Aug. 27, 2024: Tulsi Gabbard Joins Team MAGA

Hamas official: "We do not believe in a two-state solution"; Zuckerberg says White House censored Facebook; In search of Kamala Harris

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The Big Story

On Monday night, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman, Iraq War veteran, and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, endorsed Donald Trump at a National Guard Association event in Detroit. 

The Gabbard endorsement is not necessarily a surprise: She left the Democratic Party in 2022 and has been scathingly critical of the Biden-Harris administration in frequent appearances on Fox News. In her Monday speech endorsing Trump, the former congresswoman focused heavily on foreign policy. “I know that Trump understands the grave responsibility that a president and commander in chief bears for every single one of our lives,” Gabbard, speaking on the third anniversary of the Abbey Gate ISIS bombing in Kabul, told the assembled veterans. She continued:

We saw this through his first term in the presidency when he not only didn’t start any new wars, he took action to de-escalate and prevent wars. He exercised the courage we expect from our commander in chief in exhausting all measures of diplomacy, having the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners alike in the pursuit of peace, seeing war as a last resort. The truth is, as we head toward our decision as a country in November, the same cannot be said about Kamala Harris.

Like Trump, Gabbard is a foreign policy gadfly who has courted controversy over her perceived friendliness to dictators. She was a defender of Syrian President Bashar Assad during the Syrian civil war, meeting with him during a “fact-finding mission” in 2017, and has been a vocal critic of the U.S. Ukraine policy, leading allies of the national security establishment in both parties to attack her as “treasonous” (Mitt Romney) and as a “Russian asset” (Hillary Clinton). She has also, like Trump, been a target of government retaliation: Earlier this month, a Federal Air Marshal Service whistleblower revealed that Gabbard had been placed on the Transportation Security Administration’s “Quiet Skies” watchlist, for “travelers who may present an elevated risk to aviation security.”

As a side note: It’s interesting that both Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have been attacked as foreign agents and conduits of “Russian propaganda” for their skepticism of America’s role in Ukraine, have been eminently sensible on Israel’s war in Gaza, as you can see from Gabbard’s interview with Chris Cuomo here: 

 (A cynic might note that the Democratic Party diverts the “antiwar” sentiments of its leftist base into party-approved channels such as opposition to Israel, which serve Democratic foreign policy objectives, while attacking “antiwar” voices who break from the party line as traitors and foreign assets. Thus Gabbard and Kennedy are Russian propagandists for favoring a peace settlement in Ukraine, but the president of the United States can concede that protesters working in league with Iran-backed foreign terrorist organizations “have a point,” as Biden did last Monday, without having to worry about public accusations of “treason.”)

We don’t know if Gabbard’s endorsement will make a difference in November, though we do know that she’s a perennial favorite of figures such as Joe Rogan, whose politics skew toward nonpartisan patriotism, cultural libertarianism, and mistrust of the political establishment—a broad constituency that is nonetheless difficult to poll. Our own sense is that Gabbard’s endorsement, like Kennedy’s embrace of Trump, is best set against the rush of security state officials and hawkish current and former Republicans who have embraced Harris in recent weeks, capped off by a Sunday letter from more than 200 former aides to George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney endorsing the vice president.

The election, in other words, is shaping up as a contest between inside and outside. As Richard Fernandez observed this morning on X: 

IN THE BACK PAGES: An excerpt from Naomi Kahoti Bronner’s memoir, about her mother’s life in the tiny Jewish community of Sanaa, Yemen

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The Rest

→Quote of the Day: 

People who talk about different streams within Hamas ... This is not really true. And I say this very confidently … we will never accept anything less than the historical Palestine. We do not believe in a two-state solution. We will never recognize Israel, and [although] we might accept the creation of a Palestinian state or a Palestinian entity on the ’67 borders with its capital as East Jerusalem, we would never recognize Israel.

That’s Hamas politburo member Ghazi Hamad in a July 29 interview recently translated and published by the Middle East Media Research Institute. Amusingly, Hamad specifically shot down a rumor pushed by the Qataris that Hamas would be willing to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in a “technocratic” government that would accept the 1967 borders. Speaking only a week after Hamas and Fatah signed a “unity agreement” in Beijing, Hamad explained that the Palestinian Authority has “no authority” over anything and that Hamas will only join the PLO if it renounces its “failed program” of “so-called peace through negotiation.” Hamad added, however, that Hamas will eventually “force” its way into the PLO after the war and continue to “enforce [its] will” in Gaza.  

→In a Monday letter to the House Committee on the Judiciary, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that in 2021, the White House had “repeatedly pressured” his company to “censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.” “I believe the government pressure was wrong,” Zuckerberg wrote, “and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Zuckerberg added that the decision to “temporarily demote” the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop (Facebook did not fully censor the story, as Twitter did) was made after being warned by the FBI about “a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”

→On Tuesday, the California State Senate passed a bill, AB 1840, that would make illegal immigrants eligible for up to $150,000 in state-supported home loans. The bill, which now needs to pass the State Assembly, would all California residents eligible for the state’s Dream for All loan program, which provides 20% down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, provided that they have a taxpayer identification number (TIN) or Social Security number (California makes all undocumented immigrants eligible to receive a TIN). Gov. Gavin Newsom, a top surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris, has not indicated yet whether he will sign the bill, but it arrives just as Harris is attempting to position herself as a champion of “secure borders.” Given Harris’ own background in California politics, the bill could provide an uncomfortable echo to one of Harris’ only policy proposals thus far: $25,000 in federal down payment assistance for “first-generation” homebuyers. The Harris campaign has claimed that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for benefits under her proposal.

→Why is Harris—rhetorically at least—running away from the record of the administration in which she served as “border czar”? A Sunday investigation in The New York Times offers a clue. It tells the story of Daniel Davon-Bonilla, who crossed the southern border illegally in 2022 and was allowed to stay in the country, despite being detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In April 2023, Davon-Bonilla forcibly raped a transgender woman at a migrant shelter in Brooklyn. He was arrested, but pleaded down to felony assault, and was released in June 2024 with time served and instructions to attend counseling for “problematic sexual behavior.” Due to New York City’s sanctuary laws, prosecutors did not inform ICE, which had issued a detainer for Davon-Bonilla, of his release. A little over a month later, Davon-Bonilla was arrested for another rape—this time of a homeless woman under the Coney Island boardwalk. 

According to the Times, in the year leading up to June 30, 2023, the New York Police Department and Department of Corrections received a combined 310 ICE detainers for illegal immigrants accused of crimes, but turned only 10 people over to the agency. Harris was a vocal supporter of sanctuary city laws as district attorney of San Francisco; she has not commented on these laws since becoming the Democratic nominee for president. 

→Indeed, she has not commented on much of anything. Harris announced earlier in August that she hoped to “get an interview scheduled by the end of the month,” but we’re approaching Labor Day weekend with no interview in sight. As Byron York writes at The Washington Examiner, the strategy of keeping Harris away from the press serves two purposes simultaneously. First, it hides a candidate who most Democratic insiders agreed until recently was not a good extemporaneous speaker—a Tuesday article in Politico Playbook noted that Harris and some of her aides are opposed to doing a “showy interview,” citing her previous poor performances in interviews with 60 Minutes and Lester Holt. Second, and perhaps more important, Harris’ omerta obfuscates her policy positions, allowing aides and surrogates to suggest that she has moved away from previous statements—such as her expressions of support for decriminalizing border crossings or eliminating private health insurance—without Harris having to say anything definitive that could alienate allies on the left. Even Harris’ few concrete proposals are being treated as nothing more than a bit of campaign rhetoric. Politico reported Sunday that congressional Democrats are delivering a message to allies worried about Harris’ proposed federal ban on grocery price gouging: “Don’t worry about the details. It’s never going to pass Congress.” 

→You may recall from The Scroll’s coverage of the DNC last week that one of those fake Harris policy pronouncements was a “prediction” from Rep. Brad Schneider that a Harris administration would not return to the Iran nuclear deal, which he based on conversations with Harris’ Jewish liaison Ilan Goldenberg—i.e., a meaningless statement from a congressman that was nonetheless reported as a policy statement from Harris herself. But a future Harris administration would be staffed with Obama veterans, such as Phil Gordon, who helped write the Iran deal and sell it to the American public, and the Iranians, for their part, are once again putting out feelers to negotiate. On Tuesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced that there was “no barrier” for the new government of President Masoud Pezeshkian to “engage” the “enemy” in negotiations. As the Associated Press noted, “his comments mirror those around the time of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.”

→Still, if public polling is to be believed, Harris’ “say nothing” strategy is working: The vice president is leading Trump by +1.5 percentage in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, as of Tuesday. Writing at the blog of the political consultancy ColdSpark, however, Mark Davin Harris explains why you shouldn’t believe the polls:

Many public polls right now are likely oversampling highly educated Democrats, and very high likelihood to turnout voters. They are not capturing the full electorate and while this may fix itself with rising response rates throughout the fall as we approach the election, it is a real problem for the polling industry to address.

So as the fall progresses, keep an eye on the public polling because it is likely once again to significantly understate the support for President Trump and Republicans.

Read it here. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Bowls of Therapy, by Flora Tsapovsky

Stressed out Israelis seek refuge from daily life in ceramic studios

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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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My Grandfather’s Leg

by Naomi Kehati Bronner

Sanaa 1936-1945

My mother was married to her uncle at the age of 10.

He was 18.

In the Jewish quarter of Sanaa, girls often married young, like their Muslim neighbors. Her friend Zivia had been betrothed at 12 to her cousin and had no complaints. But in my mother’s case, the rationale was a business deal gone bad. Her father, Yihye Harif, owed a debt to his brother, and it seemed easiest to pay it off with a girl who was still several years away from becoming a teenager. My mother’s soon-to-be husband lived eight hours away by donkey.

Born in Sanaa around 1936 (birthdays were not recorded), the girl was named Hamame (“dove” in Arabic, the spoken language). She was her parents’ third child after her brother Hayim and sister Bracha, who had died in childhood, a not uncommon event. Hamame was a resilient child, perhaps because she nursed for so long; which secured a meal, precious in a community marked by regular deficiency. In exchange for this nourishment and comfort, Hamame helped her mother, Rumia, avoid an unwanted pregnancy, such being the superstitious convention among Yemenite Jews.

The Jews of Yemen mostly lived in the hilly region, which reached 12,000 feet high. Divided by many valleys, it was a fertile area surrounded by deserts. In the first half of the 20th century, the population of Yemen was 4 million people; 50,000 of them were Jews who were scattered among 1,100 villages. Many villages had several Jewish families only. Only 15% lived in Sanaa.

Sanaa, at 7,500 feet, the highest capital in the Middle East, was itself enclosed, but the Jewish quarter had its own tall walls and a gate that locked at night. This ghetto, known as Qa al Yahud, was home to some 6,000 Jews, a quarter of the city’s population.

Mother and daughter were inseparable. Hamame stretched her part of the deal and nursed vigorously until age 4 when her mother submitted to another pregnancy. It was a boy, Avraham, after whom sister Sara came along, followed by Shoshana.

My mother’s uncle Shmuel, her father’s youngest brother, lived with his parents, two brothers, and two sisters about 20 miles south of Sanaa in a village called Bani Bahloul (which was also the name of the area) and was in the family business of dried fruits and nuts, mostly almonds, raisins, dates, and walnuts. (Yemen’s sunny climate made it easy to dry the produce outdoors on large pieces of fabric.) From an early age, Shmuel and his brothers had trained to join the family business by their father, Aharon, a small-time merchant. Each of the sons and their father would walk alongside a donkey, usually full of produce, from village to village, selling as much of their merchandise as they could before trekking to the next community on their route. Two of the brothers eventually had to drop out: Yusef, who was blinded by smallpox and ended up working as a grinder of henna, the red dye paste, and his older brother, my grandfather Yihye, who suffered an injury and worked only part time at a sandal-making shop.

Hamame knew her family struggled. Rumia not only cleaned the synagogue but worked for other families. She scrubbed their houses, did their laundry, ground their wheat, baked their bread, and went to the well for them. In return, she got money and essentials. During holidays, she came home with flour, potatoes, meat, or clothes so she could dress her children and bury the shame of poverty. There were no social welfare institutions; instead, an informal system developed where wealthier Jews were expected to support the poorest. And then there was the Almighty: As the 17th-century Yemenite Jewish poet Shalom Shabazi famously put it, “Even if the generous lock their gates, God in heaven never will.”

Years later, when my mother devotedly cleaned the homes of Israeli families and brought home their castoffs to brighten our wardrobes, I saw how easily she duplicated that role of her mother. She had witnessed her mother moving from place to place every day with no respite, and now she did the same.

The family’s endless struggle really had one source: her father’s leg. Its origins were mysterious. Around 1930, Yihye married Rumia Witry, who was from the neighboring village Beit Witr, in the Bani Bahloul area. She moved in with his family, and things looked promising for the young couple, given the family business. But one day, not long after their wedding, Yihye was alone on a business trip when something happened. “It was like I was stabbed by a knife,” he told his wife when he returned, pointing to his thigh, inflamed and bleeding. They moved to Sanaa soon after in search of a remedy and income.

When asked what happened to her father, my mother would say, “The genie attacked him,” recounting what she heard from her mother. “Young grooms were not supposed to walk alone in the mountains,” she explained. “Genies roamed freely outside the city because it was an open space with no metal, especially iron.” Genie talk was everywhere, like the story she heard of the two fearful women who were instructed by a genie to leave food. They did and found it burned the following morning. Terrified by what she now understood as supernatural harm, my mother better understood why everyone uttered the prayer, “Please God, protect me from the bad spirits (shedim),” when they felt unsafe, and she said it with greater intention.

For the rest of his life, Yihye walked with one leg that could not bend at the knee because of the wound that would not heal. He tried every treatment, including highly valued lamb meat offered by Arab neighbors for building strength, but especially makwa. Jewish healers would heat up a piece of metal, like a skewer, until it was red and apply it for a few seconds to a specific area on the skin, after which they would apply oil and cover the wound with special leaves thought to have medicinal qualities. It usually left a scar. The idea seemed to be that the burn sent a shock wave through the nervous system to the corresponding area in the brain that generated healing. The pain that resulted from the burn was usually short-lived and bearable. Makwa treated physical as well as emotional pain—from infections to depression.

Whatever the mechanism, Yihye’s wound often went dormant afterward. But then it grew inflamed with pus and blood so painful that he could not go to work at the sandal shack down the road. Years later, after a series of operations in Israel, the wound was stabilized, but his towering self still dragged that right leg.

The one thing that helped sedate his agony was alcohol. On mornings when the wound was inflamed, as my mother remembers it, Yihye would call to his wife to come and bring the bottle of arak—alcohol made from figs, grapes, or dates in Jewish homes, as Islam banned drinking. (Its name, which meant “sweat,” was inspired by the dripping of the liquid as it was being made.) Before exposing his wound, Yihye would stretch his hand out to the bottle and, grabbing it, guzzle its contents as if they were water. Then, he pulled the edges of the typical white male robe to expose the wound. (For their part, women covered themselves from head to toe, leaving only their faces, hands, and often bare feet showing. They wore long, heavy, cotton black dresses and necklaces with colorful embroidered leggings underneath. The gargush, a hooded headdress decorated with silver strings and coins that dropped over their shoulders, framed their faces but did not cover them as comparable garb for the Muslim women did. A close look at a gargush’s elaboration would reveal social standing. Most were scantily adorned.)

As Yihye kept hold of his pants, Rumia would put her hand around the spot and feel its heat, then go outside, gather dirt in a clay bowl, and spread it on the floor under his thigh. Then she'd begin massaging the edges, making sure that the pus dropped onto the sand, and urge him not to move as he screamed and sighed, his body twisting in pain. He spent many days like this, at home in pain and intoxicated.

And so it went for years, the state of the wound dictating the family’s state of security. Droughts were common, raising the price of food, sometimes exorbitantly. When Yihye could work, there was food and relief, and in between, there was the dreadful fear of hunger and having to rely on the generosity of others. Never was there plenty. The family—parents, siblings, uncle, and aunts, so many mouths to feed—would sit on the floor surrounding a big bowl of food in the middle of the room, sinking their fingers in with hope there’d be enough for everyone. At the end of the meal, the bowl was as clean as if it had been washed.

My mother knew not to take too much of what was offered, mindful of others in greater need. “My daughter,” her mother would say, “always split your bread in half and give to the needier.” The many beggars she saw each day made poverty a bit easier to bear, even if it did nothing to alleviate her own hunger.

From her early years, Hamame was spunky and a quick learner. She shadowed her mother doing all the housework, gradually taking on more responsibilities, including helping clean the adjacent synagogue. She swept the cement floor that the family was too poor to cover with carpets. She scrubbed laundry on rough stones. She learned to follow dietary laws of separating meat from dairy and salting the meat to make it kosher. (Jewish law forbids consuming the blood of the animal.) She walked with her mother to the well for water, each carrying a tanake, a tin container that, when empty, produced an appealing hollow sound and was used as a drum at celebrations. Her mother would fill it to its brim, and Hamame only halfway. On one of those trips to the well, Hamame was walking with her mother and did not notice a rope attached to cows dragging a big leather bag for carrying water. Looking down as she carried her tanake on her head, she collided with the rope, which, at neck height, clenched her windpipe and threw her on the ground. Her mother threw her tanake down and rushed to her daughter. Seeing the dread on her mother’s face hurt more than her own injury. Hamame, whose injury had extended no further than getting the wind knocked out of her, pulled herself together as quickly as she could. “I am OK, Mother,” she said. Rumia’s panic was not altogether unexpected. In the Jewish quarter, death was ever present, especially among babies and children, mourning a constant. It was not unusual for a woman like my paternal grandmother to give birth to more than a dozen children and see only two or three of them make it to adulthood. My mother remembers one flu season in which a family lost seven members.

Most important of all housework was making pita, the basis of all meals. She squatted next to her mother, their long dresses gathered between their knees, and watched Rumia add water to the pile of freshly ground wheat, sinking her skilled hands in, knuckles first, with an assuredness that slowly transformed the off-white powder into a ball of dough. Her mother then tore pieces from the big ball, flattening and spreading them on the walls of the truncated clay oven known as a taboon. Hamame would eagerly wait for the bread to come out so she could arrange it in the big basket. Her hands became so used to carrying hot things that by the time she was 7, she could take the flatbread straight from the oven.

Throughout my early childhood—before my mother yielded to a more modern kitchen—she made pitas this way in the taboon in our Tel Aviv backyard. For the rest of her cooking, mostly chicken soup with potatoes and carrots, she used a kerosene burner. As a child, just as she had done with her own mother, I watched her effortlessly insert and press the pieces of dough against the walls of the taboon. She was making saluf, a round flatbread that was then dipped into turmeric soups, and hilbe, a paste of fenugreek and cilantro. Feeding others was core to her identity, and she fed everyone in the neighborhood who came to her door, rich and poor. Food was her currency, her childhood trauma and resolution continuously reconstructed.

When her parents were at work, Hamame was left in the care of her aunt Saade, who like her uncle Yusef, had been blinded by smallpox, which scarred their faces and bodies. The oldest known illness to humankind, smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people, mostly children, in the 20th century alone until it was eradicated in the 1970s. Yusef and Saade were among its survivors. (My mother, too, contracted it around age 8 but escaped with a mild case.)

Saade was unique in having her own space: a few stairs up on a different level of the house. For someone who couldn’t see, she had astonishingly good style. “She dressed like a bride all year long and decorated her room with fabrics so beautiful that they would put the king’s palace to shame,” my mother recalled with deep fondness. Saade earned her own money, mainly grinding wheat and washing clothes. When my mother asked her, “Aunt, how can you tell when the garment is clean?” she explained, “I scrub and scrub until I feel the cloth become lighter.”

My mother was the eyes for her aunt and uncle. They put their palms on her shoulders and moved with her in and outside the house. She, too, knew how it felt not to see. She occasionally suffered from a condition where her own lids would not open properly. To treat it, her mother would find fresh cow manure, put it in a piece of cloth, and tie it around her head before sleep, taking advantage of what was later understood to be antibacterial and antifungal qualities of dung. The next morning, she could open her eyes. Later, in Israel, she would be able to take advantage of modern sophisticated treatments, but her eyes remained vulnerable throughout her life.

It was obvious to Hamame and all children from a very young age that boys and girls had different roles, something she found hard to accept. Her brother Hayim, older by four years, never helped around the house. Most of the day, he was supposed to be in the nearby synagogue, studying with a teacher known by the Arabic title mori. But Hayim was not a natural student, and there were days that he skipped school to play. Once, Hamame, angry that her brother clearly did not appreciate the opportunity she would have taken if allowed, told her father that he had skipped school. Yihye was, predictably, not pleased to hear this, especially as it added to already mounting concerns that his unruly son was hanging around with older kids who were joining the Zionist movement and plotting a move to Palestine, to Jerusalem. (A few years later, as a teenager, he was the first member of the family to leave.)

When his son came home, Yihye grabbed him and beat him with his bare hands to teach him a lesson in obedience. Humiliated and angry, Hayim went looking for his sister to teach her a lesson in loyalty. He dragged her to the courtyard, pushed her onto the cement, and beat her like his father beat him.

Bleeding and crying, she ran to her mother. Rumia was squatting on the floor, grinding hot peppers on a big stone. She had to wash her hands carefully, or the peppers would burn her girl’s eyes. She gathered Hamame into her arms and inspected the damage. A crack opened on Hamame’s nose, nearly exposing the bone. After washing it well, she looked for spider webs, soil, and tobacco ash and stuffed the wound. (If you look closely, you can still see the scar on my mother’s nose. Suffice it to say, Hayim was never punished.)

Because girls weren’t taught to read and write at all, everything outside the home and domestic duties was the domain of men. Girls and women were expected to maintain home life and raise children from age 12 or 13. Girls had a few religious responsibilities. From her mother, Hamame learned the blessings for lighting Shabbat candles, before eating, and the Shema, the centerpiece of every prayer session: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Hamame would recite it again before she went to sleep, and when she was scared, understanding the prayer as a way to unite with God’s power and protection. The only holiday on which my mother went to synagogue was Simchat Torah, when the men celebrated the end of the reading cycle of the five books of the Old Testament. In fact, they only “went to synagogue” in a manner of speaking: Dressed in their best clothes, the girls and women stood outside and watched the men dance with the Torah scroll and drink alcohol.

All of these things Hamame understood, but when word spread that one of the boys of the Siri family up the road was inviting girls to learn how to read and write, she ran to her mother with excitement.

“Siri is telling girls to come to his house to learn,” she said.

''Yes, I heard,” her mother replied. “Go.”

“Read and write” meant “read and write Hebrew,” not Arabic or another language used in the wider world, but that was more than fine with Hamame. After all, what could be greater than learning how to read the sacred texts? Excited to know what was written in the Torah, she walked to Siri’s place. A few girls were sitting on the floor. Their teacher was a 14-year-old boy. He gave out pieces of chalk and a wooden board and demonstrated how to push hard against the surface to create the Hebrew characters. She attended assiduously over the coming weeks and loved it.

But it didn’t last. Drought set in. The synagogues filled with worshipers asking God for rain. Fear of impending hunger spread. Debates arose over the cause and what could be done. Then the rabbis announced their ruling: God was expressing his displeasure at the teaching of the holy language to girls. The lessons were ordered stopped.

“We don’t yet know how to read and write!” Hamame lamented to her mother. “We just started!” But there was no point in challenging the rabbis. She never went back to Siri’s. In fact, she never learned to read and write.

Read the rest here.