January 22: Biden’s Men in Jerusalem
Goodbye, DeSantis; UNRWA’s weapons; One million immigration parolees
The Big Story
Political tensions inside Israel are escalating over the future of the Gaza war—and of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. On Thursday, hours after Netanyahu rejected the idea of holding elections before the war ends, Israel’s Channel 12 news aired an interview with war cabinet minister Gadi Eisenkot, in which he declared that the goal of defeating Hamas was “unrealistic” and that it was “necessary” for Israel to hold new elections “within the space of months” to regain the trust of the electorate.
Nominally, there are two sources of the emerging rift within the Israeli cabinet, which pits Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant against Eisenkot and war cabinet minister Benny Gantz—the latter pair being close to the Biden administration and likely preferred by Washington as negotiating partners. The first is a dispute over whether the IDF should prioritize defeating Hamas or freeing the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza—Netanyahu and Gallant favor the former, which they argue will help free the hostages anyway, while Eisenkot and Gantz, backed by the United States, claim the two goals are incompatible and that Israel must do whatever it takes to bring the hostages home.
The second sticking point is what comes after the war. Netanyahu has been adamant in rejecting U.S. proposals for a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority to take over Gaza after the war. That includes a recent proposal by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, which would have seen a Saudi-led postwar reconstruction effort and Saudi-Israeli normalization in exchange for Israeli promises to allow the PA to return to Gaza and to provide the Palestinians with a credible pathway to statehood. Gantz and Eisenkot have not made firm commitments about their own ideas for a postwar settlement, but they have been sharply critical of what they characterize as Netanyahu’s failure to outline a plan. It is likely that both would be more cooperative with the Biden administration’s plans than the current Israeli government is.
Indeed, it now appears that the Biden administration’s strategy is to work with its preferred Israeli partners to eject Netanyahu. Last Wednesday, for instance, NBC News quoted “three senior U.S. officials” who said that “the Biden administration is looking past Netanyahu to try to achieve its goals in the region.” On Saturday, The New York Times published an article based on interviews with four anonymous Israeli generals who echoed Eisenkot in claiming that the goals of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages were mutually exclusive, and in blaming the country’s “civilian leadership”—i.e., Netanyahu—for undermining the IDF by equivocating on Israel’s postwar intentions. A Monday article in The Wall Street Journal, which detailed a new U.S.-Egyptian-Qatari proposal to trade a release of the hostages for an eventual cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal, included this aside:
The U.S., Egypt and Qatar see another hostage deal as the key to bringing a prolonged halt to the fighting. Egyptian officials say that while Israeli leaders publicly take an uncompromising stance, there are divisions within the Israeli cabinet, with some calling for prioritization of hostages.
We should stress that the divisions in Israel are real enough, even without U.S. prodding—on Monday, protesters stormed the Israeli Knesset to demand the government do more to free the hostages, while on the opposite side, The Times of Israel reported Monday on demobilized IDF reservists who are organizing to lobby the government to pursue Hamas more aggressively. But for a Biden administration committed to maintaining its dovish posture toward Iran, even in the face of near-daily Iranian proxy attacks on U.S. forces in alleged retaliation for Israel’s actions in Gaza, the obvious solution is to pressure the Israelis into winding down the war, whether Israel has achieved its objectives or not. Gantz and Eisenkot, in addition to whatever else they’re doing, now appear to be auditioning for the role of giving Biden what he wants, and selling it to the Israeli public as a victory.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Carol Ungar speaks to evacuees from Sinai and Gaza who are now living through their second exile
The Rest
→Something else from that Saturday New York Times piece, which would seem to cut against the idea that Bibi’s intransigence is the main source of Israel’s problems in Gaza:
Before the invasion, officials thought the tunnel network beneath Gaza was up to 100 miles in length; Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, had claimed in 2021 that it was closer to 300 miles.
Military officials now believe there are up to 450 miles of tunnels underneath a territory that is just 25 miles at its longest point. Under Khan Younis alone, Israel estimates that there are at least 100 miles of passageways, spread across several levels. And across Gaza, there are an estimated 5,700 shafts leading to the network, making it so hard to disconnect the network from the surface that the army has stopped trying to destroy every shaft it finds.
The unexpected sophistication of the tunnel infrastructure, according to the report, is a main reason the “high-intensity” phase of Israel’s ground operation has not wrapped up on schedule:
On the eve of Israel’s invasion, the military assessed that it would establish “operational control” over Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah—Gaza’s three largest cities—by late December, according to a military planning document reviewed by The Times.
But by mid-January, Israel had yet to begin its advance into Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, and still had not forced Hamas from every part of Khan Younis, another major city in the south.
→Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump on Sunday ahead of the New Hampshire primary, after finishing a distant second to Trump in last week’s Iowa caucuses. With DeSantis and pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy now out of the race, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley remains the sole long-shot challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination. As of Monday, the RealClearPolitics betting average had Trump’s odds to win the nomination at 84.8% and Haley’s at 8.6%.
→An Iranian proxy militia in Iraq struck a U.S. base with a barrage of rockets and ballistic missiles on Saturday, wounding two U.S. service members. In an apparently separate but actually intimately related development, the Biden administration announced Saturday that it was preparing a “sustained military campaign” against the Houthis intended to “degrade and destroy their capabilities.” The connection, of course, is that while the United States seems happy to strike Iranian proxies, which Tehran views as expendable, retaliating against Iran itself remains out of the question.
→Quote of the Day:
There is not a UNRWA site, school, mosque, or kindergarten in which we didn’t find weapons. None. One hundred percent.
That’s IDF Col. Elad Shushan speaking to a reporter from The Times of Israel, who recently accompanied Shushan’s 646th Reserve Paratroopers Brigade into central Gaza. UNRWA, the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians, has received $1 billion from the United States since President Biden restored U.S. funding in 2021, but it has long been accused of operating as a de facto Hamas front. According to watchdog IMPACT-se, for instance, more than 100 of the Hamas terrorists who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre were graduates of UNRWA schools, and at least 14 UNRWA employees, including teachers, openly celebrated Oct. 7 on their private social media pages.
→More than 1 million people have entered the United States through the Biden administration’s immigration parole programs since 2021, according to a report in CBS News. The government has the authority to parole migrants without visas for humanitarian or public-benefit reasons, granting them the ability to temporarily live and work in the United States, but without permanent legal status. From that CBS report, here’s a rundown of how the administration has issued its paroles:
422,000 via the CBP One App
340,000 via a special parole process for Cubans, Haitians, and Venezuelans
176,000 via the Uniting for Ukraine policy
77,000 via the Afghan refugee resettlement effort
20,000 were for Ukrainians paroled at the southern border
3,600 were made via family reunification programs
These more than 1 million parolees are in addition to the several million people who have entered the country illegally through the southern border.
→Robert Malley, the former Biden Iran envoy who had his security clearance revoked for mishandling classified documents, for which he is currently under FBI investigation, is slated to teach a class at Yale on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Malley—who, in addition to mishandling classified documents, oversaw a ring of Iranian assets at his think tank, the International Crisis Group, some of whom he later hired into the U.S. government—will teach a seminar titled “Contending With Israel-Palestine” this semester at America’s second-most prestigious university. Malley also has close ties with Hamas; the Beacon’s Adam Kredo notes that Malley was fired from the 2008 Obama campaign for holding unauthorized talks with Hamas, although he was later rehired to serve as President Obama’s “point man” on Iran.
→On Friday, the FBI arrested Elizabeth Ballesteros West, a bipolar transgender neo-Nazi in Oregon, for making a series of “credible violent threats” against Jews and Black people, posting pictures of Nazi flags and firearms on social media, and threatening to go out “in a blaze of glory” due to alleged bullying from her “transphobic” coworkers, The Post Millennial reports. While executing a search warrant on West’s home last Tuesday, the FBI discovered “11 handguns, 16 rifles, one pistol, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition,” according to court documents cited by The Post Millennial.
Which brings up a curious point: There’s been regular media and White House attention on an alleged “epidemic” of violence against trans people, despite the numbers suggesting that “trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming” individuals are about 10 times less likely to die violent deaths than the average American, according to a recent essay in UnHerd by our Tablet colleague David Samuels. However, there have been several mass shootings perpetrated by trans and gender-nonconforming individuals in recent years, including:
Anderson Lee Aldrich, a “non-binary” person using they/them pronouns who killed five and wounded 40 in a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs nightclub in November 2022.
Audrey Hale, a transgender man, who killed six in a school shooting in Nashville in March 2023.
Dylan Butler, a gender-fluid person using he/they pronouns, who killed one and wounded five before committing suicide during a school shooting in Iowa in January 2024.
Thankfully, Miss West was prevented from adding herself to that list.
→Actress and woo-woo wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow posted this somewhat elliptical criticism of Hamas and its American apologists to Instagram on Monday:
Coming as it did four months after Oct. 7, Paltrow’s post sparked some criticism from supporters of Israel along the lines that it was too little, too late—and prompted whatever this is:
Our feeling is that in the current cultural environment, it’s unwise to drive away allies with purity tests. So, thanks, Gwyneth: Sometimes it truly is better late than never.
TODAY IN TABLET:
First They Came for My People. Then They Came for the Jews, by Simon Deng
A South Sudanese former slave recognized the Palestinian pogrom on Oct. 7
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.
A Second Exile
For Israelis who previously evacuated their homes in Sinai or Gaza, leaving their new homes in northern and southern Israel during the current war against Hamas feels like déjà vu
by Carol Ungar
For over a quarter-million Israelis, Oct. 7 didn’t only signal the start of a war. It was also the day they realized they’d have to leave their homes. Some of them had a sense of déjà vu. They had been exiled from their homes before.
For Pnina Rogolsky, this evacuation brought back memories of the spring of 1982, when she lost her home in southern Sinai after Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt.
Dreaming of a quiet agrarian life, Rogolsky and her husband had moved to the Yamit settlement bloc in the early 1970s in response to a government call to settle the Sinai, which had come under Israeli control after the Six-Day War in 1967. They joined a brand new moshav near Yamit called Netiv HaAsara.
“The Jewish Agency gave us a tract of land and a tractor, which we shared with another family,” Rogolsky told me. “We grew tomatoes, mangoes, and flowers. I had my first baby. We were all young. We helped each other out. We socialized. It was a good life.”
She didn’t expect it all to end, and certainly not so quickly. “When the talk started about a peace treaty with Egypt, we assumed that we’d remain in our homes,” she said. “We didn’t think we’d give back Sinai.”
Initially, Rogolsky and the other Sinai settlers fought the plan. “We lobbied Knesset members, we demonstrated, we even burned tires,” she recalled. But by the spring of 1982, she said, the battle was lost: “We left our moshav in a caravan with our lights on as if we were on the way to a funeral.”
Rogolsky and her family—along with the other 70 families who evacuated the moshav in the Sinai—helped to reestablish the moshav, also called Netiv HaAsara, in what they hoped was a more secure location just outside the Gaza Strip.
Starting again wasn’t easy. “Losing our moshav in the Sinai felt like losing a limb,” said Rogolsky. “Some of our people could barely function.” But Rogolsky, who was then in her 30s, felt compelled to pull herself together. “Working the land helped me to heal,” she said.
Then came the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, when terrorists killed 20 members of the moshav. Rogolsky and her husband were in another part of the country visiting friends, but her son was at the moshav leading the security team. Fortunately he survived the attack. Rogolsky has been back several times since Oct. 7 “to visit and to do laundry,” she said; her husband goes back more frequently to tend to the family’s chicken coop. But neither of them stays for long.
Netiv HaAsara is in its second exile, its 900 residents scattered in hotels and apartments throughout central Israel. Rogolsky lives in the Yearim Hotel in the Judean Hills just outside of Jerusalem with several dozen of her neighbors, most of them like herself in their 70s and 80s, but it’s far from ideal.
The first days were the hardest, she said: “That whole first week we went from funeral to funeral, shiva to shiva.”
Once again, Rogolsky has found comfort in work. Instead of farming, she helped to set up a program of activities at her hotel. “We play bridge. We do yoga and pilates. We go on trips. We keep ourselves busy,” she said.
As for returning to the moshav, Rogolsky is dubious: “Everything we built over 40 years seems like it’s going to vanish. We need a lot of strength and help to return to normal life. We aren’t living a normal life.”
***
Being younger doesn’t necessarily make the transition easier. For Raaya Manshari and Hila Buskila—both 30-somethings and both former Gaza envelope residents now relocated to Jerusalem-area hotels—Oct. 7 brings back memories of a more recent evacuation: the 2005 disengagement when the Israeli government relinquished control of Gaza and dismantled the settlements of Gush Katif.
Manshari, a kindergarten teacher, was 16 when her family left the Gush Katif town of Atzmona. Buskila, a social worker and stylist, was a young bride with a new baby when her family had to leave their home in Nisanit. Even now, both still mourn the charmed lives they remember having in Gaza. “Our lives were so good that we never believed it would end,” said Manshari.
Both remember holding out until the last possible moment, not wanting to leave. “We didn’t think it would happen,” recalled Buskila. “We were expecting a miracle.”
Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was marked by loud protest, which nearly slid into violence, both women left their homes peacefully.
“We allowed the soldiers into our homes. We prayed with them. We recited psalms together,” said Buskila. “They helped us to take down our mezuzahs, and they helped us to pack.”
Even after they closed their doors, they hoped that their departure would be temporary. “We packed only for a few days,” said Manshari. “We were convinced that the government’s decision was so illogical that they would walk it back.”
Like Rogolsky, the Gush Katif evacuees found the first days the most challenging. “We did a lot of crying” recalled Manshari, noting that even after the tears had dried, they struggled: “It took us a long time to find our place. We were always looking for Atzmona.”
Manshari married a man from Gush Katif and moved to Moshav Shlomit in the Gaza envelope because it shared Atzmona’s sandy landscape. “In place of the sea, however, there was Gaza,” she noted. Buskila moved to Moshav Shokeida, 31 miles away from Manshari’s moshav.
On the morning of Oct. 7, both women awoke to the sound of guns and missile fire. They had heard missile fire before—the Gaza envelope had suffered hundreds of missile attacks—but this was different.
“The booms were louder than anything I ever heard,” said Manshari. While her husband left to fight the terrorists, Manshari barricaded herself in her safe room together with her four children. “We played games, we ate sweets, and we recited psalms.”
Buskila also spent the day in her safe room with her children while her husband kept watch from the roof of their home. Miraculously, the terrorists skipped over their moshavim. Nevertheless, war had started, and the following day they were ordered to evacuate.
“We had 10 minutes to get ready,” Manshari said. “I thought we’d be gone for two or three days. That’s how I packed.”
“We didn’t know where we were going or for how long,” said Buskila.
Both women joined their neighbors driving out in a convoy. Still, the journey was terrifying. The road had yet to be cleared from the debris of the massacre. “We saw dead bodies and burned-out cars,” said Buskila. “It was hard to see.”
Even with a military escort, it wasn’t clear that the road was safe. “I was afraid that the terrorists would shoot at us as we left,” said Manshari.
Both women joined residents of their respective moshavim at field schools in central Israel. Both reported that they were well treated. “People brought us whatever we needed,” said Buskila.
Still, the experience hurts, said Manshari: “I feel like a leaf that had fallen off of a tree.”
Buskila says that she’s found relief by talking to other members of her community: “Everyone told their story of Oct. 7,” she said. “I think that really helped us.”
***
Like Rogolsky, Buskila and Manshari now live in hotels in the Judean Hills outside of Jerusalem.
“The hotel looks after us very well, but I feel like I’m in a golden cage,” said Manshari. “It’s noisy. And there’s no privacy.”
Gaza envelope residents have been going back to visit. Buskila reports that she and some of her neighbors have returned for overnight stays and even for Shabbat, but not more than that.
“We want to go back to our lives, to heal from Oct. 7,” Buskila said. “Our communities are not livable. Schools aren’t open. And you hear constant noises of war.”
It’s likely that many months will pass before they go home. Recently, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the IDF spokesman have stated that the war will continue through 2024.
While all three women strongly support the war, they blame Israeli government policies, particularly the 2005 disengagement, as the reasons for their present predicament. “The disengagement allowed Hamas to build up,” said Buskila. “I believe it led us to Oct. 7.”
Rogolsky, who had once supported the Gaza withdrawal, concurs: “We thought having the army out of the Gaza Strip would lead to peace. We got it back in our faces.”
Manshari expressed a tentative, albeit mystical, optimism. “It’s 19 years from the disengagement. It took us 19 years to liberate the Kotel and return it to Gush Etzion,” she said, referring to the period between Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and the Six-Day War in 1967. “Maybe this time we will free Gush Katif.”
Biden cannot manage to get out a full sentence and he doesn't know where the stairs are. Harris is useless and cannot be taken seriously. Whoever is actually running the US government is running it straight into the ground. The US has no business telling any other country what to do. Israel should hold tight and do what is necessary to protect itself long term.
Biden’s “support” of Israel is a clear example of the adage that talk is cheap