The war in the Gaza Strip is more about losing time than capturing territory. Time works in Israel’s favor because it is a half-trillion-dollar economy contending with a few thousand terrorists who lack supply routes, hospitals for treating the wounded and camps for training fighters. But time also works in Hamas’s favor because international acceptance of action in densely populated Gaza is eroding, along with Israel’s economy and its army’s weapons.
Who will run out of time first?
In the spring, it seemed Israel would. President Biden turned a cold shoulder to the Jewish state as support for destroying Hamas morphed into a call to end the war and a warning against entering Rafah. Strategic weapons shipments were delayed in American ports. The International Court of Justice is seeking arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and defense minister, effectively equating them with Hamas leaders. No wonder Hamas refused any deal offered, however generous. If the U.S. president seeks to end the war and the world will soon force the Israel Defense Forces to stop, why give up Israeli hostages?
Sometime last month, the hourglass turned. It happened because Israel didn’t yield to Mr. Biden and in May entered Rafah, cutting off Hamas’s last lifeline to the world. Mr. Biden found himself facing troubles of his own at home, while his presidential rival, whose only complaint against Israel was that it wasn’t destroying Hamas fast enough, began climbing in the polls. Suddenly, Hamas showed it could be flexible. It begged to restart negotiations even as Israel dropped 9 tons of precision bombs on its chief of staff, and agreed not to end the war.
Then Mr. Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Vice President Kamala Harris became the de facto nominee and gave Hamas an important gift. Never mind her childish boycott of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress last Wednesday. Why was it necessary to side with the Palestinian narrative that places the blame for the war on Israel? “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” she said the next day, after meeting with Mr. Netanyahu. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.” This is a direct threat to Israel if it continues the war, a war the Biden-Harris administration itself supported and called “just.”
Ms. Harris, who in a recent interview said she was “hearing stories” about people in Gaza “eating animal feed, grass,” is apparently unaware that food prices there are significantly lower than in Israel. In any other war in the past century, has one side regularly supplied food and goods to the enemy’s civilians—and still been attacked by the White House?
By adopting the anti-Israel narrative, Ms. Harris is giving Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, every reason in the world to refuse a hostage deal. Why give Israel the hostages without ending the war if there is a possibility the 47th president will force Israel to end it anyway? “Let’s get the deal done so we can get a cease-fire to end the war,” Ms. Harris said Thursday, distancing the deal with her words.
This is more than diplomatic incompetence. Ms. Harris’s worldview is troubling in its immorality. Campus protesters “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be as a response to Gaza,” she said recently. “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it.” The state of the Democratic Party is such that its presumptive presidential nominee claims that a war between a pro-Iranian murder organization and a democratic state “is not a binary issue.”
The administration is taking a similar stance on the Lebanese front. The Iranian proxy Hezbollah has been firing at Israel for months, destroying villages and slaughtering innocent children playing soccer. There is no “siege” and no “occupation,” yet the Biden administration is mediating between Hezbollah and Israel like a real-estate broker. Instead of sending Iran an unequivocal, threatening message, it is sending adviser Amos Hochstein to plead with Hezbollah to halt the rocket fire and offer Israeli territorial concessions.
If Israel fights back and the White House again calls for an end to the violence, we can expect another nonbinary war.
