One of the things I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen is that the most interesting thing about the current war between Israel and Hamas is that the surrounding Sunni Arab nations are staying out of it. This observation may be meaningful, for Haaretz has reported that not only are the Sunni Arabs staying out of the war, but they are also encouraging Israel to finish what she started. This is great news if only Biden doesn’t undermine this excellent situation.

Here in America, we know that Democrats are now the party of antisemitism, something that Democrat Jews are only slowly realizing. It’s in Democrat enclaves—e.g., big cities, academia, the White House, the State Department, and the CIA—that rampant Israel hatred, a mere variant of antisemitism, is making itself known.

Biden is paying lip service to supporting Israel, but the ceasefire he bullied Israel into only benefitted Hamas because Israel lost momentum and Hamas was able to regroup. Even worse, as Caroline Glick reports, Israel has no ability to push back against Biden’s pressure because Biden holds the keys to Israel’s armory.

Without America, Israel has no weapons. All her systems integrated with American-supplied ammunition. Even after the Obama administration made plain that Israel could not count on having a friend in the White House, Israel didn’t or couldn’t disengage from her dependence on America’s defense contractors. For that reason, Biden is now effectively managing Israel’s war…and he is, as I said, no friend to Israel.

Image: Gazan protesters in 2018. YouTube screen grab.

That’s depressing but, on the bright side, Israel’s Sunni Arab neighbors have been strangely passive. It turns out that, according to a Haaretz report from a couple of days ago, before Hamas broke the ceasefire and Israel reengaged in battle, this passivity is because they are as anxious as Israel is to see Hamas destroyed. The Haaretz report is behind a paywall, but this is the gist:

There are rumors that Qatar, which is headquarters for Hamas’s billionaire leaders, has been trying to broker a cease-fire that would see Hamas release its hostages in exchange for Israel releasing every single tried-and-convicted Gazan and West Bankians in its prisons. Of course, it’s worth noting that, while the hostages are women and children, the people in Israel’s prisons ended up there for attempted murder. Moreover, Omri Ceren believes some have been too badly tortured to be released.

The Qatar plan, if real, is a terrible deal for Israel. To drive home how bad it is, remember that Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the October 7 attack, was one of those released many years ago in exchange for Gilad Shalit, the Israel soldier that Hamas had kidnapped. Now, Sinwar is saying that “October 7 was just a rehearsal” and that his goal is Israel’s “annihilation.” He is the essence of evil, and those who support Hamas have no moral excuse for doing so.

Fortunately, so far, it’s unlikely that the Israeli people will support a deal of the kind Qatar is allegedly trying to broker. For them, it would be like finding you have a deadly tumor and starting surgery to remove it. Then, halfway through the surgery, with only part of the tumor removed, the surgeon not only closes you up but also gives you vitamins that, rather than strengthening you, feed the remainder of the tumor.

Haaretz claims that Israelis aren’t the only ones opposed to this deal. According to the article, even as countries like Egypt and Jordan make the usual noises about Israel being the bad guy in all this, talks behind the scenes are quite different. In those talks, “almost every leader in the region, including in most of the Gulf states, is urging Israel to end the war only after Hamas is defeated, since they view the organization as a dangerous domestic enemy.”

That contention is entirely believable. Every nation that’s ever taken in people from Gaza and the West Bank has come to regret it. Gaza and the West Bank don’t produce productive citizens. They produce people who are completely dependent on government largesse and whose only skill is protest and revolution.

In the Book of Exodus, after the Jews left Egypt, God didn’t want people who had been conditioned to be slaves to enter the land of Israel. Instead, He consigned them to 40 years in the desert so that the old generation would die before the new generation entered the Promised Land.

In the case of the Gazans, we have a people conditioned for either dependency or violence, and there’s no desert in which to put them. The Sunni nations don’t want them, so they’re hoping that Israel will do the dirty work of destroying their worst elements and bringing the rest of the population to heel—just as the Allies did with the Germans and Nazis during and after WWII.