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What is the Biden administration’s plan for Israel? — 49 Comments

  1. Wouldn’t put anything past the leftist running the Biden Administration.

    They tell us a man can become a woman and that the border is secure.

    Can not be trusted.

  2. Your reaction confirms mine of the other day. What else do you expect as the foreign policy of Barak Osama ben Biden. What reason is there to give billions of dollars to a regime that chants “death to America, death to Israel” and is intent on building nuclear weapons except hatred of the US and Israel? What good does it do to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas under the cover of humanitarian aid if not the desire to destroy Israel. Egypt and Jordan despise Hamas and won’t let the their neighbors, the people of Gaza, into their country but our State Department thinks they are worthy of help.

    The nicest thing that I can say about the State Department is that their brains are concrete and they still romanticize the dead world of Lawrence of Arabia and Glub Pasha.

    As for Blinken, was he at Biden’s notorious speech to the Council on Foreign Relation where he bragged about blackmailing Ukraine? Did he laugh like the rest of that despicable audience?

    Blinken’s threats against the Israelis tell me that we are going to be on very dark times in foreign affairs soon.

  3. Suppose Caroline has some simple majority of the Obama-Malley-Biden strategic schema correct, if perhaps not every single jot and tittle.

    Now consider the pretense, I’ll call it, now being bandied about that US forces in the USS Gerald Ford carrier group on station in the eastern Med (the widely presumed “second” carrier group has not arrived, will not for a few more days, if even then! It may in fact be tasked to transit the Suez en route elsewhere, the Persian Gulf region, say) will take action against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Suppose it so. Suppose Israel has detailed knowledge of specific target coordinates within Hezb installations, be they command and control, munitions dumps, rocket and missile factories, warehouses, what have you.

    Would prudent action on the Israelis’ part — again, bear in mind Caroline’s thesis! — would prudent action permit Israeli sharing their deeply held targeting data with the Americans? Or ought they not rather be wary that any such information placed in the hands of the Obama-Malley-Biden clique may quickly go to their enemies in Tehran and Beirut, permitting these to scramble out of the way?

    Kind of a crappy place to be vis a vis a purported main ally, no? Well yes.

  4. Meanwhile, Brandon’s senility/dementia is on full display during his meeting with Netanyahu: “A visibly confused Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday that he served in the Senate alongside his own Secretary of State. “I asked the secretary of state when he and I were working in the Senate to write something for me and he said he wrote a line that I think is appropriate. He said, ‘It’s not we lead, it’s not just…’ Well, I won’t go into it, I’ll wait ’til later, taking too much time.”

    Video of JoJo’s “senior moment” at the link: https://www.thefirsttv.com/biden-in-israel-senile-joe-says-he-served-in-the-senate-with-his-secretary-of-state/

  5. Once you realize it is actually the Obama administration plan for Israel it sadly becomes all too clear.

  6. Alas, I didn’t expect much of anything different from the Biden(Obama) Administration.

    At this point, perhaps the only way for Israel to survive will be to – if at all possible – dissociate itself from the United States, to whatever extent it can.

    At least, the United States in terms of what it’s become in this year of 2023, and may well be for the foreseeable future. For even in the eventuality of a Republican presidential victory in 2024, and the advent of the best-intentioned (new) leadership, the staffing and ideology of the State Department, other branches of the Federal Government, and particularly (especially!) the academic-corporate-media complex, will remain unchanged.

    As to the political, strategic, and above all symbolic reverberations of such a step, who knows.

    Just putting this idea out there.

    Some thoughts along these lines…

    Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz…
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/end-american-aid-israel

    Daniel J. Samet and Raphael Benlevi
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/pro-america-case-ending-aid

    Caroline B. Glick
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/time-to-stop-toeing-the-line

    As to the JCPOA – essentially an effort to create a civilizational inflection point vis-à-vis Dar al-Islam (and by extension the “third world”), versus the “West”, by facilitating Iran’s ability to manufacture and deploy nuclear weapons – see this, by Lee Smith…
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/iran-getting-the-bomb

    sdferr’s point about the inadvisability of Israel sharing targeting (or other?!) military information is very astute.

  7. One of the peaceful (and deluded) survivors of the slaughter in one of the settlements right along the border with Gaza told how they had a large number of agricultural workers from Gaza working on their land, and how they had thought that this was not only allowing these Palestinian workers to feed their families, but also showing these Palestinians a new, peaceful way of life.

    I note that this survivor did not mention that any of these Palestinian workers warned them of the attacks to come, or took any steps to defend them. *

    * See this discussion of how the Biden Administration pushed Israel to issue more such work permits, which allowed more and more Palestinians to cross into Israel, and how such work permits were found discarded among the debris from these terrorist’s attacks at https://www.frontpagemag.com/israels-work-permits-for-gaza-enabled-the-hamas-attack/

  8. Again, my forty years ago sojourn in Israel… Forty years ago, people in Israel on the right REALLY thought that Israel needed to become more independent of the US. More independent in general. Israel could do it. And I think it would be a great idea. I hate the idea that the winds of change in Washington blow with the president lackies du jour. Obummer for eight awful years, and Brandon for hopefully only four, but four that we’d’ve been better off without. I don’t trust Brandon not to put the squeeze on Israel. To somehow try and force ISarel into a secondary role in protecting itself.

    It should also be pointed out that Israel is going to have to pull police and military form necessary security roles to “protect” Brandon. Ugh.

  9. My answer to “humanitarian aid” is not until Hamas has been uprooted. And if “humanitarian aid” is going to blood money for the families of terrorists, then no, not at all.

  10. Biden’s easily going to get thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Israelis & then US service personnel killed.

    The demolition of the West may well come from the Middle East not Eastern Europe or Asia.

  11. Tony Badran, Tablet Mag, “Eyeless in Gaza”: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/america-leaves-israel-eyeless-in-gaza

    “… Promise was that I
    Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
    Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
    Eyeless in Gaza …”
    —John Milton, Samson Agonistes

    It will be a while before we’re able to piece together a more complete picture of how Israel, despite its vaunted intelligence-gathering capabilities, was blindsided by the massive Hamas terrorist onslaught on Oct. 7, which led to the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. After the current Israeli operation in Gaza concludes, there will be inquiries, official and unofficial, in Israel and beyond, about what contributed to this intelligence failure. Where was Israel blinded, and how?

    A key focal point for these inquiries will be Lebanon. Immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing Hamas and Hezbollah sources, that the terrorist attack was planned by the Iranians and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Iranians had set up a joint operations room, the existence of which Hezbollah media had previously disclosed in 2021. The New York Times corroborated the Journal’s story a few days later, adding that training for the attack, including on paragliders which were used to slaughter Israelis and tourists at a music festival, also took place in Lebanon.

    So how did Israel find itself blind and deaf in Lebanon? Why was it that, with all this activity taking place in Lebanon over several months, Israel was not able to pick up meaningful intelligence on a lethal adversary? To answer these questions, we must turn to the current security environment in Lebanon, which in turn shaped and constrained Israel’s intelligence gathering capabilities.

  12. Glick is NOT wrong. We are governed by people who think that since it’s for the ‘greater good’… enabling evil is perfectly acceptable.

  13. We should not believe Biden has any part in this. He’s incapable of making simple decisions (which way to turn to get off the stage) much less make high-level decisions. It’s doubtful he can even comprehend hypotheticals. Biden is the hood ornament on this vehicle to Hell; the driver is Obama or whoever controls him.

  14. “I sincerely hope Glick is wrong, because this is absolutely horrifying and enraging.”

    Malheureusement, she’s often spot on…

    Driving Israel right into the arms of China.

  15. Talnik:

    Biden is not so far gone as that. He has a part in it, although he also had plenty of help. And when he was Obama’s VP and not senile, he was on board with Obama’s policies. I don’t give him a pass in the least.

  16. Israel needs to tell Brandon to go eff himself. Unfortunately, in a perversion of Kipling’s poem, “Once you have been paid the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane.”

    The US gives Israel money and expects Israel to say “How high?” when the US tells her to jump. Israel is pretty much the only country that has to do that. Most of the other countries we pour money into tell us to take a flying leap when we tell them to jump.

  17. I would have hoped that when Israel declared a siege that it would have been according to the principles of siege warfare – that one starves the enemy into unconditional surrender. I would have declared the siege as lasting only until 2 things both happen – all the hostages are returned and all the Hamas leadership and perpetrators are delivered for trial. I would have explained to the world that the siege can end at any time, but it’s up to the Gazans to fulfill both requirements. I would not allow any humanitarian aid whatsoever, since the Gazans can choose humanitarian aid any time they decide to deliver both hostages and Hamas. And then I would have sat back, not invaded Gaza so as not to lose soldiers, and simply waited them out. But I suspect this will not happen because Israel is still too fearful of world opinion and her own perceived weakness, like a battered wife. But I believe the day will come when Israel reaches a breaking point when they figure, “If we’re going to die, we might as well take as many of the bastards with us as we can.” And then they will become “a firepot among pieces of wood and a flaming torch among sheaves, so they will consume on the right and on the left all the surrounding peoples, while the inhabitants of Jerusalem again live on their own sites in Jerusalem.”

    Not long now…

  18. Bill K, I have no idea how old you are, but you are wise beyond your years. And referencing Geoffrey Britain‘s post, enabling evil is evil, which is why Bill K is so wise.

  19. Mike P., I’m 69, so not many years left.

    I wonder what the Israeli cabinet is contemplating now. Surely they know of the biblical siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in which “On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land. Then the city was broken into…”

    Will they take lessons from their own history? I thought the very fact they declared a siege was an acknowledgement, but upon hearing of allowing a place in southern Gaza for humanitarian aid, I’m not so sure. But again, fear of potential consequences can overcome logic.

  20. America is done, and done for. The Democratic Party is our great internal enemy, and Lo! it won itself the presidency, controls the Senate, and bloc-votes in the House, while the GOPers still worry about individual freedoms and the Constitution, which Dems abhor, rather than coming together as a righteous cohort, a neo-Roman legion, which takes no prisoners. Republicans like the fool Gaetz voting WITH the Dems?
    American Democrats are stupid, ignorant, evil, or some combination of these.

  21. Mr Biden just gave Hamas $100M of our funny money (sounds of a printing press in background). He’s not conflicted or confused. He says it’s for humanitarian needs.

    I do not see the USA surviving any of this. The R’s narrowly win the House then step on there you know what’s over and over. Most all of them seem to trying to keep the “game” going.

    And look at all of those wonderful muslims that we helped to get into the safety of our once great country… Death to the infidels! And some have reached out congress! Stunning.

    The great melting pot, some of us are in it, and others are stoking the fires.

  22. On a related note, why during WWII did the 872-day siege of Leningrad fail?

    Per Wikipedia, “To sustain the defence of the city, it was vitally important for the Red Army to establish a route for bringing a constant flow of supplies into Leningrad… This route, which became known as the Road of Life (Russian: ?????? ?????), was effected over the southern part of Lake Ladoga…[and] the road brought necessary military and food supplies in and took civilians and wounded soldiers out, allowing the city to continue resisting the enemy.”

    It’s not a siege if it’s a sieve.

  23. I’ve been watching for J. E. Dyer to weigh in with her experience as a naval intel officer — the first half is about the US presence in the Med (hint: it’s to deter Israel from attacking Hezbollah pre-emptively, possibly at all); the second half echoes Lee Smith’s Tablet post from 2020.
    Biden is giving Iran a US-made shield.

    https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2023/10/17/the-navy-shuffle-mixed-signals-with-biden-visit-to-israel/

    Iran’s regime is issuing warnings about its intentions, and threatening Israel and the U.S. for any attempt to take the fight to Hamas and Hezbollah. Ominously, for reportedly the first time in history, Iran raised a “black flag” over the iconic Imam Reza shrine on Tuesday, a move with potentially apocalyptic overtones given the significance of Imam Reza, or the “8th Imam,” to Shia Islam.

    It feels like things are moving fast in the wrong direction because they are.

    Another event this week contributes to a tone of tension and uncertainty. On Wednesday (18 October), the JCPOA-backed UN sanctions from 2015 on Iran’s ballistic missile program are set to expire. This expiration has been scheduled since 2015, and the Biden administration has made no preparation to extend the date.

    The effect is that there will be no UN-backed basis for enforcing sanctions on Iran’s missile program. One aspect of that is the difficulty of enforcing any unilateral (i.e., U.S.) sanctions on trade with Iran in relevant materials and the funding of such trade. The aspect of missile sales and proliferation would also fall under that heading.

    But the other aspect of it is missile testing. Although enforcement has been lax since 2015, Iran has been somewhat inhibited over the last eight years in its testing of long-range ballistic missiles. After 18 October, the clamps will be off. In the middle of an emerging period of regional conflict, Iran can basically start lobbing test missiles around with no real charter from UN sanctions for anyone to warn or dissuade the mullahs.

    This is by no means a comprehensive survey of the regional powder-keg factors involving Iran. Others include Iran’s activities in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as well as in the waterways from the Suez Canal to the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s naval presence in the northern Persian Gulf.

    But the point of surveying them is this. Iran has the ability to complicate the regional situation affecting the terror militias’ conflict with Israel: to make it increasingly dangerous, operating from the Persian Gulf and across Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Middle Eastern tradeways. One particularly important thing Iran can do, for example, is seek to resupply Hamas and Hezbollah using a well-worn logistics path through Iraq and Syria. The U.S. can and should interdict that pipeline, as a means of containing the spread of conflict in the region.

    So why would the U.S. leave Iran’s geo-military environment in CENTCOM entirely without a carrier strike group and an ARG/MEU? That’s what we’re about to do: leave Iran free of the restraints those assets can impose. We’ll also be leaving the Air Force without backup in air support to our troops in Iraq. Moreover, if we have to get air support into Syria from the carrier in the Med, we’ll have to use Syrian or Lebanese air space defended by Russian anti-air missiles to get our strike-fighters through to U.S. troops.

    We seem to be going out of our way to leave Iran unrestrained and Israel overwatched, by Navy assets that are – bonus! – positioned inconveniently for support to U.S. combat forces ashore.

    It’s a legitimate question what’s going on here. Criticism of the signals being sent has focused understandably on the prospect of Israel being strong-armed and held back by pressure from the Biden administration.

    But – leaving all the other points crying out to be made on the cutting-room floor for now – let’s ask the question, Why aren’t we putting anything in place to deter and contain Iran?

    Long-time critics of Democratic policies toward Iran have ready answers to hand. It’s time for supporters of the Biden administration to think hard about this as well.

  24. Speaking of Leningrad, in the very early 90s I taught English as a second language (ESL) in Louisville, KY (exactly like Harold Ramis’s character in Stripes!). Many/most of my students were from Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. The one thing they all had in common was that they’d given up even trying to tell the new Americans they were meeting where they were from. Americans typically don’t know much about Eastern European geography, so they were all pretty stunned when I drilled down with the questions and I actually knew where Odessa, or Riga were, for example. Not a boast – anyone on this blog could do the same, but we aren’t “most people”.

    Anyway, I’m going around asking folks where they’re from, and I come to an elderly man, and he says, “St Petersburg”. I look at him, sun up his age, do the math, and ask, “So, you’re from there? You were born there?”, already my blood running a bit cold. His name was Lazar Guralnik, I don’t mind saying because he must be gone by now. He was a very sharp guy, they all were, and he was already on to me, so he allowed the pause to be awkward. “Leningrad, when you were there?” I said to fill the pause. He nodded slowly and knowingly.

    Even I’m smart enough to know not to press this at this moment, but after class he lingered and we had a long conversation, and we got to know each other pretty well. He was one of the kids who escaped across the frozen lake. None of his cousins (there were lots) made it as the Germans bombed the lake when they realized what was happening. Neither of his parents survived the siege.

    Teaching that class was a wonderful experience. I like to teach, but one of the reasons I volunteered was to get to know these immigrants. Boy did I hit the jackpot. I have a half a dozen stories every bit as good as this one. But I’ll save those.

  25. @ Michael – I had missed some of the other Tablet links you gave us.
    The first one about ending US aid to Israel had good arguments, especially in counter-point to Glick’s observation that Biden Inc can (and is) with-holding ammunition for their US-made planes and arms.

    I note this from the second one: “Granting Israel a freer hand to pursue its regional security interests will allow the country to push back more forcefully against Iran and its proxies, while also improving the security of the Gulf states, thereby allowing the U.S. to focus on China.”
    The full analysis would be persuasive if it was representative of reality, but Biden Inc does not want Israel pushing back against Iran, nor to focus America’s attention on the owner of the Biden Crime Family (well, joint owner with several other countries).

    Glick’s post amplifies some of the same arguments she makes in the video, for those who want a visual reminder (I prefer “print” to “talk” myself).

  26. Cornhead, I believe Glick too. But have you noticed how distressed she is? Barely able to speak without breaking down.

    As Lee Also and Michael above discuss Israel’s need to go it alone, Caroline represents many Israelis realizing that like in ancient Israel when the Assyrians described Egypt as “Now behold, you have relied on the support of this broken reed, on Egypt; on which if a man leans, it will go into his hand and pierce it. That is how Pharaoh king of Egypt is to all who rely on him”, so they are realizing the same about America.

    It’s getting even scarier for the Israelis as they realize they are truly alone in the world. Kind of like when your parents die and you realize you have no backup.

  27. It comes down to Bibi. Does he mean what he said? Or is he gonna take the knee to the US? Politically, I think his career is over if he doesn’t destroy Hamas and Gaza. OTOH, maybe he makes a deal that the lawfare against him (directed by the US) ends if he takes the knee? I’ve always thought that he is more political than principled. I reckon we’ll see.

  28. @ sdferr – the only complaint I have about Badran’s eye-opening post is with his conclusion: “Did the U.S. intend for any of this to happen? Not exactly.”

    Biden Inc absolutely intended all of that to happen.

  29. @ Mike Plaiss:
    Likewise, I was a surgical resident at the U of Iowa in the 1980s when I assisted Dr. Janusz Bardach in doing a facial reconstruction operation. He was a quiet man about his past and I had absolutely no clue until 20 years later when I found out that he wrote the book, “Man is Wolf to Man”. It was about his experiences as a Polish Jew, first trying to escape the Nazis in the early days of WWII by being conscripted into the Red Army, and then later being accused, sent to a gulag, and ultimately escaping to America to become a successful professor of surgery at Iowa. Quite a book, but one comes away with a very sobering and skeptical view of the ‘innate goodness’ of human nature. All because he was Jewish.

  30. @ JackWayne
    I’m with you on Bibi, prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt amongst an argumentative and fractious people, yet it’s hard to trust any politician not to prioritize his own skin. As you say, we’ll see.

  31. Politically, I think his career is over if he doesn’t destroy Hamas and Gaza.

    Reading the tea leaves, Bibi is finished politically no matter the destruction of Hamas, no matter the disposition of Gaza, no matter the fight with Hezbollah, or Iran. It may not be fair, or just, but it’s politics all the same.

  32. “Humanitarian aid” — It is like giving money to panhandlers. If you really want the panhandler to use it for food, tell them you will buy them a meal from McDonalds. Hell, tell them you will bring them a meal from the finest steakhouse in town! And if they say sure, then you know they probably really do want the money for food. If “humanitarian aid” is what you want to give the Palestinians, don’t give them money; give them food, bandages, basic medicines… See how fast Hamas says, “Uh. No, thank you.”

  33. The NY Post has surpassed The Bee as the country’s paper of record…and it’s on a roll:

    “Chilling new image shows terrorist with Israeli woman who cooked for them to escape hostage nightmare”—
    https://nypost.com/2023/10/19/pic-shows-israeli-woman-with-terrorist-during-hostage-ordeal/
    “I was a DEI director — DEI drives campus antisemitism”—
    https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/i-was-a-dei-director-dei-drives-campus-antisemitism/
    “Media parrots Hamas’ lie without question — and Jews suffer for it”—
    https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/media-parrots-hamas-lie-without-question-and-jews-suffer/
    “Response to Hamas horror shows the feminist movement has lost its moral compass”—
    https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/response-to-hamas-horror-shows-the-feminist-movement-has-lost-its-moral-compass/
    “Joe Biden’s words in Israel were sorely needed—but what’s his Iran plan?”—
    https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/joe-biden-offers-powerful-support-to-israel-but-remains-silent-on-iran/
    Oops. That last one’s a bit of a dud…

    Looks like the Bee had better get its act together…if it wants to retake pole position….

  34. “Humanitarian aid”…
    …is really just a nifty way for “Biden” to further humiliate Bibi and the State of Israel, keep the hate towards that country on high burn and virtue signal that “Biden” is a truly moral person and, in spite of the honeyed weasel words “he”‘s been forced to mumble by those colonialist oppressor ZIOs that “he”‘s on the “right side of history”.

    That “he” KNOWS THE SCORE.
    That “he”‘s MORE than just “Decent”!

    What’s a bit mystifying, though, is why “he” hasn’t seen fit to order an emergency airlift of assorted candies, cakes and chocolates to the people Gaza so that they will be able to celebrate the victory that “he” has so meticuloously planned for them.
    (OTOH, “he” may have already done it off the books…but still on America’s dime, as part of that vaunted “Humanitarian” assistance.)

  35. he doesn’t know what day it is, but for the malley agents at state at the pentagon!
    at the nsc, it’s khaybar time,

  36. AesopFan, it’s not for me to gainsay your judgement contra Badran that “Biden Inc absolutely intended all of that to happen”, yet I remark that is a harsh judgment indeed. One of those “are we the baddies?” in a serious manner, one of the sorts of shocks — hopefully quite rare — that befall us from time to time. Too few, alas, are suffering this turn.

  37. I didn’t watch the video, but American Thinker has an article up that summarizes it. And I hate to say it, but this fills in a lot of blanks. The administration’s attitude toward this seemed like too sudden of a shift for an administration and State Department that has been bending over backwards to accommodate Iran.

    And now I have a possible explanation why that makes a lot more sense.

  38. “… it’s khaybar time…”
    Gosh, they should be careful that they’re not all salivating a bit prematurely…discretion being the better part of, um, ecstasy and all… (Premature salivation CAN be a rather embarrassing medical condition)…

    Though if things DO go a bit south for the Malley gang, Honest A. can always haul out his faithful boilerplate bona fides—“Hey, I lost several family members in the Holocaust [poignant, pregnant pause]…so Israel can ALWAYS rely on me to ALWAYS have its back ALWAYS!”…
    (Such “credentials” have been known to come in handy for ‘im in the past…but the ACT may well have worn out its welcome…in certain places…jus’ sayin’…)

    File under: Don’t whoop it up till ye see the whites (and browns) of their…charred and mutilated corpses…

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