‘Violence in Israel is the price of Biden’s weakness,’ former Vice President Mike Pence writes in scathing op-ed

JERUSALEM – With more than 3,700 rockets fired at Israel over the past ten days, former Vice President Mike Pence has issued a scathing assessment of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy in the Middle East, and it can be summed up in one word: Weakness. 

“Instead of seeking peace through strength, he has invited violence through weakness,” Pence wrote in a column published in National Review on May 17.

“The Trump-Pence administration opened the door to a future of peace in the Middle East founded on our strong and unwavering commitment to the state of Israel. But now Israel is enduring the worst outbreak of violence in at least seven years – a direct result of the weakness shown by the Biden administration from its first day in office.”

In the article, Pence extolled Trump’s strategic, bold and pioneering approach to the Middle East, including an unapologetic defense of Israel and the successful brokering of four Arab-Israeli peace treaties, which he argued was distinctly different from the eight years of chaos and violence in the region under former President Barack Obama with then-Vice President Biden.

“Many Americans witnessing the recent bloodshed in Israel are perplexed by how quickly violence erupted after years of calm,” Pence noted. “The answer is that President Biden and congressional Democrats have abandoned unambiguous support for our ally Israel, emboldened our enemies, and turned their back on the policy that yielded historic peace deals in the Middle East.”

“We withdrew from the dangerous Iran nuclear deal brokered by the Obama-Biden administration, which put the world’s leading state sponsor of terror on the path to nuclear weapons while sending pallets of cash to the mullahs in Iran. We acknowledged Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. And President Trump kept the promise made by countless Republican and Democrat politicians by actually following through in moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Israel.”

Pence argued that “Biden has sent the world a profoundly different message. Instead of seeking peace through strength, he has invited violence through weakness.”

“President Biden has emboldened anti-Semitic terrorist groups such as Hamas by shunning Israeli leaders and restoring more than $200 million in aid to the Palestinians that had been canceled by the Trump-Pence administration. He unilaterally took the Iranian-backed Houthis off the list of designated terrorist organizations. And worst of all, he has announced his intention to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, destabilizing the entire region. When asked, Biden’s press secretary couldn’t even say whether Israel remains an ‘important ally’ of the United States.”

Pence concluded his column by urging Americans to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem and stand without apology for our most cherished ally, Israel, until the violence is quelled and Israel’s security is restored.”