January 31: The Terms of Israel’s Hostage Deal Are Getting Worse

U.S. floats recognition for Palestine; ICE meets with “abolish ICE” activists; Fani’s swag

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The Big Story

Negotiations to free the more than 100 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas are underway in Paris, led by Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns and representatives from the Israeli and Egyptian intelligence services, Qatar, and Hamas. On Tuesday evening, The Washington Post published details of a joint U.S.-Egyptian-Qatari “framework” for a new deal, “parts of which have been accepted by Israel and which is under consideration by Hamas,” according to the paper.

Here are the main elements of the deal, which has three planned “phases”:

1. An initial six-week pause in fighting, which would see the IDF withdraw from Gaza’s population centers. Hamas would release civilian hostages, including the elderly, sick, and children, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, at a rate of three Palestinians per Israeli.

2. An extension of the pause would see Hamas release female Israeli soldiers in exchange for more Palestinian prisoners and an increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza. According to The Wall Street Journal, Hamas is demanding 150 Palestinian prisoners per Israeli soldier, but Israel has not agreed to these terms. Hamas regards any military-age Israeli as a “soldier,” regardless of their status with the IDF. 

3. A final stage in which Hamas would release male IDF soldiers and the bodies of dead hostages, again in exchange for Palestinian prisoners

Last week, when it was reported that Biden had dispatched Burns to lead negotiations, we speculated that the CIA director’s role would be to strong-arm the Israelis into greater concessions. We don’t have any inside information beyond what’s in the press, but the Israeli negotiating position certainly seems to have deteriorated since then. On Saturday, the day before Burns arrived in Paris, The New York Times reported that the then-current version of the deal involved a two-phase hostage exchange, with no IDF withdrawal from Khan Younis and other population centers. But on Monday, Hamas rejected that framework, saying that it will accept only a deal involving a complete end to the war and a “full Israeli withdrawal.” 

Is that because Hamas thinks Washington is on its side? As the Journal reported Wednesday, “U.S. negotiators are pushing for a cease-fire deal that could stop the war in Gaza long enough to stall Israel’s military momentum and potentially set the stage for a more lasting truce, according to U.S. and Arab officials familiar with the negotiations.” The report went on to state that “U.S. negotiators, led by Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns, argue that it would be difficult for Israel to resume the war at its current intensity after a long pause.” And since U.S. analysts believe that Hamas “can continue fighting for months with its underground infrastructure still largely intact”—which, we’re sure, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the United States forcing Israel to supply Gaza with the fuel that Hamas needs to keep that underground infrastructure running—the U.S. position amounts to asking Israel to give up on its goal of destroying Hamas.

Hamas, at least, appears to have correctly identified Washington as the Israelis’ pressure point. The Washington Post report quoted a senior Hamas official and adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, Taher al-Nunu, who said that the “preconditions to serious negotiations over a hostage release” were the “cessation of [Israeli] aggression,” “the withdrawal of the occupation [forces] from all parts of the Gaza Strip,” and more humanitarian aid. “Regardless of the timing,” al-Nunu said, any agreement “has to include a cease-fire.” He went on:

“It seems that the U.S. administration has started to be convinced of this,” he said. Asked for specifics, Al-Nunu said that among the reasons for Washington’s efforts to secure a fighting pause are threats to U.S. interests in the Red Sea, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and “Palestine’s northern borders. ... The [U.S.] elections that are encroaching. ... Of course, it’s uncomfortable for the U.S. administration.”

Indeed. On Monday, meanwhile, Sabi Abu Zuhri, the head of Hamas’ Politburo abroad, explained the game in an interview with Al-Jazeera Arabic, translation courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute:

We will continue, regardless of the price, and what happened today outside Gaza and Palestine —the targeting of the U.S. soldiers [in Jordan]—is a clear message, and the governments of the U.S. and the occupation should understand this message, before it is too late.

That message is “Curb your Israeli dog,” and Washington seems to be reading it loud and clear. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Why are American top universities protecting antisemitic foreign students? Because, Tony Badran explains, they’re cash cows.

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The Rest

→ On Wednesday, Axios reported that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had asked the State Department to “conduct a review” on possible “U.S. and international” recognition of a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza, one day after British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said the same thing. The official U.S. position has long been that Palestinian statehood should only be achieved through Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but Axios reports, citing a “senior U.S. official,” that:

Some inside the Biden administration are now thinking recognition of a Palestinian state should possibly be the first step in negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of the last.

Tablet’s Levant analyst, Tony Badran, told The Scroll via email:

We’ll have to wait and see what they say about it, but it strikes me, coming right after David Cameron made the same comment—with this telling sentence: “That could be one of the things that helps to make this process irreversible”—that this looks more like a coordinated move, precisely to “make this process irreversible.” Although the official U.S. position is that any solution has to come from talks between the two parties, this administration, starting with its previous iteration in 2016, has been moving in the direction of slowly creating a fait accompli. Obama started the ball rolling in his final days in office when he sought to lock in his preferences at the Security Council by orchestrating the passage of a resolution that endorsed the Arab rejectionist position on the so-called 1967 lines. The Biden administration then used its Saudi normalization gambit as the vehicle for the establishment of a Palestinian state, making the former contingent on the latter—the deliberate reversal of the Abraham Accords framework.

It’s worth reiterating that the administration’s Saudi normalization gambit dates back to before the current war. In August 2023, for instance, The Wall Street Journal reported “the Biden administration has made clear that it wants any deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia to advance efforts to create a Palestinian state.” Now the administration is using a war initiated by the Palestinians to force Israel into the concessions that Washington already wanted to impose. In other words, Hamas and the Iranian Axis of Resistance have provided the Biden administration with a major policy assist—and yet pundits still want you to believe that Biden and Iran might soon go to war.  

→Last week, we reported that the White House had frozen approvals for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals after meeting with a 26-year-old TikTok activist. Today, Free Beacon reporter and Scroll podcast guest Joe Simonson reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leaders met last week with an activist group that wants to abolish ICE as part of an “immigration stakeholders” meeting. ICE leaders met with representatives of several left-wing immigration NGOs, including Detention Watch Network, which has called for “abolishing ICE and immigration detention.” In its 2022 annual report, Detention Watch Network lists its funders, which include the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and the Four Freedoms Fund—itself funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations—as well as the rap-metal band Rage Against the Machine.

But wait, there’s more! One of the initiatives listed on Detention Watch Network’s website is #DefundHate, which describes ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection as “founded on racist, dehumanizing laws”; provides activists with detailed instructions on how to “defund” both agencies by “disrupting” the congressional appropriations process; and calls for border funding to be redirected toward “critical education, housing, green infrastructure, and health care programs” (i.e., as federal patronage back to other left-wing NGOs). #DefundHate is a project of the Defund Hate Campaign, which is … yes, of course, a laundry list of billionaire-funded NGOs, including Detention Watch Network, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, and United We Dream (which received $480,000 from the Tides Foundation in 2022 alone). 

→Headline of the Day: 

One Big Reason Migrants Are Coming in Droves: They Believe They Can Stay

That appeared this morning in The New York Times, which helpfully noted a few paragraphs down that “by and large, [the migrants] are not wrong.” The Times’ conclusion, an investigative feat worthy of Inspector Poirot, reminded us of the famous dialogue between Hank Williams Jr. and Kid Rock on the song “Family Tradition”:

Williams: Why do you drink?

Rock: To get drunk!

→A top aide to Fani Willis, the embattled district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, planned to spend federal grant money for a youth gang prevention program on “swag,” according to a whistleblower, who says she was fired by Willis after objecting to this misuse of funds, The Washington Free Beacon reports. The whistleblower, an employee in the DA’s office named Amanda Timpson, confronted Willis in a recorded conversation on Nov. 19, 2021, over alleged plans by Willis’ then aide Michael Cuffee to use parts of a $488,000 federal grant—earmarked for the creation of the Center for Youth Empowerment and Gang Prevention—on “MacBooks,” “swag,” “travel,” and other ineligible expenses. Timpson was fired two months later and then filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that she was wrongfully terminated, in a case that is still in discovery. The Center for Youth Empowerment and Gang Prevention never opened.

Timpson’s allegations are not the first time Willis has come under fire for misappropriating funds. In the January 2024 motion alleging that Willis had hired her boyfriend, Nathan Wade, as special prosecutor in her RICO prosecution of Donald Trump and his associates, a lawyer for one of the defendants also charged that Willis had improperly paid Wade’s salary out of emergency COVID-19 funds. And on Jan. 24, Willis requested $611,000 from Fulton County to purchase a new fleet of cars for her staff, despite spending nearly $800,000 on new cars in 2023—a request that the county denied. In addition, the Free Beacon notes, Willis spent $40,000 from a 2020 federal grant for the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative on computers, airfare, hotels, and car rentals and has purchased computers “using grants from the Georgia Innocence Project, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Program, and federal funds appropriated under the Violence Against Women Act.”

→Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that Penn State’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming could plausibly amount to “pervasive harassment” of white employees in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The surprising part? As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf reports, the judge in the case is a Black, Nigerian-born, Obama-appointed Democrat, Wendy Beetlestone. The case in question is a lawsuit by Zack De Piero, a white former English instructor at Penn State’s Abington campus who resigned in 2023, alleging that he had faced discrimination due to his race. De Piero’s complaint included these allegations:

• An assistant vice provost for educational equity led faculty in a “breathing exercise” in which “she instructed the ‘White and non-Black people of color to hold it just a little longer—to feel the pain.’”

• Faculty were required to watch a training video titled “White Teachers Are a Problem.”

• A staffer at Penn State’s affirmative action office told De Piero that “there is a problem with the white race” after he filed a complaint with the office about an anti-racism training.

In her ruling denying Penn State’s motion to dismiss De Piero’s complaint, Beetlestone wrote, “When employers talk about race—any race—with a constant drumbeat of essentialist, deterministic, and negative language, they risk liability under federal law.”

→Quote of the Day:

The reality is that when it comes to avoiding civilian harm, there is no modern comparison to Israel's war against Hamas. Israel is not fighting a battle like Fallujah, Mosul, or Raqqa; it is fighting a war involving synchronous major urban battles. No military in modern history has faced over 30,000 urban defenders in more than seven cities using human shields and hiding in hundreds of miles of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites, while holding hundreds of hostages.

Despite the unique challenges Israel faces in its war against Hamas, it has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.

That’s from an article today in Newsweek by John Spencer of West Point’s Modern War Institute. 

Read the rest here: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-implemented-more-measures-prevent-civilian-casualties-any-other-nation-history-opinion-1865613 

→We try not to spend too much time on presidential polling here, but this result, from Bloomberg/Morning Consult, is pretty remarkable: 

It shows Trump leading Biden in all seven swing states, by an average of six points. In the 2020 election, Biden won all of those states except for North Carolina. More than half of swing-state voters, however, said they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he was found guilty of a crime before the election.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Harvard’s Derek Penslar Helps Make the World Safer for Antisemitism, by David Mikics

A cultural studies professor who makes excuses for bigoted anti-Zionism is appointed to lead the university’s disingenuous ‘Task Force on Combating Antisemitism’

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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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Why America’s Richest Universities Are Protecting Hate-Filled Foreign Students

Accommodating overseas elites by tolerating antisemitism on U.S. campuses is part of a scheme to turn loss-leader DEI categories into profit centers

by Tony Badran

Five weeks after Rutgers University suspended the New Brunswick campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) on Dec. 11 for violating several university policies, the school reversed its decision and reinstated the pro-Hamas group. In celebration, SJP members filmed a video in the classic Palestinian terrorist style: faces covered in kaffiyehs, reading a communique which, following a diatribe against the Zionists, made a list of demands that the school must meet if it wished to wipe the stain of its complicity in genocide.

Since October, American cities and college campuses have been transformed into stages for this kind of Middle Eastern performance theater in support of Hamas and its murder, torture, and rape of Jews. Performances have ranged from vicarious partaking in the Oct. 7 pogrom, like the tearing down of posters of kidnapped Israelis, to calls for “globalizing” Palestinian terrorism “from New York to Gaza,” to outright expressions of support for Hamas and the extermination of Jews “from the river to the sea”—“by any means necessary,” lest there be any confusion. “There is nothing, nothing more honorable than dying for a noble cause, for justice,” a high-profile organizer of a rally at Columbia shouted into a bullhorn in a thick Arabic accent.

There’s also no confusion about the fact that these rallies feature Arab and Muslim students who eagerly support terrorism—often by denying that Hamas or its actions of Oct. 7 constitute “terrorism” at all. Equally evident is that many of the students leading, organizing, and participating in these protests and expressions of antisemitism and support for Hamas on college campuses are not Americans—meaning that they are not American citizens or even green card holders. Rather, they are foreign passport holders, including from Arab and Muslim countries, who have decided to avail themselves of U.S. educational infrastructure while importing the passions and prejudices of their home countries to American campuses.

Indeed, the universities have acknowledged the obvious fact that many of the campus protest leaders are foreign students, here on limited educational visas, in the manner with which they have chosen to handle the Gaza protests. Early on, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) cautioned students who occupied lecture halls, prevented other students from going to class, and otherwise violated school policies and guidelines, that they could face suspension for their behavior. But it quickly became clear there would be no serious consequences for noncompliance. When the students pressed on, MIT only suspended a handful of them “from non-academic campus activities.” The explanation MIT President Sally Kornbluth gave for her decision was unambiguous: “serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues.”

Plainly put, what Kornbluth said is that foreign students have been violating school policy, but academic suspension or expulsion would terminate their ability to remain in the country. MIT therefore refrained from disciplining these students in order to keep them enrolled.

Kornbluth’s concerns were well-founded. There are laws on the books that apply to foreign students and other nonresident aliens in the United States who support terrorist organizations like Hamas. Since October, leading Republican lawmakers have reminded everyone of the existence of these laws. Reps. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., led 17 other Republican House representatives in a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken “to request information regarding the potentially unlawful presence on U.S. soil of non-immigrant foreign nationals who have endorsed terrorist activity.” The letter explained the relevant law:

Student visa applicants, like all non-immigrant visa applicants, must qualify under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to be approved for a visa. They are subject to a wide range of ineligibilities in Section 212(a) of the INA.

Section 212(a)(3)(B)(i)(VII) of the INA states that, “any alien - who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization … is inadmissible.”

If a visa “was issued before DHS uncovers evidence of a visa-holder’s ineligibility under INA s.212(a)(3)B),” the legislators added, “the individual in question should immediately have their visa revoked and face expedited deportation proceedings.”

You could argue there are ideological reasons for the schools not to take action against foreign students. “Palestine,” after all, has found its place at the heart of progressive “intersectionality.” But there’s also a strong material incentive for the universities’ failure to obey the law.

The average share of international students in Ivy League schools who enrolled in the fall of 2023 is about 15%. The overall international share is higher. A quarter of Harvard’s student body is now international. At MIT, it’s nearly a third.

The scheme by which U.S. taxpayers pay to give 25% or more of the places at America’s most prestigious universities to foreign students is a recent innovation—one that took shape between 2004 and 2014, and has helped make the universities’ DEI rhetoric cost-free. The international share of freshmen at Georgetown nearly quadrupled from 3% in 2004 to 11% a decade later, with similar numbers at Berkeley and Yale. The growth in undergraduate enrollment at Yale during that decade was fueled almost entirely by foreigners. In that same period, the number of incoming foreign students at Ivy League schools rose by 46%.

Behind this increase lies the simple reality that only a comparatively small number of Americans can afford the mind-numbingly high fees that American universities extort from their captive domestic market. Foreign students, the overwhelming majority of whom are either the children of wealthy foreign elites or directly sponsored by their governments, represent a serious source of funding for American colleges, public and private alike. These students often pay full or near-full tuition and board, and help public universities balance the books in the face of budget cuts. More broadly, they augment revenue by helping to fill federally funded programs that are based on racial and ethnic quotas.

Depending on how you look at it, American universities have made either an exceedingly clever or else exceedingly reprehensible bargain: Quota-filling at a profit. While this practice is generally covered with asinine bureaucratic language such as “promoting diversity” and “fostering a cosmopolitan culture” for a “global community,” it is in fact a racket by which universities take slots presumably intended for members of groups that are held to be economically and culturally deprived—and on which the universities would be obligated to take a loss—and instead sell them at a profit to the families of some of the more privileged people on Earth, while also continuing to sell identity-politics platitudes as institutional ideology.

It seems obvious enough that foreign students who can afford the cost of full tuition and board without financial aid often come from the elite segment of their societies, which in authoritarian countries often translates into overlap with the ruling regimes. When it comes to the Middle East especially—though hardly exclusively—this privileged class is both outwardly “Westernized” and soaked in the antisemitism prevalent in their home societies.

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What should universities do in response? Well, one move might be to hold seminars for incoming foreign students explaining that the group hatreds and conspiracy theories that fuel political discourse in their home countries are in fact poisonous—and according to U.S. law could easily get them expelled. Or, universities can pretend that these views are normal—and encourage home-grown professors to serve as faculty advisers and active sympathizers—so as not to disturb their cash cow.

And it’s not just tuition money that schools are milking. Foreign governments also write big checks to ensure that their students—and their politics—are given red-carpet treatment at big-name universities. According to the National Association of Scholars, since 2001 Qatar has given around $5 billion to American universities, more than any other foreign government. Between 2014 and 2019, American colleges and universities received $2.7 billion in Qatari funding without any public acknowledgment of the source of those funds. Given that Qatar hosts the leadership of Hamas, one can see how cracking down on Hamas-sympathizing students might seem like a bad idea for university presidents who cash Qatari checks.

The political and financial incentives for the universities, therefore, are straightforward. But here’s the thing: It’s not just the students who are breaking the law. The schools are actively doing so, too. Universities did not simply refrain from expelling foreign students who violated the terms of their visas by espousing and endorsing terrorist activity. They took extra steps to protect foreign students from the legal repercussions of their actions, which in some cases would appear to make the universities themselves accessories to the crime of facilitating terror-supporting activity.

In November of last year, for example, the presidents of Columbia University and Barnard College announced the establishment of the “Doxing Resource Group” in response to “Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students,” who participated in the rallies cheering terrorism and the murder of Jews, having their names and photos publicized “by third parties.” This was doxing, according to the presidents: “a dangerous form of intimidation” that is “unacceptable.” For this initiative, Columbia and Barnard “have retained experts in the field of digital threat investigation and privacy scrubbing to support our impacted community members.”

That is, the schools hired people—who will work with the Offices of General Counsel, the Offices of the Provost, and Barnard College Information Technology—to erase whatever damning footprint their foreign students may have left online, which could be used as grounds for visa revocation and deportation. It should be noted that foreign students are not merely exercising their rights to free speech, whether determined by the First Amendment or university administrators: Foreign students are not U.S. citizens, and their entry and presence in this country are strictly conditional. Once these conditions are violated, the violators have no right to stay or exercise rights that belong to citizens.

The schools, in other words, know the law. They know that what their international students did violates the terms of their legal status in the U.S. and is therefore subject to legal sanction. Nevertheless, they took steps toward being actively complicit in their students’ illegal conduct.

But what the schools also know is that they have political cover from the Biden administration to violate the country’s visa and terrorism laws. On Nov. 1, three weeks after the Oct. 7 pogrom and the eruption of antisemitic, pro-Hamas street action in U.S. cities, the White House unveiled “the first-ever National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia in the United States.” The initiative, with its inversion of reality, gave a green light to pro-Hamas protesters while telegraphing to the university administrators that the former were members of a protected class—rather than a danger to public safety.

University administrators were hardly the only ones to get the message. In Massachusetts, for example, the top-down imperative to protect student demonstrators from the legal consequences of supporting terrorist groups led to a wholesale change in police functioning that under any other circumstances would be excoriated by the left as evidence of incipient fascism.

“Under Massachusetts law,” the University of Massachusetts Amherst explained in a statement, “daily police logs, including the names and addresses of arrestees, must be made public ‘without charge to the public during regular business hours and at all other reasonable times.’ For several years, the University of Massachusetts Police Department (UMPD) has posted these logs online to ensure compliance with state law. Beginning in December 2023, UMPD police logs will no longer be available on the UMPD website. UMPD logs will, however, remain available to the public at no charge at the UMPD lobby at 585 East Pleasant Street in Amherst.”

The real victims, you see, are the brave students chanting genocidal slogans in public; the villains are the people who attempt to “dox” them by posting footage of their noxious statements and behavior online.

Instead of this kind of dangerous moral inversion, universities and the state and federal authorities that govern their behavior would be better served by obeying the law. Deporting foreign students who support and aid terror groups that kill Americans and hold them hostage seems like a first step toward sanity at American universities whose desire to have their sectarian DEI cake and get even fatter by eating it has led them into a moral abyss.