The Speech that Biden Should Give

This is the speech that President Biden should give but never will.  This speech demonstrates his leadership and articulates the moral clarity that is missing from the discourse on the war facing Israel.  But he won’t give it because he faces too much political pressure from those who seek to demonize Jews and the state of Israel.

My fellow Americans, I want to talk to you about the ongoing war that Israel is fighting on multiple fronts, in particular in Gaza. It is time for this war to end. It has gone on too long.  I have spoken with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and he agrees. We both want to see an end to unnecessary civilian deaths. That is why we have proposed a three-stage plan for a cease fire, conditioned on the release of the hostages.

But Hamas has rejected this plan.  

Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas, sees civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices.”  Those are his exact words. Hamas believes that by prolonging this war and inflicting ongoing casualties among Gazans, he will force world opinion to turn against the US and Israel and achieve a cease fire on his terms.

We will not let that happen.

Israel has the right and the obligation to defeat Hamas. Israel suffered an unprovoked attack by terrorists on October 7 that committed the worst possible war crimes: rape, mutilation, torture, beheadings and burning alive helpless civilians.  Israel should not and cannot live side-by-side with Gaza if Hamas is in power. This is a “just” war in every sense.

I want to be clear about what caused this war. Hamas is an alliance between Sunni and Shia factions with a death-cult mandate to kill Jews and Israelis. Israel bears no responsibility for starting this war. It left Gaza in 2005. Hamas took over in a bloody coup and began its campaign of terrorism against Israel.  

Since then, Gaza has received more per capita foreign aid than anywhere in the world. But it did not use that money to support its citizens. It spent the money to buy weapons and build terror tunnels.

The US will provide the military and intelligence support to defeat Hamas. Hamas will be defeated, as was Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II and ISIS more recently. When this war is over, Hamas will no longer wield power over Gazans.

We will continue to ensure that sufficient humanitarian relief is provided to Gaza.  There have been problems delivering that aid to civilians in Gaza, but that is the fault of Hamas, which steals the aid before it can be delivered to the citizens of Gaza. It is also the fault of Egypt, which has prevented aid from being delivered in Rafah. Israel has provided vital support – even though it is under no obligation to do so – and has been a valued partner in the supply of humanitarian aid.

Israel will prevail in Gaza. That victory will come in months, not years. There is only one way to accelerate that schedule and end this war sooner. That is for Hamas to accept the terms of the cease fire proposal that has been endorsed by the US, Israel, Egypt and Qatar. I urge Hamas to do so and end the loss of civilian lives.

But Israel faces aggression on other fronts. Hezbollah is firing missiles – sometimes hundreds a day – at northern Israel, turning that region into an uninhabitable death zone. In early April, Iran launched a massive missile and drone attack on Israel.  There have been attacks from Yemen and Syria.

With our support, Israel can and will defeat those enemies, just as it will defeat Hamas.  

I have a message for Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and anyone else who targets Israel and seeks its destruction. You will fail. All you will do is cause unnecessary civilian deaths. You will cause death and destruction among your countrymen. End your aggression or you will suffer devastating consequences.

I want to offer three more messages – to the leaders of our academic institutions, to the media and to global policymakers.

This spring, we saw demonstrations and encampments at approximately 90 colleges and universities. I am not here to tell the leaders of those institutions how to control and discipline those protestors. I realize that there is a balance that must be struck between free speech and how you operate your institutions.  

But I implore you to educate your students. When students accuse Israel of genocide, racism, apartheid or settler-colonialism, they are wrong. They are wrong on the facts, wrong on the history, and wrong on the definition of those terms.  Genocide was a term defined in the aftermath of the Holocaust to apply to the purposeful extermination of a race of people. That applies to Hamas but not to Israel. Apartheid is a form of racism and applies to discrimination based on someone’s race or ethnicity. But Israel does not discriminate against its Arab citizens. Those citizens enjoy the same rights as Israel’s Jewish citizen and serve in every branch of the Israeli government and are fully integrated into its society. Jews have lived in Israel and in the West Bank since biblical times, and Arabs have lived there since the seventh century. Both people are indigenous to the land of Israel, and neither is guilty of colonizing the other and both have rights to settle in Israel.

When people make calls to “globalize the intifada,” they need to know they are calling for the murder of innocent civilians.

Educate your students. Teach them the unbiased, factual history of the Middle East.  Explain that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and the only one that provides far-reaching human-rights protection. Israel has never started a war. It wants nothing but peace with its neighbors. When your students accuse it of genocide and other false charges, you need to correct them.

We must fight the antisemitism that has infected our society. Since October 7, there has been a widespread unmasking of antisemitism. Those people did not become antisemitic overnight. They have been miseducated and uninformed. A key place to start is with our educational system – at all levels. We must train our teachers to understand the factual history of the region, to ensure that students are properly educated.

The American media must do a better job at reporting on this war. If you are uncritically reporting the number of deaths in Gaza without citing its source as Hamas, a terrorist organization, then you are not doing your job. The vast destruction of buildings in cities like Khan Yunis was caused mostly by booby traps planted by Hamas. If you are portraying that destruction as the fault of Israel, you are not doing your job. If you are showing only images of wounded and dead civilians, and not of Hamas terrorists, then you are not doing your job. And if you refer to those terrorists as militants and not by their proper name – terrorists – then you are not doing your job. Even better, call them jihadists. That is what they are.

Our policymakers face a great challenge. The institutions that were established to facilitate global peace and justice are failing us. I speak of the United Nations, UNRWA, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.  The UN has a pathetic record of antisemitism. UNRWA is an arm of Hamas and has educated the children of Gaza to hate Jews. Three quarters of the jihadists on October 7 were educated in schools run by UNRWA. The ICC has threatened to issue arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu. That would be a travesty and would thoroughly delegitimize that institution. The ICJ has taken similar steps to accuse Israel of genocide. That is a false charge that is devoid of evidence.

I call on policymakers in the US and elsewhere to reform those institutions. They are not working. They are doing more to incite conflict than to promote peace.  

I want to say a few words about Prime Minister Netanyahu. He conducted this war with an unprecedented respect for civilian life. He cares far more about the safety and welfare of the civilians in Gaza than does Sinwar and Hamas. He has taken steps, such as the evacuation of civilians from conflict areas, that have never been taken before by any country. As a result of his leadership, Israel has achieved a remarkable success. There have been fewer civilian casualties relative to combatants than in any other modern war.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and I don’t agree about everything, but we are in complete agreement about the most important thing. We both want to see a quick end to this war, the release of the hostages, and a pathway toward a lasting peace.  

I implore Hamas to accept the cease-fire proposal we have made. That is the fastest way to end this war and bring an end to the loss of life and casualties among civilians.

The US stands firmly in support of the state of Israel in its quest to achieve a lasting peace for the Middle East.