The United States, while providing crucial military support to Israel, has inadvertently hindered our war efforts against the Hamas terrorist organization. Through a combination of humanitarian aid that benefits the terrorists and restrictions on IDF actions, America's well-intentioned policies have prolonged the conflict and increased suffering on both sides. This article examines the unintended consequences of US involvement in the ongoing Gaza war.
The French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine coined the term "bear hug" in the 17th century. In his story, a bear tries to shoo a fly from his gardener friend's face, picks up a large stone, and crushes the fly along with his friend's skull. In the story of US-Israel relations during the latest war, our great friend – who has made a substantial contribution to Israel's security and defense – is not crushing our skulls, God forbid, but its often-suffocating embrace has greatly harmed the war's progress and outcomes.
Now that everyone is investigating (or about to investigate) everyone else regarding the conduct of the war, we need to zoom in on the contribution of the American player, whom no one will likely be required to investigate – to prolonging the war and extending the suffering of Israeli citizens, hostages, and their families. We deserve to know.
Let's start with a well-known central fact, whose implications are less known: Alongside the air and sea bridge of armaments and weapons to Israel, the US ensured a "humanitarian train" for Gaza residents, including fuel and food in insane quantities. Hamas, for whom this aid was not intended, leveraged it to preserve its governing capabilities, seized most of it, and even made a nice profit from selling it to the Gazan population. Thus, in practice, the US preserved the governing capability of the murderous terror organization and even provided Hamas and its leadership with more and more fuel, and in effect – oxygen, allowing it to continue staying underground with most of the hostages, instead of coming to the surface and being exposed.
Hamas understood the humanitarian aid quite differently from how the US understood it, and from its perspective, these were more and more boxes of legitimacy for its continued existence as the ruling power in the strip and for toughening its stance on the hostage issue.
With one hand, Biden bent Israel's arm to shorten the war, and with his other hand, he actually prolonged it, reduced the chances of hostages surviving, and allowed Hamas to fight and exist for many more months in underground Gaza, continue firing at Israeli border communities, and harm more Israeli soldiers. In doing so, Biden prolonged both the suffering of Gaza residents, whom Hamas has used and continues to use as human shields to this day, and their time as refugees evacuated from their homes. All this, of course, before we point out the inherent anomaly in the decision to aid the murderous enemy of your closest ally in the Middle East, a twisted historical precedent, and conduct that would not have crossed America's mind against its own enemies.
This reality was sharpened to the point of absurdity in one of the recent Cabinet meetings. The participating ministers were left speechless when Maj. Gen. Eliezer Toledano, who used to head the IDF Southern Command, made it clear to them that Settlements and National Projects Minister Orit "Struck is right in saying that if you kill Hamas, you simultaneously eliminate the distribution mechanisms for humanitarian aid. You have no one to distribute aid, and then you rely on humanitarian organizations that Hamas doesn't allow to distribute, and so there's no one to distribute." The question of how the Hamas mechanism for distributing aid to the population aligns with the decision to deny Hamas governing capability remained unanswered.
These absurdities lead to even greater absurdities: When the US imposes sanctions on the Israeli Tzav 9 group that blocks aid trucks headed for Gaza, and its leader Reut Ben Haim, a mother of eight from Netivot – it harms Israeli democracy and freedom of demonstration and expression in Israel, but also ridicules its own concern (during the judicial reform period) for those very values.
The American measures against a legitimate Israeli protest organization, which blocks the path of aid trucks to the enemy and acts in the spirit of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant's words from the beginning of the war – "There will be no electricity and food and fuel, everything is closed" – are also the opposite of sanctions that the US imposes in other parts of the world precisely on regimes that harm such value-based and conscientious protests. And again – with one hand, the US punishes countries like China and Russia, which harm such protests, and with the other hand, it behaves like those dark regimes, and harms here in our country civil and democratic protest of the kind it sanctifies elsewhere.
The second leg on which the administration's trolling stands is the handcuffs placed on Israel's hands regarding the nature of the fighting and its pace, as well as the types of armaments it is allowed to use. The American restrictions further endanger IDF soldiers, slow down their rate of progress in the combat zones, and once again – prolong the war and the suffering of the population on both sides.
Along the way, the US was also caught not telling the truth, when it turned out that the delay in sending weapons to Israel does not relate to one weapons shipment, of a certain type, as Biden claimed, but to various ammunition that Israel paid for, and which was delayed for months, in the fields of artillery and air and tank warfare, as well as thousands of "Heavy Rain" kits, which turn bombs dropped from planes into smart target-guided bombs.
And again, the supposedly moral restriction is revealed as hypocritical sanctimony. According to the Brown University Cost of War Project, the wars that the US waged following the 9/11 attacks (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan) claimed the lives of more than 400,000 civilians directly and about 3.5 million indirectly.
Relatively speaking, and considering the population size of the US and Israel, the number of those murdered in the Oct. 7 massacre was 30 times larger than those killed on 9/11 in the US. So yes, we're just a "small mosquito" compared to the US and "what's allowed for them is forbidden for us" etc., but on a moral level, even if Brown University's estimate is exaggerated, we are doing much better than the Americans, who have a long trail of harm to hundreds of thousands of uninvolved people, with and without quotation marks, in the wars they have waged in recent decades.
At the core of American conduct toward us since the beginning of the war – the one that benefits us: weapons worth $6.7 billion, the deterrent aircraft carriers sent to the area against the Iranian axis and broad diplomatic backing; and the one that chokes us – stand Western logic and double standards. The logic that thinks Western and not Middle Eastern is reluctant to exploit humanitarian disasters or dates like Ramadan to create leverage that would shorten the war, defeat Hamas, and perhaps release the hostages at a lower price.
The double standards, which are not recognized anywhere else in the world, are new standards set especially for Israel, which made it very difficult for Israel to fight and even detracted from its results. From here also stems the American obsession with establishing a Palestinian state, and don't confuse them with facts like the support of about three-quarters of Palestinians in the West Bank for the Oct. 7 massacre, the support of governors in the Palestinian Authority for terrorism and active participation of Fatah in attacks, or consistent education and incitement to hate Israel and glorify "martyrs." Hence also the lack of such elementary understanding that a Palestinian state is the very picture of victory for terrorism and encouragement for more acts of massacre. What the Biden administration sees, albeit somewhat blurred in front of the Hamas Palestinazis, it struggles to see in front of their twins in the Palestinian Authority.
