Israel Fights the West’s War, Gets Punished for It
Exploits against Iran and its proxies go underrated.
Israel launches airstrikes on Beirut, saying it’s targeting Hezbollah’s financial arm. (NPR)
In an airstrike in Syria on Sunday, Israel eliminated the Hizballah commander Salim Jamil Ayyash. Convicted in absentia by a UN-backed tribunal in 2020 for the murder of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, Ayyash was wanted by the US State Department to the tune of a $10 million reward for information on him.
Rafiq Hariri, a Lebanese Sunni leader who wanted to free Lebanon from the grip of the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, was killed in a 2005 car bombing in Beirut that killed 21 others—orchestrated by Salim Jamil Ayyash.
In an airstrike in Beirut last July, Israel also assassinated Hizballah second-in-command Fuad Shukr, who likewise had a US price on his head of up to $5 million. Shukr was thought to have played a part in the 1983 barracks bombings in Beirut that killed 241 US military personnel, and was made a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department in 2013.
It may appear that Israel is doing the US’s work for it—and in a sense, it is, and it goes well beyond even the elimination of those two major terrorists.
In its aerial attack on Iran last October 26, Israel destroyed three Russian-made S-300 air-defense systems and severely damaged Iran’s missile-production facilities.
That redounds to the benefit of the US—and the West generally—in three ways.
First, it displays far and wide the superiority of US-made, Israeli-modified warplanes to Russian-made air defense systems. Second, it stops Iran from continuing to supply Russia with ballistic missiles for its war against Ukraine. Third, it leaves Iran defenseless against further attacks from the air.
And finally, beyond even that level, Israel’s effective war against Hamas, Hizballah, and their patron Iran means that one member of the anti-Western axis of evil—Russia, China, North Korea, and, of course, Iran—is being severely weakened and exposed as a paper tiger.
For its efforts, what is Israel getting from the Biden administration?
Israel’s Ynet reports that
The US is silently halting various arms shipments to [Israel].... New details reveal that [the US] is delaying an extensive shipment of 134 D9 bulldozers, which Israel ordered and paid for but are awaiting export approval from the . . . State Department.
The use of these bulldozers, primarily for flattening structures in the Gaza Strip, has led to significant internal criticism in the U.S., protests and intense pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, which has succumbed and frozen deliveries for several months.
The impact on the battlefield is already apparent in both [the Gaza and Lebanon] combat theaters, [where] the bulldozers...often lead the...combat teams, clearing “contaminated” areas from explosive charges intended to detonate against infantry and armor troops.... [T]hese machines...help save soldiers’ lives.
In addition:
[Th]e U.S. is still freezing the shipment of around 1,300 munitions purchased by Israel from Boeing...citing similar concerns that the IDF could use them against civilian populations.
Half of this shipment, which was frozen in May by the Biden administration, has been released and delivered to the IDF, but the other half remains in U.S. warehouses....
The delay in delivering the bulldozers and heavy munitions adds to the cold shoulder Israel received from Washington regarding the purchase of Apache attack helicopters earlier this year.
As Republican Senators Cotton and McConnell stressed in a September 25 letter to President Biden: “Israel requested these helicopters last December, recognizing the increased need given the war in Gaza. That need has only increased with Hezbollah’s escalation in the north.”
Their letter clearly fell on deaf ears: the lame-duck Biden administration is now threatening an arms embargo on Israel by Thursday, November 14, unless it increases humanitarian aid to Gaza. Israel says it is already increasing the aid, but much of it gets stolen by Hamas. That, too, doesn’t seem to cut the ice with Washington.
This state of affairs may help explain an Israeli survey finding shortly before the US elections:
Nearly two-thirds of the total sample say former President Donald Trump is better for Israel's interest, compared to only 13% who say Vice President Kamala Harris is better, and 15.5% who maintain there is no difference between them.
In the Jewish sample, the gap is even more significant: 72% think Trump is better for Israel's interests compared to 11% who think Harris is better.
Israelis—alongside remembering the first Trump administration’s pro-Israel policies—are well aware that, throughout the October 7 War, the Biden administration has given Israel crucial military, and sometimes diplomatic, support.
But they are also aware that, alongside the hand that gives, is the hand that treats Israel as a blundering vassal and reproves, admonishes, and punishes.
The great majority of Israelis think that, as a small country fighting and sacrificing on the front lines against the enemies of civilization, Israel deserves better treatment from its powerful patron.
Hornik telling it like it is.
There’s a theory that holds that one of the critical reasons that Hamas is holding on to power in Gaza, in the face of its devastating losses, is its seizure of food and its resale on the black market. In top of the purely financial aspect is a measure of social control: disloyalty is penalized.
Of course, the answer would be for the IDF to take control of the distribution - something which would likely only expose its soldiers to increased casualties. I suppose another option would be for Israel to target the warehouses where Hamas hoards the food, but that too would divert the IDF from its combat mission. And if the IDF simply destroyed those warehouses, it would be accused of deliberately starving civilians etc.
As to the US’s supposed fear that munitions, bulldozers and whatever else we are slow walking or blocking altogether might be used against Gazan civilians only rewards Hamas for its human sacrifice strategy - and this should be something so obvious as to make you wonder what the aims of the Biden Administration might actually be.
It would not surprise me if the goal is to insure the survival of Iran’s “equities” (to use Obama’s term in a misguided effort to keep Israel and the Sunni states dependent on Uncle Sam’s protection. Hence the threatened arms cut-off on November 14 and the recent news items about yet another impending famine.
The real question is whether Trump will try to warn away the Biden Administration on the arms cutoff. He might but I remember that he tried to have Obama veto that UN Security Council resolution that threw Israel under the bus in December 2015. Obama ignored him and had our ambassador abstain - allowing the resolution (which according to some we orchestrated in the first place) to pass.
I’ve read that Israel has more than sufficient munitions to see it through, but the end game will likely be either an Israeli rejection of any further 10 year arms purchasing agreement with the U.S. (which would hurt our manufacturing to some extent) or one with less restrictive terms that limit Israel’s independent arms manufacturing.
Similarly, once Trump is in office, I can see (as I’ve optimistically noted elsewhere) that an actual peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon be agreed to as a condition for Lebanon’s inclusion into the Abraham Accords and U.S. involvement (directly or indirectly) with any reconstruction project.
Platitudes about a Palestinian state once its ruling authority accepts Israel’s legitimacy and history as the nation state of the Jewish people, forswears its annihilationist goals and shows itself able to create a transparent and peaceful society - none of which is currently likely, but who knows - should be sufficient for Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords, further isolating and, along with the return to a US-led “maximum pressure” campaign and whatever Israel’s response would be to Iran’s currently threatened attack, destabilizing the Iranian regime.
Had Harris won the election, not one element of my rosy predictions would happen. They might not under Trump, but then again, some or even all might. We shall see because an enlarged Abraham Accord and a weakened Iran is the est recipe for regional calm - which would be the sweet spot for a President who says he is committed to ending wars not starting the.