ABOVE: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, meets with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani at Lusail Palace in Lusail, Jan. 7, 2024/VOA PHOTO.

By Lee Smith, Contributor | Tablet magazine

[Veteran journalist and bestselling author Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. He has written for Slate, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New Republic and for a variety of Arab media outlets. TABLET bills itself as ‘a Jewish magazine for the world.]

Reports are circulating that the Israelis are planning an operation in Rafah to eliminate the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza. If so, the Netanyahu government will be acting against the very public wishes of the Biden administration, which has spent the last half year moving heaven and earth to save a terrorist organization from destruction.

Bizarrely, the White House’s statements and actions show that Hamas’ survival is more important than the security of a traditional American partner, Israel; more crucial to American interests than the preservation of the U.S.-led order of the Middle East; more precious than the dozens of American lives that Hamas ended on Oct. 7; more valuable than however many Americans and Israelis are still alive in the terror army’s tunnels.

Why? As the money and prestige that the U.S. has invested month after month in protecting Hamas demonstrate, the Biden administration sees the terror group as a valuable asset.

A day after the massacre, before Israel’s campaign against Hamas even began, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote that he was encouraging the Turkish government’s “advocacy for a cease-fire.”

It makes no difference that the tweet has since been deleted, since the White House has produced no shortage of evidence since that its top priority is to deter Israel from defeating Hamas, by increasing Israel’s vulnerabilities at every turn, and conditioning aid on Israel adopting a purely defensive posture.

The Biden administration has stopped Israel from entering Rafah by demanding it produce plans to protect the civilian population, piously insisting that “even one civilian death is too many.”

That would be a hard task in any military scenario, but given that Hamas hides among noncombatants, the White House’s policy openly reinforces the terror group’s political and military strategy.

The president abdicated America’s historical role of vetoing anti-Israel activity at the U.N. Instead, the U.S. delegation abstained from a key Security Council resolution in March demanding an immediate cease-fire—thereby putting America’s diplomatic weight behind Hamas’ demand that it should be allowed to keep its hostages and continue ruling Gaza.

The White House then sanctioned Israeli civilians on the West Bank for crimes dreamed up by left-wing pro-Palestinian organizations, while ignoring a Palestinian terror wave aimed at murdering Jewish civilians who were guilty of crimes like stopping at a red light, buying gas, and herding sheep.

Much of the false reporting supporting the pro-Hamas offensive is channeled through U.S. Army Gen. Michael Fenzel. The U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority are spending taxpayer resources to build a Palestinian terror army on the West Bank that may soon be repurposed for Gaza, too.

By compelling Jerusalem to “surge” food aid and energy to Gaza, the White House broke Israel’s siege, and demanded an ally resupply its adversary at wartime. Whenever Israel goes on the offensive, Biden and aides publicly threaten to stop resupplying arms.

After Iran’s massive missile and drone attack last month, administration officials let on that if Israeli retaliatory strikes exceeded meager U.S. limits, the White House would hobble Israel’s air defense systems. Thus, the Israelis were forced to adopt the battle-tested American military strategy of bombing sand.

The White House has used CIA Director William Burns as one of its main instruments of diplomatic deterrence. He’s traveled to Egypt, Qatar, and elsewhere for endless hostage negotiations with the Palestinian terrorist organization.

That none of these negotiations has gone anywhere is the point. Burns’ jawboning is designed to stall Israel’s war while legitimizing the act of hostage-taking, even as it’s become increasingly clear that many of the hostages whose release he is supposedly negotiating for are dead.

To emphasize its evenhandedness in the conflict between a key U.S. military ally and a designated foreign terrorist organization, the White House has amplified Hamas propaganda that has repeatedly been shown to be false.

The president himself and the secretary of state enthusiastically repeated accusations that Israel intentionally murdered World Central Kitchen aid workers. Without evidence to support USAID head Samantha Power’s claims of rampant famine in Gaza, the administration and its validators began calling it a “reported famine.”

To fight the mythical famine, Biden is sending thousands of U.S. troops to build a $320 million pier to resupply Hamas—an arrangement that will turn American forces into human shields to deter Israeli military operations against the terror organization.

By leaking fake news, most recently an internal State Department memo alleging Israeli war crimes, that Israel was hindering aid to starve Gazans, the administration laid the groundwork for arrest warrants likely to be issued by the International Criminal Court.

While the warrants reportedly target Netanyahu and other members of Israel’s war cabinet, the action is likely to set a precedent broad enough to justify arresting any Israeli who served in the Gaza campaign.

It’s useful to remember that what distinguishes the Palestinians from other ethno-national groups born of the breakup of the multiethnic empires of Europe and the Levant after World War I is that their claim on the world’s attention issues largely from their willingness to hire themselves out as terrorist mercenaries. ##