Morning Glory: Israel unbound

When Israeli Prime Minister visited the United States at the invitation of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) this past summer, the Congressional leaders intended the visit to be a gesture of support for our embattled ally. 

But Vice President Harris, who ought to have presided at the joint session of Congress in her role as President of the Senate along with Speaker Johnson —with both seated behind Netanyahu—instead skipped the Israeli PM’s address to the joint session of Congress on July 24. Harris thus sent a very public message to her supporters—she did not care to reschedule previous commitments though Netanyahu’s visit was long in planning—and then met with Netanyahu privately as did President Biden. 

Whatever the President and Vice President said to the Prime Minister after what the Vice President did by way of very visible messaging, Netanyahu embraced a different strategy for Israel after his return to Jerusalem. Two months later, when Netanyahu returned to the states to deliver a fiery address the United Nations General Assembly last week, that new strategy had already rolled out in large part in the region, though it is crescendoing still. 

First, Israel took the war everywhere in Gaza, and Hamas is all but obliterated as an organized fighting force though 101 hostages remain in the terrorists’ tunnel network and the condition of Yahya Sinwar is unknown. Sinwar’s military commander, Mohammed Deif, was killed in an Israeli air raid in southern Gaza on July 13, though that news was not confirmed until after Netanyahu’s visit to Congress. 

Not long after Netanyahu’s return to Israel, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated on July 31 along with his personal bodyguard while in the  Iran’s capital of Tehran. 

Fuad Shukr, a senior commander in Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, was killed by the Israeli Air Force a day earlier, on July 30. Hezbollah’s top military commander thereafter, Ibrahim Aqil, and 10 other senior commanders of Hezbollah’s elite ‘Radwan Force’—structured as special operation forces trained to invade Israel and hold terriroty—were killed in an air strike on September 20. 

On September 28 the leader of Hezbollah, its ‘Secretary General’ for four decades, Hassan Nasrallah, and at least 10 other senior members of the terror organization were killed in a massive Israeli air strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Among the dead was also at least one senior general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. Iranian state media confirmed General Abbas Nilforoushan, 58, had been at the doomed conference in Nasrallah’s underground bunker. 

In the middle of these strikes at all of the senior terror leadership in Lebanon, hundreds if not thousands of Hezbollah terrorists and their accomplices in Lebanon were killed or wounded in the beeper and walkie-talkie attack that astonished the world. (Israel has not claimed responsibility for this attack.) 

Over the weekend, strikes continued on the remaining senior leaders of Hezbollah, Hamas and other terror groups and a second round of punishing air strikes on significant assets in Yemen were conducted by the Israeli Air Force in reprisals for that country’s ruling terrorists attacks on Israeli via ballistic missiles. 

There were also reports on Monday that the Israeli special forces had been conducting raids in southern Lebanon, including inside of Hezbollah’s vast tunnel network, in preparation for ground operations to secure northern Israel from the threat of ongoing attacks against the Jewish State which began on October 8th, the day after the barbaric Hamas massacre of 1,200 inside the southern border of Israel (and the kidnapping of 250 more, more than a hundred of whom have been rescued or released via negotiations last fall.) A desperate and disorganized Hamas seems incapable of even responding to proposals for hostage exchanges and the IDF is going about methodically destroying Gaza’s 500 miles of terrorist tunnels.

Netanyahu and his governing coalition got stronger this weekend as a former ally turned rival became an ally again as Gideon Saar brought his ‘New Hope’ party into the governing coalition led by Netanyahu and his Likud party. 

What this week and the next four that follow right up to the United States presidential election will bring in Israel, Lebanon, Gaza and the entire region is unknown, but what is clear is that Israel does not feel in the least constrained by President Biden and his team and their mantra of ‘de-escalation.’ 

Israel tried every tactic requested by the United States, did its best to negotiate a cease-fire and hostage deal, and was repeatedly spurned by the terrorists in Gaza. (The consequences of the U.S.-enforced delays will be assessed after the wars conclude.) Though Vice President Harris had ‘studied the maps’ of Rafah and publicly concluded that Israel could not evacuate the more than a million Palestinians taking refuge there, Israel in fact did just that, and without loss of innocent life save those of the soldiers of the IDF killed in the Rafah operations and six hostages Hamas terrorists ruthlessly executed, including an American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. 

At the same time as the Gaza War intensified, Israel hammered Iran’s other proxies in Lebanon and Yemen, both of which—Hezbollah and the Houthis—had kept up a barrage of rocket, drone and missile strikes on the Jewish State. 

After Netanyahu’s visit to the Congress and his snub by the possible next president, it seems clear he returned to Israel resolved to prosecute Israel’s seven front war on his terms, not those of the United States, which itself continues to be subject to missile and drone barrages against its fleet and land forces in the region and to reply only intermittently. Nothing the United States has done can compare with Israel’s withering counter-attacks. Israel is restoring deterrence in the region and Iran, which threatened to strike back against Israel, has not yet attempted a reprise of its direct assault on Israel in April. 

Whatever Biden and Harris and all their senior officials intended Israel to do, unless they recommended Netanyahu do all of the above, then Israel has shrugged off the demands made of it by the appeasement-driven Biden-Harris administration. 

Perhaps Netanyahu is simply unwilling to risk what are widely expected to be the anti-Israel policies of Harris should she win. Perhaps he took the measure of President Biden and concluded the American Commander-on-Chief is spent and not really in command at all. 

Correlation is, of course, not causation. But whatever Biden and Harris said to Netanyahu in July, unless it was ‘Go get them,’ the Israeli Prime Minister has decided to protect his people and not his friendships with the clueless foreign policy blob inside the Beltway.

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.