How Biden’s Israel Mistakes May Actually Help the U.S. Restrain Netanyahu
The close Israeli ally with which America once shared key values no longer exists. The Israel to whose defense Joe Biden immediately stepped up on Oct. 7 is a phantom, a memory of a country that was during the Cold War a dependable U.S. friend, a reliable defender of U.S. national interests, and an enemy of anti-U.S. forces in the region.
It would make sense to offer the instant and comprehensive support Biden offered Israel in the wake of the brutal Hamas terrorist attacks to that illusory Israel, the one he and many of us remember from the 1960s and 1970s.
But that Israel, as manifested by its government—the region’s David to the Arab Goliath that threatened it, a country that was not only turning the desert green but was nurturing democracy from soil that had not produced it before—is no longer real. Thus, Biden’s response was too robust. It made the U.S. appear to be a full partner in whatever Israel would choose to do in response to those attacks. Worse, for many, it evoked an era in which Israel was seen as a U.S. proxy and its actions were seen as a direct extension of U.S. foreign policy. (I should add that the ties between the people of the United States and those of Israel remain, as they should, largely unchanged.)