It is never wise for anyone, regardless of how powerful or wealthy they are, to spend their moral capital all the way down to zero. That, unfortunately, is precisely what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing. In the process, he is dragging his nation down with him. And by not acting forcefully to check some of Netanyahu’s egregious actions, President Biden is also needlessly destroying America’s credibility.

From the medical professionals to aid workers and officials from various organizations who have traveled through Gaza in recent months, the one consistent message coming across is that conditions there are unlivable. There is not enough food and water. Babies, elderly men and women, and everyone else trapped in that hellscape, are starving. Doctors and nurses desperately complain about acute shortages of the most basic essentials for medical care, such as gauze needed to treat wounds. None of these gut-wrenching portrayals have been enough to move Netanyahu and his closest aides to act to relieve the humanitarian suffering.

That inexcusable callousness is what led the Biden administration to demand last month that Israel must start allowing at least 350 aid delivery trucks into Gaza daily within thirty days. The letter sent by the administration to the Israeli government warned that if it failed to meet that minimum requirement, it risked losing U.S. funding and weapons supply. Before the war began last year, about 500 trucks entered Gaza each day but recently, that number had dwindled to below 40 on most days, according to various reports.

A report published earlier this week said that last month, an average of 57 trucks entered Gaza daily, well below the 350 demanded by the Biden administration. The thirty-day deadline has come and gone without much change in the quantity of aid delivery. Asked about whether the U.S. would follow through on its threat to withhold funding and weapons to Israel for failing to meet the requirement, a State Department spokesman said that “Israel has made some good but limited progress in increasing the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza and [we] will not limit arms transfers to Israel.”

That was quite a bizarre response. Why would the Biden administration issue such a public ultimatum if it was so completely unprepared to impose its threatened sanction? There is no better way to incinerate one’s credibility. To be fair, President Biden has tried to put some restraints on the Israeli government over the course of this war but has been largely unsuccessful because of Netanyahu’s intransigence. Furthermore, it appears that no American president is willing to take that drastic step of withholding arms supplies to Israel and leaving it dangerously vulnerable in a region where every one of its neighbors is threatening to wipe it off the map. Most people, however, ascribe much of the inaction to fear of the Jewish lobby in America.

Under the current circumstances, I strongly believe that it is in the interest of the Jewish lobby to step up and provide some of the political cover that President Biden obviously needs. That any leader needs this type of shield because they lack courage is itself a tragedy, but that is a discussion topic for another day. Israel is becoming too dangerously isolated in the world, and that cannot be good for any Jewish person, regardless of where they live. Inside Israel itself, large segments of the population have been extremely unhappy with Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. That included his last defense minister, Yoav Gallant, whose opposition to some of the war tactics led to his firing a couple of weeks ago.

In situations like this, the only thing that can help move the needle is a critical mass of people acting in unison. That is why intervention by the Jewish lobby in America and all supporters of Israel elsewhere is absolutely crucial.

Members of the Jewish lobby might ask why they should bother, when the Palestinian population cheered the Oct. 7 rape, torture, massacre, and kidnapping of innocent Israeli civilians. That jubilation was indeed an abomination. But, most likely, not every single Palestinian took delight in those terrorist acts by Hamas militants. It follows therefore that there is no justification for the entire populace being subjected to indiscriminate killing and maiming in the manner that we have witnessed this past year. After all, the thousands of children and babies, including newborns, who have been killed or starved to death, had absolutely nothing to do with the Hamas attack.

Lots of people around the world, including me, recognized Israel’s right to respond to the Oct. 7 attack. But what is happening now with the denial of essential supplies to an entire population cannot be considered an appropriate form of self-defense. Sometimes a strong show of moral character is the best antidote to the type of cruelty that Hamas displayed that morning in October last year. One of Netanyahu’s previous excuses for limiting truck entries into Gaza was that Hamas was diverting the deliveries to its soldiers. The militant organization has essentially been decapitated with the killing of most of its top leaders, and is in disarray. Therefore, there isn’t much basis for that claim any longer.

Depriving people of water, food, medicine, and other basic essentials of life is extreme cruelty, regardless of who the targets are. It is even more so when some of the victims happen to be babies and elderly women and men. No person of conscience should be able to sleep at night after watching any of the things happening in Gaza now.