Noah Rothman writes for National Review Online about the Biden administration’s approach toward Israel.
On Monday, the president’s reelection campaign dispatched a co-chair, former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, to Michigan to plead its case. It did not go well.
Landrieu was reportedly set upon by embittered activists who presented the Biden White House with an ultimatum: withdraw its support for Israel and its goal of neutralizing Hamas or they walk, possibly taking Michigan’s coveted electoral votes with them. To this, Landrieu confessed that the administration’s hands were tied. “This conflict is going to be a long conflict,” he said. “I don’t expect that it’s going to end anytime soon.” Landrieu’s audience was unimpressed. Along with at least 39 state and local officials, Biden’s Michigan-based critics plan to support an effort to protest the administration endorsed by Representative Rashida Tlaib by voting “uncommitted” in the state’s Democratic primary.
This threat to the Biden campaign’s bottom line in November is sufficient to explain the administration’s efforts to mollify the anti-Israel activists in its coalition in ways that, in every other aspect, defy logic. The latest example of the administration’s commitment to folly has taken the form of a proposed draft U.N. Security Council resolution which, if passed, would signal that America’s support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas has come to an end.
The text of the resolution calls for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza — a cessation of hostilities Biden has already said he would force Israel to observe indefinitely. It calls on Israel to refrain from taking its ground offensive into Rafah, from which it recently exfiltrated Israeli hostages and in which Hamas fighters are still holding out. …
… Though it reads like an act of statecraft, the resolution is intended for the consumption of Biden’s monomaniacally anti-Israel domestic critics. Little else explains the administration’s willingness to sacrifice U.S. national interests but its political investment in self-preservation.