After 11 Israelis died from terror attacks early in April, Ellie Cohanim, who served in the State Department under President Trump, says that the mood in Israel is abnormally heavy.
She explains that normally when there’s a suicide bombing in Israel, Jewish citizens defiantly show up the next day to the exact spot where the attack happened and drink coffee or eat lunch.
Instead of displaying resilience and going about life as normal, Cohanim says that her friends in Israel are saying it’s different this time. “People are remembering the trauma of the intifadas,” she says. “They’re remembering the suicide bombings. They’re remembering the waves of terror attacks. I think Israelis are bracing themselves for the worst.”
Cohanim believes the Biden administration deserves much of the blame for emboldening this new wave of terror. She cites three key policy mistakes that have been made from the time President Biden took office.
The first mistake, in Cohanim’s estimation, was that Biden’s team distanced themselves from Israel and failed to show the kind of support for Israel that President Trump had shown.
The second mistake happened recently when Secretary of State Antony Blinken changed the agenda for the Negev Summit, a historic summit where, for the first time in history, Israel hosted Arab foreign ministers. Each foreign minister represented a country that had signed the Abraham Accords, a historic Middle East peace deal.
According to Cohanim, the original agenda for the summit was to figure out how to counter the Iranian threat and strategize on how to secure the Middle East as the U.S. seems to be exiting the region.
Instead of contributing policy ideas that advanced the interests of the nations at the summit, Blinken insisted that Israel seek peace with the Palestinians. “We all know that there’s nobody who wants peace with the Palestinians more than the Israelis,” Cohanim says. “However, the Palestinians are not proving themselves to be peace partners. The tremendous success of the Abraham Accords was the fact that the Trump Administration proved to the world that the Palestinians no longer were going to veto peace. … And so Blinken, with his visit and with his comments and with his statements, kind of brought us back to this pre-peace time, and it was very damaging.”
The third policy mistake that Cohanim addresses is the move to give money to the Palestinian Authority again, which she says they only use for more weapons to attack Israel. She calls it “pay to slay.”
Cohanim blames the new wave of terror attacks on Blinken’s recent show of weakness at the Negev Summit, and she directly blames Biden’s pivot on foreign policy for the abnormally heavy mood in Israel.
“When the United States signals weakness in its support for Israel, that is when we start to see blood flowing on the streets of Israel,” Cohanim says. {eoa}
Rob Vischer is a freelance writer for Charisma Media.
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