February 28, 2024: Is USAID Funding Terror?
Gallant calls to draft Haredim; Biden, Trump win Michigan; Pogrom at UC Berkeley
The Big Story
The U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development is funding an Islamic charity with ties to U.S.-designated terror groups, despite an ongoing investigation from the agency’s inspector general, the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky reports.
Last year, USAID’s IG launched an investigation into a $110,000 grant given in 2021 to the Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD), a charity headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, that has partnered in the past with the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which carried out the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. Although the IG found that the 2021 grant warranted further review, in October 2023 USAID issued another grant of $78,000 to the same organization.
HHRD has long been a target of congressional Republicans and external watchdog groups for its ties to radical Islamist groups in Pakistan. For instance, in 2017, HHRD co-sponsored an event in Pakistan with Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), which is LeT’s charitable wing and has been a U.S.-designated terrorist group since 2016. The conference also included Alkhidmat, the “welfare arm” of the Islamist organization Jamaat-e-Islami. In archived posts from 2007, Alkhidmat boasted of wiring money to the Hamas politburo, which in turn assured the Alkhidmat delegation that “Palestinians will not relinquish their just Jihad and continue to wage it until the First Qibla is liberated from Zionist yoke.” That same year, Alkhidmat listed HHRD as one of its donors, alongside KindHearts, which was shuttered in 2012 after having its assets frozen by the U.S. Treasury for financing Hamas. HHRD was nonetheless praised in a 2014 State Department brochure on American Muslims, which described the group as being “lauded for its ability to deliver effective aid.”
The problems with HHRD have been known for years: In 2019, Congressman Jim Banks (R-IN) authored a resolution urging federal agencies to halt their partnerships with the organization, which he described as a Jamaat-e-Islami “domestic affiliate.” The USAID IG investigation—unusual for such a small grant amount—suggests that at least some staffers inside the agency understand HHRD’s potential terror connections.
However, it’s possible that the U.S. government is making a policy decision to ignore potential terror financing from U.S. charities. As we wrote in the Nov. 16, 2023 Big Story, in a discussion of the government’s failure to investigate potential terrorism-financing charges against American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP):
We will not know [about these NGOs’ links to terror groups] absent investigations from law enforcement, which [former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan] Schanzer says have not been happening for at least a decade. “I am not aware of significant efforts within the U.S. government to track Hamas within the last 10 years,” he said in his live testimony to the committee. … Schanzer said that when he first raised the alarm about AMP and SJP in 2016, a federal law enforcement official informed him that “suspected Hamas activists in the United States were viewed then as protected sources in the fight against the Islamic State.” ISIS is no longer a threat, but the Muslim Brotherhood’s main international patrons, Qatar and Turkey, remain important U.S. partners.
And then there are domestic considerations, related to the Democrat Party’s need to court voters for whom a group’s connections to Hamas and LeT may be a selling point. With Joe Biden bleeding support among Muslim and progressive voters in the battleground state of Michigan over his allegedly full-throated support for Israel, we suspect that a high-profile conflict with a Michigan Islamic charity over potential terrorism ties is pretty unlikely, regardless of what the USAID IG does or does not find.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Armin Rosen profiles Gershon Hacohen, the rare IDF general who believes in winning wars
The Rest
→Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called on Wednesday for the ultra-Orthodox to be drafted into the IDF, saying that “all parts of society” must “bear the burden of service” to protect the state of Israel. Gallant also said that he would not back a new draft law without the support of war cabinet members Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, of the opposition National Unity Party. Gantz announced that he and his party would support new draft legislation, as did former Prime Minister Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party. A new law mandating conscription for the ultra-Orthodox would likely be popular with Israel’s non-Orthodox majority, but could risk bringing down Netanyahu’s coalition government, which relies on ultra-Orthodox parties for its majority.
→Joe Biden and Donald Trump won their parties’ respective primaries in Michigan on Tuesday. Trump defeated Nikki Haley with just under 70% of the vote—a decisive result, but another underperformance relative to pre-election polls, underscoring his continued struggles among college-educated Republican voters. On the Democratic side, Biden won 81% of the vote, which would be an impressive number were he not an incumbent president running almost unopposed within his own party. Just over 13% of Democratic primary voters chose “uncommitted” on their ballot, including more than half of voters in the Arab American strongholds of Dearborn and Hamtramck and nearly 20% in Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. Pro-Palestinian organizers had set themselves a goal of 10,000 uncommitted votes to send the administration a message; they ended up with more than 100,000. Biden won Michigan by about 150,000 votes in 2020, but current polling shows Trump leading by a narrow margin of between two and four points.
→Here’s some more in-depth election forecasting, courtesy of Back Pages contributor @kilovh:
→Quote of the Day I:
Palestine will be free when all the jews are dead
That was Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. airman who self-immolated outside the Israeli Embassy in D.C. on Sunday, in a Reddit post from two months ago under the username “acebush1.” Under the same username, Bushnell mocked the deaths of three fellow service members in Jordan in January and endorsed vandalizing the homes of elected officials behind “anti-trans” bills. The Pentagon spent two years investigating far-right “domestic extremism” in the military only to conclude it wasn’t a real problem; perhaps they should have been investigating acebush1 instead.
→And here are some of Bushnell’s comrades at a UC Berkeley student “protest” on Monday night, outside a campus theater scheduled to host an event with a former IDF soldier (video courtesy of the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council):
Protesters can be heard in the video shouting “Intifada, intifada!” and one attendee reported that a woman spit in his face and called him “Jew, Jew, Jew.” While we can’t confirm the identities of the protesters, the video reminds us of what Neetu Arnold wrote in yesterday’s Back Pages:
The answer is clear to anyone who watched the videos: these student protests are no longer composed solely of left-wing American students steeped in critical theory and post-colonial ideology. The protests are now havens for foreign students, especially those from Arab and Muslim countries, with their own set of nationalist and tribal grievances against Israel and the United States. In some cases, such foreign students appear to lead the protests in their pro-terrorism chants—some of which are in Arabic, or translations of Arabic slogans.
Whatever the protesters’ nationality, it’s abundantly clear that they’ve adopted the Third World style of street violence and mob intimidation in the service of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
→Quote of the Day II:
Israel’s greatest failure since Oct. 7 is political. Much of the world considers the massacre another round of Israeli-Palestinian violence, not an Iran-orchestrated attack. Since 2021 Hamas has been a full-fledged member of what Tehran calls its “axis of resistance,” a proxy network that spans the Levant, Lebanon and Yemen. Each proxy has a distinct character, but all are united in their hatred of Israel and the U.S. From 2021 on, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah have reportedly planned and coordinated operations jointly from a nerve center in Beirut with direct Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps supervision.
America has insisted on a fictitious distinction between Tehran and its proxies. But the threat this pseudo-empire poses to the U.S.—as well as countries across Europe and Asia—is real.
That’s from an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Seth Cropsey of the Yorktown Institute, in which Cropsey also criticizes Washington for treating Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East as “aftershocks of the Israel-Palestinian conflict” rather than as expressions of Iran’s long-term strategy of ejecting the United States from the Middle East.
Our only disagreement is with Cropsey’s assertion that Tehran is “tricking” or “manipulating” the United States into acting against its own interests. That’s only true if you believe that the Obama-Biden foreign policy team is invested in such outdated notions as protecting our regional allies from Iranian imperialism—rather than in blessing and encouraging that imperialism under the guise of “regional integration.”
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-us-and-israel-play-into-irans-hands-hamas-proxies-control-destroy-response-e02ca462
→A brief exploration into the world of “moral clarity” journalism: Earlier this week, Adam Rubinstein, a former New York Times editor fired in 2020 for his role in editing the infamous Tom Cotton op-ed, published an essay in The Atlantic recounting his experience working at the Times. It led with an anecdote of Rubinstein saying that he liked the spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A, and a Times HR employee responding, “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.”
On the nose? Maybe. Implausible? Well, only if you’re the sort of person who believes that Times staffers could successfully oust two editors over the Cotton op-ed on the grounds that it literally “put the lives of Black staffers in danger,” but that the idea of those same staffers objecting to Chick-fil-A is simply too absurd to be believed—i.e., if you’re a moron. Thankfully for our ability to generate content, morons are in ample supply. Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times Magazine weighed in on X to say the alleged incident “never happened,” while Michael Hobbes of The Huffinton Post wondered aloud if anyone would “contact the Atlantic to ask them about the process behind publishing this egregiously fake anecdote.” Sarah Jones of New York, meanwhile, mocked the story with an obscene reference to The Simpsons.
What none of them did, apparently, is contact The Atlantic. That fell to journalist Jesse Singal. He emailed a spokesperson at The Atlantic, who said that the details of the story had been confirmed by “New York Times employees who had contemporaneous knowledge of the incident in question.” Several other journalists said on X that Rubinstein had told them the story around the time it occurred, in 2019.
The incident is funny, but it does raise a serious question: If these people just know without checking that an embarrassing anecdote about media progressives is false, and it turns out the anecdote is demonstrably true, what does that say about their judgment on every other story under the sun?
→French President Emmanuel Macron suggested at a news conference on Monday that NATO could consider “elements of deployment” in Ukraine, widely interpreted as a nod to the possibility of sending ground troops to reinforce the Ukrainian war effort. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, however, denied considering whether to deploy NATO troops, and the leaders of the United Kingdom and several major European countries, including Germany, Italy, and Poland, clarified this week that they are not planning to send ground troops to Ukraine. On Wednesday, Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the Russian State Duma and a close ally of Vladimir Putin, warned Macron that any French troops in Ukraine would meet the fate of Napoleon’s Grande Armée.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Tantalizing, Unsentimental Prophet, Is Miles More American Than Maya Angelou, by David Mikics
Just don’t ask him about sex
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.
Due to Substack length constraints, today’s Back Pages is an excerpt. The full essay can be found on Tablet’s website.
The General Who Believes in Winning Wars
For the past two decades, Gershon Hacohen has been a lonely dissenter in the highest ranks of the IDF. Unfortunately, he was proven right.
By Armin Rosen
Four-and-half months after Hamas commandos overran the police station in the center of Sderot, all that remains is a dusty lot of twisted rebar. Although the city’s police killed over two dozen terrorists before the IDF arrived late in the morning of Oct. 7, it took over a dozen tank shells to bring down the hijacked station, where outnumbered officers had fought Hamas’ Nukhba forces to a bloody impasse. An Israeli tank had never fired on an Israeli building on Israeli territory in combat before.
A freshly painted mural next to the former site of the demolished station memorializes this unprecedented breach in the national reality of the Jewish state: A tank is shown bombarding the building against eerily colorful skies. The numinous image of an open Torah scroll hovers above the scene, recalling the desecrated happiness of the holiday on which the fighting took place. On the day I visited, earlier this month, an American family was on a guided tour, feet away from a group of several dozen uniformed policemen who were also on some kind of organized visit to their force’s newest national shrine. On Feb. 11, the Times of Israel reported that rubble from the station, which was bulldozed the morning of Oct. 8, had been dumped in a nature preserve north of the city.
Is the Sderot battle something to be canonized or buried? It isn’t surprising that the answers, as expressed in the present, are so bizarrely incoherent. One of the major features of the war that began on Oct. 7 is its persisting lack of clarity. Israel might be on the verge of defeating Hamas in Gaza—or it could be weeks away from the steep strategic setback of American recognition of a Palestinian state. While the demobilization of reservists and a newly announced government timeline for the repopulation of the Gaza border region has partly relieved the feeling of an active emergency, an even worse crisis looms in the form of a potential war with Hezbollah, a threat that has so far prevented 60,000 displaced Israelis from returning to their homes in the north.
Months after Hamas’ destruction of a 30-year-old illusion of a settled national existence and the discrediting of most of those responsible for theorizing and implementing it, there is societywide consensus on the need to defeat Hamas and a fog over nearly everything else. There are relatively few senior Israelis left who have proved themselves qualified to see through the morass. Of those few remaining former generals, government ministers, and agency heads still worth listening to, almost none held as senior a position in the security apparatus as Maj. Gen. (Res.) Gershon Hacohen.
In 2000, when Hacohen was the head of the IDF general staff’s training and doctrine division, he was asked to produce a paper about how Israel could defend itself without control of the Jordan Valley, which was to be ceded to a future Palestinian state under peace plans that Prime Minister Ehud Barak, nearly the entire top leadership of the IDF, and the next decade’s worth of Israeli leaders did not think were irresponsible. “My paper was very short: It is like asking an F-15 pilot to just rise up without an engine,” he recalled. “No way.”
In the years before his retirement from active duty in the mid-2000s, Hacohen, who was also the commander of Israel’s national defense college, emerged as one of the IDF’s strongest and highest-ranked internal dissenters. Hacohen, now 69, claimed to me that he was the only active-duty general to accurately warn about the likely security consequences of the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, an operation he was then put in charge of.
In a war game in April of 2005, four months before the withdrawal, the IDF general staff simulated a scenario in which terrorists in the coastal strip launched rockets at Ashdod, Sderot, and Ashkelon. Hacohen’s advice in the midst of the exercise was to tell Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that “we don’t have a full way to retaliate because we will not be allowed to cross the border every week, we will not be allowed to launch artillery at a refugee camp of 50,000 residents, we will kill uninvolved people … therefore tell him what will happen will be a disaster, and we will not have a good way for retaliation.” After giving this assessment, Hacohen said he “was warned by chief of staff,” Moshe Ya’alon, “that I was speaking politically. I told him: ‘I am the only one here speaking professionally.’”
Hacohen was given a monthlong time frame for the removal of Gaza’s 9,000 remaining Israeli civilians, a job he finished in only two weeks. “Why did I succeed?” he asked. “Because I convinced the settler leaders to join me, to understand that they must struggle, but not to the fatal end, because in that way they will lose that legitimation they needed for the main battle about Judea and Samaria.” No soldiers died implementing the withdrawal, the settlement movement retained its credibility in Israeli society and dramatically grew in power, and there were no subsequent unilateral Israeli pullouts from the West Bank.
Hacohen is active in the Bitchonistim, known in English as the Israel Defense and Security Forum, an organization of over 20,000 former security and defense officials who are opposed to any overly risky concessions to Israel’s enemies, most notably the Palestinians. In 2022, the organization presented a detailed security assessment in which it argued for the strategic necessity of forcibly disarming the Gaza Strip. Yoav Gallant, the current minister of defense, attended the launch event for the paper—retired Gen. Amir Avivi, the Bitchonistim’s founder, worked closely with both Gallant and Hacohen when he was in the army. Members of the Bitchonistim are perceived, fairly or unfairly, as having access to the current government, which has informally drawn on their advice over the course of the war.
***
Israel is a country where ex-generals, including the quietly influential ones, have no particular aura to them—within the martial and Jewish-flavored egalitarianism of Israeli society, a former member of the general staff could be mistaken for a professor or a farmer or a bus driver. Hacohen is different even from the typical run of Israeli former officials. He speaks in a hypnotically slow, even, and high-pitched English, and the spindly retired officer often looks and sounds like a poet or a desert hermit who only happened to have commanded men into battle for over 40 years. I met him late on a Thursday night in Tel Aviv in mid-February, at a mostly deserted cafe near the Defense Ministry headquarters. A few hours earlier, protesters had blocked traffic in front of the ministry, demanding new elections and an immediate hostage release deal, even though there is no realistic one on offer. The demonstration was the city’s one glaring pocket of abnormality: Dizengoff was packed even beyond pre-conflict levels; my hotel in Ramat Gan was at capacity with Israelis heading to a concert at nearby Menora Mivtachim Arena.
“Tel Aviv was empty like a dead city at the beginning of the war. It took time to resurrect it. What you can see now is a miracle,” Hacohen said. Was the miracle the performance of the IDF in Gaza? I ventured, given that the army was slowly progressing toward full control of the territory and rocket fire from the Strip hadn’t threatened the city in weeks. “No,” he replied, “it is because of the power of life.”
The endurance of even a superficially normal existence in wartime Tel Aviv was a fragile miracle in the former military man’s view, and not only because of the long-range missiles that Hezbollah has aimed at the city. “The idea of President Biden to build a Palestinian state is a threat much more serious to the existence of Israel than the nuclear bomb in Iran—definitely,” he said. “And if Israel will not struggle against this idea, we are just opening the door for the fatal end of Israel.”
Hacohen’s injunctions might sound unduly alarmist. Then again, few military professionals foresaw the current nightmare on the eve of the Gaza pullout, and many serious Israeli security types thought that Operation Guardian of the Walls was a game-changing victory just a couple of years ago, showcasing Israel’s technological superiority and ability to dictate to its enemies. “The fact that Tel Aviv is still full with life is due to the fact that we are controlling Judea and Samaria,” Hacohen said. The loss of that control would bring Israel to a dire existential crux.
Hacohen then rapidly moved on to the bigger question of why the country needs to exist at all. Security is a necessary condition of life anywhere, he said, but that was not the point of Jews being sovereign in the land of Israel. “If the American administration thinks that we are here just for security, as they are always telling us, I’m telling them, always, that our story is not security. If all our anxieties are just security, why not look to find that in New Jersey? What’s bad there? Why struggle here for more than 100 years, only for security that’s still not achieved? Security is only the means for another goal. The main goal is redemption … Tel Aviv without being a gateway to Jerusalem is nothing beyond Brooklyn on the Mediterranean.”
“I spoke like that always while in the army,” Hacohen said. The religious register was once a commonplace of the worldview and vocabulary of Israeli military figures who are now considered icons of the country’s snuffed-out era of hopeful secular liberalism: “This was the way in which Moshe Dayan spoke. Yitzhak Rabin spoke like that,” Hacohen said. Over time, that mutually reinforcing sense of danger and purpose grew dimmer in Israel, even though the basic realities of the country hadn’t really changed. In Hacohen’s view, the country’s elite lost sight of continuities in the Israeli condition, the nature of war, and the connection between war and national survival, a mass delusion that Hamas shattered in horrifying fashion.
***
Hacohen began his career in the army in the early 1970s and was one of the soldiers who crossed the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. One day in 1977, as a company commander along the front line in the Golan Heights, he loaded a dozen tanks onto flatbed trucks to send them to a nearby live-fire exercise. Gen. Rafael Eitan, soon to become IDF chief of staff, was on hand and suddenly ordered a different kind of drill: Hacohen was to imagine the Syrians were attacking across the line of control, right that very second, meaning he had to get the tanks off the trailers as fast as humanly possible. “He did that to emphasize that the enemy is coming by surprise: Everything could happen at the very definite wrong moment, unexpectedly,” Hacohen said.
“The basic principle of defense is that you are not dependent in the field upon an alert,” he continued. “It is a part of the military profession as commander to keep the ritual of readiness.”
The ritual lapsed, along with the culture and the mindset that allowed it to exist in the first place. Even now, months after Oct. 7, it is possible to trick yourself into thinking that Eitan’s snap exam in the Golan belonged to a different era in warfare. It is true enough that the Syrian army of the late 1970s, whatever its myriad faults, was at least a uniformed regular military with a doctrine based around actual combat and a sense of honor that compelled it to stand and fight against other soldiers. In contrast, on Oct. 7, Hamas commandos fled from active confrontation with armed Israelis in order to maximize the number of Israeli civilian dead, and the group’s tactics in Gaza are based on sacrificing the largest possible number of Palestinian civilians while avoiding combat altogether. But if the long-ago Syrian army is a different kind of opponent than today’s Hamas, it requires a similarly inventive and broad-minded approach to military leadership to see each enemy clearly. Hacohen believes that mentality has all but vanished within the IDF.
In Hacohen’s view, the army lost the institutional memory of what it really means to “participate in a huge war,” something the IDF hadn’t done since the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In time, Hacohen said, “most of the commanders did not have that experience of warfare.” The end of the Cold War tricked the world’s leading militaries into believing that generals no longer needed to think or even care that much about the prospect of major combat for military leadership, and that wars would be small and manageable from now on—as Hacohen noted, even the viciously unsentimental Vladimir Putin was convinced that a handful of special forces could conquer Ukraine in a couple of days.
In the post-Cold War era of the Oslo Accords, peace with Jordan, and near-peace with Syria, the Israeli establishment became convinced that the country had fought its final existential battle. The rising generation of IDF generals were people who seemed well-suited to the smaller, more contained, lower-stakes conflicts of the post-historical world. “Those who were promoted came from special forces,” Hacohen said. “They cannot understand warfare in the same way that a very excellent brain surgeon cannot understand [general] medicine.”
According to Hacohen, the belief that mass-maneuver warfare was a relic of military textbooks from the past, and that the skills involved in fighting such conflicts no longer had any relevance, fed a growing institutional malaise within the IDF. The country’s strategic complex, busily preparing itself for peace with Yasser Arafat, generated self-fulfilling excuses for why the army needed to move away from the rough business of large-scale conflict. The profession of an IDF general went from existential warfare to “fire dominance by standoff,” as Hacohen explained—the idea that enemies could be fought at a distance through specialized units, airpower, and technological superiority. This was convenient, given that these were areas in which Israel already excelled, and which were central to the country’s newfound economic prosperity.
Candidates for high rank in the IDF weren’t prized for their ability to think creatively or deliver victories—victory being an outmoded concept in the new age of surgical operations in the service of peace—but for being good organizational functionaries. As war itself became hopelessly abstracted, the Israelis responsible for its theory and practice grew alienated from their core civic function, which is to prepare for the unthinkable, to live at the brink of national doomsday so that civilian life could be as orderly and productive as possible. Hacohen said that in his experience, when given the chance to study in the United States, most active-duty Israeli generals chose to learn industrial management at the National Defense University in Washington, rather than field command at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. Even chiefs of staff, Hacohen said, saw these stints in Washington as a chance for officers to educate themselves for their post-military careers.
“Warfare is a realm of uncertainty,” Hacohen said. “It is definitely a different profession. Most of the generals are not at all fitted to the profession of warfare. They are not educated enough, and actually also in Israel generals don’t like warfare. They don’t like their profession. They are not learning about it—not learning enough.”
Instead, he said, they are learning “bullshit, management, studying in the Wexner program at Harvard—knowing how to speak nicely.”
Defense Minister Gallant also wants to win wars but his comments here ignore the fact that the number of Charedim in the IDF is already increasing
The IDF needs generals who want to win wars as opposed to becoming politicians