President Joe Biden’s rapidly shifting Israel policy is taking criticism from foreign policy experts who believe the administration is fundamentally or deliberately misunderstanding the true nature of the situation. “The Biden administration either is not connecting the dots or frankly, they don’t care, which is actually more troubling,” suggested Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
“The Biden administration fundamentally doesn’t understand the Israeli people,” Center for Security Policy senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs Caroline Glick lamented on “Washington Watch” Monday. “They think they can snap their fingers, and Israel will just salute them and do whatever they tell us. But the Israeli people — particularly since October 7th — understand the implications of the enemy’s calls to annihilate the Jewish people.”
“The Biden administration doesn’t understand the seriousness of purpose, not only of Israel, but of our enemies — of Iran, of Hezbollah, of Hamas, etc.,” Glick continued. “They think that they can just again snap their fingers and say, ‘It’s over,’ and we’re going to get it to a ceasefire. And it never happens that way.”
If Jews aren’t safe in Israel, “Where do they go from here?” Perkins asked. He related an anecdote to demonstrate that “people go to Israel as kind of the last place of protection and safety for the Jewish people.” During a recent trip to Israel, he visited “one of the kibbutz that had been attacked just north of the Gaza border,” where residents told him they had emigrated from Europe “because of the rising anti-Semitism.” The perception that Israel is a safe place for Jews “was shattered on October 7th,” he explained, and “that’s the realization that really encompasses Israelis in Israel right now, that the rest of the world — at least here in America — doesn’t fully understand.”
Glick agreed that even “the Jews in the diaspora in the United States and Europe and in other countries are beginning to realize that” same fact. “The scale of the massacre and the savagery of what was done to Israel by Hamas … on October 7th has empowered and inspired anti-Semites of all kinds in the United States to openly attack Jews on the streets … in a way that nobody had experienced until now,” she said. “The idea that Jews can be safe anywhere if they’re not secure in Israel has just been shattered. It’s very clear that the security of all Jews everywhere is contingent on Israel defeating our enemies in Israel.”
Yet the Biden administration seems slow to recognize this, she complained. “There is a lot of ideological rigidity in the administration that’s very hostile to Israel and willing to accommodate Hamas,” said Glick. Based on their actions, “it’s almost impossible to not reach that conclusion.”
“The Biden administration is falling into the U.N. rhetoric right now of ‘Israel is always the problem,’” Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) pointed out during Monday’s “Washington Watch.” “If you go to the U.N., Israel is always the problem.”
But Lankford disagreed with that assumption. “The problem is Iran in the Middle East. They are the destabilizing force,” he said. “They’re funding the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. It’s amazing to me,” he added, “that President Biden is chastising Israel right now for trying to defend themselves from the attacks that come from Gaza, but I hear absolute crickets about Hezbollah and their march to the south right now, and their militarization of that zone that’s supposed to be demilitarized.”
“The problem [is] the Qataris right now, that they’re not using the leverage that they really have” as one of Hamas’s chief financial backers, Lankford continued. “The pressure really needs to be placed on the people that could actually end this war. Rather than demanding Israel has a ceasefire, let’s demand [that] Hamas has a ceasefire, the Houthis [have] a ceasefire, Hezbollah has a ceasefire, [and that] Qatar uses its real leverage that it has to be able to get those hostages out.”
Glick criticized the Biden administration for believing that, “if they can just blame Israel for everything, then Iran will be happy and appeased and they’ll stop bothering America, at least until after the elections in November.” She skewered them for thinking that, “if they just say that there’s going to be a ceasefire, humiliate the government of Israel, [and] try to overthrow the government of Israel by sowing domestic subversion … that all the problem is going to go away.”
“That, of course, is not how things work,” Glick declared. “Nothing happens that way. Nothing.”
“There are people in that region that intensely hate our freedom, that intensely hate us as Americans,” Lankford noted. Radical Islamist extremists often repeat that “America is the Great Satan, and Israel is the Little Satan,” he said. “They’re really trying to be able to come after us and will do that [with] every opportunity.”
“Jews aren’t responsible for what happened,” protested Glick. “We’re not responsible for the hatred of others. We can only do our best to defend ourselves from that hatred. And that’s what we’re doing in this war.”
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
