Says who? The White House, that’s who, where leakers want to push Israel into changing its war strategies, aims, and preferably withdraw entirely. No fewer than five times does the Wall Street Journal cite unnamed “U.S. officials” to report that Israel and the Biden administration are about to collide over the war that Hamas started with its grotesque and barbaric slaughter of hundreds of civilians — including almost three dozen Americans.

In the most telling leak, one “U.S. official” warns Israel that they have to wrap up their campaign in “weeks, not months”:

The southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis is a critical target for Israel’s military—strategically and symbolically. The centuries-old market town is the suspected hiding place of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and the militant group’s most significant remaining military stronghold.

But the fight to capture it risks putting Israel on a collision course with the Biden administration, which has called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties and ease humanitarian deprivation in Gaza, and to hew to a more limited war aim of expelling Hamas from power. …

In Israel last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told officials in Israel’s war cabinet that the Biden administration believed the conflict should end in weeks, not months, said U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions. Israeli officials made no guarantees but expressed their interest in a return to normal, particularly so that the country doesn’t take a hit economically, the officials said.

If nothing else, this tends to confirm the report that Antony Blinken told Israel that they didn’t have enough “credit” to continue fighting in Gaza for much longer. This looks like more of the same pressure, this time via the American media, leaked out in a rather scummy way in order to keep Blinken and Joe Biden from getting blasted again over their craven attempts to sell out an ally.

It’s not Israel that is colliding with the US. It’s Biden and his team colliding with Israel on behalf of Hamas as part of its appeasement policy toward Iran. This also attempts to throw Israel under the bus so that Biden can score some political points at home with the Democrats’ anti-Semitic wing of hard-Left progressives.

To put this in perspective, let’s recall that today is the 82nd anniversary of Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan’s navy conducted a sneak attack on our naval installation and support infrastructure, killing 2,403 Americans — all but 68 of them members of the Navy and Marines. Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared December 7 “a date that will live in infamy” and pledged war until total victory over Imperial Japan.

That victory took nearly four years, cost over 100,000 American lives (including 6,000 civilians), while Japan lost 700,000 civilians and well over a million in armed forces. The US conducted an aggressive campaign of attacking Japanese forces and infrastructure even when Japan merged those into civilian areas, especially in the relentless bombing campaigns of 1945. We did this because we recognized that the US and its allies would be unsafe while the bushido clique ruled Japan, and that total victory over it was the only solution. (I wrote about this in August.)

And it worked. The utter defeat of Japan and the occupation afterward forced them into reforms by stripping the bushido clique of all power and status. It ended Japan’s long belief in ethnic supremacy and turned a hostile imperial power into a responsible state and an economic powerhouse.

Now, let’s compare that to the situation Israel faces. A supremacist cult has waged war on Israel for the last 17 years from Gaza, refusing to reform or even to moderate its rhetoric. Hamas launches constant missile and rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centers even during so-called ‘cease fires.’ Their latest attack on the ground two months ago to the day slaughtered 1400 men, women, and children — mostly civilians — in one of the most grotesque paroxysms of evil barbarity seen in centuries of warfare. On a population basis compared to 1941 America, that would relate to a Pearl Harbor with 21,000 deaths rather than 2400, and one in which most of the deaths were civilian rather than military.

Hamas has made clear for 17 years that it has no interest in peace or co-existence with Israel. In the weeks since the 10/7 massacre, Hamas officials have repeatedly insisted that they will repeat those massacres as often as possible until Israel is annihilated. Even while demanding ‘pauses,’ Hamas wants to rope in other states into that war of annihilation on their side to defeat the Israelis and conduct genocide of the Jews in favor of their own supremacist delusions.

Imagine if the Soviet Union had come to the US in July 1942 and told us that we only had a few more weeks to wipe out Japan, due to our failing “credit.” Imagine if the UK had scolded us over civilian casualties while fighting our way up the Pacific Rim island chain to defeat Japan’s war machine. How would we have reacted if Sweden had told us to fire Curtis LeMay and stop bombing Japan’s cities in 1945 to maintain our international ‘credit’? Consider what would have happened had we allowed Imperial Japan to survive in mid-1945 out of an obsession with looking ‘nice’ in a war that Japan started.  Not only would that have been an utter disaster, it would have led to another war just as soon as Imperial Japan re-armed. Knowing this, we would have ignored the interference and made clear our determination to fight to victory over the totalitarians that started the war.

So why should it be different for Israel? And more importantly, why should it be different for Israel with an American president after Hamas’ slaughter of dozens of Americans and kidnapping of nearly a dozen others? If there’s a rational argument for that, then let Biden and Blinken make it publicly — rather than hiding behind anonymous sourcing to advance their craven retreatism.