Sullivan’s frustration at the media’s failure to distinguish between aggressors and victims is understandable, but the source of their confusion is his boss.
Given the flamboyance with which the White House has broadcast its hostility toward Israel’s conduct in its defensive war against Hamas, we can safely deduce that the administration wants the world to take note of its displeasure. The administration has succeeded in generating attention for itself, but it’s unclear what its strategic objective was beyond that. Joe Biden and his officials have managed only to alienate Israel’s supporters while winning no plaudits from Israel’s reflexive detractors. It’s a strange approach. In fact, if the remarks of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan are to be taken at face value, it has become a source of internal conflict within the administration.
“When it comes to the issue of the hostage talks, one of the things that I have found somewhat absent from the coverage is that what we are talking about in the first phase is women, elderly, and wounded civilians,” Sullivan said yesterday when pressed for an update on cease-fire negotiations. “A cease-fire is on the table today for six weeks to be built on into something more enduring if Hamas would simply release women, wounded, and elderly. And the fact that they will not do so says a lot to me about Hamas’s regard for innocent Palestinian civilians.”
Sullivan went on to say, albeit in a roundabout way, that the foremost obstacle to peace in the Gaza Strip is Hamas. If the terrorist group were to release the civilians it has held in its custody since the October 7 massacre, Sullivan added, that would “bring calm to the fighting” and “create an enormous opportunity to flow humanitarian assistance in much greater quantities.” As an aside, Biden’s NSA added that he has “encouraged Israel to stay at the table” and conclude negotiations on favorable terms, but that implies that Israel is a meaningful participant in those talks while Hamas is not.
Sullivan deserves all the credit in the world for this forthright and unqualified testament illustrating which is the truly irresponsible party to this conflict. He would have done himself and his boss favors by noting that the hardships endured by the Gazan people would be substantially mitigated if Hamas would surrender unconditionally. But even in the absence of such throat-clearing, statements like Sullivan’s are valuable. After all, value is a function of scarcity.
It is, however, increasingly difficult to square sentiments like those Sullivan expressed with the administration’s growing efforts to alienate Israeli leaders, up to and including advocacy for a change in the character of the government in Jerusalem.
“[Benjamin] Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultra-orthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy,” read an Office of the Director of National Intelligence report published in Axios on Tuesday. “A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”
Of course it’s a possibility. Israel has not had stable politics for years, and it wasn’t that long ago that Netanyahu spent 18 months out of power after being ousted by a coalition of centrist parties. The prime minister is deeply unpopular in Israel, but his coalition is no longer as dependent on “far-right and ultra-orthodox parties.” It’s a war cabinet composed of erstwhile opponents — a reflection of Israel’s whole-of-society interest in seeing this war to a victorious conclusion.
The administration has made a straw man out of Netanyahu in its efforts to indict Israel’s battlefield conduct, but there are few indications that a successor government would handle this war differently. The White House seems to know that, or it wouldn’t have given Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet, the Netanyahu treatment during his recent visit to Washington — deeply undiplomatic conduct, the details of which the administration made sure to leak to the press.
As Sullivan tacitly confessed, the problem is not Benjamin Netanyahu or the cross-partisan coalition that came together to see the war in Gaza through to a conclusion. The problem is Hamas. Sullivan’s frustration with political media’s failure to observe clear moral distinctions between the aggressors and their victims is understandable, but he should look inward if he’s genuinely interested in identifying the source of their confusion.