Biden is risking Israel’s security, future to boost his, Kamala Harris’ 2024 re-election hopes

The White House is so serious about pushing Israel to make nice with Gaza’s civilians that it sent, drumroll please, Vice President Kamala Harris to deliver the message.

Cue the laugh track.

On second thought, cue honest outrage because panic over President Biden’s faltering re-election campaign is driving a wedge between America and Israel — just when Israel’s enemies are already emboldened.

The odds that Israel’s security could be sacrificed to help boost Biden’s bid for a second term have been growing ever since polls started showing that many young leftist Americans have no love for the Jewish state.

The polls inadvertently tell an ugly truth — the antisemites chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” on college campuses are mostly Democrats. And now they have Biden’s full attention because he’s desperate.

Support softens

So much so that his support for Israel, iron-clad in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, has softened dramatically.

His once-stout statements about Israel’s right to defend itself have turned into scolds and warnings that it must do more and more to protect Arab civilians.

Never mind that Hamas uses its own people as human shields. Biden is joining the chorus demanding that Israel protect them, even at the risk to its own citizens and soldiers.

The clear implication is that Israel cannot count on American support for its ultimate goal of eliminating Hamas from Gaza and killing its leaders. Biden doesn’t have the stomach for it.

His shameful new message is being delivered primarily by others in the administration. Most alarmingly, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is talking gibberish about a two-state solution in ways that smack of rewarding Hamas.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also has been drafted into the campaign, and he warned recently that Israel could be driving civilians into siding with Hamas, saying it would turn a “tactical victory” into a “strategic defeat.”

If that weren’t enough, Harris finally got called off the bench last weekend and she raised the ante in separate talks and meetings with the leaders of three Arab nations — Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Ostensibly on a trip to a Dubai climate summit, Harris reportedly spent nearly all her time making it clear the United States is nearing the end of its tolerance for Israel’s military operations in Gaza. She is also said to have taken a hard line in a call with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

Domestic politics role

A puff piece in The New York Times about the trip described her remarks to regional leaders as “intentionally forceful,” as if to counter any suggestion she was veering off message in one of her word-salad appearances.

Yet even the Times had to acknowledge the elephant in the room: domestic politics.

“But the vice president was also speaking to disaffected voters in the United States, especially the young voters and people of color who helped propel President Biden to the White House in 2020,” reporter Michael Shear wrote.

Later in his piece, he returned to the political angle, saying “Some Democrats have said they will not vote for Mr. Biden next year because they say he has not held Israel’s feet to the fire when it comes to protecting civilians in Gaza. Aides to the vice president say her tough remarks were aimed in part at reassuring Americans who hold similar views.”

Politics doesn’t get any cheaper or more reckless than pandering to the bigot-laced mob calling for Israel’s destruction.

The Times, of course, is fully on board with the new message. Its daily coverage is fixated on Arab civilian casualties, with Tuesday’s digital version leading with this headline: “Israeli Forces Enter Southern Gaza’s Largest City as Fears Grow for Civilians.”

It doesn’t say whose “fears” are growing, so we can assume it’s the usual suspects, including the Gray Lady’s editors and reporters.

The paper now routinely reports death figures provided by Gazan health officials despite that the same officials notoriously lied to Times reporters about the nonexistent Israeli bombing of a hospital that supposedly killed 500 people.

From Hamas’ standpoint, the more dead civilians, the more Israel will be pressured to back off.

Despite that calculus, the paper that routinely labels Donald Trump a liar cites without comment crucial information supplied by terrorists.

Even Biden not so long ago scoffed at Hamas’ casualty statistics, saying “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”

That was on Oct. 25, and that might have been the high point of his support for Israel. The very next day he privately apologized to five Muslim Americans for doubting the death number, and the White House said that was the first of many meetings with Muslims angered by his support of Israel.

Democracy at stake

The rush to placate Israel’s critics, including antisemitic ones, suggests Biden has forgotten something he once understood — that Israel is the canary in the coal mine of the free world.

Perhaps Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the president in mind when he recently warned on Fox, “If we don’t win now, then Europe is next and you’re next.”

But Biden and those around him shouldn’t need any reminders. For one thing, Iran and its terror proxies are firing daily rockets at American ships and our military bases in Iraq and Syria.

For another, the FBI says intelligence shows an alarming rise in the threat of terror attacks on American soil.

“The ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in late October. In new testimony Tuesday, he said the attack on Israel was serving as a global inspiration for jihadists and that “you’ve seen a veritable rogues gallery of foreign terrorist organizations calling for attacks against us.”

The threats prove once again that the desire to destroy Israel has nothing to do with its borders or how it treats Gazan civilians. Those are just excuses.

The real issue is Israel’s existence. That’s what is at stake.

Kissinger Aced This Test

My favorite interaction with the late Henry Kissinger came at a book party for his longtime aide, Winston Lord. After thanking Kissinger, Lord, in telling the story of his first test as a speechwriter, revealed a management trick favored by the era’s greatest diplomat.

After Lord submitted the first draft of his first speech, Kissinger asked if this was the best he could do. Lord remembered saying, no, he could probably improve it.

An hour or so after he submitted his second draft, Kissinger called again and asked the same question. Lord said he answered that he could probably make it better by tweaking it here and there.

An hour or so after he submitted the third version, Kissinger called and asked if this was the best he could do.

Yes, it is, Lord replied confidently, to which Kissinger said: Good, now I will read it.