How craven and stupid can the administration get?

The big news story of the last few days has been Israel’s success in killing the head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, in or around Rafah. That would be Rafah in the Gaza. And that would be the Gaza President Biden and VP Harris have been swooning about and — more than swooning — demanding that Israel sustain.

In a masterpiece of bad timing, a matter of hours before Sinwar’s killing was confirmed, Biden and Harris, through their underlings at the State and Defense Departments, threatened Israel with withholding the weapons it needs to decommission the pre-civilization thugs who form Hamas. The administration did this by tacitly, if brazenly, swallowing the fiction that Gaza is something other than Hamas’ staging area. As NBC reported Biden’s de facto extortion:

The Biden administration may restrict military assistance to Israel if the humanitarian situation in Gaza doesn’t improve within the next 30 days, according to a letter sent last weekend to Israeli Defense Minister Yaov Gallant and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer. A U.S. State Department spokesperson confirmed the existence of the letter yesterday.

In the letter, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the U.S. must continually assess under its own law whether Israel is “directly or indirectly” impeding the transport of U.S. humanitarian assistance to Gaza. If it is, they warned that the U.S. could halt additional military financing, two U.S. officials and a defense official said.

Except that, as Biden and Harris knew months ago but now pretend to have forgotten, to “aid Gaza” is to aid Hamas. Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal has a better memory (which, in Biden’s case at least, may not be saying that much, but still):

On Oct. 18, 2023, President Biden announced that humanitarian aid would move from Egypt to Gaza with Israel’s consent “based on the understanding that there will be inspections and that the aid should go to civilians, not to Hamas.” A year later Mr. Biden has reneged on that pledge, and he’s blaming Israel in the bargain.

Mr. Biden’s words a year ago were definitive: “Let me be clear. If Hamas diverts or steals the assistance, they will have demonstrated once again that they have no concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people and it will end. As a practical matter, it will stop the international community from being able to provide this aid.” Note that “it will end.”

Instead the President has demanded that Israel transfer ever more aid, even as Hamas steals it to keep power over Gaza’s population. Israel’s Channel 12 News reported, with video evidence, that Hamas commandeered 47 of 100 aid trucks entering Gaza last Tuesday. This is Hamas’s lifeline.

Anyone wanna bet it’s as few as 47 out of 100? A terrorist army brutal enough to do what Hamas did to 1200 civilians last October is brutal enough to steal anything it cares to — and is doing just that, as Biden and Harris can’t help knowing. But continuing to pretend that a distinction exists between “aid to Gaza” and “aid to Hamas” is indispensable to the effort to keep Israel from defeating its mortal enemy and, in a move that re-defines the word “perverse,” instead requires the Jewish state to help serve up three square ones a day to the people who want to see it vaporized.

I guess if we keep calling it “humanitarian” aid, that will make everything OK.

Good grief. I know Ms. Harris is often comically unserious, but this is taking unseriousness to an absurd extreme. Simultaneously, it’s demonstrating, albeit at a hideous cost, how dangerous her unseriousness can be. And this is while she is, for the moment, only Vice-President.

Israel lately had been squeezing Hamas in northern Gaza, trying to break its aid-grip on the people…

It was exactly that squeeze on Gaza that produced the opportunity to kill Sinwar — the most consequential victory of the war so far — but Biden/Harris are pretending they don’t know that either.

…but Vice President Kamala Harris came out against the effort on Sunday. She is grandstanding for anti-Israel voters in Michigan…

…at the expense of a steadfast American ally fighting for its existence. But, as Ms. Harris tells us over and over (for example, in her Fox News interview), it’s Donald Trump who has the monopoly on bad character.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Israel may soon retaliate against Iran for its recent missile attack, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei needs to know that America has Israel’s back. Instead Mr. Biden sends a more equivocal message: The U.S. will aid Israel’s defense but do its best to weaken Israel’s response to attacks.

This is a part of the double-game against Israel that Paul explained months ago in several insightful posts.

The U.S. aid ultimatum is best understood in this light. The Biden team supports Israel, but not the moves that might deliver victory. The Administration suggests it could withhold offensive weapons from Israel—while maintaining missile defense. Under duress, Israel has signaled it will cooperate on the aid, so Mr. Biden may not make good on his threat. The question is why he so often threatens Israel, and never Hamas or Iran.

The other question is whether Ms. Harris, should she become President, will be even worse, and the evidence strongly suggests the answer is “yes.” Joe Biden is, as ever during his career, merely carried along on the Leftist tide of the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris is one of its leaders. She has demonstrated it again, saying that the Israeli success in eliminating Sinwar is, not a moment to seize for going forward to the only thing that will actually deliver peace — a complete, decisive victory — but (you guessed it) the much-heralded ceasefire! As she put it just hours ago:

This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, and it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.

In other words, so that Hamas can re-group and do it again.

Donald Trump might have a bunch of problems, but Kamala Harris keeps reminding us why, for Israel, for the United States, and for civilized life, we just don’t have a choice.