TEL AVIV—President Joe Biden has admonished Israelis to stop waging “indefinite war” and embrace his plan for Middle East peace.
But more than half a dozen war-weary Israeli reserve soldiers told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s diplomacy is actually dragging out the Gaza war he is pressing Israel to bring to an end. By restraining Israel, they said, Biden is preventing the Jewish state from defeating or deterring its genocidal enemies.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Snir Tal, 24, a reservist in an elite Israel Defense Forces commando unit. He saw two of his best friends killed during six months of service in the war in the Gaza Strip, which the Palestinian terror group Hamas started with a massacre and mass abduction in southern Israel on Oct. 7. “It feels like all our work and all our losses were for nothing.”
“I don’t think Biden really understands this neighborhood,” said Emil Grishpun, 40, a Finance Ministry official and infantry reservist who volunteered on Oct. 7 and served four and a half months in the West Bank. “We’re here doing the job, so let us finish the job. Otherwise, it will be like this until the end of time.”
“The U.S. is really strong-arming us and not letting us have the military might that we need to win,” said Etay Inbar, 34, a principal at a Tel Aviv venture capital fund and military intelligence reservist who has been involved in the search for the Israeli hostages. “What we need to do is come to a conclusion quickly, but we need to come to a positive conclusion for us so we don’t face the same thing a decade from now.”
The frustration among IDF reservists reflects growing awareness in Israel, more than eight months into the Gaza war, of a fundamental conflict between the Biden administration’s imagined Middle East and the brutal reality that Israelis know. It’s a shift that could complicate U.S. efforts to turn Israelis against their own government in the name of peace.
As Biden has ramped up pressure on Israel to end the war without dismantling Hamas, Israelis have grown increasingly distrustful of the U.S. president, according to previously unpublished results from an omnibus survey by Hebrew University of Jerusalem pollsters.
Forty-five percent of Jewish Israelis see Biden as “anti-Israel,” the pollsters found last month, up from just 18 percent in January. Two-thirds say former president Donald Trump, who leads Biden in polls of their 2024 electoral rematch, is more pro-Israel than Biden, and most believe the Republican would increase U.S. support for Israel.
The results were comparable among IDF soldiers, who accounted for 425 of the 1,586 respondents. The margin of error was plus or minus 4 points.
In an op-ed published over the weekend by Israel’s N12 news station, Azar Gat, a left-leaning Tel Aviv University military historian and self-described “fierce” critic of Netanyahu, slammed Biden’s ceasefire plan as a “complete surrender” that would critically compromise Israel’s “security and future.”
“No country can accept a complete surrender—in my estimation, not even Israel, after the full extent of Hamas’s demands and their meaning become clear, including in the future blood reckoning,” Gat wrote. “The United States is essential to Israel’s security and existence. But it is worth remembering that except for the Kissinger era, 99 percent of American initiatives in the region since 1984 have failed miserably.”
Many analysts, including retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, consider Biden’s decision to end what the president called America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan a historic mistake.
In his May 31 remarks, Biden criticized Israel’s “pursuit of an unidentified notion of ‘total victory’” in Gaza, invoking a phrase favored by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The president appealed to Israelis to press their leaders to accept a deal that would see a “permanent end to hostilities” and the release of thousands of Palestinian terrorists from prison in exchange for Hamas’s return of the some 120 hostages still in Gaza, many of whom are believed to be dead.
Biden also held out the promise of quiet in Israel’s north—where at least 60,000 Israelis remained displaced amid daily bombardment by Hezbollah, a Hamas ally and fellow Iran-backed terror group—as well as of a “historic normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia” and a “regional security network to counter the threat posed by Iran.”
Israel has accepted a version of the deal, while Hamas has yet to respond. The White House and the Israeli government both declined to comment for this article.
After Biden threatened last month to stop supplying Israel with offensive weapons over humanitarian concerns, a series of reservists anonymously spoke out from Gaza in protest of U.S. influence on the war effort. A commander alleged in an open letter that “the IDF became an official subcontractor of the United States,” and another soldier said in a video that he and his comrades had not “left our families and sacrificed ourselves” to “bow down to the Americans.”
In similar clip that circulated widely in Hebrew-language media, a reservist issued a call from atop his tank for Israel to break its dependence on the United States, saying, “I hope that on the eve of Independence Day we will manage to be a little more independent and that we will come to our senses and be stronger, win the war, and achieve our goals.”
Shilo Marom, 33, a religious teacher and father of four young children from Keshet, a town in the Golan Heights, confirmed to the Free Beacon that he is the reservist in the viral video.
“I’m just a regular guy, but what I see is that the people of Israel want to defeat Hamas, want to bring back the hostages, and want to go all in. But for some reason we’re dragging our feet in the sand in Gaza,” he said. “The only explanation I have is that Biden is holding us back.”
During the first four months of the war, Marom’s reserve tank unit spearheaded the IDF’s operations in Khan Younis, a former Hamas stronghold in the south of the strip. Two members of the battalion were among nearly 300 soldiers killed so far in the ground operations, according to the IDF.
Marom returned to duty at the end of April, this time with an assignment to guard the so-called Western Erez Crossing, the third entry point for humanitarian aid into Gaza, which Israel opened under U.S. pressure. Less than two weeks later, he recorded the video.
“We see Hamas terrorists with weapons a couple hundred meters away, but we’re not allowed to shoot them,” Marom said, referring to IDF rules of engagement that strictly protect aid convoys. “Would you not be frustrated?”
Kobi Michael, a former head of Palestinian affairs at Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, said the Biden administration’s Middle East strategy has become increasingly clear. He said the Americans seek to force Israel to end the Gaza war—and stand down against Hezbollah and Iran, which launched an unprecedented direct attack on the country on April 12—as part of an effort to disengage from the Middle East.
“Instead of defeating Hamas, defeating Hezbollah, defeating the Houthis, defeating the Shiite militias, and weakening Iran … the Americans are trying to weaken Israel. They want to bring us to our knees so we will agree to Hamas’s demands,” said Michael, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy in Jerusalem.
“At the end of the day, they are normalizing Hamas and keeping Hamas as the sovereign power in the Gaza Strip,” Michael went on. “This will give encouragement to the Iranian axis and create huge challenges for Israel on all the other fronts. It doesn’t mean Israel won’t successfully end the war in the Gaza Strip, but it means the war will be much more complicated and difficult.”
Nisael Vaknin, 34, a railway worker and reservist tank loader, has been stationed for the past few weeks at a kibbutz in the evacuation zone that extends up to three miles into Israel from the Lebanon border. His evacuated hometown, Shlomi, is just down the road. Next week, he will return to duty in Gaza, where he served four months at the beginning of the war.
“It’s all the same war,” he said. “We have to finish Hamas in Gaza so we can go deal with Hezbollah in Lebanon—if not now, then within a couple years.”
Like several other reservists, Vaknin expressed hope that Biden will no longer be in office when the time comes for war in the north.
“If Trump wins, I think it might be different,” he said. “We might have the freedom to change our reality.”
