We are less than a month away from the first anniversary of Hamas’s bloody breach of a cease-fire, which launched war in Gaza. This war should have ended months ago with a decisive win by Israel, and would have done so if not for the interventions of the Biden-Harris administration. By putting all the pressure on Israel to reach a cease-fire on just about any terms, so long as they are acceptable to Hamas, the Democrats have strengthened Hamas’s bargaining position while delaying an end to the conflict.
Representative of the administration’s mindset is the latest apologia for the Biden-Harris regime, written by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, grandly titled “How Netanyahu Is Trying to Save Himself, Elect Trump, and Defeat Harris.” This hit piece begins by accusing Benjamin Netanyahu of dragging out negotiations with Hamas over the release of the hostages, and purports to hold him accountable for the death of six Israeli hostages (one with dual American citizenship) who were shot in the head by Hamas leaders. Later in his essay, Friedman does briefly refer to the real villain of the situation, Yahya Sinwar, as a “murderous Islamo-Fascist leader” to make the point that it is “also” (along with Netanyahu) in Sinwar’s interest to prolong the war for two ends: first, to create massive strains in the now fragile US-Israel alliance, and second, to provoke internal discord in Israel.
But Friedman never connects the dots. If the endless delays serve Hamas, how can they also help Israel? Or Netanyahu? What is to Israel’s advantage is an all-out, no-holds barred attack in Gaza to root out Hamas root and branch, once and for all. But Friedman tends to regard that outcome as an unrealistic folly, and then urges the very steps to make sure that it will never happen.
One concern is, of course, with the civilian losses among the Palestinians, which seem to be uppermost in the minds of President Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democratic candidate’s running mate, Tim Walz. Thus, Walz has said in one breath that Israel has the right to defend itself, and in another, as the New York Sun painfully reminds us: “But we can’t allow what’s happened in Gaza to happen. The Palestinian people have every right to life and liberty themselves.” Walz goes on to say, “[w]e need to continue, I think, to put the leverage on to make sure we move towards a two-state solution.”
That Democratic position jibes with Friedman’s, and both look at the world through Hamas-tinted glasses. Friedman insists that Biden “wisely” seeks a grand solution that uses a two-state solution to facilitate an Israeli alliance with Saudi Arabia, while getting the hostages back home and giving the Israeli army a well-deserved rest. This is wrong on all counts. Any settlement that secures the release of the hostages will entail the return by Israel to Hamas of terrorists now detained in Israeli jails. Sinwar himself was released in the 2011 deal that, with Netanyahu’s unwise approval, brought captive soldier Gilad Shalit back to Israel in exchange for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including hundreds of terrorists. That disastrous transaction has resulted in thousands of deaths for Israelis in the following thirteen years, and there is no reason to think that a reprise would play out any better.
Nor is there any reason to believe that talking about some ersatz two-state solution will do anything to make matters better. Friedman hedges by talking about that solution “someday,” without being able to say when. But now is certainly not that time, and if Hamas has its way, there never will be a two-state solution if it can force Israel into the sea. Any deal that allows Hamas to survive today at best puts the position back to what it was on October 6, 2023, when a permanent cease-fire was already in place with Hamas. Hamas broke it then, and if it is allowed to regroup and rearm, it will strike again at the opportune moment.
That moment could come quickly, given the instability of Israeli politics over the contentious matter of judicial review. Recall that progressive Israelis had carried out massive protests to judicial reform in the runup to the October 7 attack. That reform was needed to reorganize Israel’s byzantine judicial system, which gives its Supreme Court and attorney general the extraordinarily dangerous power to keep the corruption case against Netanyahu in limbo by refusing to proceed (either by timely moving ahead with the prosecution or abandoning it altogether). Yet so long as the case lives on, it makes it impossible for Netanyahu to move to the center to complete his coalition—thus strengthening the hand of the conservative coalition in Israel, which has no interest in the compromises that Friedman, speaking for Biden, Harris and Walz, wants to create.
And just what do the president and his allies want to do? First, to slow down, if not stop altogether, the fighting in Gaza, on the ground that it has caused too many causalities to Palestinian civilians caught in the cross-fire. But note that none of these four advocates puts any demands on Hamas to release the hostages unconditionally, even though the world knows their capture was wholly illegal, and has been deemed so by the International Court of Justice. That court did call on Hamas, albeit too gently, to arrange an unconditional release of the hostages, yet in the same breath flirted with labeling the Israeli actions in Gaza a “genocide” in an obvious effort to slow down its military operations. Yet the “genocide” slur and Walz’s woolly charges against Israel are clearly specious in the face of interconvertible evidence of the extensive precautions, as US military expert John Spencer has repeatedly documented, taken by Israel to reduce civilian casualties, even as Hamas continues to use human shields and embed its military personal in hospitals and schools.
But in Friedman’s eyes, Israel gets no credit for doing the right thing, and he asks nothing of Sinwar, who continues to insist that the release of hostages be contingent on a permanent Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Instead, Friedman takes dead aim at Netanyahu, accusing him of stonewalling by insisting on keeping Israeli military personnel in the Philadelphi corridor that runs along the Gaza-Egyptian border. Why insist, he asks, on keeping that force in place now, when Israel did nothing to secure that location for the first seven months of the war? The answer should be self-evident: Hamas uses that corridor to smuggle weapons into Gaza, as even Friedman admits. So long as Israel controlled Gaza from within, such activities could be interdicted at some other checkpoints inside Gaza proper. But should the Israelis pull out from the center, it may make perfect sense to increase fortifications at the border to stop the flow of arms. It is Friedman’s naïve worldview that threatens peace in the region, not Netanyahu’s.
So, when should the two-state solution come off the back burner? The correct answer is never. Friedman posits that talks with the Palestinian Authority are the path to take. But that organization is run for the moment by Mahmoud Abbas, the octogenarian who now presides over a West Bank that once again erupted into deadly violence in Jenin, as the Israelis moved quickly to stop the rash of killings of Israeli civilians in the area. That disturbance hardly augurs well for any peace negotiations. Indeed, not one major Palestinian leader has questioned the Hamas orthodoxy, and thus there are none who could credibly represent a nascent Palestinian state. Indeed, the negotiations would break down instantly over the simple question of whether, and how, the new state would be demilitarized. Is it to be kept in order by combined forces from the UAE, Morocco, and Egypt, who are likely to turn the place over to Hamas or some similar organization within days after their arrival? The answer is for Israel to control the borders and the army, and to create conditions under which Palestinian civil society can return to Gaza and the West Bank, once Palestinian terror against other Palestinians is prevented.
Friedman’s notion that an Israeli willingness to negotiate a two-state solution would somehow coax the Saudis into an alliance is similarly delusional. What the Saudis need is a confident Israel flush with some military success, and thus in a position to help them confront the Iranians, a task for which any weakened party is an unattractive ally. Friedman praises Biden for building an impressive set of regional alliances from Europe to Japan. What he forgets to mention are the administration’s fiascos in Afghanistan (which Friedman defended), Ukraine, and the South China Sea. The Biden global strategy is marked by one flawed premise: when attacked, shoot down the incoming weapons, but never, ever take out a base in Gaza, Yemen, or Russia. Yet Netanyahu (like Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy) must be aware that staying wholly on defense for months, let alone years, is an invitation for disaster, allowing enemies to operate with impunity. Despite Friedman’s insinuations, Netanyahu’s support for Trump over Harris is not some egotistic flourish. It is a simple matter of improving Israel’s odds of survival.
