How US policy is hindering Israel’s war effort – www.israelhayom.com

While the United States has provided Israel with critical military support, it has inadvertently hampered our war effort against the terrorist organization Hamas. Through a combination of humanitarian aid benefiting terrorists and restrictions on the actions of Israeli forces, America’s well-intentioned policies have prolonged the conflict and increased suffering on both sides. This article examines the unintended consequences of U.S. involvement in the ongoing Gaza war.

French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine coined the term “bear hug” in the 17th century. In his story, a bear, trying to shoo a fly off his gardener friend’s face, picks up a large rock and crushes the fly along with his friend’s skull. In the story of U.S.-Israeli relations during the recent war, our great friend – who made a significant contribution to Israel’s security and defense – did not crush our skulls, God forbid, but his often suffocating embrace did significant harm to the course and results of the war.

Now that everyone is investigating (or is about to investigate) everyone else for the conduct of the war, we must focus on the contribution of the American actor – which presumably no one needs to investigate – to prolonging the war and the suffering of Israeli citizens, hostages and their families. We have a right to know.

Let’s start with a well-known central fact, the implications of which are less well known: in addition to the air and sea bridge of arms and weapons to Israel, the US provided a “humanitarian train” for the residents of the Gaza Strip, which included fuel and food in insane quantities. Hamas, for whom this aid was not intended, used it to maintain its ability to govern, confiscated most of it and even made a nice profit by selling it to the people of the Gaza Strip. Thus, in practice, the US ensured the ability of the murderous terrorist organization to govern, and even supplied Hamas and its leadership with ever more fuel and, in effect, oxygen, which allowed it to continue to remain underground with most of the hostages, instead of coming to the surface and being exposed.

Hamas understood humanitarian aid very differently than the United States. From their perspective, it increasingly served as a basis for legitimizing their continued existence as the ruling power in the Gaza Strip and for a tougher stance on the hostage issue.

With one hand, Biden has forced Israel to shorten the war, and with the other he has actually prolonged it, reducing the hostages’ chances of survival and allowing Hamas to fight and exist in underground Gaza for many more months, continuing to fire on Israeli border communities and harming more Israeli soldiers. In doing so, Biden has prolonged both the suffering of Gaza residents, whom Hamas has used and continues to use as human shields to this day, and their time as refugees evacuated from their homes. All of this, of course, is before we point out the inherent anomaly of the decision to aid the murderous enemy of your closest ally in the Middle East, a twisted historical precedent and behavior that would not have occurred to America toward its own enemies.

This reality was exacerbated to the point of absurdity in one of the recent cabinet meetings. The ministers attending were speechless when Major General Eliezer Toledano, who formerly headed the Southern Command of the Israel Defense Forces, made it clear to them that the Minister of Settlements and National Projects, Orit Struck, “is right when he says that if you kill Hamas, you simultaneously eliminate the humanitarian aid distribution mechanisms. You have no one to distribute the aid, and then you have to rely on humanitarian organizations that Hamas prohibits from distributing, and so there is no one to distribute the aid.” The question of how the Hamas mechanism for distributing aid to the population is compatible with the decision to deny Hamas the ability to govern remained unanswered.

These absurdities lead to even greater absurdities: when the United States imposes sanctions on the Israeli group Tzav 9, which is blocking aid trucks bound for Gaza, and on its leader Reut Ben Haim, a mother of eight from Netivot, it not only harms Israeli democracy and freedom of demonstration and expression in Israel, but also makes a mockery of its own concern for these same values ​​(during the period of judicial reform).

The American actions against a legitimate Israeli protest organization that is blocking the path of aid trucks to the enemy, acting in the spirit of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s words at the beginning of the war – “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed” – are also the opposite of sanctions that the US imposes in other parts of the world against precisely regimes that harm such value-based and conscientious protests. And again – with one hand, the US punishes countries like China and Russia that harm such protests, and with the other hand, they behave like those dark regimes and harm civil and democratic protests here in our country, as they sanctify them elsewhere.

The second leg of the government’s trolling is the handcuffs it has placed on Israel in terms of the type and pace of fighting and the types of weapons it can use. The American restrictions put Israeli soldiers even more at risk, slow their advance in combat zones and once again prolong the war and the suffering of the population on both sides.

In passing, the US was also caught telling the truth when it turned out that the delay in arms deliveries to Israel was not a single shipment of a specific type of weapon, as Biden claimed, but various artillery, air and tank munitions paid for by Israel, the delivery of which was delayed for months, as well as thousands of “Heavy Rain” kits that turn bombs dropped from aircraft into smart, target-guided bombs.

And once again, the supposed moral caveat turns out to be hypocritical hypocrisy. According to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, the wars the United States waged after the September 11 attacks (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan) cost more than 400,000 civilians directly and about 3.5 million indirectly.

In relative terms, and taking into account the population size of the US and Israel, the number of people killed in the October 7 massacre was 30 times higher than the number killed in the US on September 11. So yes, we are just a “small gnat” compared to the US and “what is permitted to them is forbidden to us” etc., but on a moral level, even if Brown University’s estimate is exaggerated, we are much better off than the Americans, who have harmed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, with and without quotation marks, in the wars they have fought over the past decades.

At the heart of American behavior toward us since the beginning of the war has been Western logic and double standards – on the one hand, what benefits us: $6.7 billion worth of weapons, the deployment of aircraft carriers to deter the Iranian axis, and broad diplomatic support; on the other, what crushes us. The logic that thinks Western rather than Middle Eastern is hesitant to exploit humanitarian disasters or dates like Ramadan to gain influence that would shorten the war, defeat Hamas, and perhaps release the hostages at a lower price.

The double standard, which is not recognized anywhere else in the world, is a new norm set specifically for Israel, which made it very difficult for Israel to fight and even affected its results. This is also where the American obsession with establishing a Palestinian state comes from, and it should not be confused with facts such as the support of about three-quarters of Palestinians in the West Bank for the October 7 massacre, the support of terrorism by governors in the Palestinian Authority and the active participation of Fatah in attacks, or the consistent education and incitement of hatred of Israel and the glorification of “martyrs.” Hence also the lack of such an elementary understanding that a Palestinian state is the symbol of the victory of terrorism and an encouragement to further massacres. What the Biden administration sees, albeit somewhat blurred in the face of the Hamas Palestinian Nazis, is difficult to see in the face of its twins in the Palestinian Authority.