Thursday, July 04, 2024
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: Can Israel afford to stand up to America?
Melanie Phillips: Can Israel afford to stand up to America?
Against this dire backdrop, Netanyahu is going to America in three weeks’ time to address Congress. Among the many who loathe and distrust him, there is nervousness and criticism that he may make a bad situation even worse by criticizing Biden so close to the presidential election.Jonathan Tobin: Reaffirm our belief in the promise of America
There are fears that he may repeat what such people believe was the harmful result he achieved when he addressed Congress in 2015 in an attempt to head off President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Obama outfoxed him by some fancy Beltway footwork and the deal was duly done. Netanyahu’s critics say that he therefore achieved nothing but bad blood with Obama. The same fears are being expressed over the likely effect on Biden of this month’s visit.
But this is to get things back to front. In both cases, Netanyahu decided to address Congress because an already virulently hostile administration posed such a danger to Israel that he could not remain silent.
In 2015, he had a moral duty to lay out for Congress and the American people the dire consequences of Obama’s Iran deal. That warning has been amply borne out. In 2024, Netanyahu has a moral duty to explain to Congress and the American people the dire consequences of the Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran, why Israel is fighting a war for its survival unlike any other since its foundation and that the seven-front war against it is merely the opening shot in Iran’s war against America and the West.
What Netanyahu’s critics fail to acknowledge is that he is a supremely cautious politician. He rarely airs his grievances with the U.S. in public. When he does so, it signifies desperation. It’s because he feels he has no other option.
That’s why he addressed Congress in 2015. It’s why he outed the Biden administration for holding up the delivery of weapons essential to the war effort. And it’s why he’s beating a lonely path back to Congress once again.
His intended audience isn’t just U.S. lawmakers. It isn’t just the American people. It’s also the Arab and Muslim world, which is watching carefully and where the stakes for Israel are very high.
For what inspires aggression and war in the Middle East is above all the perception of weakness. If Israel is seen to be bullied into surrender by the Biden administration, the Arab and Muslim world will smell that weakness. The Arabs may accordingly retreat from their recent historic overtures of friendship or Iran will move in for the kill. It is therefore essential that Israel is seen to be standing up to America.
As the former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger has observed, the State Department has systematically pressured Israel to act against its own security requirements ever since 1948.
And it never learns from experience. The Obama-Biden strategy of appeasement empowered Iran, created the conditions for the Oct. 7 pogrom and is leading the free world to catastrophe.
As Ettinger has said, the question is not how Israel can afford to stand up to America. It’s how can Israel afford not to.
Seeing the forces dedicated to tearing down the belief system that underpinned ideas about American exceptionalism that served as the foundation for Jewish acceptance, they now worry about their future on these shores. Liberal writer Franklin Foer spoke for many when he pondered whether “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending” in a gloomy piece in The Atlantic that mixed realism with partisan point-scoring (which undermined its credibility).Big Lies About Israel
Antisemitism is not merely on the rise; it has become a daily occurrence. These days, left-wing versions of the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., back in August 2017 focus on support for Hamas, and demonizing Israel and the Jews. And so, despair about America is understandable. That’s especially true when considering that appeasing the forces behind these despicable provocations and acts of violence, if not open support for them, has a powerful constituency in mainstream politics and the media.
The context of this struggle is one in which contempt for traditional American civic culture is implicit in the left’s new secular religion.
The Times continues its ideological assault on the 1776 paradigm with pre-July 4 articles questioning not just exceptionalism but the whole idea of America being a “city on a hill” that is the last, best hope of mankind. And if that isn’t enough, it also trashed the celebratory aspects of the holiday since the fireworks that John Adams envisioned as an annual event in a letter to his wife Abigail, annoys pets and are too closely associated with gun rights. The liberal elites who run the paper may think that no celebration of newer holidays like Pride month or Juneteenth is too lavish, yet on the Fourth of July, it wants everyone to stop driving trucks, eating meat and supposedly harming nature by firing off a few bottle rockets. That is merely the lighter side of a problem more serious than most of us could have believed a few years ago.
The long march of the progressives through U.S. institutions has led to a situation where tolerance and even permission for antisemitism is a feature and not a bug of this belief system. But as much as Jews have rightly focused on this new seemingly respectable version of antisemitism, it is merely one aspect of a worldview that is just as hostile to traditional notions about American liberty and the core beliefs of Western civilization from which the spirit of 1776 sprang.
American history is replete with failures and open breaches of the principles of the founders—of which the most prominent was the decision to tolerate slavery until a civil war that cost the lives of 750,000 Americans ended the practice. The ideals of the declaration were often honored in their breach, but they remained the aspirational touchstone of the long arc of progress through which liberty eventually expanded to the point where its words have been given full expression.
Nevertheless, if we are to remain locked in the ideological dead-end of woke ideology, not only will that progress unravel amid the racial and ethnic quotas mandated by “equity” that ends the hope of equality and a color-blind society. We will find ourselves living in a nation where Jews are forced to see this as not an exceptional nation but just one more failed attempt at building a home in the Diaspora.
For months, Israel has refuted libelous claims of famine in Gaza, as international organizations -- especially the UN and the EU, the International Court of Justice and mainstream media alongside NGOs such as Human Rights Watch -- pushed the false, malicious narrative that Israel was causing famine in Gaza and even using it as a "weapon of war." Israel might have saved itself the effort. No one was listening.
In May, the World Food Programme (WFP) of the UN claimed, without a shred of evidence, that there was a "full blown famine" in Gaza.
Now, it turns out, it was all a big lie. There was no famine, there is no famine and Israel has not been using hunger as a "weapon of war." In its report published on June 4, the UN's IPC [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] concluded that famine was no longer even "plausible" and had no "supporting evidence."
By comparison, more than three million children in Sudan are acutely malnourished, and a quarter of a million more are likely to die in the coming months. By the UN's own admission, the war in Sudan is "the war the world has either forgotten or ignored." The irony of that statement has clearly been lost on the UN, which is probably the main reason that Sudan – and other conflict spots – is ignored: the UN focuses almost all its resources on Israel and Gaza.
The "made-up" famine is just the latest in a long row of fabrications demonizing Israel's military operations in Gaza, which over the last months have been exposed as lies yet have received zero coverage in the media.
In early May, the UN effectively admitted that Hamas's casualty figures were untrustworthy...
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres led the incitement against Israel, as the UN almost always does.
Overall, 18 million people in Sudan face starvation.
