America’s Betrayal of Israel

I am writing this on Saturday, as news outlets report hundreds of Israeli dead, and dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers and civilians kidnapped by Hamas terrorists and taken into Gaza.

It is never a good idea to write anything as events are still rapidly unfolding, especially as neither I nor anyone else can answer the only question that ultimately matters—namely, “what happens now?” But we can answer another, much more rudimentary and no less urgent question: Who’s at fault?

There will be plenty of time to pore over how a cataclysmic disaster of this magnitude could happen, and who—from Bibi down to the IDF chief of staff, head of intelligence, et al.—failed to protect the lives of Israelis. A lot of it will have to do with people who should have known better—including former prime ministers and former and current high-level security officials—abandoning the core commitment of defending Israel and instead entertaining themselves by cosplaying some game of Demokratia, complete with donning handmaid outfits and ululating about fascism. Hysterics about your political opponents being the enemies of democracy may be fun in Kalorama; in Sderot and Ofakim, and even in Tel Aviv, there’s a price to pay for abandoning the real world and indulging in fetish play.

But the bigger mistake on the part of the Israelis is that over the past few years they have gotten the power equation that governs their lives backward: Instead of understanding themselves to be citizens of a strong but beleaguered country whose first responsibility is to protect itself, they luxuriated in the fantasy that the United States was and always would be their protector—when in fact the ruling party in America has decided that Israel is a liability.

Watch this video. That’s a Hamas drone taking down an Israeli Merkava tank. A drone operated by an organization sponsored and trained by Iran applying both Iranian tactics and, most likely, Iranian hardware to attack Israel. This happened weeks after America sent Iran $6 billion, and one week after we learned that the American government had over the past years ceded whole parts of its own intelligence units to Iranian spies.

The stage for this attack was not set by Israel. It was set by the United States.

For the better part of the past decade, the United States has pursued a foreign policy designed to strengthen Iran and enable it to form a strong sphere of influence in the region. This is the idea behind what Tony Badran and Michael Doran called “the realignment,” a vision of a new world order in which America partners with Iran in order to “find a more stable balance of power that would make [the Middle East] less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” Those words aren’t Badran and Doran’s; they’re Robert Malley’s, Barack Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran deal who, as Semafor reported this week, helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Biden himself, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, spoke of “an integrated Middle East,” using the phrase no less than three times to make clear that his administration was intent on pursuing his predecessor’s commitment to seeing Iran not as a U.S. foe but as our collaborator.

And the Biden administration wasn’t just talking the talk. It was also walking the walk, from unfreezing billions in assets to make it easier for Tehran to support its proxy Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon to sending huge cash infusions used primarily to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of unvetted “security personnel.” And while the previous administration halted all aid to the Palestinians—directly because of the “pay for slay” policies that support the families of those who slaughter Israelis—the Biden administration was quick to reverse the decision.

Lots of people argued that this was simply clear-minded realpolitik after decades of disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bullshit. Here’s how you know this policy was, and is, motivated not by what’s best for America but by what would kneecap the Jewish state: Because it extended to inside Israel’s borders…..

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Continue reading this article at Tablet Magazine.