Insanity: Biden's Mideast Guy Is Israeli

How did he get a security clearance?

From the TIMES today: LINK.

Nice for Israel to have one of its nationals in the White House, defending not just Israel’s interests but, get this, the Saudis too. Excerpt below.

A Biden Confidant Emerges as a Crucial Mideast Diplomat

Amos Hochstein, an energy policy official who was born in Israel, is playing diplomatic firefighter along the Israel-Lebanon border….. [He was a tank crewman prior to moving to Washington].

Officially, Mr. Hochstein, 51, is Mr. Biden’s top aide for global energy and infrastructure. But his wonky title does not capture the ever-broadening portfolio bestowed upon him by a president whose close confidence he has earned over more than a decade and who is said to view his adviser as a results-getting “doer.”

Mr. Hochstein has made at least five trips to Israel and Lebanon since the war in Gaza prompted Hezbollah to launch rocket attacks on northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas. He speaks constantly with Lebanese officials as well as top Israeli officials, sometimes including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“He’s a very close adviser of the president,” said Edward M. Gabriel, the president of the American Task Force on Lebanon, a nonprofit organization in Washington that seeks better relations between the United States and Lebanon. “As a consequence, I think he can speak with a lot of authority when he’s in the field.”….

Last week, Mr. Hochstein, who cuts a dashing profile in his slim-fitting suits and slicked-back hair, was in Paris coordinating U.S. and French efforts to bring calm to the Israel-Lebanon border. In mid-June, he saw officials in both countries, and a week later met twice in Washington with Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, with whom he speaks on a regular basis.

In addition to his work on the Israel-Hezbollah file, Mr. Hochstein has also been one of Mr. Biden’s main envoys to Saudi Arabia. He was among the U.S. officials who helped convince Mr. Biden that the United States should not ostracize Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite revulsion over the murder of the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Working in tandem with a White House colleague, Brett McGurk, the top National Security Council official for Middle East affairs, he has led quiet diplomacy in pursuit of an ambitious grand bargain that would include a U.S.-Saudi security agreement and normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Mr. Hochstein has met with Prince Mohammed more than a dozen times, talks that have also included Saudi oil production plans. (Mr. Hochstein reports to and works closely with the president’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.)AA former lobbyist, congressional aide and executive at the natural gas firm Tellurian, Mr. Hochstein is passionate about renewable energy, and has trumpeted his purchase of an all-electric Ford Mustang with rooftop solar panels, although some environmental activists have complained about his background in the fossil fuel industry.

AND HERE’S HA’ARETZ ON THIS “DISHONEST BROKER” LINK.

By Carolina Landsmann

What’s Israeli to me? Amos Hochstein. To the Interior Ministry, he’s also Israeli. A Jerusalemite. If you ask the IDF, you’ll find he’s simply a tank crewman, no more and no less. But here’s the thing. After the army, Hochstein settled in the United States, and in recent years he returned to the Middle East wearing an American hat. So American, in fact, that he became “impartial.” So much so that these days he’s serving as the American broker between Israel and Lebanon on the gas agreement. Suddenly an Israeli gets up in the morning and feels he’s an American broker.

In the stormy media debates for and against the gas agreement with Lebanon, I haven’t found one ambivalent comment about putting the American brokerage between the two in the hands of an Israeli tank crewman (sorry, an American of Israeli descent). No one tried to conceal that biographical detail. Quite the opposite. Ynet, for example, celebrated “his astounding story” with a laudatory headline: “‘Biden’s guy’: How the Israeli tank crewman became the American broker in the gas agreement.” A star.

In the stormy media debates for and against the gas agreement with Lebanon, I haven’t found one ambivalent comment about putting the American brokerage between the two in the hands of an Israeli tank crewman (sorry, an American of Israeli descent). No one tried to conceal that biographical detail. Quite the opposite. Ynet, for example, celebrated “his astounding story” with a laudatory headline: “‘Biden’s guy’: How the Israeli tank crewman became the American broker in the gas agreement.” A star.

It’s time to stop the American brokerage farce, whose players are almost all American Jews, some of them former or future Israelis. If the United States is a side in the conflict, then it should say so and conduct the negotiation as though Israel is its protégé. And if it really wants to be an honest broker, then come on – Amos Hochstein? Who do they think they’re kidding?