(Official Washington Examiner editorials, July 25) The wildly diverging partisan reactions to Wednesday’s Capitol Hill appearance by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu show that the Left has neither a moral compass nor a sense of U.S. national interests in the Middle East.
Netanyahu is a divisive figure in his own land and worldwide, but even his personal detractors here should welcome him as the duly elected leader of one of America’s most important allies.
Just as it would be unacceptable for U.S. elected leaders to boycott or protest any prime minister of Great Britain, regardless of ideological differences, as long as that great nation remains an ally and a representative democracy, so too is it wrongheaded to maltreat an Israeli leader. Israel remains a beacon of democracy and human rights in a part of the world otherwise hostile to those practices, and it collaborates with the United States, to the great benefit of our nation’s interests, in ways too numerous to count.
Yet President Joe Biden long has treated Netanyahu with disrespect, and Kamala Harris shamefully refused the vice president’s traditional role of presiding when a foreign ally addresses Congress. Some left-wing House and Senate members were even worse. For example, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), one of the most senior Democrats in the House, had the effrontery to call Netanyahu “the worst leader in Jewish history since the Maccabean king who invited the Romans into Jerusalem over 2100 years ago.”
Both Netanyahu and Israel have been subjected to widespread left-wing excoriation in the aftermath of Hamas terrorism and for their international posture in general. As definitively documented by the U.S. Military Academy’s John Spencer, Israel’s efforts in Gaza, compared to other instances of urban warfare, have been remarkably restrained and humane, with a historically low percentage of civilian casualties. Israel has done so while responding to an unprovoked and barbaric attack from an enemy that openly boasts about using women and children as human shields…. [The rest of the editorial is here.]
