Is Israel on a collision course with the United States? It might be, and while there is a way to avoid the clash, it is a step that >Benjamin Netanyahu will have a hard time taking.

The clash is already identifiable from remarks made in recent days by top administration officials like Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Both warned Israel against the growing civilian death toll in Gaza and said that the US would “under no circumstances” allow the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, the besiegement of Gaza, or the redrawing of the borders of Gaza.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, the architect of the US mission to combat ISIS, went even further, warning Israel of “strategic defeat” if it does not protect civilians and instead drives them into the hands of the radicals.

These statements are not missed by Israeli diplomats or military officers who understand that the diplomatic clock is running out. As a result, the IDF is pushing deeper and more aggressively into Hamas strongholds in Gaza – Khan Yunis, Shuja’iyya, and Jabalya to name some – and with that push, the Palestinian death toll will increase.

While the US has held off so far on calling for a comprehensive ceasefire – instead sticking to calls for “pauses” and breaks to facilitate the release of hostages or the transfer of humanitarian aid – there is little doubt in Jerusalem that such a call is growing closer.

This is obvious from the division of roles right now within the administration. While Joe Biden is sticking to the pro-Israel approach, he is coordinating with Harris, who is taking a more vocal role that is tougher on Israel, with the goal of bridging the democratic divide on the war and bringing back party members who feel that the president has been too soft.

Israel needs to keep in mind that words are not the only way for America to express its displeasure. In 2014, for example, the Obama administration delayed the delivery of Hellfire missiles to Israel after it was upset that the IDF was directly asking the Pentagon for a resupply during the Gaza war that summer.

Imagine more delays in the $14 billion aid package to Israel. Already, Republican senators are fighting with Democrats over the package and connecting it to reforms in border and immigration policy, while some of the more progressive Democrats want to see Biden tie the aid to a change in Israeli military conduct.There are more subtle ways, such as making it harder for the IDF to access the forward-based arms depot the US maintains in Israel, or mysteriously delaying the delivery of spare parts for Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter jets. Shipments scheduled to arrive on a Tuesday could suddenly be delayed to the following Sunday due to “technical” reasons.And then there is the more public option: Biden directly calls on Israel to wrap up the war and Israel refuses, claiming that it needs more time. So far, Biden has refrained from doing so, but – depending on how the ground offensive continues and the climbing death toll in Gaza – that could change before we even know it.

A plan for the ‘day after’

ISRAEL HAS a way to avoid this clash or at, the very least, to minimize it. To do so, it needs to put forward a plan for the “day after” the war with Hamas that includes some sort of diplomatic engagement with the Palestinian Authority, which the Biden administration would like to see empowered and bolstered to be able to one day retake the reins over the Gaza Strip.

This is not something that Netanyahu, who is already in political campaign mode, can do. As evidenced by his recent statements against the PA, it seems pretty clear what Netanyahu’s election campaign is going to be about: a claim that only he can prevent the PA from taking over Gaza while his rivals – Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid, and Naftali Bennett – will be weak and more susceptible to US pressure.

This is dangerous and mixes Israeli national security interests with politicking. Instead, what Israel should consider doing is providing the world with a diplomatic vision so that it backs off and gives the IDF the time it needs to degrade Hamas capabilities, eliminate more of its leaders – including the top leadership – and, as a consequence, also improve the conditions for another hostage release or exchange.

If you listen carefully to Netanyahu, there is a way to interpret what he is saying as not just what Israel will not allow, but rather what it will allow. When he says that he cannot allow the PA to move into Gaza since it incites against Israel in its education system and has laws that pay salaries to terrorists, he is essentially saying that if that were not the case, then his position might be different. Due to politics and fear of coalition partners Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu cannot say so publicly, but in private conversations with the Americans, government officials are getting that point across.

Americans need to undergo their own transformation 

The Americans, though, also need to undergo their own transformation. The constant referencing of a “two-state solution” is misguided and creates unrealistic expectations. It shows a profound misunderstanding of what happened here on October 7. In the absence of an Anwar Sadat-like leader on the Palestinian side, Israel will not withdraw from territory in the decades to come, an ironclad condition for the PA. By creating expectations to the contrary, the US is causing more damage than good.

This challenge – creating a diplomatic endgame to the war – is not new for Israel. Over decades of peace talks with the Palestinians, consecutive Israeli governments almost never put forward their own plans for what they wanted to happen and instead created a vacuum that was always filled by American and European initiatives. Israel thought it was buying time, but in reality, it allowed for increased diplomatic pressure.

Without creating a plan that is coordinated with the US and some of Israel’s Arab allies, the country will once again be setting itself up for a vacuum that will almost certainly lead to the creation of a plan that will not be best for Israel.

Which is why the government needs to stop playing politics and instead outline a vision for the day after in Gaza. Doing so will help alleviate international pressure, will stave off a clash with the US, will buy the IDF more time to achieve its military objectives, and will – just as importantly – help restore some public trust in our political leaders.

Published by Jerusalem Post

Photo Credit:מג’ די פתחי/TPS

The post Israel is on a Collision Course with the US first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Speaking at Dubai’s COP28 Summit, US Vice President Kamala Harris said “we cannot conflate Hamas with the Palestinian people.” “We” Israelis, Americans, Westerners, don’t have to – the Palestinians and their thuggish enablers keep doing it by deifying Hamas.

Harris’s comments sounded foolish to most Arabs’ ears – they know the truth. For decades, the world has absolved Palestinians of responsibility for the violence they keep encouraging.

This morally idiotic free pass continues, even as Palestinians worldwide cheer Hamas, even as we hear reports of doctors and UNWRA teachers holding innocent Israelis hostage, even as polls show that 75% of Palestinians support Hamas – especially the October 7 massacre, which Gazans facilitated. Just last week, Gazans threatened to lynch the hostages being freed – bizarrely, the Hamas war criminals protected the Israeli women and children from the mob.

Absolving responsibility for violence

That three-quarters of Palestinians champion the savagery reflects a broad Palestinian consensus. Only 36% of Americans approve of Harris, yet she represents them. Westerners proclaiming Palestinian “innocence” or warning that, by defending itself, Israel might alienate Palestinians ignore how Jew-killing thrills the Palestinian street. Note the absence of Palestinian resistance to Hamas, even in free countries.

Harris and her fellow Western dupes should learn Roni Krivoi’s story – Israelis know it well.

The first male Israeli adult hostage freed, Krivoi is a 25-year-old Russian-Israeli soundman who staffed the Supernova music festival. That desecration of the love celebration is now Israel’s worst single terrorist attack, murdering 364 civilians, wounding hundreds more, kidnapping 40. The terrorists’ own Go-Pro cameras broadcast searing images of Palestinians raping, kidnapping, and killing.

Dragged to Gaza, Krivoi eventually escaped his captors amid the chaos following a bombing. But unlike in World War II movies, there were no “good Germans” to save him from these modern Nazis – a serious Palestinian resistance exists only in Western hallucinations. After four days, his aunt reported, “the Gazans captured him and returned him to the terrorists’ hands.”

Krivoi’s recapture explains why, to many Israelis, it’s not just about Hamas. Even before the polls proved it, Gazans shared videos of themselves celebrating the violence and following the terrorists into Israel to rape, pillage, and murder.

Raided kibbutznikim recognized workers whom they had befriended participating enthusiastically, sometimes directing the evil. That’s why Western leaders who pretend that only Hamas committed these war crimes sound naive to their Arab interlocutors in Dubai, let alone to Israelis.

THE BLIZZARD of lies denying Israeli suffering while forgiving Palestinians reflects an age-old phenomenon – the dehumanization of the Jews.

In the 1590s, William Shakespeare recognized that bigots first degrade individuals. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Shylock the Jew in The Merchant of Venice famously asked. “If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Today, Israelis – and Jews – feel that same erasure of pain, that denial of humanity, and that self-righteous fury against us for daring to defend ourselves. Today, many Jewish women wonder: “If you deny you raped us, do we not suffer?”

The post Where are the righteous Palestinians? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

It’s been goosebump-central in Israel, with every innocent Israeli freed, every joyful leap into loved ones’ arms, each homecoming-and-healing process launched. We pray for all stolen Israelis to have the happy reunion they deserve.

But beware. It’s moral-equivalence-central worldwide. Baby-stealing has been normalized. The world treats Hamas terrorists as rational actors trading goods, not monstrous human traffickers treating people like poker chips.

Even when The Washington Post doesn’t call lawfully imprisoned Palestinians “captives,” the rhetoric of “exchange” equates pure souls named Ella or Avigail whose only crime is being Israeli, with twisted terrorists who happen to be young or female – one planned to be a suicide bomber, another stabbed her neighbor for being Jewish.

Breeding terrorism

Every capitulation to Hamas blackmail – that’s what it is!!! – should remind everyone: Negotiating with terrorists breeds terrorism. Everyone, especially US President Joe Biden, must remember that beyond 161 innocents still caged, Hamas’s mass manipulation holds 9.3 million Israelis hostage, too.

When so many accuse Israel of discounting Palestinian lives because this enlightened, life-affirming democracy will trade multiple Palestinian terrorists for one civilian, some blur the moral clarity in Israel’s position – validating Hamas’s lies.

Remember that on October 7 the “terrorist group Hamas unleashed pure unadulterated evil in the world.” Its “stated purpose for existing is the destruction of the State of Israel and the murder of Jewish people.” We cannot retreat, because “history has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction…. And the cost and the threats to America and the world keep rising.”

What’s changed since October 19, when President Biden said those words?

Actually, the moral, diplomatic, and existential stakes have only escalated. Hamas confirmed every Israeli fear the West dismissed, and then some. Having made Gaza one big fortress of evil, Hamas leverages Palestinian and Israeli suffering into a worldwide anti-Zionist propaganda barrage. Yet despite being absolutely responsible for the death of thousands and the misery of many more, every Hamas lie becomes a truth believed among too many Westerners.

Hamas claims Israel still “occupies” Gaza, after Israel withdrew from every inch of Gaza in 2005. Even The New York Times, describing “the subterranean maze” stolen international humanitarian aid built, reports that Hamas’s tunnels “extend across most if not all of Gaza, the territory they control.” If Hamas “controls” the “territory,” how can Israel occupy Gaza?

Hamas complained about Israel’s evil “blockade,” overlooking Gaza’s Egyptian border. Somehow, all this cash, weaponry, and material to build its citadel of sadism arrived, suggesting it wasn’t much of a “blockade” either.

Hamas accuses Israel of violating international law by bombing hospitals, mosques, and kindergartens. But when you use your hospitals and mosques and kindergartens to store weapons, let alone develop command-and-control centers there, or hold kidnapped innocents or slaughter Israelis there, you lose the international legal protection genuine sanctuaries deserve.

We need a language shift. Shifa and Rantisi are Hamospitals, not hospitals. Call mosques with rocket-making factories Hamosques. Schools filled with weapons caches, and propagating hate, are killergartens, not kindergartens. The organization often facilitating this is UNRuin not UNRWA. And hostages are pawns.

Confront cynical supporters of these homophobic, theocratic, autocratic, rapists and murderers. Only sloberals – not liberals – rationalize stealing babies or beheading them. And only feminasties – not feminists – stop believing abused women’s testimonies while losing their voice against gendered violence and rape culture when Israelis are victimized.

MOST DANGEROUS are the self-defeating “ceasefire” demands, without acknowledging that Hamas started the war, and must be degraded militarily. A clear victory is the best way to free the remaining hostages, along with millions of others threatened by Hamas, including 9.3 million Israelis, and hundreds of millions more who will suffer if Hamas isn’t punished severely for behaving brutally.

This is personal

Yes, it’s personal. When Biden or anyone else says “ceasefire,” I hear them say: “I’m willing to kill your kids in Israel so we can feel good about ourselves in America.” When J Street, while condemning Hamas “unequivocally,” supports “consideration of alternative strategies and tactics for removing Hamas from operational control of Gaza that minimize harm to Palestinian civilians,” you wonder how any serious person could write such claptrap. Who doesn’t wish that “alternative strategies” worked?

The post All Israelis are hostages first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

It was a period of euphoria. In June 1967, Israel defeated three Arab armies in just six days and tripled in size. The country was on a high and Jews from around the world responded in kind.

If aliyah to Israel in 1967 was just 15,000, by 1968 it had jumped to 20,000, and by 1973 to almost 55,000. During this five-year period, some 30,000 American Jews moved to Israel, an unprecedented number. In 1966, for example, only 826 Jews immigrated from North America. By 1973 that number had skyrocketed to almost 5,000. Even today, despite the existence of special organizations to ease the aliyah process from the US, the numbers are barely half of what it was 50 years ago.

And while this large number of olim (immigrants) seemed impossible just a few years earlier, it was clear why it was happening: Israel was perceived as successful and powerful. Fresh out of a miraculous victory, Israel was a place to which people wanted to tie their fate. It was riding a wave that came crashing down with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973.

Aliyah came crashing down as well. In all of 1974, about 32,000 people moved to Israel, a drop of 23,000 and by 1975, the number was down by almost 70%.

Perception of Israel

The lesson was obvious. Perception of Israel and its power is important, not just for the country’s efforts to deter its enemies, but also for how it is perceived by fellow Jews around the world. When the country is perceived as strong and successful, Jews rally behind it and decide to tie their fate to it. When, after the Yom Kippur War, Israel was perceived as vulnerable, weak, and failing, the number of people who wanted to be connected to here fell.

And this is an important lesson today as Israel’s war against Hamas continues in the Gaza Strip. On the surface, in wake of the attacks on October 7, Israel is creating a new security paradigm in southern Israel. It is operating in Gaza to degrade Hamas’s military capabilities, to kill or capture its leaders, and to remove it as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip. The days of containing the Hamas enemy are clearly over.

No matter how this war ends, Israel will also now need to change the substance of its relationship with Diaspora Jewry and declare that what was, will no longer be. All Israelis have been moved to see how Jews from around the world have stood up to assist Israel during this difficult time. There are those who donated money, others who have come here on solidarity missions to volunteer, and even more who have lined the streets of New York, London, Sydney, and Paris, with posters of the hostages and Israeli flags, at rallies in support of Israel’s battle to defeat Hamas.

THEY HAVE done so despite the explosion of antisemitism and the risk that it now poses to the future of American, British, and European Jewry. While Jews in Israel are obviously most at risk of physical harm, the killing of Paul Kessler at a pro-Israel rally in Los Angeles, and the death chants against Jews in Dagestan, as well as on the streets of London, indicate how antisemitism shows, to some extent, how all Jews are in a similar situation.

What we have to keep in mind is the objective of the protesters against Israel and the threat it poses to Jews. They want people to be afraid to speak up, to appear in public in support of Israel and to proudly identify as Jews. They want Jews to be afraid, to removed mezuzot from their front doors like in Paris and to remove their kippot (skullcaps) or any other Jewish markings.

The explosion in antisemitism shows just how intertwined the fate of Jews around the globe is to Israel, whether they support or care about what is happening here or not. They are immediately blamed for the IDF action and, as a result, Israel cannot ignore the Diaspora plight.

What Israel needs to do now is twofold. On the one hand, it should prepare for a possible increase in aliyah. As Jews face growing antisemitism, there might be a rise in the number of people who want to move here. The second step is to empower Jews around the world with the knowledge that Israel is the home of all Jews, no matter where they come from and how they practice their religion.

When Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, for example, praised Diaspora Jewry this week for donating over $1 billion to Israel Bonds, he wrote that “Diaspora Jews and the people of Israel stand together in the battle for the victory of light over darkness.”

While that sounds nice in a tweet, Smotrich needs to back that up with practical steps. Over the last decade, his party members have been some of the most vocal opponents to allowing Diaspora Jews to pray the way they want at the Western Wall, to convert to Judaism the way they want and to simply believe in what they want. If we really do “stand together,” then there are significant changes that Israel needs to make to the way it treats Jews who do not fit into the Orthodox way of life.

This war has shown us that no matter where a Jew lives, their identity and feeling of safety is connected to the State of Israel. That brings with it a responsibility that Israel cannot ignore.

Two very different experiences

Tuesday marked a month from the Hamas invasion on October 7 and I spent it moving between two very different experiences. In the morning, I watched as our daughter, who has been in the IDF for the last 18 months, graduated from Bahad 1, the IDF Officer Training Academy and became an officer.

In the afternoon, I went to Kibbutz Nir Oz along the border with Gaza and walked between the burned and bullet-ridden homes to see up-close what had happened there a month earlier.

Nir Oz was attacked like the rest of the borderline communities and while the death toll was lower than Be’eri as an example, more than 70 of the 240 hostages are from Nir Oz. The reason was because of Nir Oz’s proximity to Gaza but also the fact that there are roads that cut through the field and connect Gaza directly to the Kibbutz making it easy for Hamas to drive straight there with pickup trucks and load up hostages.

The sequence of events – watching my daughter become an IDF officer and then visiting Nir Oz, makes it clear what this country is about and what it is fighting for.

When the hundreds of soldiers stood on the parade ground at the Bahad 1 near Mitzpe Ramon and took upon themselves the mantle of command in the IDF, they do not have to wonder what they will be asked to do. This country is at war, and these youth are our inspiration.

As a parent, as an Israeli, and as a Jew I could not be prouder.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and the immediate past editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.

Published by Jerusalem Post

The post Israel-Hamas war isn’t just about security, it’s about Jewish peoplehood first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.