Time for another narrow-sliver-of-terrain post

The Biden administration is getting cold feet re: Israel, and the Republicans continue to deify the Very Stable Genius

It’s pretty clear that there’s not a sufficient supply of mature Americans of sound judgement to stave off the dismal choice looming over us.

I considered whether another post on this subject would be repetitive, but recent developments have made it clear that the stakes are yet higher than even the most recent time I wrote about it.

The only real US ally in the Mideast, and the only Western nation in that neighborhood is currently on a mission essential to its survival. Israel must end Hamas’s existence. Were it to stop short, not only would more October 7s ensue, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran would pile on with a new level of aggressiveness.

So the only signal coming out of Washington ought to be “finish the job.”

Alas, such is not the case.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been qualifying that message with irrelevant admonitions and pie-in-the-sky notions of what comes after the current conflict:

[H]e's still, after Palestinians have given the thumbs-down to the 1937 Peel Commission proposal and the 1947 UN partition plan, and after the 2000 failure of the Ehud Barak-Yasir Arafat-Bill Clinton summit,  to name the three most noteworthy offers, prattling about an end goal of a Palestinian state:

“It is important for us to be talking about and thinking about every aspect of this challenge – not only today but also what happens the day after the conflict in Gaza is over,” Blinken said. “How are we thinking about what happens in Gaza itself? How is it governed? Where does the security come from? How do we begin to rebuild? And critically, how we get on a path to invest in lasting peace. And for us, of course, that has to result in a state for the Palestinians.”

Broaching that subject weeks after the Hamas assault of October 7 demonstrates that Blinken is considerably over his skis.

Don't we need to focus on more immediate concerns such as this? 

Four people were killed and five were wounded Thursday, one of them seriously, in a terror shooting attack claimed by Hamas at the entrance to Jerusalem, police and medics said.

One of those killed was a civilian who fired at the terrorists and was mistaken by other responders for one of the shooters.

The victims were named later as Livia Dikman, 24, Ashdod rabbinical judge Elimelech Wasserman, 73, and Hannah Ifergan, who was in her 60s. The civilian hit by friendly fire was named as Yuval Doron Castleman, 38.

According to police, at around 7:40 a.m., two Palestinian gunmen got out of a vehicle on Weizmann Boulevard at the main entrance to the capital and opened fire at people at a bus stop.

And Vice President Kamala Harris convened a press conference on the sidelines of the current climate conference going on in Dubai (by the way, I have to momentarily digress to express my glee that the conference’s host, the UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber threw a wrench in the designs of the climate alarmists who made up most of the attendees) for the purpose of reinforcing the position Blinken had conveyed:

In remarks in the United Arab Emirates after meetings with leaders of the UAE, Jordan, Egypt, and the Hamas-sponsoring Iranian ally Qatar, Harris delivered a version of the same message. It was rooted in the same failed Obama-era strategy of trying to show “daylight” with Israel in the groundless hope that it will earn more trust in the Arab world. She reiterated the administration’s “steadfast conviction” that “Israel has a right to defend itself” but then insisted, “Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating.”

The reality is that Israel is going above and beyond its responsibilities to minimize civilian casualties given that it is fighting an enemy that operates from hospitals, U.N. buildings, schools, and residential neighborhoods. Hamas operates this way as a matter of strategy, and among the objectives of that strategy is eliciting just the reaction that it has from Harris. Israel has provided regular warnings to civilians in areas it plans to target, even though it knows doing so will also alert Hamas fighters. It has allowed trucks of humanitarian aid into Gaza, even knowing that the aid will be diverted to Hamas and that Hamas will steal fuel intended for its people so it can fire rockets at Israel. Israelis have put more troops in harm’s way by carrying out a methodical ground invasion rather than simply fighting from the skies. The measures that Israel has taken to protect Palestinian civilian lives have put the lives of their own soldiers and civilians at greater risk and have meant that the operation is taking longer than it would without such precautions. And yet, they are getting attacked by the Biden administration simultaneously for not being surgical enough and for taking too much time — even after having been pressured by the U.S. into pausing combat operations.

Instead of blaming Hamas for the toll on civilians in Gaza — both for launching the war and for using its own civilians as shields — the vice president put the onus on Israel.

Even if one were to look past Harris’s moral obtuseness, her understanding of Gaza — and outlining of the administration’s hopes for its governance after the war — show a lack of understanding of reality.

Harris said, “We cannot conflate Hamas with the Palestinian people.” As a matter of the laws of war, this is a truism; as a statement about public sentiment among Palestinians, it is an absurdity. On October 7, Palestinians were seen taking to the streets to celebrate the attacks. When a dead Israeli was dragged out from a car in Gaza, a crowd started stomping on his dead body; elsewhere, a crowd cheered as Hamas terrorists paraded a semi-naked dead female body through the streets of Gaza (who we now know to be the murdered German-Israeli Shani Louk). Polling also supports the idea that the scenes were representative of the prevailing sentiment among the population. Three-quarters of Palestinians approved of the October 7 attacks, according to a November poll from the Arab World for Research and Development.

Additionally, Harris said after the war, the administration wants to see Gaza and the West Bank unified under a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority and envisions a two-state solution. This is wishful nonsense.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it handed over control to the PA. Within a year, Gazans elected Hamas over the corrupt PA, and within two years, Hamas drove the PA out of Gaza. In the poll taken last month, 90 percent of Gazans said they had a negative view of the PA. On top of this, PA president Mahmoud Abbas is 88 years old, and nobody knows who or what will come after him — no small thanks to his refusal to hold an election since winning his “four-year term” nearly 19 years ago. While one could understand why the current U.S. administration might have a soft spot for octogenarian leaders, the idea of America imposing an unpopular and corrupt government with an elderly leader on a volatile region with a history of terrorism is a recipe for disaster.

As for the Biden-Harris vision for a two-state solution, it is a receding fantasy that Western leaders like to promote so they have something to say about a conflict that offers no easy answers. According to the same poll, just 17 percent of Palestinians said they supported a two-state solution, compared with 75 percent who preferred a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” — i.e., without Israel.

Precipice readers know I don’t post the foregoing in order to cultivate the opinion that they ought to look at the political alternative.

That’s at least as bleak.

The Republicans’ answer to Jim Jones continues to spew out infantile social-media posts. A few themes reoccur in these blurtings. One is “see how nobody cares about formerly important people and outlets. once they’re no longer loyal to me.” He recently went after The Drudge Report in this fashion. (“Something happened, but when Drudge went anti-Trump, the site fell apart . . . That often happens when people cover "TRUMP" unfairly. I love it!”)

Now, lots of people churn out infantile social media posts. But put that in the context of his documented expression of desire to shut various outlets down, as evidenced by lawsuit he’s filed against CNN for calling his election-fraud claim a big lie, or the more recent one against 20 media outlets for reporting that Truth Social lost $73 million.

Yes, such efforts are petty in the extreme, and they tend to get shot down by judges, as happened in the CNN case. But consider what he’s told us about his intentions upon re-election. Robert Kagan, writing at the Washington Post on November 30, makes us face the reality of Trump’s designs:

Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.

Liz Cheney similarly imparts the gravity of what the country is facing:

"I think that the situation that we're in is so grave, and the politics of the moment require independents and Republicans and Democrats coming together in a way that can help form a new coalition, so that may well be a third-party option," she said. . . .

[She called] the defeat of Trump the crucial task to save democracy and protect the Constitution. "The president who's willing to ignore the rulings of the courts, the president who's willing to ignore the guardrails of our democracy is an existential threat," she said.

These are sober voices. The deeper we get into the 2024 election cycle, the more clearly we see how Trump will behave with no checks on his power and with the experience gained from a previous attempt at upending America’s bedrock institutions and principles.

I become more convinced daily that the only moral choice next November is to stay home. It’s not quixotic. It’s what all American voters who understand these twin scenarios of the nation’s doom ought to do.