The Biden administration built a floating pier off Gaza at the cost of $320 million. Hamas mortared it on April 25, before it opened, just to let the Americans know who’s boss. A senior Hamas official told the Associated Press that any foreign soldiers would be treated as “an occupying force and aggression.” The Biden administration has not given the Gazans a lifeline; it has given Hamas more leverage. If the U.S. disappoints Hamas and Hamas lobs more mortars at the pier, American servicemen and women will be in the firing line.
Given the volume of food now coming into Gaza overland from Israel, the pier is no longer needed. The first shipment of goods via the pier was hijacked as soon as the trucks left the secure landing zone. Like the money that the Biden administration started sending to Gaza in 2021, the food will be distributed by Hamas. As with the money, so with the food: U.S. aid is bolstering Hamas’s rule, and the administration knows it. The difference is, in 2021, the administration sent the money in the assumption, then widely shared, that Hamas could be bought off.
Nothing now suggests that Hamas will volunteer to be defeated. Hamas believes it is winning — and if you view the war in Gaza from a bunker in Rafah or a hotel suite in Qatar, you can see why. By massacring Jews in quantities unprecedented since 1945, Hamas has stolen the mantle of “resistance” from Hezbollah. It has discredited the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, damaged society, split the U.S. and Israel, and still retains the support of major American allies like Turkey and Qatar.
The Biden administration has backed Israel by supplying weapons and diplomatic cover. It has undermined Israel by withholding weapons and withdrawing diplomatic cover. It has prolonged the war by restraining Israel. It has pressured Israel to end the war as soon as possible. The ostensible reason is to preserve the political horizon, with its ever-receding mirage of the “two-state solution.”
Everyone in the Middle East knows that the “two-state solution” is a diplomatic bridge to nowhere. The Palestinians have repeatedly blown it up, so the Israelis no longer want to cross it. There is no “road map,” only potholes. Regardless, the Democrats, the State Department, and the Europeans remain committed to the “peace process.” The process is an end to itself. Our diplomats are bureaucratic proceduralists, proceeding to sinecures in the universities and think tanks. The primacy of liberal proceduralism is at stake here. Hence, the Biden administration’s terms for linking a Palestinian state to a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia are more stringent than those of the Saudis themselves. Mohammed bin Salman & Co. know that the Palestinian cause is a bridge to nowhere good. But an Israeli-Gulf alliance would be a wall against Iran.
The peace process cannot continue without a semblance of coherence among the Palestinians. Hence a further set of policy contradictions and mixed messages. Hamas must be removed from power because it is evil, but Hamas must be left in power. Hamas is the enemy of civilization, but Hamas is with our friends in Qatar. Israel must create a situation where Hamas cannot exercise a veto over a revived peace process, but Israel must not go into Rafah.
It is clear, though no one says it aloud in Washington, that if there is such a thing as the Palestinian national movement (rather than the regional norm of clans and militias), then only Hamas is brutal enough to hold it together. It is also clear that, as Salman Rushdie observed on May 20, a Palestinian state would be “Taliban-like.” Strange, Rushdie mused, that the “progressive movements of the Western Left” are backing the creation of a “satellite state of Iran” under the “fascist terrorist group” Hamas.
This was unfair to the Taliban. For years, the Taliban tolerated the presence of two Jews in Afghanistan. That’s two more than Hamas will accept. Yet the Biden administration accepts Hamas, to sustain the two-state fiction and build an even bigger bridge to nowhere: turning Iran from a mortal enemy to a regional proxy.
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The U.S. wasted decades of cash and credibility on the Palestinians. The Iranians supplied the means for the Palestinians to detonate its foundations, even as the Obama and Biden administrations tried to bribe the Iranians. Now the American-led regional structure is tumbling into the sand. The exposure of tunnels between Rafah and Egypt suggests corruption at the highest levels of the Egyptian military, which is American-funded and American-trained. Now we can see why the Egyptians warned Israel against going into Rafah. And we can guess why the Biden administration gave the same warnings.
From the start, the Israelis have said that they face a long campaign in Gaza. The bridge and tunnel disaster cannot be resolved within the administration’s electoral time frame. Biden and the Democrats have personally insulted Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu, too, so neither will offer a diplomatic exit ramp before November. An October surprise can come from anywhere, but expect it where the Biden administration has invited Hamas to strike the U.S. directly: the Gaza pier — and perhaps sooner than October. The bridge to nowhere leads to the road to perdition.
