When then-candidate Joe Biden and his foreign relations and security teams sat down in his home in Wilmington, Delaware, to shape the U.S. Presidency for what he was going to offer the country, two ideas came forward:
The team he gathered during his vice presidency years would prefer President Barack Obama’s White House. Still, he had his agenda to create a narration for “the first African American president, so the second-best bet for the Bush Remnant democrats-turned-conservative” hawks was Biden’s Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Biden, a strong supporter of Bush the Father’s Gulf War and Bush the Son’s Iraq War, had qualms about providing a refuge to the architects of those wars under his wings. The team, of course, had in no time choreographed the best action plan for a former senator and vice president who did not have a political backbone other than expedient opportunism. (He used to call it “prudent politics.”)
The resentment that the Bush Remnant “democrats-turned-conservative” hawks (read NeoCons) had about Türkiye’s rejection to provide a stepping stone to the U.S. Infantry before the infamous Battle of Baghdad (in which 34 U.S. and U.K. soldiers died and about 60,000 Arab and Kurdish inhabitants of the city perished), James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), who was waiting for the decision to allow the U.S. forces pass through Türkiye to Iraq and when it turned the request down, had said to the U.S. press embedded in his command that “Turks will pay dearly.” Jim Mattis became the epitome of that rancor when he served as the U.S. secretary of defense. He resigned when President Donald Trump ordered him to withdraw from Iraq and Syria, leaving the job to fight with Daesh in Türkiye. Now, Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of the U.S. Forces-Iraq, was second in command for Mattis to be Biden’s secretary of defense, and this is not a random coincidence.
Biden seems to be religiously implementing the action plan Robert Kagan-Anthony Blinken’s team designed. Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife), currently serving as under-secretary of state for political affairs, and a passel of “Our Boys” are meticulously carrying out that two-fold policy in the Middle East. That is not all of that “Wilsonian” world architecture that Biden has in mind. (“Having in mind” is just a metaphoric expression because Mr. Biden is dementedly saluting his back end as if it is someone else!) “Great Walk” over Russia – after its federation and military might be wiped out – to Pekin is in the offing. But it is not the matter at hand now.
(See Jordan Henry’s excellent piece in the National Interest Review about Biden’s foreign policy team: “It is difficult to escape the impression that a Biden administration might constitute a restoration of neoconservatism in liberal hawk garb.”)
In Turkish folklore, we have an excellent allegoric trope about a bunch of oarsmen fighting each other for nothing but to draw the attention of those who would hire a boat to cross the Golden Horn. Boatsmen’s fight (kayıkçı kavgası), which looks like a vicious contention, barbarous threats flying and machetes swinging, somehow entertaining but scaring some, seems to be the best metonymy for the recent “rebuke from the U.S. to Israel.” Biden, the vicious-looking oarsman with a machete, declined an “invitation in the near term” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, “Israel cannot continue down this road.” We are to understand that the Biden administration has put significant pressure on Netanyahu’s government to postpone the planned judicial overhaul. In Netanyahu’s “mind-your-own-business” response, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said Israel is “not another star on the American flag. We are a democracy, and I expect the U.S. president to understand that.”
Oh my! If you know nothing about the U.S. protective role in the area for Israel since the atonement the whole U.S. people figuratively made after confessing that the Holocaust is as American crime as it is Hitler’s, if you don’t know the motives behind the dismemberment of Iraq and Syria, you’d scream to the nearest bomb shelter!
I have news for Mr. Itamar: My dear minister, David, is the 51st star on the U.S. banner. If it were not, the 170,000 Syrian people would be receiving emergency aid after the devastating earthquake since your country couldn’t destroy the Aleppo airport, the only entry port to the country, for no reason. Your country is occupying almost all the Palestinian lands that historically belonged to Arabs and were given to them by the United Nations. I am not going to the line-item list that Israel has been privileged with by the U.S. You know it, and the whole world knows it.
What happened after Ben-Gvir’s and Netanyahu’s indomitable responses to Biden? The next day after the show of valiancy, Netanyahu postponed his effort to change how Israel appoints judges to the Supreme Court. The court now has an essential mission in Israel and could rule over future legislation from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition. After months of demonstrations in Israel, with protesters saying it’s an attempt to pave the way for a nationalist and religious agenda, did we hear any characterization like “autocratic, dictatorial, totalitarian” about Netanyahu or his government from those so-called liberal lighthouses of democracy?
Why did we not? Why was the White House quick to praise Netanyahu’s effort to paper over the dispute in his response to Biden’s rebuke?
That is why, my Yedida Itamar: Israel is “yet another star” on the American flag. Get used to it!
