The Israelis needed this weekend.
The country’s defensive war with Hamas had entered a trying phase as progress against the terrorist group’s dug-in battalions in Rafah has stalled. The wartime unity cabinet that had governed Israel since the outbreak of war was coming apart. Its foreign allies — the United States, in particular — have leaned heavily on Jerusalem to adopt tactics aimed at reducing Palestinian civilian casualties, the effect of which was to boost the number of Israeli combat injuries and deaths. As attested by the spontaneous celebrations in Israeli streets, the daring raid that rescued four Israeli civilians from the captivity and torment they’d endured since the October 7 attacks came as welcome relief.
But the Biden administration did not evince the same enthusiasm for an outcome its members insist they had long sought. In France, the president welcomed the hostages’ liberation by calling on Israel to forgo the sort of military operations that freed them and might secure the emancipation of the 120 or so captives still in Hamas’s custody. “We won’t stop working until all the hostages come home and a cease-fire is reached,” Biden said in reaction to the Israeli raid.
The Biden administration and its supporters likely see no contradiction in these remarks, which is illustrative of the Biden administration’s problem. It should occur to the president and his advisers that calling for Israel (the only party to this conflict that is at all receptive to Biden’s overtures) to cease hostilities with Hamas in direct response to the IDF’s liberation of the terrorist group’s hostages, who are still held captive only to secure that very outcome on terms favorable to Hamas, is uncommonly obtuse.
Biden wasn’t the only member of his administration who reacted to the Israeli operation with trepidation and despondency. “Thankfully, four of those hostages were reunited with their families tonight,” Vice President Kamala Harris said over the weekend. Unfortunately, this was a throat-clearing gesture. “And we mourn all of the innocent lives that have been lost in Gaza, including those tragically killed today,” she continued in reference to an estimated 200 Palestinians killed when the operation that freed the hostages devolved into a firefight. “We have been working every day to bring an end to this conflict in a way that ensures Israel is secure, brings home all hostages, ends ongoing suffering for Palestinian people, and ensures that Palestinians can enjoy their right to self-determination, dignity, and freedom,” Harris continued.
Once again, the Democratic lawmakers are unlikely to see why this rueful response to an Israeli triumph is in any way objectionable. Their confusion is owed, in part, to their commitment to unreality. The better day for the Palestinian people to which the Biden administration insists it is admirably committed, is possible only on the other side of a successful campaign that neutralizes Hamas as a military and political force in the Strip. The civilians who are put in harm’s way by Hamas or drafted into active support for its terroristic enterprises are victims, but the Israelis are not their tormentors. Nor is Jerusalem to blame for the collateral damage incurred as a result of a war in which Hamas is the aggressor.
As a matter of politics, the Biden administration is apparently committed to an absurd course of action that seems calibrated to annoy as many Americans as possible. It cannot bring itself to celebrate unreservedly the deliverance of Israeli hostages from their agony, thereby frustrating Israel’s American supporters. But nor can the administration sacrifice the American national interests that would be lost if this White House pursued policies that were reflective of its newfound rhetorical hostility toward Israel’s cause.
As the Washington Post and New York Times reported, no doubt with heavy input from Biden administration officials, the “precise intelligence” that contributed to this successful raid came partly from American sources. “U.S. intelligence analysts also are helping Israeli officials in some of their work to map out the extensive network of tunnels that Hamas has built beneath Gaza,” the Post’s report added, “contributing powerful analytic technologies that fuse fragments of information, according to officials with knowledge of that work.”
This is heroic work, but the Biden administration cannot bring itself to take any credit for it. They have denied themselves the ability to celebrate alongside their Israeli partners in their moment of success. It’s a moment to which Biden administration officials contributed and for which they deserve the gratitude of the civilized world. But they don’t want it. Instead, the administration’s highest-ranking officials have adopted a more-in-sorrow tone that alienates Israel’s supporters while doing nothing to assuage its monomaniacal critics.
After conducing a survey of the political landscape over the weekend, Commentary’s John Podhoretz determined that we are left with no other option but to conclude that “the Biden team is stupid.” Sounds about right.