Joe Biden’s Backstabbing Dents Israeli Morale

President Joe Biden might have thought he was only talking to a small group of wealthy donors. But his disparaging comments, published Tuesday, about Israel and the Israeli government have dented national morale — and cheered Israel’s enemies.

Biden claimed, without evidence, that Israel practices “indiscriminate bombing”; that Israel is losing support around the world; and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fail unless he boots democratically-elected right-wing parties out of his cabinet.

Two factors made Biden’s comments even worse.

One was that he was speaking to an ostensibly pro-Israel group of donors, led by Lee Rosenberg, a former chair of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Rosenberg was tapped for the job during the Obama years, when it was hoped that he could use his shared Chicago ties with Barack Obama to moderate some of Obama’s left-wing policies. That hope was dashed as Obama grew hostile to Israel, and began cozying up to the Iranian regime.

The other factor is that Israel has been absorbing a series of bad-news stories lately, most of all about the deaths of hostages in Hamas custody, and about the deaths of elite soldiers who are fighting in Gaza to free them.

At 115 casualties since the invasion, Israel has suffered fewer losses than expected. But each fallen soldier is mourned deeply by the entire nation, especially in a small country, and especially when so many of those doing the fighting are reservists, away from their jobs, spouses and children.

Israel is also shocked — at a level that doesn’t always come through in the headlines — at being abandoned by the universities of the West.

Israelis, like Jews around the world, value higher education, and many work closely with the brightest American minds in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. They seem to have assumed the smartest people in the world would have understood the fact that a nation attacked by terrorists in an unprovoked and brutal assault has a right to respond.

The fact that the president of Harvard and other elite universities would tolerate calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jews has left a deep wound.

So Biden’s backstabbing — after making a show of his support for Israel at a Hanukkah party — has hurt Israeli morale, badly.

It is also being celebrated by Israel’s enemies, who believe that if an American president says something — even something provably false, like “indiscriminate bombing” — you can regard it as a political fact.

Hamas is pointing to Tuesday’s non-binding vote of the United Nations General Assembly on a ceasefire resolution as proof that Israel is, as Biden said, losing support — and all the terrorists need to do to survive is hold out just a little bit longer against Israel.

It is dawning on the Israeli left, in particular — who loved his criticism of Netanyahu, who savored his “don’t” warning to Iran — that Joe Biden’s only real interest is, and always has been, the political survival of Joe Biden, and that Biden remains, as he was for decades, wrong about everything in foreign policy.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.