MELANIE PHILLIPS/
If people think the war in Gaza is intolerable, they should buckle up for what may now be coming.
This week, the north of Israel burned as fires caused by barrages of Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon consumed 3,460 acres of land. In addition, Hezbollah, which has been subjecting northern Israel to rocket and missile attacks for eight months, expanded its range as far south as Acre and Nahariya.
This escalation may mean that Israel, which has been carefully limiting its responses to Hezbollah's aggression, now takes the gloves off and mounts a full-scale assault on Iran's proxy army.
Israel has been reluctant to do so because of what may follow. Hezbollah has embedded an arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles in Lebanon. If it unleashes its full might, tens of thousands of Israelis may be killed.
Iran may enter the battle directly, along with its proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. And Russia and China may escalate this further into a world war.
Clearly, this is best avoided if at all possible. Equally clearly, Israel cannot allow itself to be under such an onslaught from Lebanon even more so than under the intolerable threat from Gaza.
People assume that if Israel comes under overwhelming attack from Hezbollah, the U.S. will come to its defense. Yet it's America that brought us to this fateful juncture.
The appeasement of Iran by the administrations of both President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama laid the groundwork for the Oct. 7 pogrom. Even now, the U.S. continues to thwart Israel's necessary defense.
Astoundingly, the Biden administration is today doing everything it can to prevent the destruction of Hamas as a military force and to protect Iran.
Although it sent two aircraft carriers to the region immediately after Oct. 7, it was clear from the start that the Biden administration's embrace of Israel was also designed to prevent the Jewish state from taking essential action against both Iran and the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.
Even before the Hamas stormtroopers had been finally stopped on Oct. 7, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Soon afterward, Biden forced Israel to abort the preemptive strike against Hezbollah by which the IDF intended to prevent what has now unfolded: the daily barrages of missiles and rockets from Lebanon.
When the IDF went to war in Gaza to prevent Hamas from repeating such a massacre ever again, the Biden administration made the Israelis prioritize Palestinian lives over their own people. It forced the IDF to proceed so slowly that Hamas had time to regroup. The Americans forced the Israelis to accept ever greater consignments of aid, most of which Hamas stole for itself.
The Biden administration promulgated Hamas propaganda demonizing Israel with lies about civilian casualty figures in Gaza and the withholding of aid. When Iranian proxies launched dozens of attacks on American interests, the U.S. responded only weakly.
In the current ceasefire negotiations, Biden tried to bounce Israel into surrender by suggesting falsely that the Israeli government was proposing a permanent end to the war without the return of all the hostages and with Hamas remaining a player in Gaza.
And according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. tried to pressurize Britain and European countries into backing off plans to censure Iran at this week's International Atomic Energy Agency's board meeting over Tehran's accelerating progress towards developing nuclear weapons.
The explanation for America's bewildering and malign behavior lies in a number of fundamental conceptual errors that it has made for years and continues to make about both the Middle East and America's role in the world.
The West refused to see that the Palestinian cause was the principal means by which the Islamists realized they could destroy Israel and conquer the free world for Islam. The Palestinian cause has accordingly brought together the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood--whose military wing consists of Hamas, Al-Qaeda and ISIS--and the Shi'ite fanatics of Iran.
The most lethal component of this infernal alliance is Iran because it has become a regional hegemon. And it is America that has enabled that to happen.
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