When Joe Biden gave his State of the Union address this year, he bragged, “No one has a stronger record with Israel than I do.”

The strength of that record, though, may depend on your perspective. While Biden reportedly considers Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu another word for the south end of a northward-traveling donkey who needed a “come-to-Jesus meeting,” most Americans still support Israel’s fight to defend itself. This is a fight that yesterday opened another front, as Israeli forces ordered civilians to evacuate a portion of the city of Rafah, which is believed to be the last holdout of Hamas fighters, and soon seized the Gaza side.

Hamas is supposedly (but not believably) eager for a ceasefire brokered by Egypt and Qatar, and the Israelis are working on both military and diplomatic solutions. Meanwhile, Biden has made a tic-tac-toe board of red lines over the last few months as the world awaited the all-but-inevitable Rafah invasion. At the same time, he’s dealing with his own unrest back home, as college campuses have erupted in protests seldom seen since the Vietnam War.

While the unhinged Left is trying to paint Biden as “pumping unending military aid into the Israeli war machine” and whining about his pro-Israel stance, the far-left People’s World complained that Biden was criticizing tuition-paying debt-ridden students but “has said nothing about the trespassing carried out by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and elsewhere.” But the real “scoop” last week was about how, according to Israeli officials, Biden has put a hold on a promised American ammunition shipment to the Israelis.

Some, such as Scott Johnson at Power Line, see this as a signal of Biden’s tacit support of Hamas — support that is alleged to have come with a price. Yet it’s probable that Biden is only delaying the inevitable. The editors of The Wall Street Journal would like to see this conflict end with the cleaning out of Rafah, and they had this to say about Biden’s equivocation:

Mr. Biden’s strategy of pressuring Israel to make concessions that its government and citizens are united against hasn’t worked. It hasn’t won concessions from Hamas and its allies in Iran and Lebanon. And it hasn’t tamed the anti-Israel protests in the U.S. that threaten his re-election.

Mr. Biden was in a stronger position, politically and strategically, when he spoke with moral clarity about Hamas and in support of Israel after Oct. 7. The fastest way to end the war is with an Israeli victory, and withholding weapons is exactly the wrong message to send an ally under siege.

Thousands of unruly college students have been buffeted by pro-Gaza propaganda, including inflated body counts, and they are becoming the best campaign commercial Donald Trump doesn’t have to buy. After all, “from the river to the sea” means eliminating Israel from the map, no matter how the Left tries to spin it otherwise.

The tightrope Joe Biden is walking in trying to appease both Hamas and the Israelis is getting more and more frayed, just like the nerves of those folks trying to make their way around college campuses without stumbling upon the squalor of pop-up tent cities. We like the way columnist Josh Hammer described this: “The doddering dolt from Delaware has been on a monthslong crusade to mollycoddle Hamas, a U.S. State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization that slaughtered dozens of American citizens last October and still holds many hostage today in Gaza. The senile octogenarian, a mere puppet of his addlebrained ventriloquists, is now all in for Hamas.”

That may win Joe Biden a few votes from the Soros-backed agitators helping to create chaos on college campuses, but there are a lot more of us who would prefer the crackdown start now and finish up before another long, hot summer plagues the presidential campaign season.

Ultimately, we suspect that when the competing foreign policy records of Joe Biden and Donald Trump are weighed and measured, Biden will be found lacking.