By Caroline Glick, JPost—
Until Wednesday, President Joe Biden had maintained a fairly supportive posture towards Israel in the face of the Hamas terror regime in Gaza’s launch of its newest round of war against the Jewish state. In the first week of the new war, Biden’s administration blocked the UN Security Council from adopting anti-Israel statements and resolutions three times.
Until Wednesday afternoon Israel time, Biden avoided publicly calling on Israel to halt its counterstrikes against Hamas and expressed his support for Israel’s right to protect its citizens from Hamas’ missiles.
So it wouldn’t be surprising if some Israelis were flabbergasted when Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday afternoon that he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire,” effectively ordering Israel to stand down by day’s end.
But Biden’s week of professions of support for Israel were hardly the last word on his administration’s positions on Israel and the war. Indeed, they weren’t even its first word.
Biden’s actual policies regarding Israel, are revealed in three different ways. First, there are the policies that Biden had already adopted before Hamas opened its missile offensive from Gaza and its spate of organized anti-Jewish pogroms in mixed Arab-Jewish cities throughout Israel.
Biden’s courtship of Iran through the renewal of nuclear talks in Vienna, in which he has signaled his willingness to end U.S. economic sanctions on Iran; and through his administration’s persuasion of Iraq and South Korea to unfreeze billions of dollars in Iranian oil revenue have signaled Iran and its terror proxies including Hamas that the Biden administration is abandoning the U.S. alliance with Israel and the moderate Sunni states in favor of Iran and its proxies.
Likewise, Biden’s announcement that he is restoring U.S. funding to UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority despite their funding of terrorism were a tailwind for Iran and Hamas plans to attack Israel. With U.S. funding and sanctions relief, not only did they realize that the U.S. had their back, Iran and Hamas gained the economic wherewithal to wage war. So too, Hamas was able to use America’s abandonment of Israel as a means to persuade Israeli Arabs that they could safely participate in pogroms against their Jewish neighbors and accept Hamas as their representative. Continue Reading….