TradWives, TradLives
When MAGA came for Catholic culture.
Bill and Egger covered Biden’s Israel pivot well this morning. I’d just add a few points.
(1) Israel has to go into Rafah. To leave elements of Hamas in place would undercut the entire rationale of the war—not to mention Israel’s security.
(2) Biden has to beat Trump. Biden is trying to manage two different crises. The first is a shooting war in Gaza, in which Biden is trying to make sure Israel achieves its security aims. The second is an election in America where Biden has been bleeding votes from the left because of his support for Israel’s war.
With this move, Biden is trying to make sure Israel achieves its aims while recovering some political support at home.
Will his pivot work? Maybe. Maybe not.
But his position would have been stronger if the people denouncing him today had been a little more vocally supportive over the last seven months when Biden was taking shots from the left. Instead, many of those people barely gave Biden grudging nods when he was doing exactly what they wanted.
(3) Does Israel need our 2,000 lb. bombs to carry out its operation in Rafah? This is a military question I don’t have visibility into, but will the policy change Biden announced last night have any practical impact on the Rafah operation?
The IDF has evolved its operational protocols over the course of the war. They have gotten better at finding Hamas operatives and better at preventing civilian casualties. It’s not clear that they need large-scale ordnance from us to conduct the Rafah operation.
(4) The American military is still helping Israel. CENTCOM remains tightly integrated with the IDF and I suspect that intelligence sharing matters a great deal more to Israeli operations than heavy ordnance.
(5) The long-term goal is still a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That’s the real prize in terms of Israel’s sustained security. If Biden’s pivot makes it even slightly easier for the Saudis to work with us and the Israelis on normalization, then it’s probably a net help.
Then again, the chances Saudi Arabia agrees to normalization before the next administration are probably close to zero. They’d love to give that win to Trump as a way of further ingratiating themselves.
(6) Netanyahu is a lousy coalition partner. No surprise here; Bibi is a heel. Biden had to know that Netanyahu would take and take and take—and then refuse to give when Biden needed political cover. There’s a reason everyone hates that guy.
But Netanyahu is the democratically elected leader of Israel and Biden was committed to Israel. So he held hands with Bibi, even knowing that he’d get screwed in the end.
(7) It probably doesn’t work out for Biden. This pivot is mostly about optics. And as such, it’s likely to be a failure. Biden will lose some Israel supporters who see it as a betrayal and I doubt he’ll win back any progressives in return. After all, if you sincerely think Biden has contributed to a “genocide” then why would this move change your mind? So on the politics, this is a loss for Biden.
But on the merits, we don’t know yet. If Israel is still able to eliminate Hamas and the Saudis are willing to keep moving forward to a deal, then it will have been a plus. If not, then it will have been a bad decision.
Onto the rest.
1. The Trad Life
Back in the Before Times—that is to say, before integralism became a thing and MAGA infected the American Church—I was a fairly traditionalist Catholic. People would call me “orthodox” in that wary way that kind of means “conservative” and kind of means “crazy.”
I love the Novus Ordo Latin Mass. I believe all the stuff the Church says is true.1 I think the ordination of women as priests or a married priesthood, like the Episcopalians have, are unwise for the Catholic Church. I love both JPII and that notorious hardliner Benedict XVI.
I find Pope Tambourines to be at best misguided and at worst pernicious.
All of which was enough to make me a “Conservative Catholic,” up until about 2016.
Then some weird shit started happening.