The business model of terrorism is killing people and then demanding a payoff. The game always works the same way. The terrorists attack, their targets fight back, and a third party sends in the diplomats to negotiate on behalf of the terrorists before they get hit too hard.
The Islamic terrorist war against Israel has worked exactly this way for generations.
Like a radio pop song that plays every time you go into a supermarket, you know the next verse and can feel the next beat before it even kicks in no matter how much you hate the music.
It’s the same way with the regular mini wars that begin with a manufactured political provocation that can be blamed on Israel, (this time a court ruling evicting illegal Muslim colonists occupying homes that were seized during the ‘48 ethnic cleansing of Jews from Jerusalem), followed by terrorist violence with the usual pattern of attack and escalation.
Hamas and a few of its allies shell Israeli towns and cities using the latest Iranian technology and some of their own cruder models. Israel responds by calculatedly taking out terrorist compounds which Hamas has, with equal calculation, filled with civilian human shields.
Especially children.
Politicians, the media, and social media (three distinctions without a difference) rush to attack Israel, vastly inflating the already inflated casualty figures put out by the terrorists, lying about the nature of the conflict, and doing their best to mainstream antisemitism a little more.
The Biden administration makes a few public statements vaguely supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, an absurd point, and sends in mediators to negotiate the payoff for the terrorists.
Israel had a brief break from America acting as the paymaster and bagman for the terrorists.
It was a refreshing pause especially for all the children who didn’t get bombed, the homes that didn’t have rockets smash through their roofs, and the soldiers who didn’t get shot just so that State Department negotiators could tell Israel the current going rate for ending the attacks.
Islamic terrorists aren’t crazy or irrational. The average suicide bomber might be, but their leadership doesn’t do anything without a profit motive.
The profits for Islamic terrorism against Israel come in two ways.
First, the terrorists are backed by Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and the rest of the Islamist gang to carry out attacks on Israel. Second, the terrorists are rewarded by the United States, Europe, and Israel for ending the attacks.
This never leads to peace because if you keep rewarding terrorists for ending the violence, you’re also telling them that if they do it all over again, they’ll profit from the violence.
Paying the terrorists not to attack you is really the same thing as paying them to attack you.
But the essence of the peace game is obliviousness. That means believing that there are root causes that can resolve the underlying grievances. The root cause is the existence of Israel.
The terrorists want to destroy Israel: Israel doesn’t want to be destroyed.
And the negotiators came up with a compromise which satisfies no one: a two state solution that will only destroy a part of Israel. The solution, which has solved nothing and will solve nothing, incrementally destroys parts of Israel by handing them over to the terrorists.
The amount of Israel being destroyed through this process has kept on increasing ever since the original fake peace deal was celebrated by Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Yitzchak Rabin at the White House. Every exchange of fire leads to a push for a new peace “compromise” that will destroy even more of Israel by handing more territory over to the terrorists.
Since this process provides the terrorists with zero incentive to stop the violence, it failed.
The Trump administration overturned conventional wisdom by recognizing that the terrorists, who had repeatedly rejected and sabotaged peace negotiations for two generations, not the Israelis, who had shown up for every bad faith attempt at negotiations, were the problem.
Instead of taking away territory from Israel and giving it to the terrorists, President Trump began recognizing Israeli claims to parts of Israel, while cutting off money and political support from the terrorists. The terrorists didn’t turn pacifist, but they turned down the violence because they understood that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, unlike Kerry, wouldn’t be bailing them out.
They just waited, while Kerry privately assured the terrorists Trump would soon be gone.
The Biden administration is going back to the same old policies of propping up the terrorists. And the first thing you need to do when propping up the terrorists is giving them some leverage.
The leverage of terrorists is terrorism.
Rebooting the old negotiating process requires a war. And so the Biden administration turned on the money tap to the terrorists and their Iranian sponsors. It made it clear that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the anti-Iran coalition linked to the Abraham Accords were out of style in D.C.
Biden also appointed Hady Amr, a veteran of Qatar’s Brookings operation, a state backer of Hamas, as his “point man” on the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” which had been low on conflict.
At least the conflict had been low until Biden got started.
Amr, a Lebanese anti-Israel activist, had made no secret of his raving hatred for Israel and support for the terrorists.
“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr had declared during his time as an anti-Israel activist.
“I have news for every Israeli,” Amr ranted in one column written after Sheikh Salah Shahada, the head of Hamas’ Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was taken out by an Israeli air strike.
Arabs “now have televisions, and they will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents.”
These days, Amr is the one doing the avenging for Israel’s attacks on Hamas.
Amr has repeatedly argued for a deal with Hamas. In 2019, he co-wrote an article arguing that Hamas should offer Israel a cease-fire with the PLO acting as a broker for the deal in exchange for Israel “offering a significant move on Israeli-Palestinian peace.” That’s diplo-mafia speak for appeasing the terrorists with more territory that they can use to launch attacks on Israel.
But you can’t have a cease-fire until you first have a war. That’s the war now raging.
It’s the familiar model already embraced by terrorist organizations who pretend that their political and military wings are separate organizations.
The Biden administration policy is for the PLO to play the political wing to Hamas’ military wing. Hamas starts wars, and the PLO collects territory and concessions to stop the fighting, while disclaiming any responsibility for the violence. And the Biden administration oversees this terrorist shakedown by insisting that Israel make more concessions for ‘peace’. Diplomats and experts go around making the same false promises that Israeli appeasement of the PLO will discredit Hamas and make it possible for Israelis and the terrorists killing them to live in peace.
The purpose of this political strategy is to isolate Israel, creating a system that profits from terrorism while maintaining enough plausible deniability to keep a fake peace process going.
Generations of this horror show have not been enough to discredit it. Not to the diplomats who keep pushing this big lie, and not to American Jews who when faced with a choice between blaming Israel and the politicians they support, always choose to blame Israel.
Biden is rebooting the same old scam after stocking his administration with appointees like Amr who have made no secret of their hatred for the Jewish State.
Biden’s Senior Director for Intelligence on the National Security Council, Maher Bitar, was pictured dancing in a keffiyah in front of a banner reading, “Divest from Israel Apartheid”.
Reema Dodin, Biden’s Deputy White House Legislative Director, had argued that, “suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people.”
Sarah Margon, Biden’s Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, had advocated for boycotts of Israel and cheered a proposal to destroy the Jewish State.
The Obama administration stocked its foreign policy team with Iran Firsters, while the Biden administration has gone even further with a roster of Hamas Firsters.
The Biden administration seeks to blame Israel for a conflict for which it provided a profit motive.
The fighting in Israel commenced after the Biden administration sent the signal that it was resuming its support for the terrorists. The violence is a prelude to the negotiations. And Biden’s people have already laid out their plans for getting Israel to pay off the terrorists. All the terrorists had to do was attack Israel and wait for Biden’s team to do their dirty work for them.
The Biden administration wanted a war in Israel. It needed to blame Israel for that war. And now it got everything it wanted. The next stage is the pressure campaign against Israel tying together domestic anti-Israel lobbies like J Street, and the radical Left like AOC and Warren, to pressure American Jewish organizations to drop their already weak support for the Jewish State. And then, having isolated Israel, they’ll move in for the kill with their big pitch for a terror state.
All of this is bad for Israel, but it’s also terrible for America.
Everything that the Biden administration’s team of terrorist sympathizers is doing to Israel, they also intend to do to America. If you think gas prices are bad now, wait until Iran really starts throwing its weight around. And while Biden’s people are insisting that the only real terrorist threat is domestic while dismantling our counterterrorism system, the Jihad will come.
Al Qaeda built up its networks into a massive international killing machine on Clinton’s watch, and ISIS grew into a state power while Obama was building up the Arab Spring. We don’t know what terrorist nightmares Biden will breed, but they are likely to be worse than either one.
Israelis are in bomb shelters now, but after a few years of Biden, Americans might be there too.
{Reposted from the Sultan Knish blog}