Friday 10 May 2024

TOM FRI

OPINIONTHOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Biden’s Real Mistake in Pausing Military Aid to Israel

Opinion Columnist

May 10, 2024

It is unfortunate that President Biden chose to announce his pause of some weapons sales to Israel while on a political campaign swing through Wisconsin. I use that word — “unfortunate” — not because I don’t understand why Biden did so, but because the move has enabled Benjamin Netanyahu to deflect attention from the fact that the most dangerous leader threatening Israel today is not Biden but Bibi.

Netanyahu’s policies have not and will not produce a sustainable victory in Gaza, cannot secure Israel against its greatest existential threat — Iran — and are endangering world Jewry and undermining America’s broader Middle East strategic needs and goals.

That is the real source of tension between Washington and Jerusalem today. It is not Biden’s temporary hold on sending Israel a fresh supply of 2,000-pound bombs and some other offensive weapons — which Biden has been warning Israel for months that he would do if Israel attempted to pulverize Rafah, the way that it did Gaza City and Khan Younis, without an evacuation of civilians.

It is a measure of the level of contempt with which Netanyahu’s government views the Biden administration that Bibi’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, immediately posted on X about Biden’s move: “Hamas ❤️ Biden.” That is how Bibi’s team treats the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history, the man who rushed to save Israel from Hamas on Oct. 7 and from Iran on April 13. It is just shameful.

Just do a simple mind experiment: Let’s assume Biden gave Israel all the 2,000-pound bombs it wanted. Israel leveled Rafah, where Hamas’s leadership, four intact battalions and many Israeli hostages are believed to be holed up. None of that would change the fact that Israel has no Palestinian or Arab partner to govern Gaza the next day in a way that would ensure a new Hamas would not rise from the ashes.

Netanyahu has managed to persuade and cajole Israel’s army leadership and people to fight this war in Gaza for more than seven months with no plan for how to get out and consolidate whatever military victory has been achieved. This is a direct result of the fact that in December 2022, Netanyahu formed the most extreme, far-right cabinet in Israel’s history — to get back into power and stave off his trial on corruption charges. The Jewish supremacists in his cabinet will not let Netanyahu form any partnership with the non-Hamas Palestinian Authority that governs in the West Bank for fear it could lead to a Palestinian state there and in Gaza.

That means the morning after any triumph over Hamas, Israel will either leave Gaza and have on its border some kind of gang-governed Somalia, where Hamas would most likely re-emerge under new leadership — as it has after Israel assassinated its previous generation of leaders — or Israel will find itself permanently occupying both Gaza and the West Bank, where it is already in charge. Together, about seven million Israeli Jews would be permanently controlling about five million Palestinian Arabs in two occupied territories, which would be a moral, economic and military overstretch that would delight Iran — because it would hasten Israel’s descent into being a global pariah.

As Biden officials kept pressing Netanyahu on this, the answer they kept getting was the geopolitical equivalent of “just shut up and dribble” — that is, just keep sending us arms and using your credibility to defend us on the world stage, particularly at the United Nations. We’ll do whatever we want, consistent with Netanyahu’s political needs. Biden’s political needs and America’s geopolitical needs be damned.

It’s a grave mistake to underestimate the danger the current Netanyahu government poses to Israel and its relationship with the United States and the world.

Amos Harel, a veteran military correspondent for Haaretz, quoted a senior Israeli military commander on Friday, who summed up the situation better than I ever could: “The best way to harm Hamas now is by presenting a governmental alternative in Gaza. That’s not happening because the prime minister doesn’t want it. Every week, senior defense officials meet with foreign diplomats and generals. The repeated question is: What the blazes are you trying to achieve now? We don’t have a real answer for them.”

Look at what is already happening as a result, Harel added. The Israeli Army has withdrawn so many of its troops from Gaza, save for the fresh units now surrounding Rafah and holding the central corridor dividing Gaza from north to south, that “Hamas is taking back governance in Gaza by every means,” Harel said. “Hamas’s efforts to restore governance also include the resumption of activity by the sharia courts, municipal services and sanitation departments in the municipalities.”

If that is what winning looks like in the areas Israel has “liberated,” is it any wonder that Biden is wary of Israel leveling another Gazan city with no plan or partner for what comes next?

That said, I thought it was a mistake for Biden to speak publicly for the first time about one of the most serious departures in U.S. foreign policy — pausing the transfer of some 3,500 bombs to Israel — in an off-the-cuff exchange with CNN’s Erin Burnett at a campaign stop.

It left the impression that this was being done to satisfy the president’s left-wing base that opposes the war, and Republicans and some American Jewish leaders immediately pounced on him for it. If the president of the United States is going to discuss publicly for the first time something as serious as even a limited holdup of arms transfers to Israel, he needs to do it in a well-thought-out speech that puts all of this in context for Americans at home, for Israelis, for Israel’s friends and for Israel’s enemies.

Such a speech would begin by making clear that if the U.S.-Israel alliance is under strain today, it’s because Israel has become a radically unstable partner under Netanyahu. He made a failed judicial coup his top priority for his first year in office — not dealing with Iran or the Palestinians. That divided Israeli society and distracted its military, probably tempting Hamas to think the time was right for an attack.

This crazy lurch to the right in Israel — combined with a can’t-win strategy in Gaza combined with the fact that, as Harel wrote, “for almost a decade, Netanyahu purposefully wore down the civil service, weakened it and transferred the centers of power from the gatekeepers in the judiciary, treasury and defense establishment to a small group of” incompetent cronies — is hurting not only Israel’s interests but also America’s.

For starters, the United States’ most advanced and vital military partner in the region is now bogged down in Gaza, with no apparent way out, straining American weapon reserves that are also needed by Ukraine. And an endless Gaza war can also destabilize other U.S. allies, particularly Jordan and Egypt.

In addition, the United States is trying to forge a new security alliance with Saudi Arabia that would enable the Saudis to focus on what they most want to focus on right now — their economic development — without having to fear an attack from Iran. To help sell that deal to the American Congress, the Saudis agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel — if Israel would embark on a pathway to a Palestinian state with a reformed Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu is refusing that condition and now the whole deal is up in the air.

Last, as much damage as Hamas has done to Israel, Israel’s true existential threat is from Iran and its network of allies — Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas and Shiite militias in Iraq. On April 13, the United States pulled together an alliance with moderate Arab states, Britain and France to shoot down virtually all 300 of the drones and missiles Iran fired at Israel that night. The more Israel gets mired in Gaza and civilian deaths continue, it will get harder and harder for the moderate Arab states, particularly Jordan, to be seen as defending Israel from Iran.

There is no question that Israel will be better off, Palestinians will be better off and the Middle East will be better off if Hamas is totally defeated. And if it takes Israel going into Rafah to do that, then so be it. Hamas invited this war. Many, many Palestinians in Gaza will feel liberated by its defeat — not only Israelis. But that is if and only if Israel partners with non-Hamas Palestinians to build a better Gaza and create the possibility of a new dawn for Palestinians and Israelis. Biden is justified in using U.S. leverage to insist that Israel operate with that goal in mind — because Israel’s prime minister is not.

President Biden Just Made His Biggest Blunder

May 9, 2024

Against a clear sky on a sunny day, President Biden, tieless in a blue suit, walks down from Air Force One. — Credit... Al Drago for The New York Times

Opinion Columnist

In announcing that the United States will pause delivery of 3,500 bombs to Israel, President Biden has the laudable motive of wanting to spare innocent Palestinians from the military consequences of Hamas using Rafah as its last stronghold in Gaza. Less laudably, but no less understandably, he also needs to shore up support among progressive voters who think that Israel’s use of American weapons implicates us in war crimes.

But motives are not results. And the consequences of Biden’s decision, if not soon reversed, will be the opposite of what he intends. How so? Let me count the ways.

The munitions cutoff helps Hamas.

The tragedy in Gaza is fundamentally the result of Hamas’s decisions: to start the war in the most brutal way possible; to fight it behind and beneath civilians; to attack the border crossings through which humanitarian aid is delivered; and to hold on cruelly to Israel’s 132 remaining hostages, living or dead. Whatever else the arms cutoff might accomplish when it comes to Israel, it is both a propaganda coup and a tactical victory for Hamas that validates its decision to treat its own people as human shields. And it emboldens Hamas to continue playing for time — especially in the hostage negotiations — with the idea that the longer it holds out, the likelier it is to survive.

It doesn’t end the war. It prolongs it.

No Israeli government, even one led by someone more moderate than Benjamin Netanyahu, is going to leave Gaza with Hamas still in control of any part of the territory. If the Biden administration has ideas about how to do that without dislodging it from Rafah, we have yet to hear of them.

That means that, one way or the other, Israel is going in, if not with bombs — and the administration is also considering barring precision-guidance kits — then with far-less accurate 120-millimeter tank shells and 5.56-millimeter bullets. Other than putting Israeli troops at greater risk, does the Biden administration really think the toll for Palestinians will be less after weeks or months of house-to-house combat?

It diminishes Israel’s deterrent power and is a recipe for a wider war.

One of the reasons Israel isn’t yet fighting a full-blown war to its north is that Hezbollah has so far been deterred from a full-scale attack, not least from fears of having its arsenal of an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles decimated by the Israeli Air Force. But what if the Lebanese terrorist group looks at reports of Israeli munitions’ shortages and decides that now would be an opportune time to strike?

If that were to happen, the loss of civilian life in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other Israeli cities could be immense. Biden would have no choice but to authorize a massive airlift of munitions to Israel — reversing this week’s decision. And the United States might have to even more directly support Israel militarily.

There will be unintended foreign-policy consequences.

Israeli doubts about America’s reliability as an ally won’t lead to Israeli pliancy. Instead, it will strengthen its determination to become far more independent of Washington’s influence in ways we may not like. State-of-the-art Israeli cybertech for Beijing? Closer Israeli ties with Moscow? Americans who accuse Israel of freeloading off U.S. power will like it even less when it becomes a foreign-policy freelancer — something Biden ought to have learned when he tried to turn Saudi Arabia into a global pariah only to learn, to his own humiliation, the kingdom had other strategic options.

Worse: Rather than weaken Netanyahu and his political partners on the Israeli far-right, it will strengthen them. They will make the case that only they have the fortitude to stand up to a liberal president who folds to pressure from Israel-hating campus protesters.

It’s a political gift to Donald Trump.

Though the anti-Israel chants on college campuses may be loud, they aren’t especially influential: Few voters, including young ones, put the war in Gaza anywhere near the top of their list of political priorities. But a clear majority of Americans back the current level of support for Israel or even want to increase it, according to a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll. The cutoff will further alienate pro-Israel voters and will only partly mollify anti-Israel ones, who will now pressure the president to go much further.

In other words, it’s a classic case of falling between stools. It also plays into the perception that Biden is weak — unable to stand up to the left flank of his party, and a feckless ally to our embattled friends. The last time the United States bailed on an ally, in Afghanistan, the result was a political debacle from which the president’s approval rating never recovered. Why would the White House want to put voters in mind of that episode?

There is still time for the president to reverse this ill-judged decision. Netanyahu and his ministers can help by demonstrating that they are taking immediate, visible, meaningful steps to move Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. But an arms cutoff that weakens Israel as it faces enemies on multiple fronts is unworthy of a president whose clear and stalwart support for the Jewish state at its lowest moment was — and should remain — his finest hour.

MINSKY MOMENTS

Opinion | Quantitative Tightening Becomes a Trap for the Federal Reserve

May 9, 2024 1:32 pm ET

Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Jerome Powell speaks at a news conference in Washington, May 1. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

As policy-wonk buzzwords go, few are more important these days than “ample.” What that word means, or rather what the Federal Reserve thinks it means, has become a $7.4 trillion question hanging over the U.S. economy.

The issue is the Fed’s balance sheet, which currently stands at about that level. The Federal Open Market Committee decided last week to slow the pace at which the balance sheet will shrink. Since June 2022, the central bank has been allowing up to $60 billion a month in Treasurys to roll off and up to $35 billion in mortgage-backed securities. That rate will now slow to $25 billion per month for Treasurys.

This sounds counterintuitive. The Fed is fighting stubborn inflation. Quantitative easing (the purchases of bonds through which the central bank expanded its balance sheet after 2008) marked a prominent effort to stimulate the economy and inflation. Quantitative tightening to unwind those purchases seemed to be part of the Fed’s plan to combat inflation starting in 2022. Why slow down now?

Because taming inflation isn’t the central bank’s only task (and the Fed isn’t sure QE matters to inflation anyway). The central bank also has changed the way the American financial system operates in significant ways since 2008 and this is limiting the Fed’s ability to shrink its balance sheet.

The problem is the central bank’s liabilities, which necessarily have increased in tandem with its assets. One liability in particular ballooned under QE: bank reserves. These are the deposits commercial banks hold at the Fed to guarantee their liquidity, and they’re huge: $3.3 trillion as of the most recent count, and that already is down from $4.3 trillion at the peak, in late 2021.

It wasn’t always this way. Before the 2008 panic, reserve balances were minuscule relative to the size of the economy—in the low tens of billions. Banks instead borrowed from and lent to each other overnight to manage liquidity.

Regulatory changes since 2008 have pushed banks to hold more reserves, and the Fed further encouraged this stockpiling when it started paying banks interest on reserve balances. Banks now rely primarily on reserve accounts rather than overnight borrowing to satisfy liquidity requirements, and that overnight market has shriveled.

The Fed describes this new system as an ample-reserves regime—there’s that word—but no one can say what “ample” means. The quantity of reserves banks want to hold arises from a complex alchemy of regulation, market forces and managerial preferences. No wonder the central bank’s estimates of likely reserve demand have shifted dramatically over the years, from as little as $100 billion in the mid-2010s to $1 trillion in late 2018 and around $2.3 trillion now.

This is especially concerning because the Fed has other large liabilities that affect its ability to meet banks’ uncertain reserve demand. Particularly relevant here is the Treasury general account, the federal government’s checking account at the Fed. The TGA has grown considerably since 2008 (before then, Treasury parked most of its cash at private-sector banks) and it’s very volatile. Seasonal tax payments, for instance, rapidly withdraw money from the banking system and cause a decline in bank reserves while pumping up the TGA.

The pinch comes if a change in the TGA or elsewhere on the Fed’s balance sheet causes bank reserves to fall below some minimum level everyone knows exists but no one can identify. This already has happened once. The central bank started its first quantitative tightening in 2017, when bank reserves hovered around $2.3 trillion, give or take. By September 2019, reserves had fallen to around $1.5 trillion, still well above what the Fed at the time thought was ideal. Then a surge in tax payments caused the TGA to swell at the expense of bank reserves—and it turned out banks thought their reserves were too low. Sudden demand for liquidity caused overnight lending rates to skyrocket out of the central bank’s control.

Chairman Jerome Powell is slowing quantitative tightening now because the Fed is anxious to avoid a repeat of that fiasco. Is his caution premature? Perhaps, considering reserves still stand at roughly double their pre-pandemic (and post-September 2019) level. But you can understand the worry.

His bigger dilemma is this: The conceit of many Fed innovations since 2008 has been that novel policies—for which no one voted and that the central bank itself often doesn’t fully understand—could be easily reversed when the time came. Well, the time has come amid the worst inflation spike in 40 years and a new debate about Fed accountability. But the central bank finds itself hemmed in by those “temporary” policies. In this way, the balance sheet is becoming a political problem as much as an economic one.

Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Allysia Finley, Mary O'Grady and Dan Henninger. Image: Chris Pizzello/Associated Press

Appeared in the May 10, 2024, print edition as 'Quantitative Tightening Becomes a Trap for the Federal Reserve'.

Thursday 9 May 2024

ON MR. RIPLEY, WEALTH AND HIS TALENT

I have not watched the recent Netflix series based on the novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, nor do I intend to watch it. And today I would not spare time to watch the original movie or read the novel on which it was based. There are far too many other noble pursuits to indulge than what I consider to be wasteful consumption of fictional and fictitious media and showbiz bling, which I find distasteful and harmful in the extreme, to young and old minds alike. But I did have occasion to watch the original film based on the novel in the days when hotels universally had subscriptions to movie channels and hapless tourists stuck in small rooms at night or on days of inclement weather were helpless hostages to Hollywood dross and smut.

From what I gather, the latest version of the Ripley story treats the maligned protagonist from the outset as an incurable psychopath prone to all and any crime to satisfy his craving for wealth and luxury. If that is the case, then the makers of this series have completely misconstrued the very intriguing and problematic crux of the original story, which is more properly and subtly sketched in the original film with Matt Damon as the lead character. The very serious psychological and ethical problem tackled in the original novel and film is that, contrary to the mistaken and facile presentation in the latest iteration and in common understanding, Ripley does not start as an acquisitive ravenous psychopath ready to sacrifice loves and friends to his overweening ambition and lust for the good life, but rather he turns into such a refined monster only after a series of circumstances that are in part fortuitous and not always within his firm control. Let us call these oblique circumstances ‘temptations’ – temptations that are the combined and partly accidental by product of two elements: - Ripley’s innate ‘talent’ and his strong penchant for pursuing it, and the unhoped-for opportunities that present to him to enable that pursuit. After all, these are the conceptual ingredients of ‘temptation’: - the desire to pursue a perilous goal, and the opportunity to do so. Perilous means here the same as dangerous because the pursuit of the goal involves possible outcomes that may be harmful, physically and morally, both to one’s person and to others.

Ripley has a talent for artistic pursuits – not just a proclivity or a desire, but a true genuine ability to acquire and exhibit what are widely perceived as desirable and worthy activities and skills or virtues or even virtuosisms, if you like. That, in a nutshell, is the nature of talent – a natural or divine ‘gift’ not usually bestowed to the many among us. The problem Ripley faces is interesting in its manifold complexity. Ripley has had the good fortune to acquire the initial knowledge and skills to develop his talent; but, alas, he has come accidentally to a point where he is in imminent danger of no longer being able to afford the continuing pursuit or indulgence of this talent. As is easily opined, this presents us, the viewers, the readers, the judges, with a not negligible dilemma: is Ripley justified in pursuing his talent that his lack of wealth threatens imminently and immanently, or should he just accept his lamentable fate and acquiesce in it? In other words, is Ripley wrong to try to hold on to what he never had?

As Macbeth would have it, mirroring the existential dilemma faced by Hamlet, “to seek or not to seek: there is the rub!” And there, in this philosophical problema, in this existential conundrum, lies the interest in “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, or at least in the philosophically and ethically worthwhile part of it. By stultifyingly avoiding this dilemma, the recent Netflix series reduces Ripley to a flat, unproblematic psychopath – and in so doing it hides and buries the entire socio-political problem of how wealth in capitalism is accessed, acquired and distributed. And consequently of how existing wealth may bar the way, pose an insurmountable obstacle to the pursuit of talent. Ah, there is the rub!

Opinion | India’s Economy Isn’t the New China (Yet)

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivers remarks in New Delhi, April 24. Photo: Pib /Press Information/Zuma Press

Is India on the cusp of a long-awaited economic takeoff? America’s corporate titans appear to think so. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for having “done an unbelievable job.” Tim Cook, on whose watch Apple began making iPhones in India, called the country “an incredibly exciting market.” Warren Buffett said India holds “unexplored” opportunities for Berkshire Hathaway. Elon Musk said he looks forward to visiting India later this year.

How justified is the hype? First, the glass-half-full story: The International Monetary Fund estimates that India’s economy grew a robust 7.8% in the fiscal year that ended March 31. When Mr. Modi first took office in 2014, India was the world’s 10th-largest economy by gross domestic product at market exchange rates. It’s now the fifth-largest economy, behind only the U.S., China, Germany and Japan. The IMF estimates that by 2027 India will become the world’s third-largest economy, after the U.S. and China.

India has also dramatically reduced poverty over the past two decades. At a conference on the Indian economy at George Washington University last month, Oxford economist Sabina Alkire estimated that 415 million people in India exited poverty between 2005 and 2021. In 2015-16, 27.7% of Indians were poor, according to the United Nations Development Program’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, which measures health, education and living standards. By 2019-21 this had fallen to 16.4% of the population.

The World Bank takes an even more optimistic view of poverty reduction, estimating that in 2021, despite the pandemic, only 12.9% of India’s population was living on $2.15 or less a day, the global benchmark for extreme poverty. Indian economists Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin wrote this year that “India has eliminated extreme poverty.” Regardless of whom you believe, there’s no doubt that the extreme deprivation with which India was once synonymous has diminished greatly and is on track to disappear entirely.

There are other reasons for optimism. The Modi government has presided over a large infrastructure buildout. Economists Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman estimate that India has built 34,000 miles of national highway since 2014, and that India’s infrastructure—including ports and airports—“has been transformed.” A combination of widespread internet access, the proliferation of cellphones, and a massive rollout of bank accounts has also improved the government’s ability to deliver welfare payments to the needy.

India’s service exports have continued to boom. Messrs. Subramanian and Felman estimate that India’s share of global highly skilled services nearly doubled, from around 3% in 2005 to 5.8% in 2022. JPMorgan Chase now employs about 60,000 people in India. Toss in a youthful workforce—the median Indian is 28—and a surge in companies seeking alternative investment destinations to China, and the case for India’s impending takeoff is complete. In a speech at George Washington University, India’s chief economic adviser, V. Anantha Nageswaran, described achieving a near-term 10% annual growth rate in dollar terms as “not particularly daunting.”

Despite this progress, India still faces many challenges. Here’s the glass-half-empty version of the story: India’s economic performance looks much less impressive when contrasted with that of other countries. India’s per capita GDP ($2,730) is about 1/30th of America’s ($85,370) and about one-fifth of China’s ($13,140). Indermit Gill, chief economist at the World Bank, estimates that at current growth rates it will take 75 years before per capita GDP in India reaches a quarter of the U.S. figure.

And there’s no guarantee this will happen. According to World Bank research, most poor countries hit a wall at 10% of U.S. per capita GDP. At current growth rates, it could take decades for India simply to catch up with Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of $5,270.

China benefited during a period of Western openness to trade. The global environment is much less benign now, and India has made it harder for its companies to become part of global supply chains by choosing to remain outside large trade blocs such as the 15-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the 11-member Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Nimbler Asian rivals such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore are part of both. Mr. Modi has failed to solve India’s central economic challenge: moving tens of millions of subsistence farmers to more productive factory jobs.

Mr. Modi says he wants India to be a developed economy by 2047, when the country will celebrate 100 years of independence. Is it possible? The jury remains out on that question.

0:02

Playing

Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Allysia Finley, Mary O'Grady and Dan Henninger. Image: Chris Pizzello/Associated Press

Appeared in the May 9, 2024, print edition as 'India Isn’t the New China (Yet)'.

Skip to...

FTSE 100

8362.53

0.10%

DAX

18554.77

0.30%

CAC 40

8126.67

-0.06%

SX5P

4475.49

-0.06%

FTSE MIB

34136.01

-0.05%

IBEX 35

11023.30

-1.16%

FTSE 250

20485.20

-0.03%

Biden Slaps an Arms Embargo on Israel

The President withholds bombs, large and small, to spare Hamas in Rafah.

The Editorial Board

May 8, 2024 6:21 pm ET

Students with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment block the entrance of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University after taking over it on April 30. PHOTO: MARCO POSTIGO STOREL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Call it what it is: a U.S. arms embargo against Israel. That’s the astonishing story this week as the Biden Administration confirms it is blocking the delivery of weapons to its main ally in the Middle East.

OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH

Stormy Daniels Testifies at Donald Trump’s Hush-Money Trial

25:08

Explore Audio Center

The Administration would like to focus on the denial of 2,000-pound bombs, which it says are too destructive. Never mind that a professional force can employ them in a manner that restricts the radius of damage. Mr. Biden is also halting a shipment of 500-pound bombs and holding up Joint Direct Attack Munitions, which convert unguided bombs into precision “smart” bombs. Politico reports that Small Diameter Bombs are being withheld. The Journal adds that the Biden Administration has been sitting on a deal that includes tank shells and mortar rounds.

The message from the White House, in other words, is that Israel shouldn’t have large bombs or small bombs, dumb bombs or smart bombs, and let it do without tanks and artillery too. Now isn’t a good time to send the weapons, you see, because Israel would use them.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other U.S. officials explain that the goal of the embargo—which they present as a “pause” or “review”—is to prevent a wider Israeli attack on the Hamas stronghold of Rafah. This is the terrorists’ reward for using civilians as human shields.

We’ve written about why Rafah must fall: It is home to Hamas’s leaders, hostages and four military battalions. If Israel can’t complete its invasion of Rafah, Hamas wins. “I refuse to let that happen,” Mr. Biden said on Oct. 20, but that was when it cost the President nothing, before the anti-Israel vote in Dearborn, Mich., had entered the national political conversation. Mr. Biden also promised to make sure Israelis “have what they need to protect their people today and always,” a repetition of his pledges on Oct. 7 and Oct. 10 that had so moved the Israeli people.

No matter how fiercely the President trumpets his “ironclad” support for Israel, his denial of weapons now puts the Jewish state in danger. Israel is at war, assaulted on multiple fronts. Denying it U.S. arms is an invitation to its enemies to take advantage, in hostage talks and on the battlefield.

It hasn’t been four weeks since Iran attacked Israel directly, in the largest drone attack in history, plus 150 or so ballistic and cruise missiles. Hezbollah fires dozens of rockets each day, depopulating the north of Israel for seven months and counting. The terrorist group and its Iranian controllers could decide at any time to precipitate an even larger war. Would it then be OK for Israel to have bombs?

Israel needs to be ready now, and its enemies need to know the U.S. stands behind it. That’s why Congress approved military aid to Israel in April, 79–18 in the Senate and 366–58 in the House. The overwhelming votes, including a majority of both parties, marked an important defeat for the anti-Israel left. Failing in its efforts to disarm Israel, the left lost. Now Mr. Biden is endorsing its policy.

Wonder Land: A highly organized left is targeting the takeover and ruin of liberal institutions and cities. Image: Candice Tang/Zuma Press

Appeared in the May 9, 2024, print edition as 'Biden Slaps an Arms Embargo on Israel'.

The Economics Forum 21

Commentary on Political Economy