The wildly diverging partisan reactions to Wednesday’s Capitol Hill appearance by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu show that the Left has neither a moral compass nor a sense of U.S. national interests in the Middle East.
Netanyahu is a divisive figure in his own land and worldwide, but even his personal detractors here should welcome him as the duly elected leader of one of America’s most important allies.
Just as it would be unacceptable for U.S. elected leaders to boycott or protest any Prime Minister of Great Britain, regardless of ideological differences, as long as that great nation remains an ally and a representative democracy, so too is it wrongheaded to maltreat an Israeli leader. Israel remains a beacon of democracy and human rights in a part of the world otherwise hostile to those practices, and it collaborates with the United States, to the great benefit of our nation’s interests, in ways too numerous to count.
Yet President Joe Biden long has treated Netanyahu with disrespect, and Kamala Harris shamefully refused the vice president’s traditional role of presiding when a foreign ally addresses Congress. Some left-wing House and Senate members were even worse. For example, Jerrold Nadler, one of the most senior Democrats in the House, had the effrontery to call Netanyahu “the worst leader in Jewish history since the Maccabean king who invited the Romans into Jerusalem over 2100 years ago.”
Both Netanyahu and Israel have been subjected to widespread left-wing excoriation in the aftermath of Hamas terrorism and for their international posture in general. As definitively documented by West Point’s John Spencer, Israel’s efforts in Gaza, compared to other instances of urban warfare, have been remarkably restrained and humane, with a historically low percentage of civilian casualties. Israel has done so while responding to an unprovoked and barbaric attack from an enemy that openly boasts about using women and children as human shields.
It was an attack, the world should remember, not by a people Israel has abused, but by people whom Israel has long provided water and power and billions of dollars of humanitarian aid, assistance that Hamas terrorists redirect from their own people to use instead for terrorism.
Of all Israeli leaders since that brave nation’s founding, Netanyahu has been the one most friendly to the U.S. He spent many of his formative years as a child and a young man here, and he long has expressed love for this nation and usually has backed that up with concrete action. He also is a peacemaker, having worked for years, to great effect, to put in place the alliances with Arab nations that were formalized in the Abraham Accords, arguably the most far-reaching peace agreements in the history of the Middle East.
It is likely that those accords would have been publicly proclaimed sooner if the Obama-Biden administration’s hostility to Israel had not gotten in the way.
Once Joe Biden himself became president, he picked up where Barack Obama left off, treating Netanyahu with open disrespect. And except for a single week of strong support for Israel immediately after Hamas’s terrorist attack last fall, Biden repeatedly has worked to hamstring Israel’s justified response rather than doing more to enable it to eradicate Hamas, all while Biden also gives short shrift to American hostages held in Gaza.
More inexcusably, both the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris administrations have consistently bent down to the ayatollahs of Iran, the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism and a self-avowed enemy of both the U.S. and Israel. It is Iran that finances and largely directs the terrorists of both Hamas and Hezbollah, each of them dedicated to wiping Israel from the globe and eventually to taking down the U.S., which they persist in calling the “Great Satan.”
The Obama-Biden administration entered a foolhardy deal with Iran related to Iran’s nuclear power, and the Biden administration repeatedly and inexplicably has released back to Iran billions of dollars of cash and other assets, even as Iran’s provocations continue. And even though Iran sponsored close to 200 attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, Biden has responded only with near-pusillanimous, supposedly (but barely) “proportionate” retaliation against Iranian-backed militants.
Now Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Iran is less than two weeks away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb, despite Biden’s adherence to the pathetic “agreement” that was supposed to keep Iran’s nuclear work restricted only to energy production, not weapons.
There’s still no word on what Biden’s plans are in response to this bombshell (literally) revelation. But don’t fear: Team Biden remains dedicated to treating Netanyahu, not Iran, as the real malefactor in the Middle East, with Harris’ snub of Netanyahu’s speech being an outrageously childish gesture and an unforgivable breach of protocol. In a classy move, Netanyahu himself said what is surely a greater number of complimentary words about Biden, personally, in this one speech than Biden has said about Netanyahu in 40 years.
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In pushing the demonization of Netanyahu, Harris clearly is courting this nation’s radical-chic university types and the left-wing Arab American community in swing-state Michigan, thus hoping to energize her natural base in the anti-American Left. She is courting those who Netanyahu rightly described as “Iran’s useful idiots.”
All other people, though, should resent Harris’s anti-Israel posturing and her administration’s weak-kneed kowtowing to Iran. And be willing to vote accordingly.