By Restraining Israel, Biden Is Preventing The Jewish State From Defeating Or Deterring Its Genocidal Enemies

By restraining Israel Biden is preventing the Jewish state from defeating or deterring its genocidal enemies

Andrew Tobin

President Joe Biden has admonished Israelis to stop waging “indefinite war” and embrace his plan for Middle East peace.

But more than half a dozen war-weary Israeli reserve soldiers from across the country told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s diplomacy is actually dragging out the Gaza war he is pressing Israel to bring to an end.“It’s very frustrating,” said Snir Tal, 24, a reservist in an elite Israel Defense Forces commando unit.

“I don’t think Biden really understands this neighborhood,” said Emil Grishpun, 40, a Finance Ministry official and infantry reservist who volunteered on Oct. 7 and served four and a half months in the West Bank. “We’re here doing the job, so let us finish the job. Otherwise, it will be like this until the end of time.”

“The U.S. is really strong-arming us and not letting us have the military might that we need to win,” said Etay Inbar, 34, a principal at a Tel Aviv venture capital fund and military intelligence reservist who has been involved in the search for the Israeli hostages.

“What we need to do is come to a conclusion quickly, but we need to come to a positive conclusion for us so we don’t face the same thing a decade from now.”

Israelis are overwhelmingly grateful for U.S. military and diplomatic support, and officials are generally loath to criticize the country’s most important ally.

But, more than eight months into the Gaza war, IDF reservists’s frustration with the Biden administration reflects growing awareness in Israel of a conflict between Washington’s imagined Middle East and the brutal reality.

It’s a shift that could complicate U.S. efforts to turn Israelis against their own government in the name of peace.

In his May 31 remarks about Middle East peace, Biden criticized Israel’s “pursuit of an unidentified notion of ‘total victory’” in Gaza, invoking a phrase favored by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The president appealed to Israelis to press their leaders to accept a proposed ceasefire deal that would see a “permanent end to hostilities” and the release of thousands of Palestinian terrorists from prison in exchange for Hamas’s return of the some 120 hostages still in Gaza, many of whom are believed to be dead.

Biden also held out the promise of quiet in Israel’s north—where at least 60,000 Israelis remained displaced amid daily bombardment by Hezbollah, a Hamas ally and fellow Iran-backed terror group—as well as of a “historic normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia” and a “regional security network to counter the threat posed by Iran.”

As Biden has ramped up pressure on Israel to end the war without dismantling Hamas, Israelis have grown increasingly distrustful of the U.S. president, according to previously unpublished results from an omnibus survey by Hebrew University of Jerusalem pollsters.

Forty-five percent of Jewish Israelis see Biden as “anti-Israel,” the pollsters found last month, up from just 18 percent in January.

In an op-ed published last week by Israel’s N12 news station, Azar Gat, a left-leaning Tel Aviv University military historian and self-described “fierce” critic of Netanyahu, slammed Biden’s ceasefire proposal as a “complete surrender” that would critically compromise Israel’s “security and future.”

“No country can accept a complete surrender—in my estimation, not even Israel, after the full extent of Hamas’s demands and their meaning become clear, including in the future blood reckoning,” Gat wrote.