NETANYAHU’S ASSASSINATION SPREE

Killings by Israel in Lebanon and Iran risk dragging the US and the Middle East into a regional war

Vice President Kamala Harris and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrive for a meeting in the vice president’s ceremonial office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on July 25. / Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images.

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.