Ultimate question: Does Israel have the right to exist?

Is it just me or did President Biden throw Israel under the bus, presumably because the Muslim vote for his re-election is pretty shaky? Biden threatened Israel that the U.S. would withhold further weapons should Israel invade Rafah, the last stronghold of Hamas.

I don’t think it’s just me. As Gary Bauer, founder and director of American Values, commented: “Biden is withholding military assistance, approved by Congress and that he signed into law, for Israel because he is afraid that he will lose the election if Israel finishes off Hamas. That is exactly what Pelosi accused Donald Trump of doing with aid to Ukraine.”

Bauer notes that Biden removed sanctions from Houthi terrorists and from the Iranian regime, which is still the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world. Yet he is leaving Israel high and dry, as it fights a must-win war for its national survival.

Again, I don’t think it’s just me. The excellent political cartoonist Gary Varvel wrote in his newsletter recently: “By refusing to give military aid to Israel, President Biden is supporting Hamas.”  

All of the recent protests on campuses in favor of Hamas appear to be working. Rep. Ilhan Omar, an active Muslim and member of the Squad, tweeted (on X): “This is what young people across the country were protesting for and finally the needle has moved in a significant way. I hope we see more progress, but don’t ever let people tell you that your voices are meaningless, and your actions are worthless. The arc of what is possible is always within us to bend.”

Some of those pro-Palestinian student protesters tried to spoil the comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement address at Duke over the weekend. They walked out on his speech, shouting, “Free Free Palestine.”

Meanwhile, at Columbia, a student was barred from the school recently for a threat of violence. He tweeted (on X): “Zionists, they don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don’t deserve to live….The same way we are very comfortable accepting Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live.”

What a lot of these young pro-Palestinians don’t realize is that ultimately, the position of Hamas calls for the death of Israel.

We keep hearing the phrase “From the River to the Sea.” What does that actually mean? It means that the modern state of Israel belongs to the Palestinians. The Jews have no claim on the land.

As Victor Davis Hanson notes, “When student protestors scream ‘From the river to the sea,’ that is not advocacy for a two-state solution. It is a call to eliminate the state of Israel — lying in between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea—and its 10 million Jewish and Arab citizens. The Hamas charter is a one-state/no-Israel agenda, which we saw attempted on Oct. 7.”

Someone might say, “We need more dialogue.” How can you have dialogue with someone who does not agree with your right to exist?

Last month, I spoke again with New York Times best-selling author Robert Spencer on the radio about the anti-Israel protests at Columbia protests.

For this piece, I asked him for a statement about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large.

He told me, “The conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is not based on land. It is based on Islam. The Qur’an says, ‘Drive them out from where they drove you out’ (2:191). Although it’s actually a historical myth that Israel drove the Arabs out, it is widely believed, and makes destroying Israel a matter of obeying a divine command. This means that while Palestinians might accept Israel in some form as a step toward realization of that goal, ultimately they can never allow Israel to exist at all, no matter how small it may be.”

All of this is ironic in light of Israel’s historic claim on that land. As the late Dr. Charles Krauthammer once noted, "Israel is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago."

Why can’t there be lasting peace in the Middle East? Israel, a tiny nation-state, no bigger than New Jersey, is surrounded by hostile neighbors that don’t want it to continue to exist.

Israel is constantly having to deal with enemies from without and from within. The Judeo-Christian principle of “just war” applies to them — that is, that they have the right to defend themselves from those who would try to destroy them.

The ultimate question is: Does Israel have the right to exist? Of course, it does. Therefore, it has the right to defend itself. It’s too bad the current administration and many in the culture at large are acting like fair-weather friends based on shifting political winds.