Rescued Hostages a Blow to Biden’s Effort to Thwart Israel By Philip Klein
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rescued-hostages-a-blow-to-bidens-effort-to-thwart-israel/
By carrying out a daring military operation in Rafah that rescued two hostages, Israel sent two important messages to President Biden. One, operations in Rafah are necessary to destroy Hamas. And two, hostages can be secured by military action, and not merely through negotiations that demand Israel abandon its war aims.
As Biden has been cratering in polls and increasingly convinced that he needs to reassure the anti-Israel base of his party, he has taken to lashing out at our ally both privately (by calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an obstinate “a**hole”) and publicly by claiming that Israel’s response to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust has been “over the top.”
What Biden hopes is that he can convince Israel to swallow a tremendously one-sided hostage deal that would involve Israel releasing many times more Hamas prisoners and agreeing to a cease-fire of several months, with the aim of making it permanent. Israel has made significant progress in dismantling Hamas’s grip on Gaza, but the frenzied negotiations are happening as Israel is preparing to take Rafah, the last major stronghold of the terrorist group.
The Biden administration claimed at the beginning of the war that it supported Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas, but now Biden and his team are trying to kneecap Israel before the job is done. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that an Israeli operation in Rafah would be a “disaster” and “not something we would support.” Biden just yesterday told Netanyahu, according to a White House–supplied readout, that “a military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there.”
While Biden has reportedly been complaining that a stubborn Netanyahu is an obstacle, the war against Hamas has wide support in Israel, and Benny Gantz — a member of the war cabinet who will be the leading rival to Netanyahu in the next election — reiterated that “there is no question about the need to act in any place in which there is terror. Broad action in Rafah, as we said in the past, is not in question.”
The fact that Israel was able to rescue two hostages by going into Rafah will only reinforce public resolve to press on — even in the face of Biden’s opposition.
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