I
am writing this on Saturday, as news outlets report hundreds of Israeli
dead, and dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers and civilians kidnapped
by Hamas terrorists and taken into Gaza.
It
is never a good idea to write anything as events are still rapidly
unfolding, especially as neither I nor anyone else can answer the only
question that ultimately matters—namely, “what happens now?” But we can
answer another, much more rudimentary and no less urgent question: Who’s
at fault?
There
will be plenty of time to pore over how a cataclysmic disaster of this
magnitude could happen, and who—from Bibi down to the IDF Chief of
Staff, head of intelligence, et al.—failed to protect the lives of
Israelis. A lot of it will have to do with people who should have known
better—including former prime ministers and former and current high
level security officials—abandoning the core commitment of defending
Israel and instead entertaining themselves by cosplaying some game of
Demokratia, complete with donning handmaid outfits and ululating about
fascism. Hysterics about your political opponents being the enemies of
democracy may be fun in Kalorama; in Sderot and Ofakim, and even in Tel
Aviv, there’s a price to pay for abandoning the real world and indulging
in fetish play.
But
the bigger mistake on the part of the Israelis is that over the past
few years they have gotten the power equation that governs their lives
backwards: Instead of understanding themselves to be citizens of a
strong but beleaguered country whose first responsibility is to protect
itself, they luxuriated in the fantasy that the United States was and
always would be their protector—when in fact the ruling party in America
has decided that Israel is a liability.
Watch this video.
That’s a Hamas drone taking down an Israeli Merkava tank. A drone
operated by an organization sponsored and trained by Iran applying both
Iranian tactics and, most likely, Iranian hardware to attack Israel.
This happened weeks after America sent Iran six billion dollars, and one
week after we learned that the American government had over the past
years ceded whole parts of its own intelligence units to Iranian spies.
The stage for this attack was not set in or by Israel. It was set by the United States.
For
the better part of the last decade, the United States has pursued a
foreign policy designed to strengthen Iran and enable it to form a
strong sphere of influence in the region. This is the idea behind what
Tony Badran and Michael Doran called
“the Re-Alignment,” a vision of a new world order in which America
partners with Iran in order to “find a more stable balance of power that
would make [the Middle East] less dependent on direct U.S. interference
or protection.” Those words aren’t Badran and Doran’s; they’re Robert
Malley’s, Barack Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran Deal who, as Semafor reported this week,
helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence into some of the
most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State
Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of
staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations.
Biden himself, in an op-ed in The Washington Post,
spoke of “an integrated Middle East,” using the phrase no less than
three times to make clear that his administration was intent on pursuing
his predecessor’s commitment to seeing Iran not as a U.S. foe but as
our collaborator.
And
the Biden administration wasn’t just talking the talk. It was also
walking the walk, from unfreezing billions in assets to make it easier
for Tehran to support its proxy, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, to
sending huge cash infusions used primarily to pay the salaries of tens
of thousands of unvetted “security personnel.” And while the previous
administration halted all aid to the Palestinians—directly because of
the “pay for slay” policies that support the families of those who
slaughter Israelis—the Biden administration was quick to reverse the decision.
Lots
of people argued that this was simply clear-minded realpolitik after
decades of disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bullshit. Here’s how
you know this policy was, and is, motivated not by what’s best for
America but by what would kneecap the Jewish state: Because it extended
to inside Israel’s borders.
In
addition to creating the external circumstances for terror, the Biden
administration did everything in its power to derail Israel’s
democratically elected government and prevent it from being able to see
an attack like today’s coming. That the Israelis let themselves fall for
this was stupidity of criminal order. But the invisible hand here was
America’s. Biden himself took to CNN to call Netanyahu’s government “the most extreme” he’s ever seen, and lost no opportunity to lecture
his Israeli counterpart about democratic values. The former U.S.
ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, took the unprecedented step of intervening
in the country’s domestic affairs, announcing ominously that he
“think[s] most Israelis want the United States to be in their business.”
And if words weren’t enough, the administration also sent American
dollars to support
the anti-Netanyahu NGOs organizing the protests that brought Israel to a
halt for months. Netanyahu was famously denied an invite to the White
House; his key opponent, opposition leader Benny Gantz, had no such problem.
One
idea floating around my inbox this afternoon is that part of Israel’s
complete military collapse today was caused by a massive Iranian cyber
attack that hacked its systems and prevented it from seeing what ought
to have been obvious. The U.S., having recently given a team of Iranian agents high-level access to U.S. intelligence
which could very well have included information about Israeli systems,
is not nearly as far-fetched a scenario as many would like it to be. And
to the extent that we ever find out the truth about any of this, it will be because of Elon Musk, without whom we’d only have access to state-approved propaganda.
It doesn’t matter what words Biden
says today. When you champion Iran; when you send it and its proxies
money; when you reward Palestinian violence; when you go out of your way
to portray Bibi as a dangerous fascist; when you finance and champion
his opponents, contributing to further instability and unrest; when you
hand over U.S. intelligence keys to Iranian agents; when you have your
spokespeople declare it “disinformation” for people to connect obvious dots; when you do all of this, you know what is going to happen. You mean for it to happen.
Here
today, then, is the challenge for Israel’s leadership: Can you accept
that this is what’s happening? Can you imagine a future for the Jewish
state decoupled from America? Because you must.
For
at least a decade now, we’ve been told that part of what makes Israel
so mighty and so safe is its superior technology, developed in
partnership with America. Who, went this line of argument, needs to
worry about missiles when we have Iron Dome and F-35 stealth fighter
plans as part of a 3 billion dollar military aid package? Who cares
about guns and grenades when we’ve developed high level cybersecurity
systems that can strike at will? The war of the future, we’ve been
promised, will be waged on computer terminals, in cyberspace—not in
dusty border towns.
And
then came a gaggle of Gazans with Kevlar vests and pick-up trucks and
small arms that brought Israel to its knees. “Start-up Nation” has been
ravaged by reality. It is clear that the dream Israel’s elites have
entertained for the past decade—to become part of the global set of
people who make all the money and all the decisions and have all the
right opinions and fashionable friends—has soured into a nightmare.
And
now it’s time to wake up. Stop prattling about the “cycle of violence,”
about faults on both sides, about “the occupation,” about Bibi’s
cabinet appointments, or any other distraction.
Re-root
yourself in what you should never have forgotten—which is that we have
enemies not because of what we did or didn’t do here or there, or on
this day or that one, or because our hasbara isn’t good enough or
because it is too good, or any other pointless argument. It is because
we have vicious enemies, and they hate us. Instead of trying
pathetically to curry favor with American overlords by scrubbing Judaism
from your streets, pray to HaShem to fulfill the promise made to Isaiah
and deliver vengeance. Reject, with great force and wrath, the death
cult that has gripped so much of American political, public, and
intellectual life and that sees virtue in prompting up benighted regimes
in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We don’t need an
integrated Middle East, because we don’t wish to integrate with the
murderous Mullahs and their packs of wild animals. We have our own
interests, and if we’re smart—and if we wish to survive—we’ll never
forget it again.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/americas-betrayal-of-israel
