April 8, 2024: What Now?

Nancy Pelosi calls on U.S. to condition aid; Brazil investigates Elon; ‘Death to America’ in Dearborn

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The Big Story

The strategic situation for Israel is more opaque now than it has been since the start of the war. Last week, in the wake of Israel’s airstrike on a convoy of World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers in Gaza, U.S. President Joe Biden and top administration officials broke openly with Israel, calling for an immediate hostage deal and cease-fire and threatening to condition further U.S. aid on a series of Israeli actions, including a major increase in aid to Gaza tied to the improvement of metrics such as “famine risk.” On Sunday, the Israelis announced the delivery of 322 trucks of aid into Gaza, the highest single-day total since the start of the war, and completed the evacuation of most of the IDF forces from Gaza—albeit with top Israeli defense officials stressing that the war would resume later. The Iranian Axis of Resistance, meanwhile, appears to be tap-dancing with glee. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah boasted in a Monday speech that Biden was forcing the Israelis to accept defeat, while reports circulated Sunday and Monday that Iran had passed a message to the Americans that it would attack Israel directly unless Washington could impose a permanent cease-fire on Jerusalem. 

Is Israel prepared to accept a U.S.-mediated defeat in Gaza, or is it throwing Washington a bone in anticipation of ignoring Biden and going into Rafah, as both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have promised to do? We reached out to several of Tablet’s Middle East watchers for help making sense of the situation. 

Here was Tablet’s in-house geopolitical analyst: 

The moves that Israel has been making recently, including withdrawing all but one combat brigade from Gaza and taking blame for the deaths of aid workers in a complex situation in which terrorists seem to have boarded aid vehicles in a deliberate attempt to confuse the IDF, are congruent with two opposing scenarios. In the first, Bibi and Gallant have folded to the demands of an “angered” Joe Biden and his wife, Jill. In the second, the wily Israelis are working whatever equation they have in their pockets, dictating the numbers of bombs, tanks, and interceptors they need to invade Lebanon, having first reduced the threat of Hamas rockets to near zero—in concert with IDF doctrine, which frowns on multifront wars. My problem with the first scenario is that it requires both Bibi and Gallant to embrace political suicide in order to bring about results that both men actively oppose. My problem with the second scenario is that it’s what cold-blooded winners would do, while Bibi smells like a loser—along with nearly the entire high political and military echelons of the country. So time will tell.

Tablet contributor Lee Smith suggested that congressional Republicans should be holding the White House’s feet to the fire, but pointed to the constraints on the Israeli leadership’s ability to buy what the Biden administration is selling them:

1) GOP lawmakers should be pressuring the Biden administration for “metrics” on the Gaza famine. Social media contradicts the notion that Gazans are starving—and if food is being stolen by Hamas, it’s unclear what Israel can do about it, except to speed up the process of eliminating Hamas. As it stands, the White House is resupplying an enemy of a U.S. partner. 

2) Iran’s threats to target Israel are timed in response not only to [last week’s assassination of IRGC Quds Force commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi] but also to Biden’s pressure on Israel. U.S.-Israel conversation is thus something like, “You have bigger problems than Hamas, and if you want resupply, you need to wrap it up in Gaza right away.” 

3) I agree that both Netanyahu and Gallant have staked their future to finishing Hamas, but I believe the fundamental issue that any Israel official has to deal with is that hundreds of thousands of citizens [in northern Israel] still have not moved back home [due to Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks]. That’s cause enough for political troubles, but worse is the strategic picture—Israel can’t let Iranian proxies redraw borders in tandem with the United States and the United Nations. If there’s a U.S.-Israeli stalemate now, it can’t last for long. I just can’t imagine how Netanyahu or any Israeli leader rationalizes shrinking the country to appease the Dem base.

Tablet staff writer Armin Rosen, meanwhile, stressed that while Israel’s tap dance with the White House has thus far not achieved the full defeat of Hamas, it has allowed Jerusalem maneuvering room to pursue its interests in the face of U.S. pressure, and may continue to do so:

The Israelis have circumvented months of American warnings that they only had a few months or weeks left to defeat Hamas—the current crisis comes in part from the war having gone too well for Washington’s taste. In the pullout of many of the remaining IDF combat troops from Gaza, it is possible to see the next iteration of Israel earning credit with the Americans while pursuing goals that are wildly at odds with the Biden administration’s revealed preferences: Israeli troops still bisect the Gaza Strip, meaning the displaced in south Gaza cannot return north without Jerusalem’s permission. If the Israelis wanted to clear a multikilometer buffer zone or otherwise create the territorial or administrative conditions under which a self-governing hostile population of over 1 million people no longer lives directly next door to Ashdod and Sderot—which would be wholly consistent with all applicable international law, for whatever that’s worth—they can still do it. Granted, the circumvention strategy hasn’t defeated Hamas or mollified the Americans, and it’s created a series of bigger and bigger clashes with Washington, but it’s also allowed the Israelis to pursue their war aims beyond what might have once seemed possible. I’d be willing to bet there are more surprises ahead.

On Monday afternoon (U.S. time), Netanyahu announced that a specific date had been set for the invasion of Rafah. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department said they had not been briefed on the matter and reiterated U.S. opposition to a “major operation” there. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: How should traditional Jews mark a solar eclipse? Jeremy Brown has answers.

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The Rest

→Forty House Democrats signed a Friday letter to Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling on the administration to condition military aid to Israel. The letter asked the White House to withhold “any future offensive arms transfers” to Israel until the completion of an independent U.S. investigation into the WCK strike—and if Israel fails to “sufficiently mitigate harm to civilians in Gaza” and “facilitate … the transport and delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.” The signatories include many of the usual suspects, including Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), but also establishment creatures such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)—which gives you a sense of how the upper echelons of the party are thinking about their Israeli “ally.”

→The Brazilian Supreme Court, backed by Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has launched a criminal investigation into Elon Musk for “disseminating fake news” and obstructing justice, in response to the X owner’s refusal to comply with Brazilian court orders to suspend right-wing Brazilian X accounts and turn over user information and direct-message content to Brazilian authorities. The latest threats come after journalist Michael Shellenberger published internal emails between Brazilian authorities and Twitter/X employees in Brazil. The emails revealed that since 2020, Brazilian police and judges have been demanding that Twitter/X “unmask” anonymous accounts for sharing “disinformation” online, ordering the company to ban users (including journalists and sitting members of Congress) for political speech, requesting access to Twitter/X’s internal data, and threatening to arrest Twitter/X employees in Brazil for refusing to comply. In response to Shellenberger’s story and to Musk’s X posts on Saturday—in which he announced he would be unblocking the accounts suspended at the request of the Brazilian government—Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes announced the criminal investigation into Musk.

→On Saturday, Huffington Post published an article based on interviews with two senior Hamas officials, Musa Abu Marzouk and Basem Naim. The article is, predictably, sympathetic to the Hamas perspective, but nonetheless contains several interesting nuggets. For instance, on Qatari protection of the Hamas leadership: 

When HuffPost visited Abu Marzouk at a large, beige compound in a suburb of the Qatari capital of Doha—a world away from the Persian Gulf state’s ritzy sea-front hotels—a Qatari police officer stationed outside repeatedly challenged the idea that a meeting was scheduled. Inside, another Qatari security official subjected HuffPost to an extensive search, a step Abu Marzouk’s Hamas aides apologized for, seemed embarrassed about and made sure to say was due to Qatar’s requirements.

The Hamas officials, as well as several analysts and former U.S. officials quoted in the piece, offered some insight as to the group’s plans for postwar Gaza. Khaled Elgindy, an analyst at the Middle East Institute, suggested that the American idea of a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority operating independently of Hamas is a fantasy:

Eventually [Abbas] is going to need Hamas approval one way or another. If he’s expecting that Hamas will disappear and therefore he will have a free hand to do whatever he wants, that’s just silly.

Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former U.S. State Department official, criticized the United States for attempting to shut Hamas out of the so-called peace process and argued that Hamas’ 2017 statement—which continued to reject the legitimacy of the “Zionist entity” but embraced a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders as the “formula of national consensus”—represented an opportunity “if someone is looking for a partner and for an off-ramp that involves, genuinely, two states.” 

Abu Marzouk similarly rejected the idea that Hamas can be cordoned off from the broader Palestinian “resistance.” Pointing to public opinion polling showing majority support for Hamas among Palestinians, he said, “When you ask about a political affiliation, there are a lot of people who are supporting Hamas as a resistance movement, but they are not affiliated ideologically to Hamas; they are secular.”

In other words, we’re seeing what appears to be a consensus forming among Hamas and the Western peace processors, which happens to echo Israeli fears: that Hamas will inevitably be a part of any future Palestinian state. The only people who reject this assertion are those in the U.S. government who are currently trying to make a Palestinian state a reality. 

→The transformation of Wikipedia from a decentralized repository of the collective knowledge of the English-speaking internet into yet another mouthpiece of artificial consensus and uniparty propaganda is a story for another time. But a sense of what the website now represents can be seen in the following passage on the MK 84 2,000-pound bomb, reportedly part of the most recently authorized U.S. weapons transfer to Israel:

For a deeper dive into Wikipedia’s decline, see this 2021 UnHerd interview with Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger, on why he no longer trusts the website he created: https://unherd.com/newsroom/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer-trust-the-website-i-created/ 

→The IDF has released footage from the interrogation of the spokesman for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), who offered an in-depth account of how Palestinian propaganda is made. The video is too long to post here in full, but here are a few excerpts.

On how PIJ, Hamas, and other factions decide to push false narratives:

It’s seen that there is a certain interest to leverage a certain narrative… It’s true that this story is false, but we want to promote it. 

Pressed for an example, the spokesman mentions the PIJ rocket that fell on Al-Ahli hospital:

It was a local rocket, we said it was Israeli. … In order to erase this story, the organization made several moves. It fabricated a story that the rocket belonged to [Israel] and the target was the [hospital]. They relied on some of the stories from the international press. 

On how the “resistance” speaks different to Arab and Western news outlets:

The international media differs from the Arab ones, they focus on humanitarian issues, we don’t speak to them in the language of violence, destruction, and revenge. … For instance, you’d say [to Western journalists], ‘It’s our right to live,’ ‘We want the situation to return to normal, and our children to live like other children in the world.’

The spokesman goes on to explain that PIJ demands to review articles prior to publication, and that international journalists will often print falsehoods in order to maintain access. He also admits that Hamas and PIJ use “all” of the hospitals in Gaza because they have 24/7 internet and electricity. 

Watch the full video here: https://twitter.com/manniefabian/status/1777380747587801456

→At a Friday Al Quds Day rally in Dearborn, Michigan, activists affiliated with the Dearborn-based Hadi Institute praised “Imam Khomeini,” led the crowd in chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and condemned Israel as “ISIS,” “Nazis,” “fascists,” and “racists.” The last time we checked in on Dearborn, it was because Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute had authored a Feb. 2 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,” which documented Dearborn imams and community leaders celebrating jihad, calling for the annihilation of the “Zionist regime,” and referring to Biden as America’s “senile pharaoh.” Here’s how the pharaoh responded: 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

A Birthday Party in Israel, by Joan Nathan

In an excerpt from her new memoir, Joan Nathan remembers the culinary delights from a celebratory family trip

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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.

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The (Second) Great American Eclipse

The rabbis wrestled with the celestial event, but there is still an appropriate religious way to mark it

By Jeremy Brown

Once again, and to the delight of millions, the shadow of the moon will race across North America on Monday afternoon. Those lucky enough to be under its path will see the sun’s disk totally covered by the moon, and the day turn to night, at least for a few minutes. For many (including yours truly), this will be the second time they will see a total solar eclipse. Seven years ago I was on the beach in Charleston, South Carolina. On Monday, I’ll be at the Indianapolis Zoo. I am excited. I just bought a T-shirt that says “Twice in a Lifetime.”

For most, the event is a celebration of a glorious natural event, caused by the random fact that the sun and the moon appear to us to be the same size in the sky, allowing the former to be covered by the latter. But, perhaps rather surprisingly, traditional Jewish teaching about a solar eclipse raises several profound religious questions, as the rabbis wondered what, exactly, caused it.

The classic Talmudic source on the cause of a solar eclipse is found in Tractate Sukkah 29a:

Our rabbis taught: A solar eclipse occurs on account of four things: Because the Chief of the Rabbinic Court died and was not properly eulogized, because a betrothed woman was raped in a city and none came to rescue her, because of homosexuality, and because of two brothers who were murdered together.

If you are struggling to find a common thread to these disparate events, you are not alone. Rashi (d. 1105), the greatest of the medieval Jewish commentators, despaired of doing so: “I do not know of an explanation for this,” he wrote.

But of course, we have known for centuries that a solar eclipse occurs when the moon lies between the sun and the Earth (and is on the same plane as them). If we know that a solar eclipse is a regular celestial event whose timing is predictable and precise, how then are we to understand Tractate Sukkah, which suggests that it is a divine response to human conduct? We have already noted that Rashi was unable to explain the passage, but this did not prevent others from trying to do so. The famous Maharal of Prague (d. 1609) has a lengthy explanation in his work Be’er Hagolah. He acknowledged that an eclipse is a mechanical and predictable event, but he further suggested that if there was no sin, there would indeed never be a solar eclipse. God would have designed the universe differently, and this hypothetical sin-free universe would have been created without the possibility for a solar eclipse.

But if we extend this 16th-century thought experiment we must ask where, precisely, in a sin-free universe, would the moon be? The only way for there to be no solar eclipses in the Maharal’s imaginary universe would be for the moon to orbit the Earth at 90 degrees to the sun-Earth axis. Then it would never come between the sun and the Earth, and there could never be a solar eclipse. But this would lead to another problem. In such an orbit the moon would always be visible, and so there could never be a Rosh Chodesh, the waxing moon that signifies the beginning of a new Jewish month. The Maharal’s thought experiment provides more complications than it does solutions.

Another attempt to explain the Talmud was offered by Jonathan Eybeschutz (d. 1764). In 1751, Eybeschutz was elected as chief rabbi of the Three Communities (Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbek), although he was later accused of being (and probably was) a secret follower of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi. In January 1751, Eybeschutz gave a sermon in which he addressed the very same problem that the Maharal had noted: If a solar eclipse is a predictable event, how can it be in response to human conduct? His answer was novel, and certainly very creative. The Talmud in Tractate Sukkah is not actually addressing the phenomenon that we call a solar eclipse. According to Eybeschutz, the phrase in Tractate Sukkah “when a solar eclipse occurs" actually means—“when there are sunspots.”

Inventive though this is, there are two problems with this suggestion. In the first place, sunspots were almost impossible to see before the invention of the telescope. The first published description of them in Western literature was in 1611 by the largely overlooked Johannes Fabricius, and later by a contemporary of Galileo named Christoph Scheiner (though Galileo quickly claimed that he, not Scheiner was the first to correctly interpret what they were). Because sunspots are so difficult to see with the naked eye it seems very unlikely that this is what the rabbis in the Talmud were describing. But there is a second problem with this sunspot interpretation. According to Eybeschutz, sunspots “have no known cause, and have no fixed period to their appearance.” However, and even by the science of his day, this claim was not correct. In fact, both Scheiner and Galileo knew—and wrote—that sunspots were permanent (at least for a while) and moved slowly across the face of the sun in a predictable way. The suggestion that these spots are a response to human activity is therefore difficult to sustain. Furthermore, while a total solar eclipse is strikingly visible to those who are in its shadow, sunspots are, as we have noted, incredibly difficult to see with the naked eye. It would therefore make little sense that these invisible sunspots are to serve as a warning to humanity. And finally, the Talmud describes a solar eclipse as visible in only some places on Earth. While this is a correct description of a solar eclipse, sunspot activity would be visible from any place on Earth, a situation that is clearly not the one described in the Talmud.

A different suggestion was offered by the Italian R. David Pardo (d. 1792) in his work Chasdei David, posthumously published by his family in 1796. R. Pardo acknowledged that most solar eclipses are indeed predictable events, but suggested that there are other kinds of eclipses that cannot in fact be predicted, and it is these kinds of eclipses to which the Talmud is referring. Unfortunately, this suggestion has no factual basis. There are no such phenomena as an unpredictable lunar or solar eclipse, and R. Pardo’s suggestion is untenable.

More recently, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (d. 1994), wrote that while a solar eclipse was predictable, the local weather was most certainly not. On a clear day the solar eclipse would be visible, but on a cloudy day the sun’s disk would be harder to see. It was this aspect—the weather—that was under divine control, and presumably God could change it in response to the local actions of people. Elegant as this might be, this suggestion, too, has considerable problems. In the first place the weather is indeed predictable, although of course the accuracy of a weather forecast is relatively limited when compared to the accuracy of an eclipse, which can be forecast centuries ahead to the accuracy of a second. But more problematic is the fact that a total solar eclipse will be completely visible whether or not there are clouds. A cloudy day will prevent viewers on the ground from witnessing the moment of conjunction as the moon covers the disc of the sun, and also prevent them from seeing the stars. However, the other effect of a total solar eclipse—darkness as though it were night—will be just as visible.

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Putting aside its causes, how might traditional Jews respond when witnessing a solar eclipse? To be specific, might we recite a blessing? There are indeed precedents for reciting a blessing when seeing an awe-inspiring event. For example, we are to make a blessing on seeing the Mediterranean Sea, or a rainbow, on hearing thunder and seeing lightning, and even on seeing an exceptional beautiful or wise person. It is perfectly understandable, therefore, when witnessing one of the greatest of nature’s spectacles, to wish to mark the event with a blessing. However, there appear to be no halachic authorities who would allow a blessing to be recited. Perhaps the first to tackle this question was the Lubavitcher Rebbe. In 1957, he was asked if it was permitted to say a brachah (blessing) on seeing a solar or lunar eclipse, and his reply was unequivocal:

There is a well-established principle that it is forbidden to institute a blessing that is not mentioned in the Talmud. And some say that the reason that no blessing was instituted is because the eclipse is a bad omen. To the contrary, it is important to pray for an omen to be annulled, and to cry out without a brachah.

Here, Rabbi Schneerson combined a halachic justification for not reciting a brachah with the classic Talmudic teaching that a solar eclipse occurs as a result of human sin. However, there are two questions with R. Schneerson’s ruling. First, it is normative Jewish practice to recite a brachah on hearing bad news like the death of a person, and second, the Talmud does not describe a solar eclipse as an omen of forthcoming disaster. It is a sign of sin, not of punishment.

R. Chaim Dovid Halevi (d. 1998) who served as the head of the Rabbinic Court of Tel Aviv and Yaffo, also ruled that we are forbidden to create new berachot, although he understood the urge to do so:

Our rabbis instituted blessings over acts of creation and powerful natural events, like lightning and thunder and so on. However, they did not do so for a lunar or solar eclipse. And if only today we could institute a blessing when we are aware that an eclipse is indeed an incredible natural event. But we cannot, for a person is forbidden to make a blessing up. If a person still wants to make some form of a blessing he should recite the verses “And David blessed … blessed are you, God, the Lord of our father Israel, who performs acts of creation.”

Finally, we should note the opinion of R. David Lau, then the chief rabbi of Modi’in and currently the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel. A young man wrote to R. Lau about his experiences of observing the (partial) solar eclipse of 2001 that could be seen in Israel. He had been left wanting to make a blessing for what was, for him, an awe-inspiring cosmic occurrence. R. Lau empathized with these feelings, but noted that since the rabbis of the Talmud had not prescribed a blessing over an eclipse, it was not possible to institute such a blessing today. R. Lau noted that his own religious response to witnessing the eclipse had been to say Psalm 19, “The Heavens tell of God’s glory” and Psalm 104, “My soul will bless God.”

Monday’s total solar eclipse over North America will allow millions to witness a memorable celestial event. Even if traditional Jews will not make a blessing, there are, as we have noted, other suggestions for an appropriate religious response. On Monday at 3:06 p.m. Central Time, I shall be reciting a verse from the Book of Isaiah (40:26):

“Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these things, who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, by the greatness of His might and the strength of His power; not one of them is missing.”