In advance of Biden's visit to Jerusalem, a warning
Joe Biden is coming to Israel, likely in July.
Prior to this visit — to Jerusalem and other places — it is important to set the stage about what has happened in the region when fresh people, capable of thinking out of the Establishment box, came to the Middle East; turned perceived logic on its head; and made a miraculous difference by introducing the Abraham Accords, a new peace concept in the area.
Prior to that, the established notion was that peace was impossible until Israel bowed to international pressure by surrendering vital territory, legitimately its own, to a violent Jew-hating Palestinian entity.
Thanks to people like President Trump and Jared Kushner, they were proven wrong.
Moderate Muslim countries see greater value in normalizing and extending ties with Israel. This has brought peace, progress, and greater prosperity to the participating countries.
One reason the world did not collapse with the Abraham Accords is that most Arab countries look on the Palestinians as an expensive nuisance and have stepped back from using them as a battering ram to bring down the Jewish State.
But it seems the developing peace camp in a new Middle East has not reached the ears and eyes of the Biden White House or the State Department, both of whom persist in slapping Israel with a wet rag to get us to move into granting even more concessions to a clearly avowed anti-Semitic and violent enemy that persists in an obsession of achieving a Jewless world in a Palestine that stretches from the River to the Sea, even to the extent that they want to divide Jerusalem, our sovereign capital.
They believe that giving Jerusalem to the Palestinians, likely to be led by Hamas, will bring peace even closer.
They cannot see the foolishness of this notion. Or maybe they do!
This is the current atmosphere in an Israel that Biden will visit, whenever he chooses to arrive.
He will tell us he loves us, and that he has our back, but we don't trust him, nor do we believe him, based on our experiences with him.
He has stabbed us in the back too many times in the past.
As vice president, he canvassed countries, including Ukraine, to vote against Israel in the U.N. Security Council in a disgraceful resolution that called Jews living in Judea an "illegal Israeli occupation."
Biden has threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Israel several times.
When he became president, he reintroduced illegal payments that run counter to two important United States laws, which give millions of dollars to unrepentant Palestinian killers of Jews.
They call it "welfare payments." We call it the Palestinian "Pay to Slay" reward system. The more Jews you kill, the more money you get, courtesy of U.S. and European taxpayers.
More recently, his administration is pushing to divide Jerusalem, Israel's sovereign capital, as a sop to intransigent Palestinians.
Whenever he decides to come, our leaders will treat him with the respect due to a sitting American president, but we will demand of our leaders not to make negative concessions to this impotent (at home and abroad) leader who has gathered around him more anti-Israel activists than have ever occupied the White House and State Department in American history.
Biden's visit is a return to the old, failed policies of a past Establishment that achieved nothing in the way of peace, but instead made the world, especially the Middle East, a more tenuous and dangerous place.
Barry Shaw is international public diplomacy director for the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
Image: U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv (cropped) via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.