Has Israel Been Checkmated, Alone?

After our catastrophic war in Vietnam, the first with television broadcasts from the field, the US cut and run in Iraq and Afghanistan, playing to the soft underbelly of much of the American audience who cannot take the reality of warfare. In the former case, we have made Iraq a part of the Iranian-Shia crescent stretching from Tehran through, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut to the Mediterranean. In the latter case, we are tragically left in control of a benighted, barbaric, misogynist terrorist group that belongs more to the 7th Century than the 21st.

On Friday, the United States put forward a resolution in the UN that demands a ceasefire in Gaza. Particularly noteworthy is that this is the first time that the Biden administration is not voting in unison with Israel. It is also the first time the US stood behind a resolution that employs the word “ceasefire”, indicating a hardening of Washington’s position towards Jerusalem. Yes—There were words within it condemning the actions of October 7th and calling for the release of the hostages, but much of the language is for a ceasefire, sharing moral equivalency between an Iranian-backed terrorist organization, Hamas, and the legitimate government of the state of Israel.

It does not matter that both China and Russia vetoed this resolution on Friday. What matters is that the United States crossed a Rubicon to put Israel in the defendant’s docket, alongside Hamas.

Today, the United States abstained from the edited version of this non-binding resolution in the Security Council because the edits would not condemn the actions of Hamas. The United States, however, still puts the agency on Israel for a ceasefire, ignoring the fact that Hamas has repeatedly rejected such offers and that it is the will of the Israeli people to eradicate the terrorist group Hamas from further threatening the people of Israel.

This ignores the fundamental fact the Islamic Republic of Iran declared war against the United States in November 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, immediately holding 52 US employees hostage in the US Embassy for more than a year.

Part of the problem is the fact that Americans are impatient. They not only lack an appetite for further military engagement, but they would like to snap their fingers and demand a quick and easy solution to the problem. Their solution is to propose a Palestinian state immediately after this war with a “revitalized Palestinian Authority.”

The problem with this is that according to the March 2024 poll taken by the Palestinian Center for Survey and Research, 75 percent of Palestinians living in Judea/Samaria (the West Bank) want the Iranian-backed group Hamas to be in power.

The administration wants to sweep aside this vexing fact, along with many others.

This includes the fact that the Iranian-backed “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” took the lives of three American servicemen in Jordan in January; or that Iranian hit men tried to take out the lives of Ambassador John Bolton, Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Brian Hook on our soil, let along independent journalists and bloggers such as Masih Alinejad.

After our botched engagements in “regime change” in Iraq, it is about time we listen to what the people are actually saying on the ground. By ignoring this and trying to create a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, we are simply signaling our weakness, and empowering Iran, its axis of evil, together with Russia and China, and all of its rapidly multiplying terror proxies.

Most essentially: It ignores the fact that our one reliable friend in the region is the state of Israel, which is sacrificing its blood to fight the Iranian terror proxies on all of its borders.

We thus are empowering Iran. Are we therefore checkmating ourselves?