February 15, 2024: Biden’s Two-State Hustle

The San Francisco DEI Complex; Fani Willis goes to court; Iran’s nuclear program

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The Big Story

The White House is stepping up its pressure campaign in a last-ditch effort to stop Israel’s impending offensive against Rafah, Hamas’ last remaining stronghold in Gaza. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that relations between U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reached a “boiling point” over the Rafah operation:

The U.S. has communicated that it wouldn’t—under any circumstances—support a plan for a full-scale invasion of Rafah, and that it would prefer to see targeted operations, U.S. officials said. The Biden administration has asked the Israeli military to produce a “credible plan” that included both a military and humanitarian component if it decides to disregard Washington’s advice and invade the city, U.S. officials said.

The United States has also been taking more concrete steps to increase its leverage over the Israelis, which, as The Scroll has been reporting, has been decreasing as the IDF has adjusted its tactics to become less reliant on American resupply. On Feb. 1, Biden signed an executive order imposing sanctions on allegedly violent and extremist Israeli settlers, paving the way for Britain and France to follow suit shortly thereafter. On Feb. 8, Biden issued a national security memorandum demanding that Israel produce a written report within 45 days certifying that it will “comply with international and humanitarian law” and “cooperate with U.S. humanitarian aid efforts” as a condition of receiving U.S. aid. And on Wednesday, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal that the State Department had launched a probe to determine if Israel had “misused” U.S.-supplied weapons in an Oct. 31 airstrike on the Jabalia “refugee camp” that killed a Hamas battalion commander and if it had illegally used white phosphorus in airstrikes on Lebanon, following complaints by Lebanon’s Hezbollah-controlled government. 

The cornerstone of this campaign appears to be a U.S. push for a Palestinian state. As The Washington Post reported late Thursday: 

The Biden administration and a small group of Middle East partners are rushing to complete a detailed, comprehensive plan for long-term peace between Israel and Palestinians, including a firm timeline for the establishment of a Palestinian state, that could be announced as early as the next several weeks.

The key, according to U.S. officials quoted in the piece, is forcing the Israelis to accept a hostage deal within the next few weeks, rather than move forward with the Rafah operation:

An initial cease-fire, projected to be at least six weeks, would provide time to make the plan public, recruit additional support and take the initial steps toward its implementation, including the formation of an interim Palestinian government, according to U.S. and Arab officials. Planners hope a hostage agreement can be reached before the beginning of Ramadan, the month of Muslim fasting that begins March 10, lest it compound the deprivation and pressure-cooker atmosphere in Gaza. 

That point about the “interim government” is an interesting one. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday that the PA was willing to take responsibility for Gaza “immediately upon cessation of aggression against our people,” while pushing back against U.S. plans for the “revitalization” of the PA that call for the “transfer of presidential functions to the prime minister.” That prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, is the man who told Bloomberg in December that he wants Hamas to become a “junior partner” in a unified postwar Palestinian government. That can’t happen if Israel is allowed to hunt down Hamas’ surviving leaders in Rafah. 

So, the U.S. plan, in effect if not in intention, is to preserve Hamas’ leadership and at least some of the terror group’s organizational and military strength and to incorporate this “deradicalized” remnant into the government of a Palestinian state, where it can reconstitute itself with international aid, constantly exert pressure on Fatah to take more radically anti-Israel stances, and serve as a permanent Iranian foothold on Israel’s eastern border, in addition to the footholds Iran already has on Israel’s northern and southwestern borders. But even if the PA doesn’t incorporate Hamas, as the PA prime minister says he hopes to do, Israel would still have problems. As The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday:

An investigation by Palestinian Media Watch, the nonprofit watchdog based in Jerusalem, documented at least 55 attacks by PA security forces against Israeli soldiers or civilians since 2020, including four in the past month alone. In each case, the PA or its ruling Fatah party has eulogized the attacker as one of their own “soldiers.”

But don’t worry—those security forces will be “revitalized” as soon as the IDF stops shooting. 

By the way, you’ll never guess who U.S. officials are casting as the main obstacle to this brilliant arrangement. As the Post goes on to say:

The elephant in the planning room is Israel, and whether its government will acquiesce to much of what is being discussed: the withdrawal of many, if not all, settler communities on the West Bank; a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; the reconstruction of Gaza; and security and governance arrangements for a combined West Bank and Gaza. The hope is that Israel would also be offered specific security guarantees and normalization with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states that would be hard to refuse.

Indeed. We’re stunned that any Israeli leader would refuse such a generous offer. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Emily Benedek speaks to an IDF reservist about the looming war with Hezbollah

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The Rest

→We rarely call things “must-read” here, but Sanjana Friedman’s recent article in Pirate Wires on the inner workings of San Francisco’s DEI complex fits the bill. We at The Scroll have reported on how the San Francisco city government funnels taxpayer money to billionaire-funded anti-Israel NGOs, such as the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, which then use it for illegal protest activity. But as Friedman shows, the problem is much deeper and more comprehensive. Despite the city’s deficit ballooning to $800 million under her watch, San Francisco Mayor London Breed has consistently shoveled more money toward the city’s activist-staffed DEI departments, including its Human Rights Commission (HRC), the Department on the Status of Women (DOSW), and the Office of Transgender Initiatives (OTI). The details are about what you’d expect, except worse. As Friedman explains, these departments fund “make-work and vote-buying schemes” that directly transfer public money and resources to political clients and professional activists, who in turn disseminate woke propaganda to lobby for the transfer of even more money to themselves. Some examples:

• OTI offers $1,200 per month in direct cash transfers and up to $2,000 per month in rental assistance to some 150 transgender and gender non-conforming people.

• HRC, through its Dream Keeper Initiative, has distributed grants of $200,000 to $320,000 to single-person media companies that produce little content and have virtually no audience.

• In 2024, DOSW plans to launch a program for monthly cash transfers to “justice involved” and “Indigenous” women.

• Dream Keeper also made a $3 million grant to the African American Arts and Culture Complex, a nonprofit and Breed’s former employer, which only puts on one event per month despite renting a 32,000-square-foot space in San Francisco’s Fillmore district. AAAC’s only other programming appears to be a resource program that distributes taxpayer-funded grants to self-identified “Black” San Franciscans for “radical self-care,” including massages and spa treatments.

• HRC subsidiary the Office of Racial Equity has been empowered to demand that all other city departments submit Racial Equity Action Plans and to recommend budget cuts to those departments if they fail to meet the goals laid out in their plans. 

→At an evidentiary hearing today to disqualify Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis from her RICO prosecution of Donald Trump and his associates, a witness and former friend of Willis struck what may prove to be a fatal blow, telling the court that Willis’ romantic relationship with fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade began in 2019, before Willis hired Wade on the case, and not in March 2022, as both Willis and Wade have claimed in court documents. If true, that would mean that both Willis and Wade will likely be disqualified for making false statements. Wade also testified at the hearing, and at times his testimony defied belief. For instance, he would not rule out that he traveled with Willis in 2021, saying only that he did not “recall” doing so. He said that he had not mentioned his travel with Willis in his divorce filings, in which he was required to produce receipts for any travel with another woman, because he did not have literal receipts for the transactions—only invoices and credit card statements. And he claimed that Willis had paid for trips the couple took to Belize and California in 2022, but that to hide her name for safety reasons, Willis had given him cash and asked him to put the expenses on his credit card—even though Wade still had to put down Willis’ name for the hotels and plane tickets, and even though at other times Willis booked travel for the couple under her own name. A combative Willis took the stand shortly before The Scroll closed today; we saw her tell the court that the interests of lawyer Ashleigh Merchant—who first brought Willis and Wade’s relationship to light in a January filing—were “contrary to democracy,” but we had to stop watching after that. We’ll have more updates tomorrow.

→Given all the other news, we’ve been a bit negligent in following the case of Adeel Abdullah Mangi, a Biden judicial nominee for the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who, it turns out, has a history of close association with and financial support for anti-Israel and other radical groups. Here are some of Mangi’s dubious links:

• He served on the advisory board of, and donated money to, the Rutgers Law School Center for Race, Security, and Rights. At a 9/11 anniversary event in 2021, the center hosted Sami Al-Arian, convicted of raising money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks it released a statement blaming Hamas’ violence on “over 75 years of colonial violence” on the part of Israel.

• Mangi serves on the advisory board of Alliance of Families for Justice, a nonprofit working to end “mass incarceration.” One of the group’s founding members is former Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, and the group has lobbied for the release of other left-wing terrorists from the 1970s and ’80s, including members each of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army currently serving life sentences for murdering police officers.

• Mangi also served on the board of the New York Legal Aid Society from 2017 to 2021. During his time there, the society publicly called for the defunding of the NYPD and for an end to immigration detention and a moratorium on all deportations. 

On Thursday, The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminksy reported that several lawyers affiliated with the Rutgers center—including its director, Sahar Aziz, who has received a $143,000 fellowship from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation—have “poured tens of thousands of dollars into Democratic campaign coffers.”

→In a Feb. 11 interview translated and published by the Middle East Media Research Institute on Wednesday, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali-Akbar Salehi, said that “we have [crossed] all the scientific and technological nuclear thresholds” to build a nuclear bomb. Salehi went on to analogize a nuclear weapon to a car, saying that you need a chassis, an engine, a wheel, and a gearbox. “If you are asking me if we built the gearbox and the engine, the answer is yes,” he said. On Feb. 6, we noted that a report from the Institute for Science and International Security, a nuclear watchdog, claimed that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in one week.

→On Wednesday, President Biden issued a memo shielding Palestinians illegally residing in the United States from deportation for the next 18 months and making them eligible for work permits. There are exceptions to who is eligible, including those who have been convicted of a felony or who are a “danger to public safety” in the estimation of the Department of Homeland Security. 

→The Justice Department is suing the state of Tennessee for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act with its “aggravated prostitution” statute, which requires harsher criminal penalties for engaging in prostitution while HIV-positive. A spokesperson for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement that “the enforcement of state criminal laws that treat people differently based on HIV status alone, and that are not based on actual risks of harm, discriminate against people living with HIV.”

→On Wednesday, Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) announced the formation of the Congressional Hip Hop Power and Justice Task Force. According to a report in The Hill, the task force “will use hip hop’s messaging of building a more equitable society to help spearhead initiatives to address economic equality, affordable housing and racial justice imperatives.” In a press conference, Bowman cited the influence of artists such as Eric B. & Rakim, Queen Latifah, Chuck D, and Public Enemy on his own career as an “educator.” 

That career, however, has become the subject of considerable controversy. The Daily Beast recently revealed that Bowman wrote extensively about 9/11 conspiracy theories while working as a middle school principal in the Bronx, and The Washington Free Beacon reported on Feb. 8 that Bowman had hung posters of Cynthia McKinney, Assata Shakur, and Mutulu Shakur on his school’s “wall of honor.” McKinney, a former Georgia congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, attended a 2009 conference on the “Gaza crisis” organized by the Malaysian Islamist antisemite Mahathir Mohamad, praising Mohamad as one of her “heroes” and referring to David Pidcock, a Muslim convert and author of several antisemitic conspiracist polemics, as “my London friend.” Assata Shakur was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1973, while Mutulu Shakur was convicted for his role in the Black Liberation Army’s fatal 1981 robbery of a Brink’s armored car, in which Kathy Boudin, the mother of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, also participated. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Words as Shelter, by Jake Marmer

Mireille Gansel’s new collection of poetry teaches us how to make ourselves at home in a broken world

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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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Waiting for War With Hezbollah

An IDF reservist describes his recent deployment on the northern front

By Emily Benedek

Itai Reuveni, a 40-year-old Israeli father, was awakened in his home near Jerusalem during the early morning hours of Oct. 7 by the eerie wail of incoming rocket sirens and the explosions of Iron Dome interceptors in the sky over his head. Not long after, his phone blew up with “endless videos of murder and executions,” images of Israelis dying in towns not even 30 kilometers away from his family home in Ashkelon, where his father and younger brothers live.

Within a couple of hours, Reuveni, who is an NCO and reserve combat medic in the Paratroopers Brigade, said that he and other members of his infantry platoon deduced that “basically the big IDF was nonfunctional” and most of the fighting in defense of the south was being done by either civilians or veterans who had headed out on their own, many without weapons.

“It was just like an apocalypse movie,” he said, “where small squads of people were operating by themselves.” Over the course of the day, he heard stories from the south that have since become legendary, like that of an elderly man who had picked up an old rifle, climbed onto a rooftop, and operated as a sniper against the first Hamas invaders. One young man from Reuveni’s regiment, who had escaped with his life from the Nova festival, joined his fellow reservists at the northern border a day or so late.

At about noon on Oct. 7, Reuveni grabbed his backpack full of combat gear, threw in a few pairs of underwear and a toothbrush, and jumped in his car. He headed toward Lebanon. “What I was reading on the WhatsApp group of my platoon was, ‘OK guys, we're probably going to be called in a few hours. Don't wait, take your stuff, go north.’”

Because of the horrors they had seen online all morning, and the seeming absence of IDF control, “Our assumption was that we are going to have to fight our way there.”

For the first time in his life, he drove in silence, without music. “Highway 6," the main north-south route in Israel, he told me, “looked like a NASCAR track. There were hundreds and hundreds of soldiers just flying north.”

“It was a complete blur," he recalled. “I had just woken up that morning with plans for the week ahead, and now, all I could think about was, ‘we need to fight. That's what's going to happen now.’”

Reuveni and I were professional acquaintances before the war. He serves as head of communications for NGO Monitor, an Israeli nonprofit that examines the funding sources of anti-Israel nongovernmental organizations operating in country, a source I have used for several stories. We communicated via WhatsApp from Nov. 28 until he was discharged from the IDF on Jan. 31, and in a long telephone call after he returned home. This is his story, but it is also the story of hundreds of thousands of other Israeli fighters who are providing essential moral guidance to the IDF in this time of war by affirming that Israel is strong and determined to fight and win—in defiance of the manifold forces, including Israel’s closest allies, who would prefer she knelt down in submission to her enemies: Iran and its tentacles in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.

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It took Reuveni an hour and 40 minutes to arrive at his base. By the evening of Oct. 7, Reuveni said that the entire regiment that would ultimately get called north had already shown up. They were joined by a significant number of reservists who were no longer required to serve—almost half the number of those who got called up, according to Reuveni. They were well aware that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had long threatened to attack communities in the north of Israel, “basically to do what Hamas had done in the south.”

“We figured that if we didn’t get there right away, that was what was going to happen. We became soldiers on Oct. 7. We got our equipment, got our guns and ammunition. Because I’m the medic in our platoon, I got my standard medical kit, and on the morning of Oct. 8, we were ready to go in.”

“There were two options: either Hezbollah will attack us and we're going to stop them inside Israel, or we're going to enter Lebanon to storm Hezbollah.”

On the evening of Oct. 8, the soldiers in Reuveni’s platoon bivouacked near Nahariya, in public parks, in civilian structures, “just waiting, and basically, preparing our gear.” He tried to collect as many extra Combat Action Tourniquets (CATS) as he could find because he knew that was what could have saved lives in the Gaza Envelope.

Civilians arrived at the parks too, with armloads of home-cooked food, bottled drinks, and other supplies for the soldiers. “All I did those days was eat, arrange how my equipment would fit on me, and think of what exactly I would need for war.”

Finally the orders arrived. It quickly became clear that the IDF was not planning to send them into Lebanon. The “million-dollar question” on everyone’s mind was why Hezbollah hadn’t yet attacked. Reuveni believed that the overnight arrival of tens of thousands of soldiers on the border, denying Hezbollah the element of a surprise attack, was more important to Nasrallah’s calculations than President Biden’s order to move two aircraft carrier strike groups into the eastern Mediterranean.

“It’s important also to acknowledge our weak points,” he told me, explaining that his month in the reserves the previous July on the northern border had made clear that “the negligence that happened in the south could very well have happened in the north also. Easily.”

“And if Hezbollah had infiltrated from the north that morning, on Oct. 7, we would have been fighting them in Haifa and Netanya and Tel Aviv”—a frightening scenario to imagine.

Over the next few weeks, Reuveni’s platoon settled into a position of defensive combat, not on the fence, but as part of “the second line” to prevent Hezbollah infiltration farther into Israel.

He explained that combat strategy teaches the first line of defense will always be breached, but the second line cannot be. “That is the line they will not cross.”

So he and his platoon “with our huge backpacks, with our gear, with our ammunition, with our rockets and grenades and everything, we're moving from place to place, a few kilometers inside our border.”

At some point, Reuveni doesn’t know exactly when, Hezbollah did move its forces forward, up to the fence. About the same time, Reuveni’s platoon was also ordered to the fence—a tall wire barricade with concrete components at Rosh Hanikra, on the Mediterranean coast.

But it was tough sitting and waiting for the enemy to figure out its strategy, Reuveni admitted. “You hear things, you see things. You don’t know their significance. What was that noise? Why did the Blue Helmets [the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL] just turn out the lights in their post? Or is it nothing?”

“For an infantry soldier, he said, “to be on defensive combat is mentally very hard. First of all, you’re not controlling what's going on. You're always waiting, and you probably will be surprised. That's the nature of war, the offense will always surprise the other side.”

Once they moved up to the border fence, “the threats were very, very real.” There were daily skirmishes. “You have mortars and missiles and efforts to infiltrate. Not an invasion of hundreds or thousands, but small squads. However, with a lot of smart things that we did, by December we had managed to drive Hezbollah some 2 to 3 kilometers away from the border fence near Rosh Hanikra.”

Reuveni said they were trained “for all possibilities”—and for each option, they had an array of “tools,” be they weapons systems, communications technology, or combat tactics. “You need to be very dynamic.”

Hezbollah was armed with drones—small drones the size of phones, and larger suicide drones the size of a car. “They have something of everything, just like we do.”

This is a different challenge for an infantry soldier who is trained to fight in the West Bank, for example, which Reuveni calls a “one-dimensional” battlefield. There, “you have terrorists in a house, you have people fighting on the streets, things like that.”

But up north, he explains, “even for the individual soldier, the threat was multidimensional. I need in any given moment to think about mortars, drones, snipers, or the squad that may be about to storm me. I need to think about the antitank missile that is going to be fired at us from 5 kilometers away, so you don't even see them coming.”

There were many missions to accomplish and little sleep; four-hour catnaps with boots on was usually the norm. Sometimes they sneaked out for the wedding of a fellow soldier, and then they’d return happy but exhausted, with dancing having taken up their allotted sleep time. The temperature dropped, and guard duty got harder when the rain came down in sheets, pummeling the roof. To remain awake, they kept talking to each other, “keeping ourselves sane,” and drinking coffee and Red Bull. But mostly, “mental will.”

“We were not fighting in Gaza,” as his brothers were, “though we really wanted to be,” he admitted. “Yes, it's very mentally hard to be on the border and to stay put. But we understood that we saved the north of Israel. By getting there fast and by being there, we are still saving it. If we are not there, Hezbollah will enter, they will come."

So they learned how to deal with the inaction when it was quiet, and they learned how to respond to the multiplicity of threats when they did arrive with or without warning. The tension waxed and waned. Sometimes, it rose to unbearable levels: Once he wrote, “I’m reading the news in real time as I’m waiting in this fucking bunker for Hezbollah to come.”

“I think that the important part is finding moments to relax or laugh,” he said, “because that helps you when the real shit starts.”

And in this way, they hunted down and eliminated Hezbollah antitank missile squads, and they found and eliminated an attack tunnel whose opening was detected steps from their bunker.

Though neither side has decided to escalate beyond “low to medium” intensity skirmishes, Reuveni believes that a war with Hezbollah is inevitable. “No one wants war, OK?” he says. “We want to be in our own homes. No one wants to maneuver inside Lebanon,” whose terrain is difficult, with cliffs and crevices, rivers and Hezbollah’s own network of attack tunnels. Also Hezbollah is much larger than Hamas, far better trained, with more than 100,000 projectiles and guided missiles, and uninterrupted supply routes that connect to Iran.

But, he added, “we have an enemy that lives and breathes only to murder Jews. This is what they want. This is their aim. Hamas made their appetites and methods very clear, and there is no difference with Hezbollah, except that it is bigger and stronger. “We cannot let it exist next to our houses and borders. That's it.”

***

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 was adopted on Aug. 11, 2006, to end a one-month war sparked by a surprise Hezbollah attack on IDF forces along the border that caused the death and abduction of two soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Using the obsequious language of international diplomacy that fails to mention Hezbollah by name, the resolution “calls for” the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani River of an area “free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL.” But Hezbollah never withdrew its forces, and the U.N. Security Council has never enforced its 2006 resolution, the implementation of which was dependent on coordination with the Lebanese authorities, who answer to Hezbollah. The UNIFIL soldiers “do absolutely nothing,” said Reuveni.

Most Israeli villages in the north were evacuated after Oct. 7 and its 80,000 residents have not yet returned. Many homes have been damaged and destroyed by mortars and missiles.

Since Oct. 7, a reported 20 civilians have been killed on the Lebanese side, as well as nearly 200 Hezbollah fighters. In Israel, nine soldiers and 10 civilians have been killed by Hezbollah fire.

President Biden has been pursuing a diplomatic effort to ensure Israel does not launch an operation in Lebanon after Gaza. He has sent Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security Amos Hochstein to try and broker a deal that will ostensibly move Hezbollah a few kilometers back from the border—far short of what UNSCR 1701 calls for—in return for IDF demobilization on the border, followed by land border negotiations that would pressure Israel to concede border areas claimed by Hezbollah and Lebanon. In 2022, Hochstein had strong-armed the Israelis to accept a lopsided maritime border deal with Lebanon, working hand in glove with Hezbollah and its cut-outs in the Lebanese government.

Reuveni says that based on history and the reality in Lebanon, “I don't see any reason why any Israeli would trust negotiations or a diplomatic solution.” In December, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant promised the mayors of the northern communities that their residents would not go home until Hezbollah was driven north of the Litani River. “If they want to go north of the Litani River, let them go,” Reuveni said dismissively. But he is not holding his breath.

On Jan. 31, after 119 days of service, Reuveni was furloughed. He climbed back into his car and drove home. He was told he must report back to duty in May.

“I need to process everything that happened,” he wrote to me a few days after getting home. “It still feels like some kind of dream. And now being back is very mentally hard. Everything is confused and I need to put things in order.”