As stunned outrage escalated in reaction to President Joe Biden’s decision to halt arms shipments to Israel in the midst of its battle against the Hamas terrorist group, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Thursday that the Jewish state would “stand alone” and “fight with our fingernails” in the face of a lack of military aid.
“I hope that’s a senior moment,” remarked House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in reaction to Biden’s announcement. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, stated that they were “appalled that the administration paused crucial arms shipments to Israel,” adding that “this disastrous policy decision was undertaken in secret and deliberately hidden from Congress and the American people.”
Democrats also expressed frustration with the decision. “As the leader of the free world, America cannot claim that its commitment to Israel is ‘ironclad’ and then proceed to withhold aid from Israel,” Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., wrote. “The mixed messaging makes a mockery of our credibility as an ally. No one will take our word seriously.”
Meanwhile, cease-fire talks in Cairo between Israel and Hamas that were pushed by the U.S. stalled on Thursday, as Hamas continued its refusal to release 132 hostages, 38 of whom are thought to no longer be alive.
As experts on the ground in Israel are pointing out, despite Hamas’ unprovoked Oct. 7 attack that killed the most Jews since World War II and despite the unreleased hostages, the Biden administration has been undermining Israel’s military response for at least four months.
“Beginning in January, we started getting first reports that the Biden administration was slow-walking munitions to Israel, including specifically ordnance for our aircraft and 155 millimeter artillery shells and tank shells,” explained Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor at the Jewish News Syndicate, on Thursday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” adding:
So, these are the basic tools of war that the Biden administration and the Obama administration convinced Israel we didn’t have to produce at home [because] the United States would be the steady supplier of all of these things.
Glick went on to detail how the Biden administration went back on its word to give military aid to Israel.
“[T]hey double-crossed us, Speaker Johnson, and the House and Senate Republicans,” she underscored. “They … made aid for Israel contingent on aid for Ukraine, knowing full well that the Republicans opposed the aid for Ukraine. … [T]hat’s just the way the Democrats fly. They didn’t want to allow Israel to be a stand-alone legislation. They forced the Republicans’ hand. Speaker Johnson wanted to get the aid to Israel [and] he risked his position in his party in order to push it through with the aid for Ukraine. And then as soon as Biden got what he wanted from the Republicans, specifically for Ukraine, he turned around, and he double-crossed them and said, ‘Nope, we’re not giving Israel what they want.’”
Glick further described how the Biden administration is setting expectations for how Israel should conduct its war against terrorists.
[N]ow what he said is, ‘We’re willing to give Israel the means to intercept incoming projectiles from Iran or from Lebanon or from Gaza, but they may not cause Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, any of them, to pay any price for their aggression.
‘All you can do is intercept incoming, but you can’t downgrade their power in any way. You cannot take the war to your enemies. They are allowed to attack you, and they will be completely immune from any sort of counterassault by Israel.’
That’s what the United States wants, and their long-term game is to transform Israel into a weak, totally dependent protectorate of the Democratic Party. … [I]t’s inviting the expansion of the war to other theaters in a major way.
In addition, Glick enumerated how Biden has personally inserted himself between Israel and other nations who have indicated their desire to provide military aid to the Jewish state.
“[E]arly on [after Oct. 7], the German chancellor came to Israel and met with Prime Minister Netanyahu,” she recounted. “And then after a series of conversations between the two leaders, the Germans agreed to sell us tank shells. … [T]wo hours after the announcement was made, President Biden was on the phone with Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and essentially push[ed] him to cancel the arms sale.”
The response within Israel has been to increase domestic production of munitions, Glick added.
[We’re] massively ramping up our domestic production. … [It’s] not productive enough to suit all of our needs, but we’re moving very quickly toward that goal. It will take a number of months, but we’re doing it. … They’ve opened up new lines of the Israel military industries in various cities around the country, and they’re hiring more and more employees to work the lines. … So we’re just going to have to build it ourselves as quickly as possible. We have to be the arsenal for our own democracy.
Glick concluded by contending that the Biden administration is in over its head in its dealings with Israel’s war against terrorism. “U.S. foreign policy under the Biden administration is … extremely shallow,” she argued, adding:
[T]hey think that war is a game or some sort of graduate seminar that you can somehow or another resolve through all kinds of fancy ideas about deterrence and balance of power. They don’t understand war.
“They don’t know what they’re dealing with,” Glick continued. “They attribute monstrous intentions through good people—the good people of Israel. And they project the goodness of the people of Israel on the monstrous enemies that are fighting us, whether it’s the Iranian regime that seeks our genocide through nuclear weapons and its terror proxy war … or whether it’s Hamas. And we saw what they did on Oct. 7, and we understand what it means when they say that they want to kill [us]. [W]e see it with Hezbollah. … [W]e found dozens of subterranean tunnels over the years that they’ve dug into Israel from Lebanon with the goal of infiltrating our villages and capturing and slaughtering our people. So, this is not a game.”
Originally published by WashingtonStand.com
