Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a meeting between his advisers and White House officials on Monday after the Biden administration let an anti-Israel resolution pass at the United Nations Security Council.
The U.S. abstained on UNSC Resolution 2728, which it could have vetoed by voting against it. The resolution calls for an “immediate ceasefire” in the war between Israel and Hamas for the last two weeks of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. However, it does not condemn Hamas for its October 7 terror attack — something the United Nations has yet to do — and does not condition a ceasefire on the release of the remaining 134 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
The U.S. had previously sought to make a ceasefire conditional on the release of hostages. Demanding a ceasefire before the release of hostages effectively allows Hamas to survive — and to win the war — while keeping its captives.
Last week, the White House demanded that Israel send representatives to Washington to consult about Israel’s plans to enter Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip near the Egyptian border, to attack Hamas’s last stronghold there. Netanyahu responded by naming his strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and his national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, to attend talks this week — though he stressed that Israel would still attack Hamas in Rafah, regardless.
However, after Monday’s decision by the Biden administration to allow the U.N. resolution, backed by Russia and China, to pass — after Russia and China had blocked a U.S. resolution Friday tying a ceasefire to a hostage release — Netanyahu called the meeting off.
Netanyahu said, in a statement released on Monday by his office:
The United States has abandoned its policy in the UN today. Just a few days ago, it supported a Security Council resolution that linked a call for a ceasefire to the release of hostages.
China and Russia vetoed that resolution partly because they opposed a ceasefire that was linked to the release of hostages. Yet today, Russia and China joined Algeria and others in supporting the new resolution precisely because it had no such linkage.
Regrettably, the United States did not veto the new resolution, which calls for a ceasefire that is not contingent on the release of hostages.
This constitutes a clear departure from the consistent US position in the Security Council since the beginning of the war.
Today’s resolution gives Hamas hope that international pressure will force Israel to accept a ceasefire without the release of our hostages, thus harming both the war effort and the effort to release the hostages.
Prime Minister Netanyahu made it clear last night that should the US depart from its principled policy and not veto this harmful resolution, he will cancel the Israeli delegation’s visit to the United States. In light of the change in the US position, PM Netanyahu decided that the delegation will remain in Israel.
The U.S. said that its policy had not changed, and that it abstained from the resolution because it did not condemn Hamas. The White House also said, according to the Times of Israel, that Netanyahu had “overreacted.” Opposition politician Benny Gantz — who participates in Israel’s emergency government of national unity — said that Netanyahu should have send representatives anyway.
Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, is already in Washington for talks about Israel’s need for rearmaments. He called the UN Security Council resolution “scandalous,” without attacking the Biden administration, and said that Israel had no “moral right” to stop the war until all the hostages were freed.
Last week, Netanyahu told visiting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that while Israel would prefer the support of the U.S. in its operation in Rafah, it was prepared to go it alone, and believed it could evacuate civilians safely.
Asked by Breitbart News on Monday about Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent comment that Israel could not possibly evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah, an Israeli government spokesperson said Israel would find a way.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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