Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Both the Harris-Walz presidential ticket and now lame-duck President Joe Biden keep insisting that they are Israel’s best friend.
A snarly Biden recently bragged at a contentious press conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think [Netanyahu] should remember that.”
Yet the thin-skinned and triggered Biden’s prickliness poorly hid—or perhaps revealed—the truth: this current administration knows that it is responsible for the current explosion of the Middle East and the particular dilemmas of Israel.
Biden further revealed his blame-gaming of the Israeli government when asked another loaded question about purported Netanyahu election interference, saying, “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know.”
Election interference?
Biden apparently forgot who just flew Ukrainian President Zelensky into swing state Pennsylvania, just as early and mail-in voting there began, to lobby for more aid even as he trashed candidates Trump and Vance to a left-wing magazine.
Recently, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris refused to say whether the Netanyahu administration is even an ally of the United States.
Her Democrat running mate, Governor Tim Walz, could not state whether the Democratic ticket would approve of an Israeli response—by either targeting the Iranian nuclear bomb program or its oil fields and exporting facilities—to some 500 Iranian missiles and rockets that hit the Jewish state.
Another Bob Woodward racy and gossipy tell-all book just appeared. It alleges that Biden despised Netanyahu and has reportedly smeared him to aides: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f**king guy!”
What are we to make of this Biden-Harris-Walz mess?
It is an election year and one of the closest races in modern memory. Biden and his successors, Harris-Walz, know that support for Israel is a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and critical for Democratic unity.
Yet they feel they must also pander to anti-Israel, Muslim-American voters who may determine the electoral college votes of critical swing state Michigan.
Democrat politicos square that circle by claiming they support Israel—despite damning the conservative Netanyahu. That way they seek to blame Netanyahu for alienating Arab and Muslim-American voters, while they do not alienate left-wing Jewish and pro-Israeli Democrats.
Two, for all the invective, a demonized Netanyahu is now regaining public support in Israel. The Israeli public approves of his near destruction of Hamas, the ongoing brilliant Israeli emasculation of Hezbollah, and Israel’s revelations that the once widely feared terrorist regime in Iran may in fact well prove to be a paper tiger.
Three, Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan admitted just eight days before the October 7 massacres that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
His boast was an admission that Biden and Harris had inherited from the prior Trump administration a stable Middle East.
So, what blew up Jack Sullivan’s quietude?
Certainly not Netanyahu or Israel in general.
It was the terrorists of Hamas who surprise attacked and murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians during peace and a Jewish holiday.
Their slaughtering torturing, raping, and hostage-taking revealed a level of precivilization barbarism rarely seen in the modern era.
Israel was simultaneously targeted by rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah that would eventually number over 20,000.
It did not respond to the bloodbath with a full-scale invasion of Gaza until October 27, some three weeks after the slaughtering.
During that interim, for most of the Muslim world and both U.S. Muslim communities and on American campuses, there was rejoicing at the news of slaughtered Jews.
For over three years, the Biden administration had signaled Israel’s enemies that it no longer acted like a close ally of the past.
After it all, Biden-Harris lifted sanctions on a hostile Iran, giving it $100 billion in oil windfalls. It begged Iran to reenter the disastrous Iran deal. It abandoned the Abraham Accords. It lifted the terrorist designation from the terrorist Houthis. It restored fungible aid to the Hamas tunnel builders. It gave new aid to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.
Israel’s enemies got the Biden message: attack the Jewish state and perhaps Americans for the first time in a half-century may not really mind that much.
And so they did in unison.
Rather than admitting their own role in igniting the Middle East, Biden and Harris now blame the victims of their own incendiary foreign policy.
The final irony?
Israel has concluded that Biden-Harris foolhardiness can be toxic—and endanger its very survival—and so will not agree to its own suicide.
Instead, Israel seeks to finish a multifaceted war it did not seek. And one of whose beneficiaries from Israeli blood and treasure will be the U.S. itself, given Israel is now systematically weakening America’s own existential enemies.
You just can’t despise the Biden-Harris administration enough. Biden, wrong on foreign policy his entire political career, a pathological liar and a “grifter”——there’s nothing admirable about him as a human being. VP Harris owns everything that’s good or bad from the Biden administration. …..But, I’ve having a hard time thinking of what good things they’ve done for the country. Harris is trying to remake herself from her marxist/liberal identity, but the “cat is out of the bag”. Could the Democrats picked any two worse candidates, Harris & Walz ? At least we know how the Trump administration ran the country for four years, and what it will look like for four more years if he’s elected again.
The long list of failures in foreign policy and relations of the Biden politicos is just astonishing when Harris proclaims “There isn’t anything that comes to her mind that she would do differently”. It is statements such as those that prove what a vacuous space she has between her ears. It frightens me to no end to think she could be our next President. Do you ever get the thought our great country is circling the drain with such examples of poor leadership?
I don’t think Biden has the cognitive ability at this stage to lead his administration, but he sure has a lot of people in both the U.S and in Israel thinking that he supports Israel to a point. It just happens that his point of departure is when Israel gets serious about defending itself.
Harris is too stupid to see the reality of Iran’s terrorist regime. If she is elected, it will be horrible.
VDH –
Great analysis…as usual.
I imagine good ‘ol Willie Brown is fondly reflecting back on his steamy relationship with his thirty year younger concubine / paramour (whatever you want to call it) and how he lifted her career in California politics. I also wonder how many of the young women who consider Kamala their role model know about this little secret.
From what I gather, Germany and India are the only ones helping Israel these days. That isn’t to say USA hasn’t helped a lot. It has. But cutting off or slow walking already promised weapons is like the expression that Israel is ‘left standing in the lurch’, or ‘dangling in the wind’. Where’s Richard Nixon when you need him?
Netanyahu has personal courage and tactical skill beyond Biden and Harris’ comprehension–and something more: faith, patriotism, focus outside their moral quagmire. Let Bibi bring biblical judgment to the barbarians; their oil, their centrifuges, their persons. Elites will wail and moan; the people will rejoice.
Excellent analysis, Victor! To think there is a real possibility that Harris could be our next Puppet President is numbing.
As a longtime reader of your essays and an avid follower of your podcasts, I agree with 90%+ of what you have to say, except for one topic: your inexcusably skimpy coverage of the war in Ukraine. Your coverage of Israel’s conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah, by comparison, is overwhelming. I am puzzled by this imbalance. Russia’s genocidal war on Ukraine is in its third year and yet you hardly talk about Russian atrocities and indiscriminate bombing of Ukrainian cities. While Israel’s losses number in the thousands, Ukrainian losses are in the hundreds of thousands. Moreover, the Russian invasion has created over ten million refugees which in magnitude dwarfs anything Israel is experiencing. As Russia is trying to extinguish Ukraine and its forty million inhabitants, you hardly talk about it, and that to me is inexplicable.
Worse, you often seem critical of Ukrainian efforts to defend itself. For example, you absurdly blame Zelensky for postponing elections. How does one hold elections, Prof Hanson, when millions are outside the country or have been internally displaced?
Furthermore, the war in Ukraine has much broader and more serious implications for Europe, the US, and the world than the Arab-Israel conflict in the Middle East for one salient reason: Russia has nuclear weapons and has repeatedly threatened to use them. Israel, on the other hand, can take out Iran’s nuclear facilities if it chooses, while Ukraine is denied the capability to strike inside Russia.