US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were highly vocal this week regarding “the United States’ strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The statements of support came during one of the most violent weeks our country has experienced in years.
While violence in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and on the Temple Mount escalated during Monday’s Yom Yerushalayim celebrations into a barrage of Hamas rocket attacks, Jewish and Palestinian rioters have been attacking each other in cities throughout the country while rocket attacks and airstrikes have been escalating between Hamas and Israel.
Member of Knesset Naftali Bennett (Yamina) has meanwhile realized that he has no choice but to crawl back to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) and give up his plans to help Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid establish a “change government” to remove Netanyahu from power. If this week’s dramatic upsurge in violence has taught Israelis anything, it’s that we can’t pretend to live in a “normal country” where westernized liberal politicians like Lapid can be trusted to lead.
Netanyahu has spent the last dozen years protecting Israel. Not just from the threats most of us see but – more importantly – from the threats we don’t always see. Netanyahu has honed resistance to US pressure to an art. When he first served as prime minister in the late 1990s, he was in over his head and the Clinton administration successfully removed him from office.
After a decade out of office, however, Bibi returned to the position with his own unique style for thwarting US efforts to force Israel to relinquish territory. Netanyahu isn’t Yitzḥak Shamir and was never able to successfully confront US leaders head on the way Shamir did but he has developed his own style of slithering through American fingers that actually protected Israel through eight years of Barack Obama and four years of Donald Trump.
Despite aggressive efforts by both the Obama and Trump administrations to pressure Israel to surrender territory in the West Bank, both presidents – like Biden – supported Israel’s strikes on Gaza without any serious consideration for how many Palestinians were killed – which brings us to the true reason for the Biden administration’s vocal support of “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Washington’s interests in the Semitic region require Israel to ultimately relinquish the West Bank.
After George W. Bush forced Israel to surrender the Gaza region in 2005, successive US administrations have been careful to show support for Israeli military responses to Hamas rocket fire, regardless of the death toll. This is because the Americans understand that the vast majority of Israelis who would even consider a withdrawal from the Samaria and Judea regions would only do so if they feel they can count on unequivocal US support in situations like these. If those Israelis were to feel abandoned by Washington when responding to military threats created by policies forced on Israel by Bush, the US would lose significant leverage in pressuring Israel to comply with its two-state agenda.
But it is precisely that agenda that Israel needs to break free from.
If Israelis genuinely want to avoid the same war repeating itself every few years, we need to understand that the only answer is to retake Gaza. We need to apply full Israeli sovereignty to the territory, rebuild the two dozen Jewish communities that were destroyed there, definitively dismantle Hamas and offer the Palestinian people a better life with us in a single state.
Realizing that this is the only responsible way forward will help us to act in our own interests rather than serving Washington’s imperialist interests in our region.
