Bahrain, Biden and Bombast

For Jews around the world, and of course in the land of Israel, it is the season of the High Holy Days: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. There is an ancient tradition that “on Rosh Hashanah, all the world passes before God like sheep.” But beyond the expectation of the divine verdict, it is also a season of renewal and a time of hope. Nothing more epitomizes the longing for a better day than the “impossible dream” of peace between Israel and the Arab world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his people on Israel T.V., declaring: “It took us twenty-six years from the second peace agreement with an Arab state (Jordan) to the third peace agreement (with the UAE). And it took us not twenty-six years but twenty-nine days between a peace agreement with the third Arab state and the fourth Arab state (Bahrain). And there will be more…”

Some would call these developments nothing short of miraculous. Yet it is clear that their catalyst was none other than the great dealmaker, President Donald Trump, and his skillful Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner. For Joe Biden, by contrast, such peace deals are not miracles; they are “accidents.” He remarked: “I think Trump is going to accidentally do something positive here, in terms of this issue of … other Arab states.” It goes without saying, however, that for the people of Israel, who have lived in a state of cold war if not hot war with their Arab neighbors since the birth of their nation in 1948, these developments are infinitely more providential than accidental. 

The latest peace agreement, with Bahrain, was announced on the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11. Leading Israel's newscast that Sabbath Eve was a melody by the celebrated songstress of the Jewish state, the late Naomi Shemer. Its hauntingly beautiful refrain went out over the airwaves and the internet: “After the Holidays all will be renewed; Our daily life will return and be refreshed; The air, the dust, the rain, the fire; You too, you too will be renewed.” 

In today's cynical culture and vulgar political climate, it's easy to become jaded, to miss the “miracle on the Mediterranean” that today’s Israel represents. For Joe Biden and the Democrat Party operatives who feed him his lines, it’s much easier to frame not only American culture but the world at large in terms of identity politics, to harp on the essentially Marxist narrative of the “oppressors” and the “oppressed.” Biden’s party views the Palestinians as the oppressed ones, though the terrorist cadre among them have perpetrated untold acts of murderous aggression against innocent Israeli civilians. 

Their Jewish neighbors, by contrast, are without question members of the most persecuted ethnic group in all of human history. They have suffered exile, dispersion, and near annihilation at the hands of genocidal Nazis. Now that a new diplomatic horizon is presenting itself for this truly persecuted people, it suits America’s minions of the radical left to frame it as happenstance. But in the Jewish state, suffering like so many countries from the China Virus, the coming Days of Awe are indeed days of hope. And for the UAE and Bahrain, Israel at last “is real.”