Biden Tells Israel To ‘Deescalate’ With Hamas. Meanwhile, Rockets Strike Israel From Another Front.

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wanted “a significant de-escalation today” in the battle between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

While Biden was trying to dictate how Israel should back off from responding to the rockets fired at it by Hamas in the south, Israel was being hit by rockets fired from an entirely different direction to the north: Lebanon, likely from the terrorist group Hezbollah.

BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanese security officials say several rockets fired from south Lebanon toward Israel.

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) May 19, 2021

Politico, which reported Biden’s remarks, claimed that the Democratic Party had displayed in years past a “long-standing and virtually unblinking support for Israel.” That statement could be belied with numerous instances from the Obama-Biden Administration, or even the good friendship between former President Jimmy Carter and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat.

Vis-à-vis Carter, from Jay Nordlinger’s fairly comprehensive delineation of him in his famed “Carterpalooza!” in National Review in 2002:

No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel down the river. In the 1990s, Carter became quite close to Yasser Arafat. After the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia was mad at Arafat, because the PLO chief had sided with Saddam Hussein. So Arafat asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over with the princes and restore Saudi funding to him — which Carter did. …

At their first meeting — in 1990 — Carter boasted of his toughness toward Israel, assuring Arafat at one point, “. . . you should not be concerned that I am biased. I am much more harsh with the Israelis.” Arafat, for his part, railed against the Reagan administration and its alleged “betrayals.” Rosalynn Carter, taking notes for her husband, interjected, “You don’t have to convince us!” Brinkley records that this “elicited gales of laughter all round.” Carter himself, according to Brinkley, “agreed that the Reagan administration was not renowned as promise keepers” (this, to Arafat).

As far as Israel and the Obama-Biden administration, The Daily Wire documented some of that history in April:

This week, in the long tradition of Joe Biden being part of administrations that leaked sensitive information about Israel, the Biden administration leaked to The New York Times that Israel had attacked Iran’s ship Saviz in the Red Sea.

Amichai Stein of the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation Kann tweeted, “US official tells NYT: Israel informed the US it attacked Iran’s ship Saviz in the Red Sea in ‘retaliation for earlier strikes on Israeli vessels’ and added: ‘the ship was damaged under the waterline.’”

Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren said in 2010, while Biden was vice president under Obama, “Israel’s ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975 … a crisis of historic proportions.” In October 2012, Danny Danon, chairman of Likud’s international outreach branch, said that the Obama administration’s policies had been “catastrophic.”

In 2020, John Perazzo delineated how often the Obama-Biden administration had leaked information about Israel between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, the Obama-Biden administration, eager to protect Iran, leaked information about a secret deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia in which the Saudis agreed to let Israel use their airspace in the event of an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. On March 22, 2012, the Obama-Biden administration leaked to The New York Times the results of a classified war game. Institute for National Security Studies analyst Yoel Guzansky said of the leak, “It seems like a big campaign to prevent Israel from attacking. I think the [Obama-Biden] administration is really worried Jerusalem will attack and attack soon. They’re trying hard to prevent it in so many ways.”

Israel defense commentator Ron Ben-Yishai wrote in May 2012 that the leaks would “make it more difficult for Israeli decision-makers to order the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] to carry out a strike, and what’s even graver, [would] erode the IDF’s capacity to launch such strike with minimal casualties.”

In April 2012, The New Yorker reported that the Obama-Biden administration leaked information that the Israeli Mossad was funding and training the Iranian opposition group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK). Perazzo noted, “This revelation was intended to portray Israel as being unwilling to negotiate in good faith with the government in Tehran, and to thereby undermine any moral authority that Israel might claim in the event of a future military strike against Iran.”

Perazzo continued: “In early May 2013, two Obama-Biden administration officials leaked classified information to the media indicating that Israel was behind a May 3 airstrike against a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles at the airport in Damascus, Syria. Israeli security analysts said that the leak could not only endanger any Israeli agents who were still on the ground in Syria, but could also increase the likelihood that Syrian President Bashar Assad would retaliate against the Jewish state. Again, the purpose of the leak was to paint Israel as an unnecessarily aggressive, bellicose nation.”

In November 2013 an Obama-Biden administration official leaked to CNN that a Syrian base inLatakia which held Russian-made mobile missile systems that could have been given to the terrorist group Hezbollah had been attacked by Israel warplanes. Perazzo pointed out, “Israeli officials called the leak ‘scandalous’ and ‘unthinkable.’”

In January 2015, the Obama-Biden administration leaked information alleging that an anonymous Mossad official had opposed sanctions on Iran. Within hours, the official, the Mossad’s Tamir Pardo responded, “Contrary to what has been reported, the head of the Mossad did not say that he opposes imposing additional sanctions on Iran…. Regarding the reported reference to ‘throwing a grenade,’ the head of the Mossad did not use this expression regarding the imposition of sanctions, which he believes to be the sticks necessary for reaching a good deal with Iran. He used this expression as a metaphor to describe the possibility of creating a temporary crisis in the negotiations, at the end of which talks would resume under improved conditions.”

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