Biden’s Both-Sidesism Collides with Reality P. David Hornik
No, Mr. President, suicide bombers and the Israeli army are not the same.
“We’ll keep working to bring hostages home and end the war in Gaza and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” President Biden said Monday night at the Democratic National Convention. He went on to say that “Those folks down the street”—the anti-Israel protesters—“have a point: a lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”
On Sunday night in Tel Aviv, a suicide bomber accidentally blew himself up as he was about to enter a synagogue. The Tel Aviv police chief said that if the bomb had not gone off accidentally, “it would have caused vast damage and multiple casualties.”
The would-be bomber was a Palestinian from the West Bank, and Hamas—Israel’s main adversary in the Gaza fighting—claimed credit for his would-be attack and vowed to carry out more.
If the bomber had succeeded to enter the synagogue, his act would not have been the same as Israel’s antiterror warfare in Gaza, which, like all antiterror warfare in populated areas, sometimes exacts civilian casualties—though “No urban fight in history has resulted in such a low ratio” of civilians to combatants killed.
But the Biden administration has for a while been embracing moral equivalency regarding the Israel–Hamas war in Gaza, and now characterizes it as a war that simply has to end so that peace can prevail. “Peace” means a return of the Israeli hostages neatly balanced by a complete, or near complete, withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
Yet Hamas, while severely depleted, has not been destroyed, and thousands of its fighters still remain. Who, then, stops Gaza from becoming an anti-Israel front again? Who prevents the further October 7–like attacks that Hamas has vowed to commit?
Versions abound—contingents from the Palestinian Authority, from moderate Arab countries, from the US or the EU, or some combination thereof fill the complete or near-complete void left by the departed Israeli forces.
Yet Israel’s experience with such “peacekeepers” has been dire. In May 1967, when Egyptian president Nasser ordered the UN contingent to clear out of Sinai, they meekly complied, and the Six-Day War followed a few weeks later. In the aftermath of Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza, the stationing of both Egyptian and EU forces along the Gaza–Sinai border to stop arms smuggling proved a total flop.
Even worse was the posting of UNIFIL forces to southern Lebanon after the 2006 Israel–Hizballah war—a farcical failure eagerly exploited by Hizballah. The results are now all too evident to residents of northern Israel—both those who have had to leave and those still trying to live amid daily rocket, missile, and drone attacks.
Politico now reports that the presumptive Israel–Hamas deal is “on the brink of collapsing…. Israel has signed on, but Hamas says in public statements it will not accept the pact.”
Although Netanyahu is not a fan of the deal, his “signing on” is probably a smart move to set up Hamas as the naysayer. The US now worries that “if they cannot get Hamas on board, they may be out of options, increasing the chance of an increase in violence between Israel and Hezbollah and a direct confrontation between Israel and Tehran.”
In those words, the basic fallacy is detectable. Iran and its proxies’—emphatically including Hizballah—war on Israel is not about Gaza, and even if Biden’s deal were to miraculously succeed and end the Israel–Hamas conflict, Iran would not be deflected from its obsessive effort to put an end to the Jewish state.
Iran is at this moment working hard to destabilize Jordan and turn it into another front against Israel. Even if peace were to break out in Gaza, it would keep doing so. The Israel–Hizballah conflict would also continue—because Israelis forced to leave their homes in northern Israel refuse to return unless Hizballah is at least pushed back across the Litani River, something that can only be done militarily and not—even if some dream otherwise—diplomatically.
No, President Biden—“those folks down the street,” who also want to rub Israel off the planet, do not “have a point.” The problem is not that “a lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides”; it’s that Iran and its proxies, unequivocally including Hamas, want to kill Israel. A strong American pro-Israel, pro–moderate Arab, anti-Iran stance in the region could have done much to counteract the dangers, but that is not the course the administration has taken.
Sinking into moral equivalency, seeing the problem as, essentially, Israel—in this case, its military presence in Gaza—is, as always, feckless and futile.
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