June 14: Iran Takes a Step Closer to Nukes
Palestinians still prefer Hamas; DIA report on the Houthis; “Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago”
The Big Story
With the world’s attention fixed on the seemingly endless back-and-forth between Israel and Hamas over cease-fire negotiations, Iran is quietly expanding its nuclear capacities, according to a confidential Wednesday report from the International Atomic Energy Association. The IAEA assessment, first reported by Reuters, judges that Iran has “rapidly installed extra uranium-enriching centrifuges at its Fordow site and begun setting up others,” including at Natanz, in what appears to be a response to last week’s IAEA resolution censuring Tehran for its refusal to cooperate with U.N. inspectors.
The IAEA described the buildup as a “limited retaliation” to the resolution; an anonymous diplomatic source quoted in an Agence France-Presse story similarly glossed Iran’s actions as “moderate.” Still, in a Thursday statement, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department said that if Iran continues to pursue nuclear activity with “no peaceful purpose,” the United States “will respond accordingly.” That’s the same United States, of course, that reportedly spent weeks quietly lobbying Britain, France, and Germany not to introduce the censure resolution, only to fold at the last moment—perhaps concerned about the optics of joining China and Russia in defending Iran’s nuclear program.
The real problem, however, is not Iran’s “moderate” response to the censure vote. It’s that, as nuclear proliferation expert Andrea Stricker writes on the Foundation for Defense of Democracies website, the new centrifuges at Fordow are only a minor element of the current Iranian nuclear buildup. Iran, Stricker writes, is “moving toward completion of a brand-new nuclear facility 100 meters below ground, where it could enrich uranium to weapons-grade with immunity from U.S. airstrikes.” This new underground facility, adjacent to the existing facility at Natanz in Iran’s Zagros Mountains, appears to be so deep that it is protected from even the most powerful U.S.-made bunker busters, according to an analysis of satellite imagery published by the Associated Press in May. The same story noted that while Iran has claimed it is only producing “highly enriched uranium” (60% enriched), inspectors recently discovered particles enriched to 83.7%, just shy of the 90% needed to produce nuclear weapons.
Iran has prohibited IAEA inspectors from visiting the new facility near Natanz and, as Stricker notes, has violated its legal obligation to declare the construction of new nuclear facilities under the modified Code 3.1 under Iran’s agreement with the IAEA. Stricker speculates that Iran may simply never declare the new facility but will instead use it for a “rapid breakout to nuclear weapons”—one that Western powers, including Israel and the United States, will be unable to stop “via military strikes using existing capabilities.”
Read more here.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Bethany Mandel on how babies are made
The Rest
→Chart of the Day:
That’s from the latest poll of Palestinian public opinion, released Wednesday by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. The poll also found that 67% of Palestinians (and 57% in Gaza) believe Hamas made the “correct” decision to launch its Oct. 7 offensive and that 67% (48% in Gaza) believe Hamas will “emerge victorious” from the war. We make the point often that the U.S. plan for a postwar Gaza ruled by a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority is unpopular among all Israelis, not merely with Netanyahu and his “far-right” coalition partners. But it bears repeating that this solution is wildly unpopular with Palestinians, too. So who is it for?
Read the rest of the results here.
→Stat of the Day: 90%
That’s how much container shipping through the Red Sea dropped between mid-December, when the United States launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, and mid-February, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Even with the vast majority of ships now avoiding the Red Sea, Middle East Eye reported earlier this week, citing U.N. figures, that the Houthis had attacked 28 ships in the Red Sea in the first five months of 2024—a total that does not include the M/V Verbena, a Palauan-flagged cargo vessel struck by two cruise missiles earlier this week, forcing a U.S. Navy aircraft to evacuate a “severely injured” civilian mariner.
→The United States is prohibiting Israel from using U.S. intelligence to target Hamas fighters, according to a Friday report in The Washington Post. The article, based on interviews with “more than a dozen current and former U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials,” touts what it describes as the “rare volume” of the Biden administration’s assistance to its Israeli ally but notes that the administration has imposed some curious restrictions:
The Biden administration has forbidden Israel from using any U.S.-supplied intelligence to target regular Hamas fighters in military operations. The intelligence is only to be used for locating the hostages, eight of whom have U.S. citizenship, as well as the top leadership of Hamas—including Yehiya Sinwar, the alleged architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, and Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing.
But the more we think about it, the more it makes sense. If the United States were to help Israel eliminate Hamas fighters, it might undercut all that administration rhetoric about how it’s impossible to eliminate Hamas and therefore Israel must settle on a “political solution.”
→Quote of the Day:
At some point in a negotiation … you get to a point where if one side continues to change its demands—including making demands and insisting on changes on things that they had already accepted—you have to question whether they’re proceeding in good faith or not.
One does, indeed, have to question whether Hamas is negotiating in good faith. This insight comes courtesy of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking on Wednesday about Hamas’ response to Israel’s latest offer for a hostage deal—an offer that, as Blinken noted, was “virtually identical” to the terror group’s proposal on May 6.
→On Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved parliament and called for snap elections after his party was trounced by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in European elections—and the gamble appears to be backfiring. According to associates of Macron quoted in a Friday story in The Wall Street Journal, the French president, who did not notify his allies prior to announcing the elections in a televised broadcast, assumed that by seizing the initiative, he would deny left-wing parties the chance to assemble a coalition, thus forcing the entirety of respectable French opinion to support Macron’s centrist Renaissance Party against the “far-right” in runoff elections slated for early July. What happened instead is that the Socialists, Communists, Greens, and France Unbowed (the party of Jean-Luc Melénchon) immediately formed a left-wing Popular Front, which is now outpolling Macron’s party. With two weeks left to go until the first round of elections, National Rally is leading with 30% of the vote, followed by the left-wing coalition at 25% and Macron’s Renaissance in third with 19%, according to public opinion polls. “We’re going to be sandwiched between the left and the far-right,” one Renaissance lawmaker told the WSJ. “It’s going to blow up in our faces.”
→South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has reached an agreement to form a coalition with the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), alongside two smaller parties. The agreement is a milestone, in a sense: it marks the first time since the end of apartheid that the ANC will not have undivided power, and the first time that the DA—which represents South Africa’s White population and its other non-Black minorities—will enter government. Writing in The American Conservative, however, Helen Andrews pours cold water on the idea that the new government marks a milestone for South African democracy. The ANC lost its majority because its voters fled to even more radical Black parties to the ANC’s left, and it “is going into coalition with the DA precisely because it is not a threat.” Coalition with the DA also, Andrews argues, allows President Cyril Ramaphosa to preserve his personal power:
In office since 2018, Ramaphosa has a reputation as a business-friendly politician. He knows that bringing the EFF into government would set off alarm bells in international markets and send the rand tumbling. He is corrupt and self-dealing, but he is savvy enough not to want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There are many true-believing Marxists in the ANC; Ramaphosa is not one of them. Going into coalition with the DA strengthens his faction of the party at the expense of the hard left.
What the DA gets from this arrangement—it is unlikely to exercise much real power, and will sully itself through governing with the kleptocratic and increasingly inept ANC—remains a much more difficult question to answer.
→Scroll History Lesson of the Day:
That’s a description of Hitler’s Berghof from the Netflix documentary Evil on Trial, shared by Jack Posobiec on X. We haven’t seen the show yet, but with insights like these, we can’t wait to dive in. Maybe we’ll learn that the Wannsee Conference was sort of like Hitler’s Muslim ban, or that the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was sort of like Hitler’s Abraham Accords. No doubt we’ll learn even more about the eerie similarities between Donald and Adolf from professor Anne Berg, who teaches a course on the “history of garbage” at the University of Pennslyvania, in her forthcoming book examining “the disturbing connections between waste management and genocide in the Third Reich.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Misadventures of the Printer Israel Bak, by Alan D. Abbey
The 19th-century pioneer of printing in Palestine didn’t have an easy life. But his role in the development of Hebrew-language culture was enormous.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
How Babies Are Made
A Tablet exclusive report
By Bethany S. Mandel
My first job out of college I found myself working in the development department at a Reform synagogue in Washington, D.C. I’m far enough into my career to admit what it actually entailed (without giving you the sugarcoated version that was on my resume for years afterward). My day consisted of opening checks mailed to me by elderly congregants in increments of $18, donations made in memory or in honor of friends and family. In turn, I inputted their names in the temple bulletin as donors that week.
It was a painfully boring and unchallenging job; I was stuck for eight hours at a desk to complete a task that involved only about 45 minutes of actual work. In addition, I had to man the development office phone in order to receive those $18 or $36 donations from whoever called in. I received maybe three calls a day. I was left with a lot of time, and thanks to a domineering IT supervisor who blocked practically the entire internet from my work computer, I was more than eager to field those phone calls.
The congregants would tell me all about their lives; they were lonely too. I developed relationships with many of them, and I suspect more than a few would call me weekly to make inconsequential donations just to have an excuse to keep me on the phone. I was an enthusiastic participant in conversations about their lives, their pasts and their families.
It’s funny: In D.C., the first question people ask when they meet someone new is about their job. What do you do, where do you work, how can I leverage a connection with you?
But these elderly congregants, many of whom I spoke to on a weekly basis, never bothered to share that information. It’s not that they didn’t have important and interesting jobs or work experience; many of them did. They just didn’t think it important to share those stories. I did know by the end of our first call how many children and grandchildren they had, and what they were all up to. That was what was most important for them to share: news of their children and grandchildren, not their careers.
I also had a colleague, 15 years my senior, with whom I developed a particularly warm relationship. She had two children, and because of the disruptive nature of fertility treatments, the entire office knew she was trying for a third.
Once, while out to lunch with another recent college graduate, she gave us some unsolicited life advice based on her experience that in no small way changed the trajectory of my life.
You’re not as young as you think you are, she told us. Many of your peers will waste their 20s dating and partying; but you should be married with at least one kid by the time you’re 30. You’ll likely want more kids than you think you do now, and you should give yourself the opportunity to keep going while you still are well within a window of relatively high fertility.
We both took that advice to heart, and both were married in our mid-20s and gave birth to two kids before we hit 30. I then kept going and had four more after that, timed roughly every other year. She was right about having more than I had initially wanted to: I planned to have three kids and ended up with double that.
I’m often asked for dating and life advice by single 20-somethings. It feels a bit strange to try to offer a perspective, having never experienced the soul-crushing experience of dating apps, though I did meet a very nice, but not right for me, guy on an app before I met my husband.
***
Nevertheless, I’m paid to give you my opinion, and so I’ll give it. What advice do I offer young women who are looking to have a family “one day” in the future?
You have to plan for the life you want, and that starts with getting married to the right man. A man who will want to build a future with you, who will hold your hair when you are experiencing the joy of morning sickness for nine straight months, at all points of the day and night, a man who will help you make that first walk to the bathroom after you’ve had a baby. You don’t want just any guy to take this most sacred job in your life, you want a good man. So, how do you find one?
Here’s my No. 1 piece of dating advice that almost no single woman I know has followed: Stop wasting the finite time you have dating for fun. Dating is not fun. If I had a penny for every woman I know who dated a guy for years, wasting their decade of peak beauty, physical health, and fertility on guys with whom they had “fun,” I’d have way more money than I’m being paid for this column.
Ladies: Be ruthless. Every one of my happily married friends knew that their husband was “the one” or at least “the one”-worthy by three months into a relationship (I knew two weeks in). If you aren’t sure or close to sure that this is the man you want to be with, even if he’s nice and there’s nothing explicitly going amiss, move on. And do it quickly, before you become too attached. If you’re not comfortable with a three-month cap, make it six months. But you should not hit a year anniversary of dating without a ring on your finger. If he’s not right for you, he’s wrong, no matter how much fun you’re having and no matter how much your friends like him. Yes, this rule applies even if you’re just 22 and fresh out of college (I met my husband at 23, just saying).
Think back for a moment to health class in high school: You were taught all of the ways to avoid pregnancy. You were taught about condoms, hormonal birth control, IUDs, STDs, and how much you don’t want to get pregnant as a teen, lest you ruin your life and all of your future potential.
But did anyone teach you about how getting pregnant actually works? Did you learn about your ovulation cycle, about when you’re at your most fertile and what happens to your body that signals that peak fertility window? If you’re like me, you had no way of knowing. I was put on the pill in my teens because of a history of ovarian cysts, and spent a decade suppressing my body’s natural menstrual cycle. I had no idea what ovulation was or what it entailed, because I practically never experienced it until I was ready to conceive.
There’s another unexpected downside to oral hormonal birth control: It could negatively impact your ability to pick out your “one.” Women are attracted to men in part by their scent, and in two studies in 2008 and 2007, we learned that a woman’s attraction to a man’s scent is altered when they are on hormonal birth control.
The lesson here is one that few people are comfortable considering and admitting: We humans are mammals. We are animals. We are made to reproduce, and any effort to subvert that process carries consequences. Sometimes we may decide that those are tradeoffs we’re willing to make, but often, women make decisions about trying to alter this biological process without sufficient informed consent.
Just as girls and young women aren’t taught about how to make a baby, similarly, we were never taught about our biological clocks. We see news coverage of celebrities like Hilary Swank, pregnant with twins at 48, defying biological reality without any seeming explanation; in fact, asserting that specifically female biology exists at all has become a controversial statement. Many women simply do not know the extent of the technology that is almost certainly involved to achieve a first pregnancy when you are in your mid-to-late 40s. And for every Hilary Swank, there are dozens, if not hundreds of women who were unable to outrun their clocks, and were left empty-handed by even the most advanced reproductive technology.
There is no avoiding the reality that you are most fertile in your 20s, and that fertility declines into your 30s and drops off a cliff in your 40s. Yes, there are exceptions. I, too, have a friend who gave birth to a healthy baby when she was 43 years old. But the fact is, that child’s existence is a statistical miracle.
You may believe there are workarounds, technological ways to avoid the realities of female biology, which society is now telling us does not exist. In reality, we are not gods; we are mere mortals. Egg freezing and IVF aren’t anywhere near a magic bullet. Statistics are difficult to obtain and vary given a woman’s age at the time of egg extraction and overall health, but generally speaking, odds are about 1 in 5 that a woman who has frozen her eggs will then go on to experience even a single viable pregnancy and live birth. Those are not good odds.
In 2018, The Washington Post profiled Brigitte Adams, the cover woman for IVF-powered careerism (literally, she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.”) The Post reported on how it went for Adams,
Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.
Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop—and collapsing to the ground.
“It was one of the worst days of my life. There were so many emotions. I was sad. I was angry. I was ashamed,” she said. “I questioned, ‘Why me?’ ‘What did I do wrong?’”
The answer: You were sold a lie, however well-meaning, and you then helped sell that lie to hundreds of thousands of other women, before realizing the depth of the deception you bought into, to the tune of many tens of thousands of dollars.
Which brings me back to that first job, straight out of college, with those dear elderly congregants and my wonderful co-worker who spent most of her mornings while I worked there waiting in an OB-GYN’s waiting room.
Those elderly congregants, who showed me what I would care about most into my twilight years offered me perspective.
My co-worker never did have that third child. The fertility treatments didn’t work out. But she is responsible in part for my six children being here on this earth. She told me the uncomfortable truths that I didn’t want to hear at 22, but desperately needed to be told. And for that, I am eternally grateful.
Regarding Palestinian polling: It seems significant that residents of the West Bank prefer Hamas rule in Gaza by a significant margin over the preferences of Palestinians in Gaza. Logically, given that Gaza residents currently exist in a war zone, it adds up, but might it be a positive sign that they are beginning to identify the source of their current misery? 54% of Gazans prefer something other than Hamas. Dare I dream?
Regarding Bethany S. Mandel’s reflections in the Back Pages, far be it from me to mansplain, but for any young men bothering to read the piece - all two of them - I would offer, from a father’s perspective, that raising children is the best thing you will do in your life. Somewhere along the line after the first son, or daughter, arrives, one comes to realize that being a father means placing others before one’s self. When that realization’s day arrives, you become a man of purpose, a brick in human history’s wall. On that day, you become a man. Choose a mate, go forth and multiply my brothers. Be a link in this most awesome chain of human endeavor. We live in hope. In despair and indecision, we perish.
“The Biden administration has forbidden Israel from using any U.S.-supplied intelligence to target regular Hamas fighters in military operations. The intelligence is only to be used for locating the hostages, eight of whom have U.S. citizenship, as well as the top leadership of Hamas—including Yehiya Sinwar, the alleged architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, and Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing.”
I saw some reporting that US Intelligence, in part, aided Israel in locating the 4 recently saved hostages.
When I read that my first thought was, “and how long had they been sitting on that little bit of intelligence?”
I have long believed that US Intelligence had at least some amount of prior knowledge of the impending attack on Israel on October 7th by Hamas (in league with Iran), or the planning for it, or some aspects, and neglected to share such with Israel, as doing so might “upset” their tango with Iran and/or Lebanon (Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy).
This administration’s one-way love affair with Iran (now accelerating efforts daily toward nuclear armament) has got to be the single most dangerous US geopolitical calculation in all of history. Their willful blindness to this fact is beyond breathtaking and, to me, thoroughly mystifying, no matter how much lipstick they try to apply to that pig.