Biden Is a Prisoner of the Progressives’ War on Israel Andrew McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-is-a-prisoner-of-the-progressives-war-on-israel/
In a pathetic sop to his political base in an election year when his approval ratings are dismal, President Biden slapped sanctions on dozens of Israeli settlers in Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. the West Bank), blocking travel and financial transactions.
As even the Biden fans and Palestinian sympathizers at the New York Times acknowledge, the move is “a gesture” to appeal to “American voters who are furious with the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.” (The Times ends the sentence there; I would have continued it with “that erupted when Iran-backed Hamas murdered over 1,100 Israelis, raping, wounding, and/or taking hostage hundreds of others in its October 7 sneak attack.”)
The sanctions will have negligible effect. Israel is currently at war on several fronts, including the West Bank, where it eliminated three Hamas terrorists in a raid on a Palestinian hospital on Tuesday. The capacity of a relative handful of people to engage in U.S. travel or finance is of little moment in the scheme of things.
Whether the president’s ploy will have the desired political effect of mollifying Biden’s base is similarly doubtful. The fringe to whom Biden is virtue-signaling (yes, this is their idea of virtue) will not be satisfied with a gesture; they want real action, you know, from the river to the sea. More importantly, they are mostly younger people who are not reliable voters; older voters, whom Biden will need in November, tend to support Israel.
How characteristic of Biden to cut off lawful visas for Israelis while he lawlessly issues hundreds of thousands of faux Biden visas to illegal aliens to usher them into the United States — heedless of the damage it is doing to the education, health-care, law-enforcement, and social-services budgets of American cities and states.
Of course, on the bright side, Biden hasn’t yet followed through on his State Department’s signal that it is mulling formal recognition of Palestinian statehood. That would be vintage Biden: Statehood is the carrot administrations of both parties would not give the Palestinians even when they were pretending to participate in a diplomatic “peace process,” because they refused to renounce terrorism, concede Israel’s right to exist, and abandon the “right of return” for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian “refugees”; now, Biden contemplates giving them statehood as a reward for their jihadist war of terrorist aggression aimed at extirpating Israel.
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