VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Try a little honesty about Israel

Both the Harris-Walz presidential ticket and now lame-duck President Joe Biden keep insisting that they are Israel’s best friend.

A snarly Biden recently bragged at a contentious news conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think (Netanyahu) should remember that.”

Yet the thin-skinned and triggered Biden’s prickliness poorly hid — or perhaps revealed — the truth: This administration knows that it is responsible for the current explosion of the Middle East and the particular dilemmas of Israel.

Biden further revealed his blame-gaming of the Israeli government when asked another loaded question about purported Netanyahu election interference, saying, “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know.”

Election interference? Biden apparently forgot who just flew Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into swing state Pennsylvania, just as early and mail-in voting there began, to lobby for more aid even as he trashed Donald Trump and JD Vance to a left-wing magazine.

Recently, Kamala Harris refused to say whether the Netanyahu administration is even an ally of the United States. Her Democrat running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, could not state whether the Democratic ticket would approve of an Israeli response — by either targeting the Iranian nuclear bomb program or its oil fields and exporting facilities — to some 500 Iranian missiles and rockets that hit the Jewish state.

Another Bob Woodward racy and gossipy tell-all book just appeared. It alleges that Biden despised Netanyahu and has reportedly smeared him to aides: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad (expletive) guy!”

What are we to make of this Biden-Harris-Walz mess?

It is an election year and one of the closest races in modern memory. Biden and his successors, Harris-Walz, know that support for Israel is a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and critical for Democratic unity. Yet they feel they must also pander to anti-Israel Muslim American voters who may determine the Electoral College votes of critical swing state Michigan.

Democrat politicos square that circle by claiming they support Israel — despite damning the conservative Netanyahu. That way they seek to blame Netanyahu for alienating Arab and Muslim American voters, while they do not alienate left-wing Jewish and pro-Israeli Democrats.

Two, for all the invective, a demonized Netanyahu is now regaining public support in Israel. The Israeli public approves of his near destruction of Hamas, the ongoing brilliant Israeli emasculation of Hezbollah and Israel’s revelations that the once widely feared terrorist regime in Iran may in fact well prove to be a paper tiger.

Three, Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan admitted just eight days before the Oct. 7 massacres that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” His boast was an admission that Biden and Harris had inherited from the prior Trump administration a stable Middle East.

So what blew up Sullivan’s quietude? Certainly not Netanyahu or Israel in general. It was the terrorists of Hamas who surprise attacked and murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians during peace and a Jewish holiday. Their slaughtering torturing, raping and hostage-taking revealed a level of precivilization barbarism rarely seen in the modern era.

Israel was simultaneously targeted by rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah that would eventually number more than 20,000. It did not respond to the bloodbath with a full-scale invasion of Gaza until Oct. 27, some three weeks after the slaughtering.

During that interim, for most of the Muslim world and both U.S. Muslim communities and on American campuses, there was rejoicing at the news of slaughtered Jews.

For more than three years, the Biden administration had signaled Israel’s enemies that it no longer acted like a close ally of the past. After it all, Biden-Harris lifted sanctions on a hostile Iran, giving it $100 billion in oil windfalls. It begged Iran to re-enter the disastrous Iran deal. It abandoned the Abraham Accords. It lifted the terrorist designation from the terrorist Houthis. It restored fungible aid to the Hamas tunnel builders. It gave new aid to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.

Israel’s enemies got the Biden message: attack the Jewish state and perhaps Americans for the first time in a half-century may not really mind that much. And so they did in unison.

Rather than admitting their own role in igniting the Middle East, Biden and Harris now blame the victims of their own incendiary foreign policy.

The final irony? Israel has concluded that Biden-Harris foolhardiness can be toxic — and endanger its very survival — and so will not agree to its own suicide. Instead, Israel seeks to finish a multifaceted war it did not seek. And one of whose beneficiaries from Israeli blood and treasure will be the United States itself, given Israel is now systematically weakening America’s own existential enemies.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.