Another week, another confirmation that when it comes to jihadism, the Biden administration’s foreign policy occupies the nexus between incompetence and moral vacancy. We’ve observed the President’s strategic genius when it comes to the Taliban (withdraw), Iran’s nuclear ambitions (appease) and Hamas (thus far but no further). Now we are seeing it when it comes to Hezbollah.
With the conflict in Gaza winding down, Israel is being forced to turn its mind to its restive northern border. Over the last eight months, with the eyes of the world fixed firmly on Palestine, the parallel war – for that is what it has been – with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah has been under-reported. Thousands of rockets have been fired into the Jewish state by the Iranian proxy, killing and maiming indiscriminately. Tens of thousands of Israeli civilians have been displaced to the south, where they are living in hotels funded by the taxpayer. Entire towns are inhabited only by soldiers and ghosts.
For the worst example of base Israelophobia disguised as lily-livered appeasement, we must turn to the Biden administration
Those who shout loudest about international law when Israel gears up for conflict have been shamefully silent about Hezbollah’s unprovoked aggression. According to UN Resolution 1701, the Lebanese militia has been supposed to restrict itself to territory north of the Litani river since 2006. It has long since violated this order.
I have visited the Israeli side of the border and seen Hezbollah men with my own eyes, operating within hiking distance. I have walked inside the jaw-droppingly sophisticated tunnels they dug into Israel before being discovered by the IDF. All this – not to mention the rockets that have claimed lives, destroyed family homes and set miles of woodland ablaze – has been met with nothing but shrugs from the UN and the Americans. They have been too busy demanding Israel stop its ‘genocide’ in the south for fear of victory over Hamas. And Biden has been too busy thinking about re-election, to the extent to which he has the capacity to form cogent thoughts at all.
What other country would be expected to live under such conditions? If the attacks continue unabated, Israel will have no choice but to offer more than targeted airstrikes in return. Its defence apparatus has drawn up plans for war which have been signed off at the highest levels. The Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Israel Katz and other officials have attempted to galvanise the international community behind a diplomatic solution as well as issuing numerous warnings. The Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has made clear his hope that Israeli children might return to their homes in time for the next school year. Nobody – not Hezbollah, not the UN, not the Biden administration – has taken the slightest notice.
Until now. That is because now there is a danger that Israel might strike back hard – and when it comes to Western politicians, that’s the only thing that focuses minds. In Gaza, about 30 per cent of Hamas butchers are believed to have been killed or wounded, which by some estimates already qualifies as the irreversible destruction of its military capabilities. Much of its infrastructure has been dismantled. The Philadelphi corridor, that narrow strip of land stippled with smuggling tunnels along the border between Gaza and Egypt, is now in Israeli hands, preventing Hamas from rearming. The Rafah campaign, which has claimed historically few civilian lives, is just weeks from completion.
Big questions remain about the future governance of Gaza, and a bloody counter-insurgency phase is yet to come. But the conclusion of the all-out war is in sight, and with it looms the beginning of a second conflict in Lebanon.
After eight months of trauma, nobody wants another fight in the north. Hezbollah is a far more fearsome foe than Hamas, with up to 150,000 precision guided missiles and the backing of Iran. Casualties would be horrific on both sides. Israel would likely suffer more destruction than it has seen in decades. Iran may join the war directly. This could even be existential. But in its growing international isolation, what alternative is left for the Jewish state? If the Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah doesn’t call off the dogs, his terror army will have to be next.
Let us briefly consider what a sane international community would look like. The 7 October atrocities, the outrageous 13 to 14 April attacks by Iran and the continued Hezbollah bombardment would have evoked a full-throated support for the Middle East’s sole meaningful democracy. The UN would be providing robust carrot-and-stick diplomacy, peacekeeping forces would be on standby and overwhelming American assets would be poised in the Eastern Mediterranean. An ultimatum, approved by the security council, would be on the table, with real consequences backing it up. Plans would be prepared not just for the elimination of Hezbollah but also the devastation of Iran’s nuclear programme and perhaps its repellent regime into the bargain. Given such global unity and powerful deterrents, it is unlikely that the jihadis would persist.
Back to reality. Yesterday, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres tweeted: ‘I feel compelled to voice my profound concerns about escalation between Israel and Hezbollah… The people of the region and the world cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza.’ He is, of course, already infamous for asserting that the 7 October atrocities ‘did not happen in a vacuum’, possibly the most insidious example of victim-blaming in recent memory. No surprise then that he was compelled to speak by the threat of Israeli action – but what about the devastation of northern Israel?
But for the worst example of base Israelophobia disguised as lily-livered appeasement, we must turn to the Biden administration. Let’s start with the ignominious figure of General Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In an interview yesterday reported by the Jerusalem Post, he made a series of points that might have been scripted by the Ayatollah of Tehran.
In short, he made it clear that the United States would not come to the aid of Israel in any war with Hezbollah. If Iran joined the fight on the side of the Lebanese militia, he added, the White House would not even repeat the purely defensive international air campaign it led back in April. He implied it wasn’t worth American lives. He concluded with a warning to Jerusalem: do not defend yourself. If you do, you’re on your own.
Brown’s intervention was matched by US Middle East envoy Amos Hochstein, who last week warned Lebanese officials that his country would not be able to hold back an Israeli invasion if Hezbollah continued its attacks. The message was clear: at the time of greatest strategic peril, the US is disengaging from the Middle East. The rights and wrongs mean nothing, as do questions of geopolitical strategy and national interest. Afghan withdrawal, anyone?
This is one of the most potent example of incompetence-come-moral-vacuity I can recall from a recent American administration. Here we have a beleaguered democratic ally, a redoubt of the West, surrounded by jihadi fanatics, mourning the victims of the savagery of 7 October and the soldiers who have fallen in battle, with an Islamofascist enemy – which literally uses the Hitler salute at its rallies – raining munitions down on its northern territory. The reaction of the world’s superpower? Frit.
Sadly, this is nothing new. Remember all the hullaballoo about Rafah? Through a public megaphone – eschewing even the dignity of closed-door conversations – the Americans informed the world that there was no way to evacuate the civilians from the town before an assault. That foreign policy genius Kamala Harris told us that she had ‘studied the maps’. There would be a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ if the IDF advanced, they warned, commanding the Israelis to stay away. What would this have meant? The survival of Hamas. The re-arming of Hamas. Another atrocity by Hamas, leading to another war.
So after some prevarication, Israel went ahead. The results were remarkable. In ten days, it evacuated a million civilians and has now almost concluded the operation, using lessons learned early in the conflict to claim record low numbers of innocent lives. Hamas stands on the brink of defeat. The American-led campaign to stop Israel from winning the war has been exposed as self-serving, mendacious nonsense.
With Hezbollah thrusting itself into the firing line, the United States, the UN and the rest of the international community are preparing to follow the same playbook. Unless a diplomatic solution is reached, we can look forward to allegations of Israeli genocide, expansionism, belligerence, white supremacy and ethnic cleansing. We can look forward to more legal action, more marches in our capitals, more arms embargoes, more countries recognising Palestine, more Israelophobic social media memes, more rampant antisemitism on university campuses and more mobs outside synagogues.
Those who insist on making a factual case for sanity will be attacked, repressed, shouted down and marginalised. Why? Two reasons. For the United Nations – a club of mostly authoritarian nations that has long been a hotbed of institutional bigotry, regularly condemning Israel more than all other countries in the world combined – it is a case of straightforward Israelophobia. They are rooting only for one side and it’s not the one with the Jews on it. For the Biden administration, this is about something more quotidian, if no less deplorable. Questions of right and wrong, geopolitical strategy, international stability and the national interest are all taking a back seat. Biden needs the issue to go away. His focus is on the November election.
Thus we find ourselves in a dreadful position in which the only hope for diverting grave international instability lies in the hands of a man who is orange. If I was the Ayatollah, I’d make a break for nuclearisation before the Americans hit the ballot box. Wouldn’t you? Maybe that’s what this is about.