[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently admitted at a congressional hearing that American soldiers operating Biden’s disastrous “aid pier” for Gaza could come under attack from Islamic terrorists.

Biden has not sent a single soldier to recover American hostages being held by Hamas, but there are now soldiers in the line of fire in order to send aid to Gaza.

In the event American forces on the pier come under attack, they would be allowed to fight back, Austin promised. But based on the rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the terrorists have to do is attack from a mosque or from behind civilians, and American soldiers would be banned from fighting back.

And those are the ways that Hamas tends to attack.

Late last month, Islamic terrorists fired mortar shells at the pier, forcing a UN team to flee for cover and damaging some of our equipment. After the attack, it was announced that the Israeli military would be tasked with providing security for the pier since Biden’s efforts to recruit Muslim allies to protect it had failed.

After the mortar attack, the terror pier was moved to the Israeli port of Ashdod, allegedly because of the bad weather, but also because of the terrorist attacks. It’s still sitting in Ashdod, despite having been completed because it’s too fragile to move in stormy weather. What’s going to happen if there’s bad weather once the pier is in place? If this one breaks, we’ll probably have to build another one.

But after having wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on the terror pier, Biden is waiting on the Israelis to secure it. Even with the Israelis physically attaching the pier, so that Biden can claim that there are American “no boots on the ground”, American personnel will still be within firing range of Islamic terrorists in Gaza.

This would not be a threat if Biden stopped interfering with Israel’s war on terrorists. But the pier is part of the Biden administration’s campaign to undermine Israel’s war effort. And that’s putting American lives at risk.

Beyond the terror pier, there are now reports that, after Israel finally took control of the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza (despite years of lies about an ‘open-air concentration camp’, Egypt, an Arab Muslim country, has its own border crossing with the Islamic terror state), Biden wants America to step in.

Unwilling to have Israel control the Rafah crossing into Egypt, where the majority of Hamas’ terror forces are based, negotiations are reportedly underway to bring in a “private American security company” that “has operated in several African and Middle Eastern countries, guarding strategic sites like oil fields, airports, army bases and sensitive border crossings” which “employs veterans of elite U.S. Army units.” This is likely to be Blackwater (which has been renamed several times) or some company like it with similar capabilities.

The ex-military personnel won’t count as “boots on the ground” but having private security contractors performing military tasks and then getting killed is no better than American military forces dying in combat with terrorists. The use of contractors during the War on Terror helped hide casualty rates, but didn’t lessen the fact that Americans were still being killed. As we saw in Benghazi.

Above all else, there is no reason for American forces, no matter how they’re classified to be tasked with securing the so-called aid crossings, whether it’s Biden’s terror pier or the Rafah crossing, when the Israelis should be in charge.

And the Israelis want to be in charge.

The only reason Americans are being put in harm’s way is because Biden doesn’t want the Israelis in control. After trying to solicit anyone else to step in, Americans are being put at risk to protect Islamic terrorists from Israel.

Opponents of the Jewish State have often accused Israel of putting Americans at risk, but it’s those opponents, especially in the Biden administration, whose obsession with protecting Muslim terrorists from Israel is really endangering us.

What is America’s national interest in protecting Iran’s terror proxies in Gaza?

Set aside any sentimental attachments to the Jewish State or any religious and cultural sympathies, and there’s still no conceivable reason to prop up another of the terrorist ‘dragon’s teeth’ that Iran has sown in Yemen, Lebanon and Israel.

The lineage of the 'Palestinian' cause can be traced back to the Soviet Union’s Marxist terrorist operations, Nazi Germany’s influence operation with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and, more recently, the Islamic revolution in Iran. What all of those had in common was that they were efforts to subvert Western presence in the Middle East by recruiting and funding Muslim terror groups.

America tried to stay out of it until Jimmy Carter decided to make common cause with Islamic terrorists. This disastrous policy led to the Islamic takeover of Iran and then Afghanistan, and to the deaths of thousands of Americans. Carter also embraced the ‘Palestinian’ cause and Clinton committed us to spending endless billions trying to create an Islamic terror state in Israel.

Until Trump, no president had the courage to try and disentangle us from the Palestinians. And until Biden, no president was this close to committing American troops to protecting a population that universally wants to kill us.

Israel wants to end the terror threat from Gaza and the West Bank. Biden should let it. Life was a whole lot better for everyone before Clinton’s experiment in ‘nation building’ led to endless waves of terror in pursuit of a Palestinian state.

If Biden really cared about the lives of Arab Muslims living in Gaza, he would let Israel quickly finish the job of putting down the terrorists. Like the rules of engagement imposed on American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, the only thing that the restrictions imposed on the Israeli military have done is get good men killed while dragging out a war that could have been ended long ago.

Too many American civilians were already killed in Islamic terror attacks in Israel. If Israel is willing to drain the terror swamps in the West Bank and Gaza, let it.

No American should die to protect Hamas or its supporters in Gaza.

The idea that we were going to neutralize ‘trouble spots’ through nation building has been tested and failed badly. While Biden washed his hands in Afghanistan, he still insists on keeping the mirage of a .Palestinian state going even though it predated our involvement in Afghanistan by a decade and failed even worse.

It’s time to end the worst and longest nation building experiment to date.

The obsession with creating a ‘Palestinian state’ has cost billions of dollars and the lives of American civilians. Now Biden is risking the death of American soldiers, in or out of uniform, to keep the nation-building dream alive.

Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, but now he wants to get us into Gaza.