Netanyahu’s Assassination Spree

The United States and the Middle East are now enduring a crisis that can in part be traced to the failed foreign policies of President Joe Biden, who will be in office, barring unforeseen events, for six more months. The core issue has been Biden’s inability to understand the recklessness and depravity of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hatred of Palestinians has now brought the Middle East and America to the brink of a war that is neither desired nor necessary. Biden also has failed to seek a negotiated settlement to the war Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, is now in the process of winning against Ukraine.

Biden’s failures will soon fall to Vice President Kamala Harris, who now has a clear path to be nominated by acclaim at the Democratic convention later this month. She has yet to indicate any disagreement with the peril the Biden policies have created, although if ever there was a time for her speaking out this is it.

The fault is not only Biden’s. The majority of Democrats and Republicans in Congress routinely vote to send billions of dollars to support a corrupt and failing government in Ukraine and similarly approve the bombs and tank shells supplied to Israel for use in Gaza. Hamas, which was financed for years by Qatar, at Netanyahu’s behest, is far from defeated and it is now clear that Netanyahu has been the one resisting a ceasefire there, despite pressure—or rather, pleading—from the Biden White House.

There were signs of Netanyahu’s irrationality from the beginning, and they were ignored. After the horror of the Hamas attack last October 7, the Israeli leadership was cautioned by a senior American who had been rushed to Israel not to retaliate with a massive bombing attack. Instead, the Israelis were advised to announce that a response was coming but would be withheld if Hamas immediately returned the 240 hostages, many of them in the Israeli Defense Forces, who had been seized. Even if the proposal failed, the anticipated failure of the Hamas leadership to respond was seen, optimistically, as a possible mitigating factor for the White House and its allies, given the violent bombing response that all knew was coming. Consider it a doomed Hail Mary-pass effort to massage the world’s anger as Gaza was torn apart. There was a further suggestion by another informed American official that Israel should consider the slim possibility that the leadership of Hamas could initiate a series of criminal trials for those in the Hamas leadership who planned the attack, to be held in Gaza. That, too, went nowhere.

The enraged Israeli leadership instead chose collective punishment, a decision that has led to tens of thousands of deaths—the numbers are impossible to measure amid the societal collapse—and growing worldwide condemnation of Israel. In America that has meant a political backlash among college students and the young against the Democratic Party, whose candidates are at peril in the November elections.

Netanyahu, invited by the Republicans to speak on July 24 before a joint session of Congress—many Democrats stayed away—had the temerity to take on American protesters in his speech, declaring that “they stand with Hamas” when they protest the killing and maiming of Gazans. “They stand with rapists and murderers,” Bibi said, to Republican applause. “They stand with people who came . . . into a home” and murdered parents and children. “They should be ashamed of themselves. . . . For all we know, Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now.” He presented no evidence for the last claim.

Netanyahu raised the specter of nuclear arms—Israel has hundreds of them, and Iran has none—by coyly noting that America and Israel have “jointly developed some of the most sophisticated weapons on Earth . . . I choose my words carefully . . . that help protect both our countries. . . . We also help keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.”

I published a book on the Israeli nuclear arsenal in 1991, and my reporting was abetted by many covert Israeli sources. I am convinced that our “shared interests” do not include the assassination last week in Iran of Ismail Haniyeh. He was the Hamas point man who was involved in the talks with Israel and America over a proposed ceasefire—one that it is now clear Netanyahu never wanted, something Biden and his foreign policy staff never seemed to have figured out. There were, however, many in the American intelligence community who understood that Netanyahu had become completely beholden to the far right in Israel—represented most alarmingly by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been Israel’s minister of security since 2022. Ben-Gvir has emerged as a leader of the Otzma Yehudit party that holds six seats that give the party control in the bitterly divided Israeli Knesset. He is an acknowledged racist who does not hesitate to say he wants to drive all Palestinians from their land. Ben-Gvir and his party keep Netanyahu in office and away from a prison sentence stemming from a series of corruption indictments. It is a lethal combination.

Read the Whole Article