The IDF has certainly been busy over the past week, probably busier than they have been in a month or more. A strike in Gaza recently took out at least 18 Hamas terrorists and another strike in Lebanon killed a central Hezbollah operative. More strikes are reportedly planned as Israel's enemies continue to launch attacks of their own. This certainly doesn't look like the "restraint" that leftist leaders kept talking about for months, so what's happening? According to one source inside the Israeli government when speaking to the Times of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu currently feels more "emboldened" to move forward with his plans to defend his nation. And the main reason for that is the fact that Joe Biden has dropped his reelection bid. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is feeling more emboldened to act against Iran after US President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 election, according to a report in the Telegraph that cites a senior Israeli official.

The official tells the British newspaper that Biden was seeking to “restrain” Netanyahu while he was still in the race, and had “told him not to respond too harshly to Iran’s attacks.”

“And Iran knew this, which is why they exploited the situation to attack Israel,” adds the official, who says the US president will now do what he “believes is right.”

There are two different types of spin being applied to this report inside of Israel. The first interpretation and probably the one more charitable to Joe Biden is that Biden had been urging "restraint" on Netanyahu, with more focus placed on ceasefire talks. But he was primarily doing that to shore up his own reelection hopes among his furthest left base. Now that Biden is no longer any pressure to win more votes in November, these sources believe that he will "do the right thing" and fully support Israel as he did earlier in his career. 

A second official disagreed, saying that Biden still wants a ceasefire, modeled as closely as possible to the three-stage proposal that the White House pitched a while back. That might at least pacify some of their base and perhaps bolster Kamala Harris' standing with the left while Joe Biden gets to ride off into the sunset claiming to have been a "peace bringer" for helping end the fighting. 

I suppose there could be a little bit from column A and a little from column B going on here, but neither seems to tell the whole story. Netanyahu wants to finish off his enemies and secure his nation and he can't keep running out the clock forever. I'm sure Bibi would love to see Donald Trump back in office because he would be a far more solid ally than either Biden or Harris. (He can't say that part aloud, of course.) However, Harris is an unknown factor if she somehow wins the White House. She's been awfully eager to appease the pro-Hamas radicals in her party. Would that come to an end once she is safely ensconced in the Oval Office or would she continue to weaken the alliance? These are all factors that Bibi has to be taking into consideration.

Netanyahu needs to keep pressing on toward the finish line. The best way to quell the debates over Hamas on our side of the pond would be to ensure that there is no more Hamas. Then the interested local parties can squabble over who will be in charge of what's left of the Gaza Strip to their hearts' content. But Bibi also has to ensure that the war doesn't spiral upward in intensity and begin blowing up in Lebanon and Iran like a wildfire. That's a difficult tightrope to walk, but Netanyahu has been doing this for a long time. As long as we continue to have his back, we need to let him steer his ship as he sees fit.