(AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday delivered some of the Biden administration’s strongest public criticism yet of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, saying Israeli tactics have meant “a horrible loss of life of innocent civilians” but failed to neutralize Hamas leaders and fighters and could drive a lasting insurgency.

In a pair of TV interviews, Blinken underscored that the United States believes Israeli forces should “get out of Gaza,” but also is waiting to see credible plans from Israel for security and governance in the territory after the war.

Hamas has reemerged in parts of Gaza, Blinken said, and “heavy action” by Israeli forces in the southern city of Rafah risks leaving America’s closest Mideast ally “holding the bag on an enduring insurgency.”

He said the United States has worked with Arab countries and others for weeks on developing “credible plans for security, for governance, for rebuilding” in Gaza, but ”we haven’t seen that come from Israel. … We need to see that, too.”

Blinken also said that as Israel pushes deeper in Rafah in the south, a military operation may “have some initial success” but risks “terrible harm” to the population without solving a problem “that both of us want to solve, which is making sure Hamas cannot again govern Gaza.” More than a million Palestinians have crowded into Rafah in hopes of refuge as Israel’s offensive pushed across Gaza. Israel has said the city also hosts four battalions of Hamas fighters.

Israel’s conduct of the war, Blinken said, has put the country “on the trajectory, potentially, to inherit an insurgency with many armed Hamas left or, if it leaves, a vacuum filled by chaos, filled by anarchy, and probably refilled by Hamas. We’ve been talking to them about a much better way of getting an enduring result, enduring security.”

Blinken also echoed, for the first time publicly by a U.S. official, the findings of a new Biden administration report to Congress on Friday that said Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law. The report also said wartime conditions prevented American officials from determining that for certain in specific airstrikes.

“When it comes to the use of weapons, concerns about incidents where given the totality of the damage that’s been done to children, women, men, it was reasonable to assess that, in certain instances, Israel acted in ways that are not consistent with international humanitarian law,” Blinken said. He cited “the horrible loss of life of innocent civilians.”

Blinken spoke to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Sunday, reiterating the longstanding U.S. opposition to what is now the growing Israeli offensive in Rafah, given the toll on civilians there, according to the State Department’s recounting of the call.

Blinken urged Gallant to allow humanitarian workers to bring aid into Gaza and distribute it. Israel’s offensive into Rafah has shut down one of the two main border crossings into the territory for a week, and most operations have stopped at the other one after it was targeted by a Hamas rocket attack.

Seven months of fighting and Israeli restrictions on aid deliveries already have led to famine in the north of Gaza. Aid organizations say the now nearly total cutoff of food, medicine and fuel and the disruption from the Rafah offensive have humanitarian operations across Gaza on the brink of collapse.

Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in a call Sunday with his Israeli counterpart, Tzachi Hanegbi, raised concerns about a military ground operation in Rafah and discussed “alternative courses of action” that would ensure Hamas is defeated “everywhere in Gaza,” according to a White House summary of the conversation. Hanegbi “confirmed that Israel is taking U.S. concerns into account,” the White House said.

The war began on Oct. 7 after an attack against Israel by Hamas that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. About 250 people were taken hostage. Israel’s offensive has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

There are increasing tensions between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about how the war has been conducted, and also domestic tensions about U.S. support for Israel, with protests on U.S. college campuses and many Republican lawmakers saying that Biden needs to give Israel whatever it needs. The issue could play a major role in the outcome of November’s presidential election.

Biden said in an interview last week with CNN that his administration would not provide weapons that Israel could use for an all-out assault in Rafah.

Blinken appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

By Jonathan S. Tobin

(JNS) Amid the celebrations of Israel’s 50th birthday in 1998, there began to be talk of the Jewish state entering into a post-Zionist era. To many Israelis as well as Jews in the Diaspora, the idea of Zionism or identifying as a Zionist seemed irrelevant to the realities of a country that was, for all of its challenges, a firmly established reality. The very term seemed to conjure up a bygone period when advocacy for the right of Jews to sovereignty in their ancient homeland was a heroic struggle against the odds.

On the eve of the 21st century, Israel had not only won its independence but also several wars in its first decades after its Arab neighbors unsuccessfully sought its extinction. Egypt and Jordan had signed peace agreements, and many believed that despite the abundant evidence to the contrary, the Oslo Accords would succeed and end the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, too. The Zionist movement may have made it all possible. But it had—in the opinion of many—become a vestigial relic that had no relevance to life in a Hebrew-speaking state that had taken its place among the nations of the global community.

Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories
Your Email
FREE SIGN UP
By signing up, you agree to receive emails from JNS and allied pro-Israel organizations.
ADVERTISEMENT

Or so many of us thought.

Fast-forward 26 years later, and despite wars, terrorism and the collapse of that peace process, as well as ongoing political and cultural divisions, it can be argued that the permanence of what had come into existence in 1948 is even more obvious than it was when the term “post-Zionist” first started being thrown around. It’s a nation of 9 million people with a First World economy; a military that makes it a regional superpower; and, barring a nuclear cataclysm or some other black swan event, can no more be wished out of existence than any other established country.

Seeking Israel’s destruction

But as we’ve seen in the seventh months since the Oct. 7 massacres perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists in southern Israel—and the subsequent surge in antisemitism and pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout the globe—the debate about Zionism isn’t over.

No better example of this could be found than in the controversy over the appearance of an Israeli singer this past weekend at the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden. Eurovision is a remarkably silly annual global television show. It is generally only worth noting because of its enormous popularity and the way it serves as a barometer of how low the standards of what is considered good in popular music and entertainment can sink. But this year, it became one more battleground for the movement that seeks the elimination of Israel.

In this case, the focus of their ire was the appearance of Israel’s contestant, 20-year-old Eden Golan. Israeli singers have been a fixture in the contest since 1973 and have won it four times. But opponents of the Jewish state, who claimed to be acting out of sympathy for the Palestinians who they believe shouldn’t suffer any consequences for the war they started on Oct. 7, thought Golan should be excluded. Their loud protests forced her to hold up in a hotel room throughout the competition, besieged by those chanting for her country’s destruction and the slaughter of its population. But contrary to their expectations (and the booing from members in the audience), she was allowed to compete, did well and went on to make the finals, finishing fifth even after winning a plurality of votes from European viewers.

The protesters, who came not only from Malmö’s large Muslim sector (reportedly as much as 20% of the city’s population) but also from leftist elites—like the world-famous environmentalist troll Greta Thunberg—were not merely expressing concern for Palestinians acting as human shields for Hamas. As Thunberg said at a pre-Eurovision protest in Stockholm, her goal is to “crush Zionism.”

That’s the same kind of rhetoric we’ve been hearing on American college campuses in the past seven months. Supposedly educated young people have been indoctrinated in woke ideologies that falsely label Israel as a “white” oppressor and a “settler/colonial state” that has no right to exist. Yet the conflict with the Palestinians isn’t racial. Jews are the indigenous people of that country, and Zionism is their national liberation movement whose triumph was one of the greatest acts of decolonization. But to the intersectional mindset that links underdogs together worldwide, Zionism is racism, and Israel should be wiped off the map.

So, just when many, if not most Israelis were ready to treat Zionism as merely an exhibit in a history museum, the idea of a Jewish state is more relevant than ever in the battle to defend an Israel that, for all of its amazing achievements, is still under siege.

An idea that is integral to Judaism

To take a deep dive into the history of the movement, its leaders and its thinkers, is to see how in the half century before May 1948, the Jewish people sought to take their destiny into their own hands. The basic elements of Zionism—the indissoluble link between the Jewish people and their homeland, and the right of all Jews to live, build and defend themselves in a sovereign state there—are baked deep into Judaism’s rituals, prayers and core beliefs. But for a variety of reasons, support for Zionism wasn’t unanimous. Some religious Jews believed that only the coming of the Messiah should bring a return to Jewish statehood. Socialists didn’t believe in nation-states and thought a European revolution would bring safety and rights to all people, making a Jewish state unnecessary. Some Jews in the free countries of the West wished to strip ethnicity from their Jewish identity and feared that they would lose their rights if a Jewish state were created. And some American Jews thought they had found Zion in a secular republic in the New World.

Throughout the last two millennia, Jews had always been a presence in the land that the Romans named “Palestine” in a failed bid to erase them from history. Zionism was also grounded in Jewish rights, not the Holocaust. The post-World War I peace agreements that created the Mandate for Palestine to facilitate the creation of a home for the Jews also grounded it in international law.

Still, Zionist thinkers like Theodor Herzl and, a generation later, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky were right to prophesize that Jews were living under a perpetual sentence in Europe.

The antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the reality of the Nazi Holocaust destroyed the illusions of the Socialists (or at least should have), as well as convinced Western Jews that there was no alternative to a Jewish state. And once Israel came into existence, those who feared it for secular or religious reasons generally made their peace with it.

Today, there is a new anti-Zionist movement among the Jews that gets disproportionate coverage in the corporate press, yet represents only a minority of non-Israeli Jews. Unlike past opponents of Zionism, it doesn’t oppose Israel’s existence because they have a better idea to protect Jews. Rather, these Jews who belong to groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace exalt Jewish powerlessness and twist Jewish beliefs into a creed that believes Jews alone of the peoples of the world ought not to have the right of self-determination or the power to defend themselves.

It is no accident that they also traffic in antisemitic blood libels, such as the claim that Israel trains American police to murder African-Americans. As the reaction to Oct. 7 has shown, these Jewish anti-Zionists may be loud and have strong support from the mainstream media, but they have nothing to do with normative Jewish values and represent only themselves.

Yet the battle over Zionism isn’t merely this faint echo of past Jewish squabbles. Today, anti-Zionism is a main plank of leftist activists, whether they are environmental extremists like Thunberg (who want the world to give up air travel, the right to own cars, as well as to eat meat or cheese); Black Lives Matter activists in the United States who smear America as an irredeemably racist nation; or the LGBT+ community that sees Palestinians as fellow victims, even though unlike Israel but in most Arab countries, they would be in danger because of their lifestyle.

They claim to speak for human rights but have little interest in any conflict or alleged humanitarian crisis unless it can be blamed on the Jews. Like intellectuals of the early 20th century who blazed the trail for the acceptance of Nazism, they claim to be moved by the suffering of victims of war but have a curious blind spot when those victims are Jews. The plight of the hostages or those who were slaughtered in the orgy of rape, murder, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction committed by Hamas and Palestinians on Oct. 7 move them not at all.

Their nurturing of Palestinian fantasies of Israel’s destruction is helping to doom the supposed objects of their sympathy to a future of more war, terrorism and destruction. The fact that their reaction to Hamas barbarism was not merely to oppose Israel’s justified war to eliminate a genocidal terrorist group, but to vow to “crush Zionism” and erase it from “the river to the sea,” remains proof that it is not so much an intersectional human-rights cause as it is just a new variant on the same old tropes of antisemitism. They aren’t merely criticizing an Israeli government’s policies or actions. Their problem is with the fact that there is one Jewish state on the planet.

They seem to believe the Jews are the only people on the planet whose right to self-determination deserves no respect. While they reject accusations of antisemitism, what else can you call those who discriminate against Jews and judge them by a standard they would never apply to any other people?

Jew-haters are now recirculating tropes that Soviet propagandists first issued a half-century ago to label Zionism as racism. The only rational reaction to this is for Israelis and Jews wherever they live to embrace not just the label of Zionist but the ideas behind it. Zionism recognizes age-old ties between a people and their land, and at its core is a fundamental expression of Jewish rights.

Zionism has created a nation that for all of its flaws and frailties is a unique experiment in the ingathering of a people in a democratic state. In the last 76 years, Zionist Jews have worked miracles not just in surviving wars waged by enemies bent on their elimination but also in a society capable of enormous economic, technological and cultural achievements. It should be celebrated—not reviled—and people of good will, whether Jewish or not, should know that by embracing it, they are identifying themselves with among the most just causes and most amazing stories in modern history.

Israelis are still mourning their dead since Oct. 7 while they battle Hamas and work for the safe return of the remaining hostages held captive in Gaza. But they are also celebrating a nation that needs no permission from any foreign power to exist and, false accusations of antisemites about “genocide” notwithstanding, whose conduct under excruciating circumstances has been exemplary by any standard.

Zionism isn’t dead. Nor will it be defeated by Hamas and its leftist enablers in the streets of Malmö or on North American college campuses. It is very much alive, and on Yom Ha’atzmaut—Israel’s 76th Independence Day—every Jew with a conscience and sense of self-respect should be proudly calling themselves Zionists.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Speaking at the Yom HaZikaron ceremony on Monday at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, the Israeli Prime Minister reaffirmed Israel’s determination to be victorious in the war against Hamas while acknowledging the “high price” of the ongoing war.

A siren ushered in the two-minute silence honoring the memory of fallen soldiers and terror victims.

President Isaac Herzog, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi were among those in attendance at the ceremony.

Addressing the audience, Netanyahu said, “Our national home is standing – our country is standing, and it is standing thanks to you. But at the same time, the sorrow is terrible and heartbreaking.”

He continued, “Dear families, our loved ones who fell in battle, and in all the battles of Israel, the battles of renewal, represent eternal values. It is either Israel or the Hamas monsters.”

He continued, “It is either existence, freedom, security, and prosperity – or it is massacre, rape, and servitude.”

Netanyahu emphasized the goal of eliminating Hamas and said, “We are determined to win this battle. But the price that we are paying – the price that previous generations have paid – is very heavy.”

He added, “There is no comfort. There is life, but the wound will remain until the end of our lives. Our War of Independence has not yet ended – it continues even now.”

This year, Israel’s Memorial Day honors the 25,040 IDF soldiers who have fallen, including 711, since the beginning of the war on 711. According to government numbers, 5,100 Israeli civilians have been killed in Israel’s wars, including 834 since October 7th.

This Israel Memorial Day marks the first since October 7th, while Israel is still engaged in war against Hamas.

Recently, the IDF has been engaged in targeted missions inside Rafah. Still, Israel has been cautioned against a full military operation in Gaza by the United States, given the risks to civilians.

However, Netanyahu has reiterated his intention to operate in Rafah, which shelters Hamas’s remaining battalions.

JNS)
Diplomatic shockwaves have been traveling between Washington and Jerusalem in the aftermath of a paused weapons shipment that was due to arrive in Israel last week.

The Biden administration confirmed that it was holding up a large weapons shipment over fears it would be used in an already ongoing Israeli operation in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Despite the critical strategic importance of the operation, the Biden administration had made clear that they strongly oppose any large-scale Israeli incursion in Rafah and would expand the weapons freeze should Israel seek to root out Hamas from its southern stronghold.

This move had been under consideration for weeks, with some sources close to the White House claiming the announcement of the decision was timed to allow President Joe Biden to make his Holocaust Remembrance Day speech without being overshadowed by a policy decision that was likely to be perceived as harmful to the U.S.-Israel relationship.

“As Israeli leaders seemed to approach a decision point last month on such an operation, we began to carefully review proposed transfers of particular weapons to Israel that might be used in Rafah,” a White House official said.

White House officials revealed that the planned shipment was said to contain 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs, as well as multiple other types of ordinance. U.S. defense officials said they were concerned by Israel’s broad use of 2,000-pound bombs in civilian areas.

However, according to experts these concerns stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of combat in Gaza.

“The use of heavy ordinance is consistent with an operation targeting subterranean positions in a populated area,” said John Spencer in an interview last week.

According to Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, “Israel is fighting the most advanced and complex terror tunnel system ever encountered in modern combat, so their disproportionate use of 2,000-pound bombs is a response to their fighting environment.”

The paused shipment is not the only military aid that has been denied or restricted in recent months. According to Sen. James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, other crucial military materiel has been frozen in congressional committees for months, including joint direct attack munitions (JDAMS), which convert dumb bombs into precision weapons, as well as tank rounds, mortars and armored tactical vehicles. Risch said some of these shipments have been waiting for approval since December, while usually, military aid to Israel goes through the approval processes in a few weeks.

An $18 billion military transfer including dozens of Boeing F-15 aircraft has also been stuck in the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee. Rep. Gregory Meeks, top Democrat on the committee, said he awaits more information about how Israel would use the F-15s.

“It’s enough of the indiscriminate bombing,” Meeks said last month. “I don’t want the kinds of weapons Israel has to be utilized to have more death. I want to make sure humanitarian aid gets in, and I don’t want people starving to death.”

Despite U.S. pressure, the government has made clear that the weapons freeze will not affect Israel’s determination to go into Rafah.

“If Israel has to stand alone, we will stand alone,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a message last week. “During the War of Independence 76 years ago, we were few against many, we had no weapons, and there was an arms embargo on Israel, but with the strength of the soul, the bravery and the unity within us, we won,” he added.

According to Channel 12, military officials are committed to an offensive in Rafah even without U.S. backing and have communicated this to Washington in recent days.

Other experts note that despite these delays, billions of dollars worth of U.S. weaponry remains in the pipeline for Israel.

“We should remember it is not the first time we have faced this type of situation, and that in the past we have been able to overcome our differences with the Americans,” Ephraim Inbar, president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy, told JNS. “We should hold a balanced evaluation of what has happened with U.S. policy, and we should try our best to sell the Israeli case in America,” he added.

“The U.S. didn’t ‘cut off’ offensive weapons, these terms make it sound worse than it already is. This was a serious signal, but it has to be read clearly,” said professor Chuck Freilich, former Israeli deputy national security adviser and currently a senior analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).

By current estimates, Israel will likely be able to carry out its operation in Rafah regardless of the U.S. weapons freeze.

“The IDF has armaments for the missions it is planning, including missions in Rafah. We have what we need,” IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said at a press conference last week.

According to Inbar, however, “We can go into Rafah without the Americans, the question is what happens afterward.”

A further military implication of the shipment freeze is a reduction in Israel’s capacity to target terror infrastructure and thereby minimize collateral damage.

According to U.S. sources, a shipment of precise munitions and precise munition kits is also being held up. The proposed arms delivery includes MK-82 bombs, up to 6,500 KMU-572 JDAMs, that add precision guidance to bombs, small-diameter tail kits for unguided bombs made by Boeing, and FMU-139 bomb fuses.

A further shipment of critical parts for the Israeli-made Spice (“Smart, Precise Impact, Cost-Effective”) bombs, which use electro-optical or infra-red systems to hit targets with high accuracy, meaning they can operate even in scenarios where GPS guidance is unavailable, is also being held up. Although these transfers were not due to arrive in Israel for many months, the lack of a stable resupply will likely limit Israel’s ability to utilize such munitions in upcoming combat.

Several U.S. military experts recently signed a letter to the White House in which they state that limiting Israel’s access to precision bombs will likely “increase civilian casualties in the conflict.”

Experts are further concerned that the growing daylight between the United States and Israel could have dire military implications for Israel in case of a second front in the north opening up, against the Hezbollah terror organization. “We need the Americans to also go into Lebanon so it is better if we can settle this issue,” said Inbar.

“There is a threat of Hezbollah, or Iran escalating because of the perception of America distancing itself,” said Freilich. “The paused shipment doesn’t affect combat at this level in Gaza, but a full-scale northern war will make what is happening in Gaza now seem like child’s play, and will require a lot of munitions and ordnance,” he added.

The Israeli government has so far downplayed the significance of the growing rift between D.C. and Jerusalem.

“The U.S. has so far provided security assistance to the State of Israel and the IDF in an unprecedented manner during the war,” said IDF Spokesperson Hagari. “Even when there are disagreements between us, we resolve them behind closed doors,” he stated. “Israel has security interests, but we are also aware of the interests of the U.S., and that’s how we will continue to act.”

Netanyahu echoed the sentiment during a “Dr. Phil Primetime” interview that aired on Thursday. “We often have our agreements but we’ve also had our disagreements. We’ve been able to overcome them. I hope we can overcome them now, but we will do what we have to do to protect our country,” he said.

Amid these developments, Israeli experts have increasingly been calling for Israel to expand its military manufacturing.

“Israel is a small country and we cannot be independent for a [while yet], but we need to work to increase our military manufacturing capabilities,” said Inbar.

The domestic response in the United States to the weapons freeze may signal a more nuanced reality.

“I think the ideological preferences of the progressives partially drive this, but also the presidential elections. Biden is paying an electoral price in America for adopting a more critical position towards Israel,” Inbar told JNS. “I think there is room for American-Israeli discussions, at the same time I think the Biden administration might reevaluate the utility of such steps in their domestic electoral campaign. He doesn’t only have to please the Arab population in Michigan; in my view, he made an electoral mistake,” he added.

Inbar’s view is confirmed by the wide outpouring of bipartisan criticism in the aftermath of the White House’s decision. Twenty-six Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have signed a letter to Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor, requesting a briefing on why the administration suspended the delivery of large bombs to Israel.

“We are deeply concerned about the message the Administration is sending to Hamas and other Iranian-backed terrorist proxies by withholding weapons shipments to Israel, during a critical moment in the negotiations. With democracy under assault around the world, we cannot undermine our ally Israel, especially in her greatest hour of need,” said the letter.

Broad pressure could also be felt from the right, with House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson calling the move “wholly unacceptable,” and former CIA director Mike Pompeo calling it “indefensible” and “a betrayal of a close ally fighting a defensive war.”

Former President Donald Trump also made a statement in support of Israel.

Speaking at a rally in New Jersey on Saturday, Trump said, “This week, he [Biden] announced that he will withhold shipping weapons to Israel as they fight to eradicate Hamas terrorists in Gaza. It was shocking to hear him—even now, there are still American hostages being held by Hamas. Crooked Joe’s actions are one of the worst betrayals of an American ally in the history of our country. I support Israel’s right to win its war on terror.”