Israel’s treacherous frenemies

Melanie Phillips,a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.

(JNS) At time of writing, Israelis are bracing for a possible direct and multi-front attack by Iran.

Following Israel’s assassination in Beirut of Hezbollah chief of staff Fuad Shukr and the even more spectacular assassination in Tehran itself of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued an order for Iran to strike Israel directly in retaliation.

If this takes place, it may take a terrible toll of Israeli civilians. Nevertheless, Iran will be the loser because Israel will use those high casualty numbers to launch an all-out war against this genocidal enemy.

The point is that, until now, Israel has been unable to do that even though it has the capacity. That’s because its ostensible best friend, the U.S., has been playing a two-faced game.

The general assumption is that, in the event of an Iranian onslaught that may overwhelm Israeli defenses, the U.S. will come to Israel’s aid. While this remains likely, with at least 12 U.S. warships now deployed to the region, there is nevertheless an element of doubt.

America may not want Israel to be destroyed. But it has been preventing Israel from directly attacking Iran, the instigator and funder of the seven-front war against the Jewish state that started with the Oct. 7 pogrom. For that reason, the U.S. may even be cooking up with Tehran the “acceptable limits” of any Iranian revenge attack—just as it astonishingly did over the Iranian attack on Israel in April—to forestall a devastating Israeli counter-strike.

With Iran openly advertising its intention to destroy Israel and America after four decades of terrorist attacks against the West, this war could have ended soon after it began 10 months ago if Israel, with or without the U.S., had set fire to Iran’s oilfields or sunk the Iranian fleet.

The Oct. 7 pogrom itself wouldn’t have happened had the Biden administration not been funneling billions in sanctions relief into Tehran’s coffers, refusing to respond appropriately to multiple Iranian attacks on American assets and frantically signaling that the U.S. would take no action to harm Iran.

If the U.S. had wanted to deter Iran, it would have conspicuously equipped Israel with bunker-buster bombs. Instead, the Bidenites have applied the thumbscrews to Israel by forbidding it to take the action necessary to deter let alone defeat such an enemy.

Straight after the Oct. 7 attack, the U.S. forbade Israel from mounting a preemptive attack on Hezbollah, which has some 150,000 missiles embedded in southern Lebanon. The result has been more than 6,000 rockets, drones and missiles fired by Hezbollah at northern Israel, burning great swathes of it to the ground and turning some 80,000 Israelis into refugees in their own country. And a missile causing the deaths of 12 innocent Druze children.

Whenever Iran or its proxies have attacked Israel over the past 10 months, America has forced Israel not to respond with anything like deterrent force. As an inevitable result, Iranian proxies have continued to attack again and again.

This is what the Bidenites call “de-escalation.” The strange thing about the word “escalation” as used by the Bidenites and their Western media echo chamber is that it never seems to apply when Iran or its proxies unleash further and bigger volleys of rockets and missiles.

When a Hezbollah rocket hit the soccer pitch in Majdal Shams last weekend and massacred 12 Druze children, White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby said: “We certainly don’t believe that, as horrific as this attack was, that it needs to result in any kind of escalation.”

For the Bidenites, “escalation” only appears to happen when Israel defends itself against further attack. This is a way of always pinning aggression on Israel, even when it is defending itself against aggression.

Israel can never be perceived as the victim, only the villain of the region—the grotesque mindset shared to a greater or lesser extent across the progressive West.

That’s why, for media outlets from the BBC to CNN and even The Wall Street Journal, the assassinated terrorist Haniyeh was described as “pragmatic,” “moderate” and a “leading advocate for ceasefire.”

This to describe a man who had the blood of thousands of Jews on his hands, celebrated the Oct. 7 pogrom and said that the people of Gaza needed “the blood of the children, women and elderly … so that it will ignite within us the spirit of revolution so that it will arouse within us persistence … defiance and advance.”

In a similar vein, Britain’s new Labour government has turned venomously against Israel.

Britain has withdrawn its legal objection to the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s request for warrants to arrest Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Britain’s prime minister, the former human rights lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, has thus demonstrated that he regards the two men as war criminals rather than condemning the prosecutor for upending international law, truth and justice in favor of genocidal propaganda.

Britain has also restored funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), despite evidence of its copious links with Hamas. And it has signaled that it will ban at least some arms sales to the embattled Jewish state.

At the moment that Israel is fighting for its very life, Starmer has decided to side with Israel’s barbaric enemies. Yet his government regularly intones its “support for Israel’s right to self-defense,” just as members of the Biden administration routinely declare that America’s commitment to Israel is “ironclad.”

This is all utter humbug.

Astoundingly, the U.S. is going out of its way to protect Iran. Not only has it helped enrich and empower Iran by lifting sanctions; not only does it persistently grovel to Tehran; but the administration has been compromised by clandestine ties to the terrorist regime—ties that also implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Washington Free Beacon has revealed that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) this week wrote to Harris expressing concern over links between her National Security Adviser Philip Gordon and Ariane Tabatabai, chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

Shortly before the Oct. 7 pogrom, Tabatabei was named as an agent of influence for Iran—at the heart of the U.S. government and with the highest level of security clearance—as part of an “Iran Experts Initiative” created by Iranian officials to bolster Tehran’s position on global security issues within the Beltway.

She had been infiltrated into the U.S. State Department by Robert Malley, who was the point man on Iran under both the Obama and Biden administrations until he was removed in June 2023 following a still unexplained “mishandling of classified materials.”

Gordon, who is likely to play a central national security role in a Harris White House, was the co-author with Tabatabei of at least three opinion pieces that the lawmakers said had been “blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests,” claiming that sanctions against Iran would create “catastrophe” and cause Tehran to “lash out.”

Cotton and Stefanik also claimed that Gordon was “closely associated with the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), another Iranian influence organization that allegedly collaborates with Tehran.”

Yet more explosively still, the two lawmakers added that Amos Hochstein, a senior energy official who has become an unofficial envoy to Lebanon, “allegedly passed intelligence about Israeli airstrikes to Hezbollah potentially as recently as this weekend.”

These astounding claims that the Biden administration has been suborned by Iran seem to have caused barely a ripple in the American media. Instead, like others across the progressive West, they are busily complaining that the assassinations of Shakr and Haniyeh have set back the chances of a ceasefire in Gaza.

In any normal universe, the insistence that a war by Iran aimed at destroying the West is nothing more than a conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza that could be ended by a ceasefire that would give Iran victory would be regarded as evidence of either insanity or treason.

In the Democratic Party and in liberal circles throughout the West, however, it’s mandatory.