Joe's Gaza Pier Project

I've read enough Bible history to know that Israel was regularly overrun by successive powerful neighbors, beginning with Egypt and leading up to the Seleucid Greeks, at which point the decision was made to ally with the upstart power Rome for protection from all the others. That was mildly successful until Rome took over itself and obliterated Israel at least as successfully as any of the others.

Israel's modern history has involved alliance with another upstart world empire, the US, having received assurance from a fading empire, the UK, that it would grant territory for a new Jewish state in territories it controlled under the Palestine mandate. Harry Truman's immediate support for the emergence of the new state after World War II was the key factor in its initial survival. It's beginning to appear, though, that Israel's relationship with the US may wind up more like its ancient relationship with Rome. Just this morning in The Hill:

During President Biden’s State of the Union address last Thursday, he announced, “I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast.”

Intended to accommodate large vessels carrying food, water, medicine and tents, the pier would be constructed without U.S. “boots on the ground,” he added.

Constructing and securing the pier will be a considerable undertaking, with or without U.S. boots on the ground. Although well-intentioned from a humanitarian standpoint, the pier is likely to create more problems than solutions.

U.S. European and Central Commands are already decisively engaged in Ukraine and the Middle East. Building a vulnerable pier is not the best course of action. Biden’s decision therefore looks like a political response to garner votes from Muslim and progressive voters in Michigan and Minnesota, not an answer to problems in the region.

The pier will also present a new target for Iranian-backed proxies in Gaza and the West Bank, including Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. The pier will have to be defended from mortar, rocket, aerial drone and unmanned surface vehicle attacks. And some nation or coalition force will have to secure it from a multitude of threats.

. . . Carving out a safe zone in a combat zone is not a good strategy. Hamas terrorists have already repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to place Palestinian civilians between themselves and the Israel Defense Forces — in harm’s way.

It's likely, in fact, that Joe's actual strategy is to use the vulnerability of the US pier in close proximity to Israel's military operation to find more direct ways to interfere with it. Two Democrat administrations have been at odds with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was prime minister fron 2009-21, during Obama's entire administration, and now since 2022 under Biden. Obama and Netanyahu repeatedly clashed on issues related to the Palestinian state and the Iran nuclear deal, and it's alleged that Obama and Biden have enabled an Israeli lawfare strategy against Netanyahu equivalent to the Democrat strategy against Trump:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the White House this week [March 2019], is facing a dubious indictment for corruption, and Israel’s election looms on April 9.

Netanyahu joins Trump as a political target of his own nation’s legal system.

. . . Trump has endured two years of a political investigation initiated by Obama administration holdovers on the charge that he “colluded” with Russia and is its puppet. Special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence that it was true.

Netanyahu is facing charges that he extended regulatory favors, but law professor Alan Dershowitz, a self-described liberal Democrat and civil libertarian, told Israel’s attorney general this would “endanger democracy and freedom of the press. … [It would] bring down a duly elected prime minister on the basis of an expansive and unprecedented application of a broad and expandable criminal statute.” Netanyahu denies the charges and adds, “The left understands that they will not beat me at the ballot box.”

Seymour Hersh in his most recent Substack essay notes:

On October 7, the prime minister was in the middle of a widely publicized criminal trial on fraud, breach of trust, and bribery charges that, according to Israeli media, he was destined to lose and face potentially more than a decade in jail.

But unlike Dershowitz, he doesn't seem inclined to connect the dots between Trump, Netanyahu, and criminal trials. He does, though, hint that Netanyahu's response to October 7 and his hard line on Hamas are meant as distractions from a politicized criminal trial. The bigger conundrum Hersh ignores is that the US Democrat object is to interfere in Israel's domestic politics -- something Hersh has opposed in cases from Viet Nam to Ukraine, but which he now seems to want to encourage in Israel. Netanyahu himself makes the point that Israel's domestic policies are supported by a significant majority there:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a Sunday interview fired back at President Biden’s suggestion that his policies were only hurting Israel.

“I don’t know exactly what the president meant, but if he meant by that that I’m pursuing private policies against the majority, the wish of the majority of Israelis, and that this is hurting the interests of Israel, then he’s wrong on both counts,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Politico.

. . . “These are not my private policies only. They’re policies supported by the overwhelming majority of the Israelis. They support the action that we’re taking to destroy the remaining terrorist battalions of Hamas,” Netanyahu said.

. . . Netanyahu said he thinks the majority of Israelis supports the operation in Gaza to destroy what’s remaining of Hamas — the U.S.-designated terrorist organization that governs the Gaza Strip. Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis in the Oct. 7 massacre and took about 250 hostages.

. . . He said he also thinks Israelis support his view “that says that we should resoundingly reject the attempt to ram down our throats a Palestinian state.”

. . . The Israel Democracy Institute survey gauges Israeli sentiment on current events on a monthly basis.

In the institute’s most recent survey from February, about 64.4 percent of Israeli respondents — including 74.1 percent of Israeli Jews and 16.9 percent of Israeli Arabs — said they agreed Israel should “Expand the military operation into Rafah in order to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a better deal for the release of the hostages.”

What we've seen from recent confused remarks from Joe where he seems to conflate Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Egypt, and Mexico into a general foreign policy muddle is that he's basically in favor of global interference, except in cases like Afghanistan, where it clearly hasn't worked out. But there's no rhyme or reason to it, and there's no rhyme or reason to Seymour Hersh's general support for that policy, either. Hersh rambles on about his respect for Eugene McCarthy, the 1968 anti-Viet Nam War Democrat candidate:

There is a lesson in the clarity of McCarthy’s purpose for President Joe Biden, who like much of the world responded with rage and a desire for payback at the horror that Hamas inflicted on October 7.

. . . Biden will have difficulty winning re-election unless he retracts his initial justified support for a stricken Israel. He must stand up to Netanyahu and tell him that the United States cannot continue to supply funding, bombs, and other munitions to Israel until, at minimum, there is a ceasefire that could open the door to substantive talks with what is left of the Hamas leadership.

The problem for Biden is he's playing both sides, something domestic politics force him to do -- but in playing both sides, he's interfering in Israel for his own perceived domestic advantage. He isn't going to threaten to cut off aid to Netanyahu, he's just going to build a pier in the ocean next to Gaza and use it as leverage to restrict Israel's military options, which he's nevertheless continuing to supply with weapons they won't be allowed to use.

This is the same strategy that failed in Viet Nam. It's not that different from the strategy that's failing in Ukraine. Meanwhile,

A staggering 53% of Jewish voters in New York state plan on voting for former President Donald Trump in the November election, a new Siena College poll found.

. . . The spike in New York Jewish voters backing Trump has come in the wake of the murderous Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, with antisemitic hate crimes and anti-Israel protests surging in New York City.

President Biden, meanwhile, has lashed out at Israel in its war against Hamas while the Democratic Party has come under fire for tolerating far-left lawmakers in its ranks who sympathize with terrorists, according to Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf.

“The 11th commandment for Jews is ‘Thou shall vote Democrat.’ Now there’s a 12th commandment: ‘Maybe you should be a Republican, darling,'” Sheinkopf quipped.