What’s More Important? Israel Defeating Hamas or Appeasing the Fanatics?

Here’s an irritating development for you:

Axios reporter Barak Ravid has the details:

President Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Sunday that he is concerned about a possible Israeli military operation in southern Gaza after the current pause in fighting ends, two U.S. officials told Axios. . . . Biden told Netanyahu that the way Israel operated in northern Gaza, which included a wide assault and three armored and infantry divisions, can’t be repeated in the southern part of the enclave because of the millions of Palestinians who are there now, the U.S. officials said.

If the White House has issued a similar call on Hamas’s terrorist fighters to limit their activities to the areas in which Israelis are conducting combat operations, we haven’t heard about it. Of course, issuing such a demand would be silly. Hamas would just ignore it. Israel is the only responsible actor in this conflict. Therefore, it is the only party that can be shamed and cajoled out of pursuing its own national-security imperatives.

And yet, the 10/7 massacre was so vicious — such a paradigm-altering event — that Israel, too, is no longer as responsive to the hectoring it routinely receives from comfortable quarters in the West as it has been in previous rounds of fighting. So what is the point of this exercise save that it gives the Biden White House the space to claim that it is functionally opposed to Israel’s inevitable push south, where it will finish the job it started in the north?

The White House has sprung quite a trap on the Israeli government. By delaying the ground offensive in Gaza for over a month after the 10/7 attacks to ensure that as many Gazans could evacuate the north of the Strip — over Hamas’s objections, dissuasion, and coercion — Israel ensured that it could not fulfill its goal of destroying Hamas. Look at all the civilians that are there now! Hamas is so proficient at hiding behind its human shields that Israel just can’t move on its strongholds in places such as Khan Younis. That would be giving the terrorists what they want. What a bummer. Too bad, Bibi.

For too long, the Biden administration has tried to have it both ways in this conflict. At times, the president and his officials say all the right things about the unacceptability of Hamas’s continued reign in Gaza, and the administration’s policies have largely reflected that morally righteous and strategically sound rhetoric. And yet, the White House has also sought to placate the anti-Israel fanatics on the Democratic Party’s progressive fringes. So, the Biden administration settles on incomprehensibly convoluted positions like this one.

Sure, Hamas has to go. But Israel must limit its operational efficacy to such a degree that Hamas would be ensured of survival in one form or another. No, a temporary pause in the fighting to secure the release of hostages isn’t a ceasefire, which would be unacceptable. But if Israel doesn’t extend the pause indefinitely in deference to the logic of hostage-taking, it will encounter reputational penalties among the vaunted members of the so-called international community. And so on.

“There comes a time when you need to join the side you’re on,” said the late author and intellectual, Midge Decter. The Biden White House would do well to internalize this logic.

Yes, assuming an unabashedly supportive posture toward Israel’s effort to dissolve the Hamas regime in Gaza will irritate the irascible mobs attacking police, laying siege to Democratic National Committee headquarters, and doing everything they can to ruin the holidays for their unenlightened neighbors. So what? Making enemies of the unsavory representatives of a tiny, monomaniacal minority sounds like a good problem to have. By contrast, preventing Israel from succeeding in a mission on which Biden has banked American prestige would be a real, nagging political headache for the White House. The administration needs to get its priorities straight.