When did they figure it out?
When did the “adults in the room,” the people who have led the most powerful nation in human history for the last four years, realize that their unfounded criticism of Israel helped Hamas and prolonged the hostage crisis?
That is the question raised by outgoing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s “revelation” in an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro for the New York Times over the past weekend.
Describing the “two great impediments” to reaching a deal to free the hostages who are still being held in Gaza, Blinken stated that the first of these impediments is that “whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we’ve seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”
It's hard to say what is worse: The prospect that it took the Biden Administration over a year to realize the obvious - that it was playing into the hands of the genocidal death cult that murdered and kidnapped American citizens, or the prospect that it knew and did it anyway. The former would demonstrate a level of ineptitude, ignorance, and sheer stupidity that is frightening from any leader, all the more so from the supposed leader of the free world. The latter would imply a willingness to go to such evil lengths for a perceived political gain that Machiavelli would be shocked.
It was obvious to anyone with a functioning brain on October 7, 2023, that Hamas’ strategy would be to attempt to cause as much death and destruction as possible inside Gaza and to lie to the world about Israeli war crimes in order to convince the international community to force Israel to stop the war prematurely and allow Hamas to survive, claim victory, and prepare for the next October 7-level massacre. This has been the Hamas strategy in every conflict it has instigated with Israel since the 2005 Disengagement and the overall strategy of the Palestinian Arab national movement for decades.
It was to be expected that many would fall for Hamas’ trap. The UN and many so-called human rights organizations are dominated by antisemites who support Hamas’ goal of wiping out Israel and the Jewish people. And at first, it seemed that the Biden Administration was avoiding falling into this trap, as President Joe Biden correctly questioned the casualty figures claimed by Hamas is the early days of the war.
But as 2023 gave way to 2024, the US government began to fall into the Hamas trap and was never able - or willing - to pull itself out. As antisemitic incidents rose to historic levels and calls for a second Holocaust dominated Ivy League campuses and the streets of major American cities, the administration began doing everything Hamas wanted of it, forgetting about the hostages and the atrocities of October 7 and focusing on criticizing Israel and demanding that Israel end the war before the hostages were freed and before Hamas was neutralized.
In early February, Biden claimed that Israel’s response to the largest and barbaric massacre of Jews since the Holocaust had been “over the top.” By the end of that month, he was saying that he wanted a ceasefire in the near future.
In the Spring, the Biden Administration was pressuring Israel not to enter Rafah, the last major Hamas stronghold where its final four military battalions were stationed. It even held up weapons shipments to Israel over the Rafah issue.
In April, Vice President Kamala Harris said of the Israelis that “if there are not changes to their approach, it is very likely we're going to change our approach." Biden echoed her a few days later, saying that he did not agree with the “approach” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that Israel should above all be calling for a ceasefire.
All of this had the predictable effect of making everything worse. The global campaign to deny Israelis the right to live could cite the American government’s unfounded criticism of Israel and Hamas was given every reason to believe that its losses on the battlefield would be counterbalanced and ultimately reversed by its successes in the propaganda war.
All indications are that the Biden Administration’s decision to play directly into the hands of Hamas and Iran were based on domestic political considerations and that the Biden campaign was spooked in November 2023 by polls showing Biden losing support among Muslim voters in Michigan, a swing state that had the potential to decide the election that would be held a year later.
The pandering to the antisemite demographic is the most shameful act of the careers of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and of everyone in their administration and campaigns who went along with this act of moral cretinism.
When Biden said that those who accused Israel of a fake genocide for the sole purpose of subjecting Israel to a real genocide “have a point,” he opened the floodgates for more violence and antisemitism in his own country.
When Harris said that the people chanting for Jewish blood and the complete annihilation of the world’s only Jewish State "are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” she was justifying violence against Jewish people everywhere.
The voting bloc these despicable statements were aimed at securing do not only hate Israel and the Jewish people, they hate America and all that is good in this world. Chants of “Death to America” accompanied the chants of “Death to Israel” in Dearborn, Michigan, where the polls first spooked the Biden campaign. American flags and pictures of Biden were burned at anti-Israel protests in New York City on the Fourth of July.
In the end, Harris lost Michigan and every other swing state, proving that the gamble of pandering to the worst and most hateful people in America was a failure. All their pandering did was feed the antisemites’ desire for more. Even Bernie Sanders would find it difficult to satisfy the insane bloodlust of the “anti-Zionists.” Nothing short of an America bombing Tel Aviv the way it bombed Tokyo or Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War and Biden personally executing Benjamin Netanyahu with his own hands would satisfy the people they tried so hard to placate.
The result was an entire year that was wasted. Instead of putting pressure on Hamas to release all of the hostages immediately, the American government doomed 100 people to continued captivity and torture, and in some cases, death, through idiotic statements and misguided pressure on Israel. Instead of making the return of the hostages its top priority, America made ending the war the top priority regardless of the fate of the hostages.
The war was prolonged. The hostage crisis was prolonged. Jews were made less safe in the US and throughout the world. And all for a few votes that would not have made a difference in the end even if Harris had won Michigan.
If Israel had listened to Biden and Harris, Hamas’ battalions would have survived and been rebuilt. Most of the hostages who have been rescued would not have been rescued. Yahya Sinwar and other October 7 masterminds would still be alive. Hezbollah would be just as powerful now as it was a year ago. Bashar al-Assad would still rule Syria. And the Ayatollahs would not be in decline in Iran. The world would be a worse and far more dangerous place.
President-Elect Donald Trump has warned Hamas that if the hostages are not released by the time of his inauguration in less than two weeks, there will be “hell to pay.” Those statements have created more hope that the end of the hostage crisis and the war itself may be close than everything that came out of the mouths of the Biden Administration in the entirety of 2024.
The idea that “daylight” between the US and Israel would magically lead to peace was always a fantasy that ignored reality. When Barack Obama came into office with that idea guiding his Middle East policies, he pretended that the 2005 Disengagement, which happened thanks to the good relationship between Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush, never existed. The result was that the Palestinian Authority refused to even pretend to negotiate and hardened its positions and no progress was made until Obama and his fantasies left the White House.
Blinken’s acknowledgement that this daylight between the US and Israel caused Hamas to refuse deals to release the hostages is too little, far too late. This was a lesson that should have been learned at least 15 years ago. Had the lesson been internalized even a year ago, the war might have ended and all the hostages might have been freed months ago.
Had the Biden Administration done the right thing and made the hostage and the defeat of Hamas its priority, had it stood up to the antisemites in America and the Democratic Party, had it demonstrated courage instead of cowardice, it could have had a foreign policy success to present to the American people in November. An administration that stood by its ally through thick and thin and played a constructive role in ending the conflict and bringing home the hostages might have gotten a few more thousand votes in many of the swing states, especially Michigan.
And even if Biden and Harris still would have lost in November, their legacies would be very different and much better if they had done the right thing and not wasted the entirety of 2024 prolonging the war and the suffering of the hostages.