The Biden-Obama Betrayal of Israel

When President Biden blocked the delivery of sophisticated bombs to Israel, no one should have been shocked. Despite his initial pledges of support, Mr. Biden has a history of wanting to cut off aid to Israel. His current hostility to Prime Minister Netanyahu was foreshadowed 42 years ago in a similar confrontation with Prime Minister Begin.A then-39-year-old Mr. Biden aggressively rebuked the 68-year-old Nobel laureate in peace in a 1982 private Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting over Israel’s handling of war in Lebanon, as Tevi Troy reported in the Wall Street Journal in 2020. Mr. Biden reportedly threatened to withhold American aid if Israel didn’t change course. According to Mr. Troy’s reporting, Begin responded clearly.“Don’t threaten us with cutting off aid to give up our principles. I’m not a Jew with trembling knees…I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”This long ago argument with an Israeli prime minister was part of a pattern for Mr. Biden. After all, he was Vice President when the Obama administration decided to withhold a shipment of Hellfire missiles from Israel over conditions in Gaza.A Wall Street Journal report at the time called a phone conversation between President Obama and Mr. Netanyahu “particularly combative.” The two leaders apparently resorted to name-calling.The Obama-Biden administration was actively involved in moving from a Middle East centered on containing Iran and collaborating with Israel to a new strategy that recentered Middle East policy around a supposedly reformed Iran.The Obama-Biden vision was to create a new “equilibrium” in the Middle East, David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker. Unfortunately, this vision required that Sunni and Shia Muslims end centuries of fighting and that Iran stop funding terrorism, sowing chaos in the region, and developing nuclear weapons. It was a fantasy.Keep in mind, there were eight years of Obama-Biden Middle East efforts. Now, look at today’s realities. How could they have been more wrong? Iran has met none of the Obama-Biden standards — but the Biden administration still turns a blind eye to Iranian malfeasance and has done nothing to change course in the Middle East.As Mr. Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, wrote last year in Foreign Affairs following the announcement of Biden’s so-called Middle East economic corridor, the Biden Middle East fantasy is alive and well.“New partnerships such as this can help make the region a place of connection rather than chaos,” Mr. Sullivan observed. “This disciplined approach frees up resources for other global priorities,” he added, “reduces the risk of new Middle Eastern conflicts, and ensures that U.S. interests are protected on a far more sustainable basis.” Mr. Sullivan conceded that “challenges remain.” He noted that the “Israeli-Palestinian situation is tense, particularly in the West Bank, but in the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.” This was weeks before Hamas ruthlessly attacked civilians, including children, in Israel on October 7, 2023.As the former secretary of defense, Robert Gates, once said, Mr. Biden’s foreign affairs worldview has been wrong for four decades. The latest betrayal of Israel is just one more in a long series of bad policies with terrible outcomes.

The Biden-Obama Betrayal of Israel

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