February 26, 2024: The People’s Temple of Palestine

PA government resigns; The CIA in Ukraine; More Smirnov weirdness

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The Big Story

For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.

Jeremiah 19: 4-5

An active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force died Sunday after self-immolating outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington in protest of what he described as the “genocide” in Gaza. In a video of his suicide posted to social media, the airman, Aaron Bushnell, 25, tells the camera:

My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. 

He then set himself on fire and shouted “Free Palestine!” before screaming in pain, falling silent, and collapsing.

Relatively little had come out about Bushnell by the time The Scroll closed today, although journalist Andy Ngo reported on X that Bushnell appeared to have been a far-left activist and that he sent a suicide email to the antifa website CrimethInc shortly before setting himself on fire. As a grim parody of U.S. culture in 2024, an antifa airman self-immolating for Palestine would seem to be too on the nose, but, well, it’s real. 

Unfortunately for Bushnell, the cause in which he chose to give his life is not. The “genocide” in Gaza is fake, a meme. Despite the IDF facing what is quite literally an unprecedented scenario in modern warfare—a 30,000-strong terror army hidden in tunnels in a densely populated urban environment, from which civilians cannot be evacuated due to Western fears of “ethnic cleansing,” and in which the terror army’s military strategy is predicated on maximizing civilian casualties—the Israelis have managed about a 2:1 ratio of civilian to combatant deaths. That’s roughly equivalent to the ratio in the U.S.-backed siege of Mosul, Iraq, in which more than 100,000 coalition forces faced off against 5,000 or fewer ISIS insurgents—who didn’t have the benefit of the tunnels. And far from backing Israel to the hilt, the Biden administration has opposed Israel’s war to the greatest extent possible within the limits imposed by U.S. domestic politics and Washington’s international commitments.

A great deal of social media commentary has turned on the question of whether or not Bushnell was “mentally ill,” as if one needs a DSM diagnosis to commit violent or extreme acts in the name of ideology. But whatever his mental state, Bushnell was suffering from a deep misapprehension about reality, one cultivated by the same propaganda machine that brought you the “trans genocide” and, before that, the “epidemics” of science denial, racist police murders, and campus rapes. 

Like the false narrative of the Gaza genocide, these were also media pseudo-events designed to incite the gullible and unbalanced in hatred of designated enemies of the people (straight men, whites, Jews/“Zionists”), who were held responsible, within the terms of the regime’s politico-religious mythology, for lurid atrocities against various categories of sacred victims. The righteous anger thus generated can in turn be instrumentalized by the oligarchs, spooks, and politicians at the top of the party-state pyramid for their own ends (mobilizing clients, punishing enemies, and astroturfing popular support for regime priorities). As in the classic blood libel, or the Soviet massacres of the kulaks, redemptive violence against the “oppressor”—or, in Bushnell’s case, against the self, with the implicit message that the “oppressors” were his real murderers—becomes an instrument of divine justice. It is the logic of the pogrom, the antifa street action, and the suicide bombing. In a stroke of grim genius, Bushnell tied all three together in one spectacular gesture. 

As news of Bushnell’s death broke on Sunday afternoon, many of those responsible for spreading the lies that convinced him to take his life duly rushed to praise his courage and claim him as a martyr to the cause: 

They may be onto something. Since Oct. 7, some have asked why Western radicals cheered Hamas’ “resistance” despite the group’s murderous violence—as if ecstatic, nihilistic violence, served with a thin veneer of “political” rationalizations, were not the entire point, just as the “racial justice” element was a sideshow to the real event of the summer of 2020, which was the looting, burning, beating, smashing, and destroying. As Lee Smith wrote for Tablet in December, the nihilism is the point:

All the wretched of the earth have attached their hopes and grievances to the Palestinians not because Hamas and the PA, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and others are indigenous underdogs resisting the colonialist war machine, or stalwart subalterns on a campaign for universal liberty. Rather: Terrorists, criminals, psychopaths, and fantasists from every part of the globe have grafted themselves on to the Palestinian cause because the most basic laws of nature have been revised to accommodate it. The Palestinian cause gives hope to each of these groups—hope that their own nihilistic and murderous ambitions could win world favor as well. And they have.

Under the rules set by great powers to govern the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anything is possible. Losing is winning. Crime is justice. Rape is love. Death is life. These are the slogans of the new spirit of the age, the dawning of the Empire of Palestine.

And now the new spirit of the age has a saint: Aaron Bushnell, first martyr of the People’s Temple of Palestine. 

Read it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/global-empire-of-palestine 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Justine el-Khazen’s mother, a top CIA analyst, begged her not to raise her children Jewish. She spoke to her former colleagues to find out why.

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The Rest

→The prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammad Shtayyeh, and the rest of his government submitted their resignations this morning to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, amid growing pressure on Abbas from Washington to “shake up” and “revitalize” the PA so that it can govern postwar Gaza, according to a report in The Times of Israel. Shtayyeh has spoken openly about his desire for a “national unity” government that would incorporate Hamas as a “junior partner” to Fatah within the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the two factions will meet in Moscow on Wednesday for unification talks. A Hamas official quoted in The Times of Israel said that the resignations “only make sense if it comes within the context of national consensus on arrangements for the next phase”—“national consensus” being the euphemism for governance arrangements incorporating Hamas and other radical factions such as Islamic Jihad. 

→On Sunday, The New York Times published a more than 5,000-word article detailing the lengthy relationship between the CIA and the Ukrainian intelligence service, which dates back to at least February 2014, when U.S.-backed protests ousted the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. One of the major through lines of the piece? The Ukrainians’ value to the CIA in generating leads about “Russian election meddling,” which has stormed back into the headlines since the Department of Justice’s Feb. 15 indictment of Alexander Smirnov, an FBI confidential human source who allegedly lied about Joe and Hunter Biden receiving bribes from Burisma at the behest of Russian intelligence officers. We asked some of our in-house experts to help readers make sense of the story. 

Here was our geopolitical analyst: 

The story is a reminder that news-wise, we live in 1980s Argentina now. Because actual news is not a product that the press produces—or at this point is necessarily capable of producing—for both practical and ideological reasons, stories like this one need to be read in a different way: as signal flags being hoisted by one camp or another within the palace walls, as part of some larger influence campaign. 

On the surface, this story is all regurgitated commonplaces from eight years ago (“the CIA is active in Ukraine”—hey, no shit!) mixed with random body parts of a discredited conspiracy theory (“Russia elected Trump!”). It’s hard to imagine the “news” reader who is so debased that they consume this kind of slop for breakfast every morning, though I’m sure there are millions of them. 

But the real story here is the byline, which includes the name Adam Entous—who is part of the new breed of reporter like Natasha Bertrand at NBC whose role is to openly shill for specific national security cliques. … Their “reports” therefore function as signal flags to those outside the walls that a campaign is underway. 

“The CIA has been doing important national security work in Ukraine for the past decade” is therefore setting up counter-framing for a forthcoming story that one can surmise will shed negative light on the CIA’s activities in Ukraine. One can also safely guess that story will have more to do with American politics than with the current Ukrainian war effort against Russia, which began in February 2022. 

As for those domestic political aims, here’s Lee Smith: 

Length of the piece, provenance (NYT), byline, and subject (Russia) suggest that this is a component of a larger operation managed by U.S. spy services designed to shape U.S. domestic politics. We saw the same exact sort of article appear in the Times and its sister publication The Washington Post starting in 2016, and it’s worth noting that many of the major spy service info ops targeting the Trump team also carried an Adam Entous byline, first in the Post and now at the Times. It’s useful to see this article in conjunction with other Ukraine-related issues in the public sphere at present, like the GOP impeachment inquiry, focused on alleged Biden family corruption in Kyiv; and also what’s presumed to be the cover-up—the DOJ indictment of the FBI’s informant charged with lying to federal law enforcement about the Biden’s alleged corruption in Kyiv. I suspect that the purpose of the piece, its role in a domestic operation, will become clearer in the near future.

→By the way, on that DOJ indictment … On Friday, we highlighted a column by National Review’s Andy McCarthy, drawing attention to the strangeness of the DOJ’s case against Alexander Smirnov. Among the points McCarthy raised:

1. The FBI/DOJ do not normally burn long-term valuable sources by criminally charging them over falsehoods or mistakes, especially without giving them a chance to explain themselves, for the very good reason that doing so makes it hard to recruit future sources. 

2. The DOJ is normally extremely circumspect about releasing any details of intelligence gathering and spycraft in court filings, and the intelligence agencies normally fight tooth and nail to hide their “sources and methods” from public exposure. And yet, to paint Smirnov as a vector for a Russian disinformation operation, the DOJ’s court filings included reams of detailed information about his contacts with high-level Russian and Ukrainian figures and in-depth conversations with his FBI handler. 

In a Friday X thread, Stephen McIntyre observed some more oddities about the indictment. For instance, the indictment attributed Smirnov’s alleged lies about Biden in part to his “bias against” Biden, as expressed in text messages with his handler. However, these were the supposedly biased texts Smirnov sent to his handler, after news broke in Ukraine of leaked phone calls alleged to be between Biden and then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko:

It’s all over the news in Russia and Ukraine as well as live calls between Biden and Poroshenko

Smells bad for Biden

Biden going to jail))))

Dems tried to impeacn [sic] Trump for same.

Even less

All those politicians same shit

Jail for all of them

McIntyre also has some theories about the DOJ’s timeline for the events described in Smirnov’s FBI interviews, which you can read here:

The Smirnov Indictment

→On X, the Palestinian American Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has a post on reports from his contacts in Gaza and the city of Rafah. We’ll link the full post below, but here are some of the highlights:

1. Hamas is reportedly digging several contingency tunnels into Egypt to prepare for the escape of a large number of its upper-level commanders, members, leaders, and administrators in the event of a full Israeli ground invasion in Rafah. These contingency plans entail mass surrender to Egyptian authorities who are more likely to spare their lives and, through a political process, facilitate their release or transfer to other countries. Some of these tunnels go as deep as 15 to 20 meters (49-65 feet) and are prepped to have their “eyes,” a local term for the tunnel’s opening, to be quickly opened on the Egyptian side when needed.

[..]

4. When some private merchants sell items for inflated/exorbitant prices (due to lack of availability or greed), Hamas’ police gangs pretend to want to do something good on civilians’ behalf: They approach these merchants and demand that prices be lowered; they either ask nicely, beat up the merchants, or confiscate their products. Seized items are placed in warehouses that often end up going to Hamas members and their affiliates/patrons.

[...]

9. Theft and chaos are widespread; trash is everywhere, and sanitation is non-existent; lice is a super serious problem among children; physical violence among the population is rampant; children are experiencing awful abuse; most people have lost half of their weight, even those with access to some food; and the dominant sentiment among civilians is that of fury and rage against Hamas for bringing so much misery and suffering upon their people—Gazans are “making dua’a” against them, hoping that they are never put in charge of Gaza ever again.

Read the rest here:

https://twitter.com/afalkhatib/status/1761863781951639791

→British financier Jacob Rothschild, the Fourth Baron Rothschild, died Monday at the age of 87. A descendant of the original Rothschild patriarch, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the Eton- and Oxford-educated Jacob broke with the family business to establish his own bank, which came to be known by the name Rothschild Investment Trust, or RIT, which Jacob led from 1961 until 2019. He was also a renowned philanthropist in Britain, serving for years as the trustee of the National Gallery, and in Israel. Among other charitable endeavors, he founded philanthropic foundation Yad Hanadiv, which sponsored the construction of the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and the National Library buildings.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Will the Real ‘Hersh Rasseyner’ Please Stand Up?, by Curt Leviant

Reading Chaim Grade’s classic story and wondering who, exactly, the Yiddish master is arguing with

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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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Due to Substack length constraints, today’s Back Pages is an excerpt. The full essay can be found on Tablet’s website.

My Mother’s Secret

My mother was a top Middle East analyst for the CIA. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. To find out why, I asked her former colleagues. I’m still reeling from their answers.

By Justine el-Khazen

My mother died on Dec. 4 of last year. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. In life, she worked for the CIA, in the Near East Southern Asia Division, for six years as head of the Arab-Israeli Division. She was an expert on Syria and political Islam.

We were watching footage of hostages being paraded around Gaza when she said it. "I worry about them," she murmured, her eyes fixed on the TV. “It's too dangerous a religion," she told me. "I don't want that target on their backs.” I couldn't tell what she was asking of me: Did she want me to skip the few traditions my family has held onto? Hanukkah candles and meager Seders? Or was she saying I shouldn't tell my kids that they were Jewish at all? I didn't ask. I was too afraid of what she would say.

"I told Dad I didn't want to raise you Jewish," she said a few days later. The Gaza war had begun in earnest by then. Moonscapes of leveled buildings and dust: images of military prowess that colored her view and, until Oct. 7, my perception of Israel. "He wanted to, but I was afraid of what might happen to you if you identified that way."

I was stunned. I'd always thought my secular upbringing had evolved organically, a combination of busy parents, a mixed marriage, and waning traditions. It wasn't so much that my mother, a 6-foot-tall blonde from the Midwest, was anxious about my dad's religion. No one felt strongly enough to carve out a space for their faith, so we embraced a smattering of rituals. Christmas trees and Hanukkah prayers, fasting on Yom Kippur and dyeing eggs on Easter. I thought it was a noncommittal melange, not an active choice.

As a choice, it didn't exactly line up with my mother's perception of Jews. Sure my dad had had to contend with Jewish quotas back in the day. Come to think of it, there was an anti-Jewish covenant on the deed to our house; and I was only asked to join the big cotillion in D.C. after bad press forced it to invite Jewish and Black kids. But that was ancient history. Jews possessed power now, too much of it to be victimized as they once were, a view that basically worked for my dad, who had no interest in the poverty or bigotry of his youth.

My father died not long before my mother—like her, of a cancer that had spread to his lungs. Aligned almost perfectly in death, they mostly weren't in life, especially when it came to Israel. My dad flip-flopped: Had Israel mistreated the Palestinians, or was it the victim of their aggression? My mother hardened in her views as the prospects for peace dimmed. But the conversation always centered on power: Was Israel powerful beyond its size? Were Jews powerful beyond their numbers? Or were they vulnerable, exposed in a hostile world?

The deathbed scene was a cosmic insult: same hospice nurses, same case manager—"Oh, I remember you!"—same oxygen machine, whirring cyclically in the background. Oct. 7 receded from view. How could I devote even an iota of brainpower to anything other than standing idly by while my mother slipped away?

And then, after she died, I became obsessed: Had she really believed that antisemitism was so radioactive a force, not only in America, but in the Middle East, that my children's Jewishness should be hidden from them? After the Holocaust, the family my paternal grandmother left behind, the ones who survived, all moved to Gothenburg, Sweden, and converted to Lutheranism. Was America in 2023 really as bad as Europe in 1945?

To understand where my mother came out on these questions, I spoke to her former CIA colleagues. Their answers only added to my shock. After enough of these interviews, I began to question everything I thought I knew about an institution I'd been close to my whole life.

***

My mother took her duty to remain impartial seriously. Her job was to analyze intelligence so lawmakers could make informed decisions. She once told Ronald Reagan she thought "we might lose Sadat," who was then a partner in negotiating peace with Israel.

"Lose him?" Reagan asked, stunned. Not long after that, Anwar Sadat was assassinated.

In her words, she was "paid to intuit things." Passing along her biases would not only have been a violation of her professional ethics, it would've been a poor way to go about her job, since assassins in Egypt don't care what analysts in Langley think. And yet, she always carried a strain of sympathy for the Palestinians. She told me once she was considered by her colleagues to be an "Arabist," someone who overly identified with the Arab players in the region and was, at some level, hostile to Israel. “Checks out,” I thought to myself.

At the funeral, her colleagues extolled her career: She could read the late Syrian dictator Hafez Assad's mind, she'd been instrumental in the Madrid and Oslo peace talks. She always said that shedding light on the interests of the Arab players in the region was her contribution to the peace process. I spoke to John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, a few days after the funeral. When I asked him whether my mother was an Arabist, he quickly shot that idea down. He acknowledged there was a need for "greater evenhandedness towards the region among some in the CIA," but, he said, she was not among them. And anyway, that was more of an issue on the political side than it was with analysts, the lion’s share of whom remained unbiased.

I asked Brennan about my mother's mentor, Bob Ames, who had an infamously close relationship with Ali Hasan Salameh, the leader of the “Black September” PLO terrorist command and architect of the Munich Olympics massacre. He laughed. Ames was, he admitted, "very close to the Palestinians" and "played it very close to the edge.” But after his death in the Beirut embassy bombing of 1983, Brennan said, the culture within the CIA changed from being operationally driven to being driven by the analysts. Spies who cultivated terrorist assets no longer set the tone. The baton had passed to the wonks in Langley.

Bob Ames' biographer, Kai Bird, had a different view of whether Bob Ames was an Arabist. Unequivocally, yes, he told me, but there were "true reasons for it." As with journalists, Ames and his colleagues were "merely reporting what they saw." When I asked what he meant, he told me that Israel is the only reason for antisemitism in the Arab world. Before 1948, the antisemitism in Cairo and Beirut was "on a par with what you would see in New York and Los Angeles."

I didn’t mention the scores of pogroms across the Arab world before 1948, nor the absence of similar pogroms in New York and Los Angeles. Bird went on to say that antisemitism does exist "globally in its European and German forms," but that it has never played much of a role in the politics of the Middle East. He sees Oct. 7, as so many of the former intelligence officers I spoke to do, as nothing more than another round in a geopolitical tit for tat. The savagery Hamas showed that day came, in their view, from a political place rather than a cultural one.

I assumed that Bird would be the only person I spoke to with these views. He's not an intelligence officer, merely a biographer. He's free to hold whatever views he likes. But as it turned out, my faith in the impartiality of the CIA was misplaced.

When I spoke to my mother's former colleagues, I consistently encountered a tendency to attribute every event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the conflict itself. It's not that Palestinian textbooks have, since the 1990s, contained material that is "openly antisemitic and encourages violence, jihad and martyrdom," or that "peace itself is not taught as preferable or even possible." Nor is it, as a 2019 review discovered, the "complete removal of all pre-existing content discussing peace agreements, summits, negotiations, and proposals supporting a two-state solution, acknowledgment of historical Jewish presence in the land of Israel and labeling the name 'Israel' on a map” from those textbooks. To retired intelligence officers with long and distinguished careers, these facts are incidental. If children were actually set on fire on Oct. 7, that was a guerrilla tactic, not the result of a culture of murderous hatred. Some expressed these views with dispassion and others, with a disturbing degree of passion, but they all expressed them.

When I asked Brennan about the most sordid details to come out of Oct. 7—the terrorist who bragged on the phone to his parents about killing Jews, the head of an IDF soldier sold as a trophy in Gaza—he told me that day reminded him of what he'd seen with ISIS, "how many of those individuals were high on drugs,” making them that much more "frenzied and murderous.”

The terrorists were on drugs, to be sure, and yet. It may be that facing the role that long-standing and unreasoning racial animus played on Oct. 7 is too much of a stretch for someone like John Brennan, who has spent his life immersed in the hard facts of power. Undercurrents of hatred percolate around dinner tables. They don’t rise to the level of a presidential brief.

When I pressed him, Brennan pointed out that Hamas is a movement that encompasses a "range of attitudes, and includes teachers, hospital workers and other professionals." I tried to imagine an American political movement with a covenant that advocated genocide. Would a call to murder be overlooked because the grievances the movement was pursuing were en vogue, or because it's simply "rhetoric?" How about if they killed hundreds and then thousands of people, thereby demonstrating that the rhetoric is real? Does Hamas get a free pass because they're Palestinian, or because it's Jews specifically that they want to kill?

When I asked Brennan why he thinks my mother begged me not to raise my kids Jewish, he shifted the conversation northward: There's been a global uptick in right-wing extremism and white supremacy, he said. Orban, Putin, Modi. Anti-democratic forces are on the rise, making Jews a target.

Every intelligence officer I spoke with performed this sleight of hand. Yes, antisemitism exists, and is serious—but only as a right-wing problem, and as a Western phenomenon. The Hamas-loving kids on American college campuses? Overblown, irrelevant. The Palestinian children being given military training by terrorists? Not the issue.