With Guardians Like These
Chuck Schumer’s recent comments about Israel exhibit arrogance and ignorance.
Joel Zinberg, City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-problem-with-schumers-israel-speech
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has long claimed to be a shomer—Hebrew for guardian or watchman—of Israel and the Jewish people. But his speech last Thursday on the Senate floor, in which he called for new elections in Israel, more readily brings two Yiddish words to mind.
The first word is chutzpah, which connotes arrogance-laced presumption. That perfectly describes Schumer instructing Israel—the only democracy in the entire Middle East—to jettison its elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold new elections, or else. Schumer threatened: “[i]f Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down . . . then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy.” That is election interference, plain and simple.
The Israeli people are quite capable of deciding when to hold elections and whom to elect, notwithstanding Schumer’s insinuation to the contrary. No foreign politician—even, or especially, one who prefaces his remarks with “as a Jew” and “a life-long supporter of Israel”—has any business interfering with an ally’s democratic processes. Critics might point to Netanyahu’s 2015 address to Congress opposing the proposed Iran nuclear deal. Democrats were livid at the time. But Netanyahu was arguing against a specific agreement that many Americans, and most Israelis, believed posed an existential threat to Israel and the world. He was not advocating for President Obama’s ouster.
Schumer claimed Netanyahu is “allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” But does anyone doubt Schumer is ditching Israel to save Joe Biden by placating his party’s radical left? Unsurprisingly, Biden praised the speech.
The second word is sechel—common sense or wisdom—something Schumer’s speech clearly lacked. The Senate majority leader claimed that the Israeli people are being “stifled by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” But the only people stuck in the past are those, like Schumer and the foreign policy establishment, who persist in wanting to impose a two-state solution that Palestinians have never favored and that Israelis, brutalized by decades of intifadas and terrorism culminating in October 7, have given up on.
Schumer identified the four obstacles to peace as Hamas and “the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways,” Netanyahu, right-wing Israelis, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. This ignores how Palestinians over the years have rejected multiple opportunities to form their own state. Indeed, polling just prior to October 7 found that nearly three quarters of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution. Reuters reports that 72 percent of Palestinians “support and tolerate” Hamas, believing that its October 7 attack was “correct.”
If Israel ends its war to eradicate Hamas, as Schumer urges, the country would be rewarding the atrocities of October 7. Hamas, the Palestinians who support them, and their useful idiot supporters in the West who chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free,” all want a land that, to use the Nazi term, is Judenfrei—cleansed of Jews. Hamas has pledged to repeat the horrors of October 7 and kill as many Jews as possible. If Hamas is not destroyed, peace of any kind will be impossible.
Instead of coercing Israel, Schumer should pressure the international community to withdraw support from the aged and corrupt Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas—now in the 18th year of his four-year term and disliked by 90 percent of Palestinians. Moving on from Hamas and Abbas is the only way moderate Palestinians might come forward as partners for peace. Israelis will reckon with Netanyahu and his failure to protect their country at a time of their choosing. Meantime, the self-styled shomer should bite his tongue.
Joel Zinberg M.D., J.D. Dr. Zinberg was senior economist and general counsel at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, 2017-2019.
