The Patriot Post® · Biden Equivocates on Israel's Righteous War

When it comes to Israel’s war with Hamas, there is a clear bad guy, and young Americans who think it’s Israel have it exactly backwards. The motive and rationale for this war is about as black and white as it gets. Israel and Hamas espouse drastically different ideologies, and due to the radical religious-based extremism of Hamas, the hope of an enduring peaceful compromise is effectively impossible.

As Hamas’s leaders have repeatedly reiterated, their goal is to see all Jews eradicated from Israel. To them, it’s a holy war. Hence their anti-Semitic genocidal chant “from the river to the sea.” No two-state compromise is even in the cards for Hamas. In fact, Hamas came to power in response to the Palestinian leadership under Fatah apparently warming to a possible two-state solution, or at least to ending hostilities.

To put it bluntly, Hamas exists to kill Jews.

Given that stark reality, and the fact that Israel has been America’s closest ally in the region — and one of our closest allies period — one would assume the Biden administration would have few qualms about standing solidly behind Israel. And yet it’s glaringly obvious that leftist political concerns have made Team Biden squeamish on espousing unbending support for Israel in its war for justice and survival.

Increasingly, the Biden administration has been ratcheting up the pressure on Israel to concede to ending the war soon, and before Hamas is annihilated. The usual excuse is concern for civilian casualties — which, by the way, Hamas deliberately causes. Joe Biden himself warned that public opinion could turn away from supporting Israel should the war and Palestinian civilian suffering continue.

White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan even traveled there last week to micromanage Israel’s war in Gaza, which he insisted needs to “transition to the next lower intensity phase in a matter of weeks, not months.”

In the past, this strategy of the U.S. and European countries brow-beating Israel for effectively defending itself too much against Palestinian jihadists has “worked.” Israel inevitably backs off, with the West promising to broker some new peace deal — only to see the peace later shattered, always, in every single instance, broken by the Palestinians.

Whether it’s via indiscriminate rocket attacks, suicide bombings, kidnappings, or murder, Israel has always been on the receiving end. And every time Israel responds, the West warns against an over-response whereby more Palestinians end up dead.

This time may be different, however. There was the sheer scale and brutality of the murderous Iran-backed attack on October 7, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also at the helm, so Israeli determination to end the Hamas threat once and for all has effectively banished any talk of conceding to ending the fight against an enemy whose sole reason for existing is to kill Jews.

Furthermore, it’s important to note that the reason Hamas wields the power it does in Gaza is because it is supported both by the Palestinian people themselves — 72% supported Hamas’s October 7 attack — and Iran, which has long conducted a proxy war with Israel via its funding and arming of Palestinian jihadi groups.

Video footage of the October 7 attack showed not only armed Hamas terrorists launching their choreographed assault against innocent Israelis but also a mob of Palestinians rushing across the border to join in the brutal atrocities carried out against Jews.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s pressure campaign against Israel’s war effort in the name of saving civilian lives has had an impact not in ending the war but in costing more Israeli soldiers’ lives. Thanks to Biden’s criticism of the Israel Defense Forces’ “indiscriminate bombing,” Israel has pulled back on airstrikes. This has resulted in making the ground campaign for IDF troops more difficult and deadly. IDF troop fatalities have now risen to a total of 445, with seven killed on Sunday.

When has Biden ever used this kind of rhetoric when talking about Ukraine in its war against Russia? When has Biden ever accused Ukraine’s military of engaging in “indiscriminate bombing”? Spoiler: he hasn’t. Instead, Biden continues to call on Congress to send billions more in funding to Ukraine’s near-two-year-long war effort. There has never been equivocating on Biden’s part when it comes to Ukraine or who’s at fault for the war.

The problem is that ever since the creation of the modern state of Israel, the West has never held an unequivocal position on Israel. Both Europe and the U.S. have refused to accept the reality that Islam and Israel cannot peacefully coexist. And Biden is just the latest U.S. president who is attempting to hold the line on promoting the realization of an impossible goal.