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Clearly I’m a masochist as I record episodes of PBS’s Frontline to then watch at my leisure, mostly so I have a handle on what the “Progressive” regime wants me to think. Yesterday I watched a recorded episode purporting to unravel the Israel/Hamas war. A prominent, concluding element involved the Abraham Accords that Trump engineered, with the message we were supposed to walk away with being those Accords utterly subverted the Palestinian (with that term being a construct used for propaganda purposes) cause to the point all Accord players could ignore them, thus inspiring Oct. 7, an operation meant to put Palestinian concerns back on the map.
Seemed too trite and convenient a thesis to take seriously. Lo and behold I am perusing my feeds today and this “striptease” piece shows up. I suspect this is precisely what is happening: feigning surprise that some think the Abraham Accords are responsible for Oct. 7, pretending to mull this perspective, and then using the supposed deliberations as a springboard to alter the US policy course, with the MSM playing along with this piece of kabuki theater. Certainly indicates what they think of our critical faculties:
The Big Story
In a 2016 article for Tablet, “Obama’s Syria Policy Striptease,” Tony Badran laid out the “striptease” messaging genre adopted by the Obama echo chamber to retail White House Syria policy to a skeptical American public. In the policy “striptease,” Tony wrote:
Hand-picked experts offer fresh policy advice to the president. The authors demonstrate their independence by criticizing the supposed current policy and propose a new course of action. Within weeks, the new course of action is acknowledged as policy, thus flattering the importance of the experts. Only, what the experts suggested was already the policy—and what they were “criticizing”—was the fan that the messaging campaign had manufactured to obscure, for a time, what the White House was actually doing in Syria.
The striptease came to mind this morning when we read, in Jewish Insider, that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) had made an appearance last week on the Twitch stream of the self-proclaimed “Marxist-Leninist” Hasan Piker. On the stream, AOC said she agreed “10,000%” with Piker’s assertion that Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and the Abraham Accords were to blame for the Oct. 7 attacks. This story, far from demonstrating that AOC is dangerously close to supposedly “radical” Marxist elements of the left—Piker once declared that “America deserved 9/11” and has hosted a Houthi militant on his stream—instead illustrates the way that the Obama-Biden echo chamber has evolved over the past eight years. Namely, rather than operating purely through such D.C. swamp creatures as Jeffrey Goldberg, it has incorporated allegedly independent “communists” and “radicals” like Piker into the heart of the party’s messaging apparatus.
We’ve written before about the split between the Biden White House’s fake public policy in the Middle East and its real, secret policy. The fake policy is both a deep commitment to Washington’s traditional partners in the Middle East, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, and a desire to continue the positive steps toward “regional integration” taken by the Trump administration during the Abraham Accords—albeit without the Trump administration’s allegedly destructive indifference to the Palestinian question. The real policy is that the administration wants to destroy the Abraham Accords, which it correctly perceives as a repudiation of the Obama-Biden policy of realignment toward Iran. Rather than doing this openly—the Abraham Accords were, after all, widely acknowledged as a resounding diplomatic success—the administration is attempting to do it stealthily, by weaving Abraham Accords-sounding language, such as Israeli-Saudi “normalization,” into its own policy framework, which inverts the Trump framework by putting the Palestinian issue front and center.
Since the Oct. 7 attack, we have seen a chorus of seemingly independent voices on the left assert a “critique” of the Biden administration’s fake policy that is in fact a justification for the actual policy, which nonetheless goes unacknowledged. On Oct. 9, for instance, The Intercept declared that Hamas’ attack represented a “total failure of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy”—which, it asserted, was centered on an “expansion of the Abraham Accords” and an expectation that “the Palestinians would simply resign themselves to a slow death.” On Oct. 20, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—helmed by leading Iran propagandist Trita Parsi and funded by George Soros and Iranian-born Francis Najafi—again pinned the violence on the Biden administration’s decision to “continue Trump’s normalization efforts” between the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states. In December, Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now, the pro-Qatari, Muslim Brotherhood think tank cozy with the Biden State Department, penned an op-ed in Time Magazine excoriating the Biden White House for supporting and expanding the Abraham Accords, which allegedly “emboldened successive Israeli governments to further ignore Palestinian rights.”
In reality, of course, the Biden policy these critics are describing is entirely mythical; the administration was so hostile to the Abraham Accords that it forbade its officials from uttering the phrase, with sometimes comic results. At the same time, the policy they present as a supposedly radical alternative is a fair description of the administration’s real policy. That policy is to emphasize, time and again, that agreements between the Israelis and Sunni Arab states—now downgraded from “peace deals” to “normalization agreements”—are “not a substitute for Israeli-Palestinian peace,” as then State Department spokesman Ned Price put it in 2021. The latest culmination of this policy is the White House’s attempt to use Saudi-Israeli normalization as leverage to force Israel to preserve Hamas in Gaza and commit to recognizing a Palestinian state.
This inside-outside game, in which the administration leaves the articulation of its real policy to “outside” “critics” of its fake policy, explains why the White House—and the Democratic Party more generally—often appears to be irrationally caving to pressure from its “left flank,” which, critics rightly point out, represents an insignificant share of the American electorate. We’re not saying that Piker is receiving instructions from the White House—although, given the revelations that the administration was pushing its talking points to the New York Times Pitchbot X account and an Arab amateur porn star, we wouldn’t be shocked if he was. What we’re saying is that the administration cannot articulate its own position, and so it leaves the task to outside “critics,” which is what gives the public the misleading impression that the left-wing tail is wagging the White House dog.
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