Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett listens during a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, on August 25, 2021. © Olivier Douliery, AFP
Barry Shaw – Israel and the United States are heading for a diplomatic breakdown
The Biden Administration is arrogantly ignoring official Israeli protests against the opening of a US Consulate in Jerusalem to serve non-Israeli Palestinians.
It is more important for them to cow to the radical wing of their party than honoring the pledge made by previous administrations to an unbreakable bond with Israel.
The Biden Administration could easily have catered to Palestinians by opening a consular office in Ramallah. This is where the Palestinian Authority is based. This is where they serve their electorate, whenever they have elections. The last one was in 2006. They were supposed to hold elections every four years but Palestinian factions have been at war with each other for decades.
That said, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah decided not to help their people – what else is new – and instead play diplomatic football by insisting that the United States must reverse their avowed declaration that Jerusalem is the undivided sovereign capital of the State of Israel. Instead, the Palestinians and the current US Administration are determined to drive a wedge, some would say a stake, in the heart of Israel and the so-called “unbreakable bond” of the United States-Israel relationship by insisting that a consulate be located not in Ramallah or Gaza but deep in central Jerusalem.
Biden is weakly, some would say willingly, surrendering to the demands of a non-state entity that uses American taxpayers’ money to pay their killers of Jews. Why not? There were no effective protests against this in America. If this fails to extract protest the opening of an office should be child’s play.
You begin to see the gradual erosion of US-Israel relations, one poisonous drip at a time.
For sure this is yet another example of who is actually controlling the White House and State Department.
Biden, Harris, Blinken, and the Democratic caucus have bowed their head to the demands of the radical wing of their party. They are too frightened to stand up to them even to the extent that they risk irrevocably damaging their relationship with Israel. It is as major a schism as that.
The power in America is now in the hands of the Israel haters.
It seems that Blinken believes that the new Israeli coalition, with a fair proportion of the government representing center-left parties, will eventually accede to their position. It could be that Biden and his political overlords and the notorious anti-Israel squad of radical women are happy to see Israel squirm politically. They really wouldn’t mind seeing the fall of a government and a political fracture within Israel over this issue. They would view it as helping the Palestinians achieve an international public relations embarrassment over Israel.
The current American Administration is as wrong in this assessment as they have been with every other foreign policy position.
On its face it is yet another example of a Democrat machine built entirely on setting back every successful Trump policy no matter the consequences of their reversal. We witness the disasters of every reverse the Democrats have touched since taking power earlier this year.
Border security and legal immigration have been thrown out of the window with an open border policy that will flood their country with over two million unverified, unidentifiable, illegal immigrants from third world countries by the end of this year for the sole purpose of fundamentally and politically changing America.
We see it in the incomprehensible setback of America from being an energy-independent nation to one that went begging to OPEC to increase production because Biden inexplicably, in his first act of the president, closed the spigot on the XL Keystone pipeline.
We see it in the Marxism of the American economy and the abuse of a bloated government demanding trillions and trillions of dollars for ludicrous projects hidden in what they laughingly call an Infrastructure Bill. Even people are called “human infrastructure” in America these days.
Tragically, we witnessed the disastrous failure of American military power and diplomacy in the death knell of a failed withdrawal from Afghanistan, perceived internationally as a victory for Islamic terrorism, in which a careless Biden Administration left hundreds, maybe thousands, of American citizens trapped behind enemy lines. Meanwhile, Israeli aid agencies have independently and covertly extracted Afghanis out of that frightening country.
Now, in their fevered attempt to set back another Trump achievement, they are determined, at any cost, to reverse Trump’s establishment of a United States Embassy in Jerusalem by uniquely planting a mini-embassy in Jerusalem explicitly for Palestinians.
There are no examples anywhere in which America, or any other country, has, over the objection of a sovereign state, ignored that nations’ sovereign objections by unilaterally opening a facility to serve people of a country or an entity outside such a sovereign state, let alone an entity that regularly practices terrorism in all its forms against Israel.
This constitutes a major diplomatic slap in the face of Israel that will have far-reaching and damaging repercussions.
The distrust is already taking form following America’s shocking withdrawal from Afghanistan and its weak display over Iran’s march to a nuclear weapon capability.
There are certainly people in the Democrat Party and in the Biden Administration, as mentioned earlier, who will be salivating to see a deep rift develop between America and Israel.
It seems these people may have their way.
Either the current Israeli Government will stand firm and actively prevent the opening of this consulate or, if it supinely accedes to the unilateral decision of the Biden Administration, the Israeli government will fall.
Israel’s enemies within America may celebrate such an event, but such a celebration will be short-lived because, with the fall of the Israeli government, Israelis will overwhelmingly vote in a more affirmative Zionist government.
Israel has a history of overcoming adversity. It always comes out stronger in the end.
We wish the same will be true for America.
Barry Shaw is the International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
