If Hamas realizes that the international community (or at least the United States) will not be its savior if it chooses aggression, its leaders might decide to be more cautious.
If Hamas realizes that the international community (or at least the United States) will not be its savior if it chooses aggression, its leaders might decide to be more cautious. I was too critical of the Biden administration. Last week, I suggested that the administration is failing a test by Hamas, and isn’t giving Israel enough leeway as it attempts to rein in the terror organization and deter it from future attacks. That was premature. Biden, to his credit, did not rush to act. After speaking with Netanyahu, he instructed his diplomats to postpone a Security Council meeting, and thus gave Israel more time to act. He should get credit for it, because Biden – like all politicians – does not operate in a vacuum. He is President of the United States but also the leader of the Democratic Party. And his party is split over Israel. He “doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo”, wrote Alex Ward in Vox. What memo? The one concerning “greater willingness to criticize Israel and speak up in defense of the rights of Palestinians”. And if you, the reader, also didn’t get the memo, you can get it here, in an op-ed in The New York Times by Biden’s former rival and current ally Bernie Sanders. “Let’s be clear. No one is arguing that Israel, or any government, does not have the right to self-defense or to protect its people”, writes Sanders. But then he makes this exact argument: “In this moment of crisis, the United States should be urging an immediate cease-fire,” Sanders writes, not realizing (or maybe realizing and not caring) that a cease-fire would hand a victory to Hamas, and that a Hamas victory is the way to deny Israel the ability to defend itself.
