April 10, 2024: Did Israel Sacrifice Its Gains in Gaza?

Haniyeh loses sons; House blocks 702 renewal; Tucker’s Palestinian Christian crankery

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The Big Story

The strategic situation in Gaza has not changed much since Monday, when we polled the Tablet brain trust on their views on whether Israel is losing while appearing to win or winning while appearing to lose. Hostage negotiations remain ongoing; Israel and Iran have traded additional threats; and President Joe Biden went off-message again Tuesday night with Univision, appearing to call on Israel to unilaterally agree to a six- to eight-week cease-fire without first securing the release of some hostages—only for “senior White House officials” to walk the president’s remarks back within the hour, reiterating the official U.S. position that a cease-fire should be contingent on a hostage deal. We even got a new use of iron-clad, with Biden dropping the buzzword in Wednesday remarks on his commitment to protecting Israel from Iran. 

But on Wednesday, we spoke with an Israel analyst experienced in military affairs who offered a somewhat different perspective on the events of the past week, especially the IDF’s near-total withdrawal of combat units from Gaza. We’re reproducing a lightly edited version of that exchange below:

It’s been clear for months that the Rafah operation would be primarily special operations raids (technically, a raid has a timed withdrawal, meaning there was never an intention to hold Rafah). Hamas’ combat power has been degraded to the point where the Israelis don’t need a big combined arms operation in the city, and there are too many civilians there in any case (even factoring in some being evacuated) to make that viable. The problem with the troop redeployment is not that it prevents targeted operations against remaining Hamas high-value targets and units in Rafah, but that it squanders Israeli leverage over Gaza’s political future and grants freedom of maneuver to Hamas’ remnants, allowing them to reconstitute and project authority onto plans for Gaza’s future. Aside from the effects of broadcasting a chastened, retreating IDF to the rest of the region, within Gaza it tells Palestinians—including scattered members of Hamas—that Hamas is still in power.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that on March 30, Hamas arrested six Palestinian Authority intelligence officials who entered Gaza with an Egyptian Red Crescent aid convoy. The arrests were made in Gaza City in the north, which was nominally cleared by the IDF months ago. Hamas has also been issuing regular warnings—to the PA, Fatah, Palestinian clans, and any potential future Arab peacekeeping force—that attempts to supplant Hamas’ authority in Gaza will be deemed “collaboration” with the Israelis and punished accordingly. 

The analyst went on:

Now all of this may be a calculation about what’s necessary to regain support before hitting Iran/Hezbollah, but (a) you’d be insane/retarded to trust any promise of support this White House makes and (b) momentum is a driving force in war. Simply abandoning battlefield gains is an unforgivable squandering of soldiers’ lives and other precious resources. 

The loss of momentum is likely harmful on the world stage, too. The longer the Israeli war drags on in an apparent stalemate, the more that the United States exerts pressure on Israel to bring it to a close, and the harder it will become to eventually resume high-intensity operations—whether in Gaza or in Lebanon. 

The positive spin on this is that by capitulating now, the Israelis are laying the groundwork to box D.C. out of the postwar settlement. That seems unlikely, but it’s equally unlikely that Bibi is going to make his legacy a humiliation by the Biden admin. 

But if Israel has no intention of going into Rafah in force, we asked, why do Bibi and Gallant keep promising to go into Rafah? And why are the Israelis purchasing 40,000 tents for Rafah evacuees?

Partly political stupidity. Bibi wants to make a big show in Rafah for his base. But the smart Israeli military analysts, like Itzhak Brik, have been saying for months that this was never going to happen. And then, given political conditions, even extensive raids—which still require shaping operations (i.e., bombing and airstrikes), close air support, etc.—would still be hampered by having that many refugees in such a small place. The last point I think is that the threat of a larger operation was a way of exerting pressure on Egypt over control of the border crossing. 

None of the options open to Israel now seem particularly good, but only time will tell.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Barack Obama is wrong, argues Michael Lind—nations must be held together by something

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The Rest

→Three of Hamas Politburo leader Ismail Haniyeh’s sons and two of his grandchildren were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Wednesday. Haniyeh confirmed their deaths, telling Al Jazeera that he “thanks God for bestowing upon us the honor of their martyrdom” and vowing not to change his position in the ongoing hostage negotiations. Underscoring our anonymous analyst’s point about Hamas’ reconstitution in the north, Haniyeh’s sons were killed in Gaza City. 

X’s Grok AI chatbot, meanwhile, extended its condolences to Mr. Haniyeh for his tragic loss:

→Nineteen Republicans, including Matt Gaetz (R-FL), joined with House Democrats on Wednesday to block a procedural vote to begin debate on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA). Section 702, a 2008 update to the law to effectively legalize President George W. Bush’s “Stellar Wind” domestic wiretapping operation, permits the U.S. government and intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign nationals—but also to spy on U.S. citizens, so long as their conversations are picked up “incidentally” as part of the spying on foreigners. Over roughly the past decade, however, Section 702 has been regularly weaponized for domestic surveillance and partisan warfare. A 2013 leak from Edward Snowden revealed that under Barack Obama, the National Security Agency had been conducting regular “backdoor” surveillance of American citizens under Section 702, and Section 702 was the authority used by Obama’s intelligence agencies to surveil the Trump campaign and transition team, including campaign advisers Carter Page and incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The content of this surveillance was then illegally leaked to the press in order to damage the incoming administration. 

The failure of the procedural vote, which was brought by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), casts doubt on whether Congress will be able to renew Section 702 before it expires on April 19. Our suggestion would be to consider ditching FISA altogether. As Angelo Codevilla, who helped author the initial 1978 FISA bill, wrote in 2020:

So long as FISA remains on the books, the party that controls the intelligence agencies can be counted on to make Watergate-on-steroids a part of American public life.

The only remedy for FISA is to repeal it and return to the prior system based on constitutionally defined responsibilities. Let the executive branch conduct surveillances for intelligence purposes according to its own guidelines. But then let us give free rein to challenging executive judgments in open court, through adversary process, with full powers of discovery.

Read more here: https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/29/angelo-codevilla-fisa-foreign-intelligence-watergate-james-mccord/

→Tucker Carlson continued his decline into crankery with a Tuesday interview with Rev. Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Christian Church in Bethlehem, in which both host and guest inveighed against American Christians for supporting Israel. They made a number of claims about the alleged Israeli persecution of Christians, but to give you a sense of the general quality of the discussion, Carlson, in his opening monologue, refers to the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, in which “a Christian clergyman was killed with American weapons, and Christian clergy in our country said nothing.” 

That’s certainly one way of putting it. What actually happened was that during an Israeli operation in Bethlehem, roughly 200 Palestinian gunmen from Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad took refuge in the church—in violation of international law and the Palestinian Authority’s bilateral agreements with the Vatican—along with some 200 civilians, whom the gunmen ordered to remain in the church. What followed was a 39-day siege, which featured several exchanges of fire between IDF troops and gunmen inside the church, resulting in the wounding of one Armenian monk. Freed captives from the church told The Washington Times after the siege that the gunmen had consumed vast quantities of food and alcohol while keeping the civilians on a starvation diet and threatening to shoot anyone who attempted to leave, while Catholic priests told the paper that Bibles in the church were ripped up for use as toilet paper. 

Somehow, what Tucker gets out of the whole episode is this: “If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you’ve lost the thread.” 

There are plenty of points to be made in rebuttal, including that both the PA and Hamas have made it an official policy to persecute Christians and “Islamicize” Christian cities through demographic engineering and that the handful of Christians who remain in Palestinian-controlled areas are either full-blown partisans in the Axis of Resistance camp or understand that failure to parrot the official Palestinian line is an invitation to official retribution—i.e., they are dhimmis. But the main point is this: It should be sufficiently clear by now that the U.S. government is not, in fact, supporting Israel but is instead trying to hamstring the Israeli war effort in order to protect Iran’s “equity” in Gaza. That’s in line with the Obama-Biden team’s consistent policy over the past decade of siding with Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and their various sectarian proxies throughout the Middle East. We suppose we can understand why Carlson would try to convince his audience to be more pro-Russian or anti-Jewish. What doesn’t make sense to us is, Why is he running cover for Obama?

→The U.K. National Health Service released the full version of the Cass Review on Tuesday, an independent review of youth gender medicine compiled by pediatrician Hilary Cass, the findings of which led the NHS to ban puberty blockers outside of clinical research settings and to advocate for “extreme caution” in prescribing cross-sex hormones prior to the age of 18. As has been the case with every official review of the scientific literature in every country that has commissioned one, Cass found that the medicalized approach to treating youth gender distress endorsed by all major U.S. medical associations—and the Biden administration—is unsupported by scientific evidence, as are the oft-repeated claims that such care is “life-saving” and that it reduces the risk of suicide.

Given that these conclusions are backed by both common sense and every high-quality evidence review that’s been done on the subject, we can’t say we’re surprised by the Cass review. The real question is not why England, France, and other countries have backed away from youth gender medicine, but why the U.S. elite remains so stubbornly committed to practicing quack medicine on children. One answer is that in England, as in most European countries, there is a relatively small elite numbering in the thousands of people that can change its mind on policy issues. In the United States, however, there is a bloated elite “class”—the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people credentialed through elite higher education—that, lacking any independent power, is the plaything of political parties and their aligned interest groups and billionaire-funded NGO and media complexes. In the United States, the party complexes define the parameters of elite opinion, and not the other way around. 

→A Boeing engineer has alleged that the company cut corners in manufacturing its flagship 787 Dreamliner aircraft and that sections of the fuselage could “break apart mid-flight after thousands of trips” as a result, according to a Tuesday report in The New York Times. The whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, who worked on the Dreamliner, made the allegations in documents sent to the Federal Aviation Administration and in an interview with the Times. The Times article provided little detail on the production problems alleged by Salehpour, except that they stemmed from changes in how sections of the Dreamliner fuselage, which come from different manufacturers, are fastened together during the assembly process. According to the Times:

Mr. Salehpour said the shortcuts that he believed Boeing was taking resulted in excessive force being applied to narrow unwanted gaps in the assembly connecting pieces of the Dreamliner’s fuselage. He said that force led to deformation in the composite material, which he said could increase the effects of fatigue and lead to premature failure of the composite.

In a statement to the paper, Boeing acknowledged that changes to the assembly process had been made, but said that they had “no impact on durability or safe longevity of the airframe.” The company also said that its engineers were engaged in “complex analysis” to determine if there could be a “long-term fatigue concern” for the aircraft. The FAA stated that it is looking into Salehpour’s allegations but declined to comment on them. 

→Lisa Cook, who was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2022, is the latest high-profile victim of plagiarism allegations. A Daily Wire investigation by Luke Rosiak and Christopher Rufo found that “in a series of academic papers spanning more than a decade, Cook appears to have copied language from other scholars without proper attribution and duplicated her own work and that of coauthors in multiple academic journals without proper attribution” (for examples, see the link to the article below). The Daily Wire also notes that Cook, then a professor at Michigan State, was a prominent voice in a public pressure campaign to get University of Chicago economics professor Harald Uhlig fired for a tweet likening “defund the police” activists to “flat-earthers” and “creationists.” Uhlig’s tweet prompted an accusation from a former graduate student that Uhlig had years ago “made fun” of Martin Luther King Jr. in a classroom, though a university investigation into the incident cleared Uhlig of “discriminatory conduct.” In a public Twitter thread, however, Cook said that “free speech has limits” and described Uhlig’s words as “reprehensible, hateful & profoundly inappropriate.” She called on him to be fired as editor of the Journal of Political Economy and for the University of Chicago to “remov[e] [his] access to students.”

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Rivers Crashing Inside, by Jake Marmer

The secular surrealist Jewish poetry of Robert Desnos

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Obama’s Americans

The former president’s atomized, placeless definition of who we are is a recipe for national disintegration

By Michael Lind

Is the United States a nation-state, in which there is an “American people” whose members have more in common with each other than merely being subject to the jurisdiction of American federal, state, and local governments? Or is the United States just a random agglomeration of tribes and individuals who share nothing except an agreement to abide by certain minimal rules? The answer is the latter, according to Barack Obama. In a plutocratic fundraiser for the reelection campaign of Joe Biden, the former president declared:

But what has always made America exceptional is this radical idea that you can get people from every corner of the globe—don’t look alike, don’t have the same name, worship differently, speak different languages, have different cultural traditions—and somehow they’re going to come together under a set of rules and we’re all going to pledge … that’s our creed …

It may seem pedantic if not cruel to dissect boilerplate political rhetoric like this. Obama is merely saying the same thing that countless Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, say in contemporary Fourth of July speeches and other orations. This kind of talk combines a historical assertion—the United States has always welcomed people from every background—with a political theory—the mere existence of a set of legal rules and political institutions can “somehow” generate a national community out of people who otherwise share nothing in common, including the language in which they communicate. While it doubtless serves the purpose of discouraging xenophobia and encouraging toleration of differences in a diverse society, it is bad history and bad political science.

Let’s start with the history. You don’t need to be a left-wing opponent of “settler colonialism” to see that Obama’s account of American history is, well, whitewashed: “What has always made America exceptional is this radical idea that you can get people from every corner of the globe.” This is true, if you are referring to the United States from 1965 to the present. It is not true of the U.S. before 1965.

The first Congress held under the auspices of the federal Constitution convened from March 4, 1789, to March 4, 1791, during the first two years of the presidency of George Washington. It is sometimes described as “the Congress of the Founders” because so many representatives and senators had taken part in the drafting of the new Constitution. They passed the Nationality Act of 1790, under which only “free white persons” could become naturalized citizens of the United States. Not until 1952 was the exclusion of nonwhite immigrants from naturalization eliminated, and only in 1965 were the vestiges of racism completely purged from federal immigration law by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This meant that for most of U.S. history if you were Irish or German you could move to the U.S. and become a naturalized citizen in a few years, but if you were an Indian or Japanese immigrant you could never be eligible for American citizenship, no matter how long you lived.

To keep out Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and other Asians, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The bar on Asian immigration was expanded in subsequent acts in 1892 and 1902, and confirmed in the federal immigration acts of 1917 and 1924 which established a quota system for white immigrants favoring those from Northern and Western Europe.

In denying citizenship to nonwhite immigrants and discouraging their immigration before the 1960s, the United States was anything but “exceptional.” All of the major English-speaking lands of settlement, including Canada, New Zealand, and Australia with its “White Australia” policy that lasted from 1901 until 1975, banned or limited nonwhite immigration and naturalization until after World War II.

OK, so Obama is wrong about pre-1965 America. Is he right that since 1965 the U.S. has demonstrated that people who “don’t look alike, don’t have the same name, worship differently, speak different languages, have different cultural traditions” have “somehow” created a community even though they agree on nothing except “a set of rules”? To put it in more academic language—does the experience of the U.S. since the 1960s prove that a democracy can function without a shared extra-political culture of some kind, even one that excludes racial and religious tests for citizenship? The answer is no, because most Americans—though not all—from 1776 onward have shared and continued to share a common language, a common culture, and common values that transcend particular religious groups.

The common language of the American cultural majority, to which most Americans of all races, religions, and ethnicities belong, is English. According to the U.S. Census, the number of people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home rose from 1 in 10 in 1980 to 1 in 5 in 2019.

Some on the right have feared that linguistic Balkanization might undermine national cohesion. In practice, this has never been a problem. Even today, following a generation of mass immigration, four out of five Americans are exclusively or primarily English speakers. Moreover, most of the foreign languages that are spoken in the U.S. are spoken by relatively small ethnic diasporas. Spanish speakers account for 62% of those who speak a foreign language at home—outnumbering the next largest groups (Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic) by 12 to 1. And native-born Hispanics of later generations lose Spanish as rapidly as the European immigrants of the past lost German, Polish, Italian, Yiddish, and other diaspora languages. Only a third of Hispanics in the third generation say they can carry on a conversation in Spanish “pretty well” and a majority cannot do so at all.

This does not mean that a common language is not important to a shared sense of national identity. On the contrary, countries divided among multiple large, permanent linguistic groups also tend to have politics divided along the lines of language, like Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland. Many such countries have broken up, peacefully or violently, like Norway and Sweden, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the successor states of Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Sudan. This has never been a problem to date in the U.S., because foreign language use has usually dwindled as the descendants of immigrants assimilated, making concerns about a “Spanish-speaking Quebec” in the Southwest and subversion by German speakers in the U.S. during World War I out of touch with reality.

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If the U.S., with its overwhelmingly monoglot population, does not prove that a country can function with a Babel of mutually incomprehensible languages, does it prove that people who, in Obama’s words, “worship differently” can “come together” to form a coherent society? Here, as in the case of language, this thought experiment has never really been put to the test, because there is far more diversity in religious beliefs among Americans than there is diversity of actual values.

The real test would be substantial elements of the U.S. population whose religions were radically alien to the values shared by most American Christians, Jews, Muslims, secularists, and others—say, neo-Aztecs or neo-Norse pagans or American worshippers of Baal who insisted that human sacrifice was an essential part of their religion. In tolerant, pluralistic, inclusive America, we make all sorts of accommodations for religious communities, allowing Native Americans in rituals to use the otherwise illegal drug peyote and allowing Jewish soldiers to wear yarmulkes in uniform. In the spirit of religious accommodation, why not permit Baal-worshipping parents to burn their firstborn infants?

Defenders of the theory that American national identity is purely a matter of abstract procedures and rules might claim that child sacrifice violates the natural or civil rights of the child. Family law in general, however, is impossible to square with the claim that federal, state, and local governments are neutral with respect to values, as distinct from theologies.

For example, Title IV-D of the Social Security Act of 1975 requires every American state to maintain a system punishing divorced parents who do not support their children under child support laws. Violators will be fined; if they do not pay up they may be imprisoned. How is this imposition of morality by coercive government compatible with value-neutrality in a purely procedural republic? Why should one view of parental rights be imposed by the state on everyone?

In The Ethics of Liberty (1982), which the libertarian Mises Institute describes as “Murray Rothbard’s greatest contribution to the politics of freedom,” Rothbard argues that parents should have the rights to sell their children and also to let them starve, if they get tired of having to feed them:

The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive. (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.) This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e.g., by not feeding it)? The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether deformed or not, to die.

To Rothbard’s credit, he claims that children of all ages have the right to flee from parents who want to sell them or starve them: “The absolute right to run away [crawl away?—ML] is the child’s ultimate expression of his right of self-ownership, regardless of age.”

Thankfully, in the United States as it actually exists, devoutly libertarian parents are not allowed to starve their children to death. When asked why the values of the majority should be imposed on them, the best answer is that of a character in a Ring Lardner story: “Shut up, he explained.”

Apart from family law, there are many areas of American life in which duties are imposed on citizens, regardless of their personal opinions and with minimal exceptions, including wartime draft laws. And then there is the common American dress code. In every U.S. jurisdiction outside of a few nudist beaches and nudist camps, it is illegal to walk around naked in public. In a purely procedural republic, nudists who believe in the Constitution and democracy and rights and the rule of law should be free to shop in the buff and to dine out in restaurants in the altogether. In actually existing America, otherwise law-abiding and patriotic American nudists may end up in jail for violating a tribal custom of the cultural majority—wearing clothes—a custom which is not mentioned in federal or state constitutions but which nevertheless is coercively enforced by governments at all levels.

Obama to the contrary, “our creed” is not that “somehow” a coherent national community spontaneously can arise by throwing together linguistic, religious, and cultural groups that share nothing in common other than commitment to a government charter. If the U.S. population were divided three ways among German-speaking Amish, Arabic-speaking Salafist Muslims, and Chinese-speaking secularists, the country would quickly disintegrate, even if the three groups agreed on free elections and minimal civil rights. In Federalist Number 2, John Jay holds out the hope that a federal union of the former British colonies might hold together thanks to the preexisting, extra-political commonalities of “one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs …” The New Deal era finally brought Catholics and Jews into the American mainstream, with the rejection of religious tests for identity in the American community. And the civil rights revolution belatedly and thankfully abolished racial tests as well. But if “manners and customs” and a common language and other elements of a common American culture are thrown out as well, what remains is more likely to be a failed state along the lines of Lebanon or Somalia than a flourishing democracy.