President Joe Biden’s proclaimed “ironclad commitment” to Israel has developed a bad case of rust. Fresh off a strong Holocaust Remembrance Day speech, which we must now read as a cynical attempt to insulate himself against the backlash for what he was about to do, the president has made an open threat to cut off the American supply of certain “offensive” weapons such as airborne bombs to Israel, should the Jewish state go ahead with its (much too) long promised offensive to destroy the last of the Hamas fighting units in the city of Rafah.
There are only two possible explanations for this head-spinning reversal. One is that Biden truly believes the Israel Defense Force is out of control and is wantonly slaughtering innocent Palestinians. The other is that he regards this move as essential in terms of both domestic and foreign politics. These rationales are not mutually exclusive, but they are catastrophically, fatally wrong in every respect, and so Ironclad Joe finds himself imposing the first U.S. arms embargo on Israel since the Jewish state’s 1948-49 War of Independence.
I do not accept the proposition that the IDF is engaged in wanton slaughter, no matter how many times it has been bandied about. One of the more sickening pieces of conventional wisdom these days is that “terrible things happen in war,” but how many people stop to think about what that really means?
During the night of 30 June to July 1 [2002], the United States Air Force bombed the village of Kakrakai, in Uruzgan province, [Afghanistan], killing 50 and wounding more than 100, most of them women and children attending a wedding. (Le Monde)
How many more such “incidents” were there in the dozen or so years of U.S. combat in Iraq and the twenty years of war in Afghanistan? The Hamas terrorists claim that 35,000 or so Palestinians have been killed in the fighting in Gaza, in which they do not distinguish between civilians and terrorists. There is good reason to think these numbers are wholly invented. Pro-Israel sources estimate the true civilian toll around 14,000. The latter figure is horrendous, but not the result of deliberate mass killings by the IDF. Consider the fact that there are some two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a tiny area of 141 square miles or 365 square kilometers. This is just about the same as the area of Philadelphia, which had a population of over 1.5 million as of 2022. If a major war were going on there, what would the casualty figures be like? We have all seen the still images and videos of the dead and maimed in Gaza, but they are the result of a war that the Hamas terrorists started, and there is no reason to believe that the U.S. armed forces would do any better than the IDF in comparable circumstances.
In any case, if Biden’s partial arms embargo does have any significant impact on the Rafah campaign, it will be to make the IDF more desperate and therefore more likely to endanger innocent Palestinian civilians who are in its way. More specifically, if the IDF’s air power is compromised and it is forced to lean more heavily on ground troops, leading to heavier Israeli casualties, those troops will become less scrupulous about protecting civilians. The Israeli government and public are united on the necessity of destroying Hamas in Rafah, so Biden’s backstabbing won’t stop them. It was that amoral sonofabitch Henry Kissinger who explained why, when he noted dryly that states do not negotiate about their existence. Nor are ordinary people inclined to negotiate away their lives. If anything, the Israeli public is furious with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for waiting so long to order the IDF into Rafah. It is hard to understand what he intends to accomplish by endlessly blustering, and blustering, and blustering about it and meanwhile giving Hamas endless months to dig in.
As to the domestic politics, Biden can swear up and down that his partial arms embargo has nothing to do with the fact that he is running for reelection against an opponent who openly promises to cancel the Constitution and rule as a dictator, and who appears to be tied with or even ahead of Biden, according to the polls. No one believes Biden on this, and it would be irresponsible of Biden not to consider how he can prevail when the future of democracy in America is at stake. But this move against Israel will backfire. It will not mollify the “Squad” and the rest of the Democratic Party’s far left flank, it will not persuade Arab voters in Michigan, and it will not calm the antisemitic mobs masquerading as “antiwar protesters.” The only thing that could make these people happy would be a total arms embargo against Israel and America entering the war on the side of Hamas and the “Islamic Republic of Iran.” As for voters who are not passionate about this issue, Biden’s flip-flop will leave them with the lasting impression of a weak president who can easily be forced to reverse himself.
In terms of the vital national interests of the United States, Ironclad Joe’s arms embargo against one of its closest allies sends the message, not that America is a fair and impartial “hegemon” that respects human rights, but that it is a weak and tottering empire, allying with which poses significant risks to anyone foolish enough to do so. This is the same message the president sent with his craven abandonment of thousands of Afghans who had worked with America over twenty years of war, and who were left to the tender mercies of the Taliban after the August 2021 pullout. Those who did escape that cursed land and applied for refuge in America are confronted with thickets of red tape designed to make them feel so unwelcome they will go elsewhere. All of which may be ancient history to a society that has synced its attention span to the rhythms of TikTok, but not to America’s allies and enemies around the globe.
Even Biden’s firm commitment to support Ukraine against the Russian invasion doesn’t look so strong, viewed in this light. The Ukrainians have been complaining for two years about Biden’s withholding of vital air defenses and fighter jets, which he has consistently justified by invoking the specter of nuclear war. But as the war has ground on and Putin’s nuclear threats have begun to sound hollow, this has become a far less convincing argument. If Biden wants to avert nuclear war, he would be better advised to go all in on supporting Ukraine and Israel, whose real adversary is the nuclear-threshold Iranian regime. Weakness never helped a friend or defeated a foe.
Emanuel Goldstein 