July 23: Hamas and Fatah Unite

DOJ "finds" Biden records; Prosecutors drop charges against protesters; Cheatle resigns

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The Big Story

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the United States, and U.S. President Joe Biden vowing on Monday night to continue working for an end to the war during his remaining months in office, the biggest news in the Middle East this week came, surprisingly, from Beijing. On Tuesday, leaders of Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinian factions signed a joint declaration pledging to form a unity government in Gaza and the West Bank following the conclusion of Israel’s war with Hamas. 

The so-called Beijing declaration contains no specific details or timetable, and previous unity agreements between Hamas and Fatah have collapsed in acrimony. Israel has already denounced the agreement, with Foreign Minister Israel Katz stating bluntly on X that the unity government “won’t happen because Hamas’s rule will be crushed” and “Israel’s security will remain solely in the hands of Israel.” However, the agreement comes at a time when both the White House and the Israeli security establishment, sans Netanyahu, are pushing for at least a temporary cease-fire. On Monday, Israeli broadcaster Kan reported that all of Israel’s top security chiefs supported a six-week pause in fighting to secure the release of some hostages. 

The unity deal is also consistent both with Hamas’ war aims and the foreign policy of the Obama-Biden (or, we suppose, Obama-Biden-Harris, though that’s starting to be a mouthful) Democratic Party. On the Hamas end, here was what analyst Matthew Levitt wrote on the terror group’s strategy in a May article in Foreign Affairs, which we previously quoted in our May 14 edition:

As debate ensues over postwar administration of the strip, Hamas has begun to lay the groundwork for reconciling with and ultimately taking over the PLO, thereby guaranteeing that it is part of whatever governance structure emerges. Al-Hayya, the Hamas official who explained that his group wanted to change the whole equation, recently acknowledged this plan and has floated the idea of a five-year truce with Israel based on the armistice lines that existed before the 1967 war and on a unified Palestinian government that controls both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Indeed, since December, senior leaders from Hamas have been meeting with factions of Fatah that are opposed to Mahmoud Abbas, the deeply unpopular leader of the PA, to discuss just such a rapprochement. On April 21, Haniyeh explicitly proposed restructuring the PLO to include all Palestinian factions.

For a militant Islamist movement that has long disavowed the more moderate and secular Palestinian Authority, seeking to join forces with the PLO may seem surprising. But behind Hamas’s recent push is the more important strategic goal of emulating the Hezbollah model. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is nominally part of the weak Lebanese state, allowing it to influence policy and have at least some say in directing government funds, yet it maintains complete autonomy in running its own powerful military and in fighting Israel. Under a new arrangement for Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas hopes to exert the same influence and independence with its own movement and militia, neither beholden to nor controlled by a government.

As for the United States, in that same edition, we highlighted reporting from Jacob Magid of The Times of Israel to the effect that Biden administration officials pushing for a cease-fire favored a Hamas-Fatah “reconciliation” deal that would see Hamas “formally withdraw from governing responsibilities” while retaining influence over the government. State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller has previously praised the Beijing-led reconciliation talks, while U.S. officials have since February at least favored the creation of a new “interim” Palestinian government that would shift power away from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and toward the PA/Fatah prime minister. Former PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, who was in office until March 31, had spoken openly to the American press about his desire for Hamas to serve as “junior partners” in a postwar Palestinian government. 

As we’ve emphasized throughout the war, all of this maneuvering is downstream of the Obama Democratic Party’s grand strategy of “regional integration,” aka rebalancing toward Iran—in which Israel is transformed into a non-sovereign U.S. province while the territories surrounding it are ceded to Iran, with Washington and Tehran acting as joint guarantors of regional security. And as we noted yesterday, Kamala Harris’ top foreign policy adviser, Philip Gordon, was a major architect of this arrangement during Obama’s second term—meaning that if Harris wins, Israel can expect more of the same. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: The mother of Daniel Boim, the first American killed by Hamas, writes about the fight to hold American supporters of terror accountable

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The Rest

→The Justice Department said in a Monday court filing that it had located transcripts of President Biden’s conversations with a biographer that played a role in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s classified-documents investigation into Biden—transcripts that the DOJ had previously denied possessing. In his February report, Hur concluded that while Biden had illegally retained classified information, a jury would conclude that the president was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and thus decline to convict him; news organizations and conservative groups have since sought to gain access to Hur’s records via lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests. The DOJ has vigorously resisted these efforts. In previous court filings, it claimed that it does not possess any transcripts of Biden’s interviews with biographer Mark Zwonitzer and that the release of Biden’s interviews with Hur would “violate the president’s privacy” and lead to “deepfakes,” according to a report in Politico. Now, in an incredible coincidence, the DOJ has discovered the transcripts it said didn’t exist one day after Biden dropped out of the race. 

→More than 3,100 people were arrested during campus anti-Israel protests in the spring, but few are being prosecuted, according to a Saturday report in The New York Times. At the three schools investigated in the Times report—Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Virginia—a total of 220 people were arrested. In all three jurisdictions, local prosecutors dropped all trespassing charges, with the exception of the local Virginia prosecutor who required 20 arrestees to keep a clean criminal record until August to have their charges dismissed. The prosecutor in Austin, Democrat Delia Garza, said, according to the Times, that “jurors in the community would very likely determine that students protesting on their own campus were simply exercising First Amendment rights.” However, 45 of the 79 people initially arrested at the UT Austin protests had “no affiliation” with the university, according to an April 30 statement from the university. The same statement noted that protesters had brought weapons—including guns, knives, and bricks—to campus, assaulted and threatened staff, and attacked police officers and slashed their car tires. That doesn’t seem like First Amendment-protected speech to us, but then again, we were always skeptical of the progressive idea that right-wing speech is violence and left-wing violence is speech, which appears to be the law in Austin. 

→“A decade of strategic funding and production mistakes played a far greater role” in NATO’s inability to manufacture artillery shells for Ukraine “than did the recent U.S. congressional delays of aid,” according to a Reuters investigation published on Friday. The report, based on interviews with dozens of current and former U.S., NATO, and Ukrainian officials, notes that NATO commanders and U.S. munitions experts had been warning for at least a decade that the United States had allowed its arms manufacturing capacity to wither. The report is full of eye-popping details, but one in particular jumped out to us. In 2020, Joseph Amadee, a former corporate factory executive and military veteran, was dispatched as a civilian adviser on a tour of the United States’ munitions factories to judge their readiness for war:

In Pennsylvania, he toured a dilapidated shell-casing factory first used for the Korean War. It had been lightly used by the military for years in the mid-2010s and was now limping along with no significant upgrades funded. In Iowa, he was briefed on manufacturing flaws, including cracked 155mm shells, that shut down one production line for months. And in Virginia, he visited a $399 million construction project running a decade behind schedule, significantly over budget and still struggling to produce the propellant needed to launch the 155mm shell.

The report notes that Western officials fell victim to a “misguided belief that industry in the U.S. and Europe could quickly reverse more than three decades of funding cutbacks and plant closures,” which it couldn’t—a lesson that we suspect has implications far beyond shell production. 

Read the full report here.

→U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday and took “full responsibility” for the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Cheatle’s resignation comes one day after her disastrous testimony in front of the House Oversight Committee, in which she exasperated lawmakers from both parties with her refusal to answer even basic questions about the security failures that allowed a 20-year-old gunman to get an unobstructed shot at the former president from a nearby rooftop. In a rare display of bipartisanship, the committee’s ranking Republican and Democratic members, James Comer (R-KY) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), formally called on Cheatle to resign on Monday following the conclusion of her testimony.  

→Insane Take of the Day: 

While Donald Trump has relied on Fox News and an army of MAGA Media loyalists to endlessly shield him from scandal after scandal, Biden had no such defenses in his arsenal when serious questions were raised about his age and mental acuity. Instead, the president—unable to conjure up his own version of reality and successfully disseminate it to the masses—was forced to grapple with the truth and make a stunning 11th hour decision that rocked the country in a political earthquake.

The entire affair, which played out in just three weeks, punctured a hole in the claim that Trump and the GOP have regularly peddled: that the news media is in the pocket of Biden and the White House.

That’s from CNN’s Oliver Darcy, a reliable weather vane for what mid-level Democratic apparatchiks would like you to think (he’s previously been a champion of “Russian collusion” and the “anti-disinformation” crusade). The new line, apparently, is that the media turning on Biden at exactly the same time as Democratic donors and party leaders did is proof that it’s on the level. 

→Indeed, for a preview of the sort of hard-hitting reporting we can expect for the next several months, here’s CNN senior reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere, delivering a scoop on Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris:

Anchovies!

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

‘We Shouldn’t Need a Crisis to Know We’re One People,’ by Hillel Kuttler

Bedouin Israelis share in their country’s grief over lives lost and those held hostage by Hamas since Oct. 7

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My Son Was the First American Killed by Hamas

I’m here to make sure we take the fight against the terrorist organization seriously

by Joyce Boim

he recent news that a group called American Muslims for Palestine was ordered by a Virginia court to provide financial documentation to state Attorney General Jason Miyares as part of an investigation into the group’s funding sources and allegations it may have used funds for “benefitting or providing support to terrorist organizations,” was another reminder of the need to shut down Hamas and its terror tentacles worldwide. But to me, the news hit particularly hard, because my son David Boim was the first American citizen killed by Hamas.

It was Monday, May 13 of 1996, and David was 17. Although he was born in New York, he was studying at a yeshiva in Israel, and, that fateful morning, he was standing at a bus stop with his friends, chatting happily as he waited for his ride back home to Jerusalem.

Tragically, Amjad Hinawi and Khalil Tawfiq Al-Sharif had other, evil plans. The two Hamas terrorists contemplated an attack on a nearby military base, but the sight of soldiers with guns made them lose heart. Better, they reasoned, to seek out more vulnerable targets. Driving around, they first shot at a bus, wounding two passengers. Then, they spotted the kids at the bus stop and opened fire.

David’s friend Yair Greenbaum was shot in the chest and later recovered. David wasn’t so lucky: He was struck in the head and was pronounced dead within the hour. Hinawi and Al-Sharif fled to the Palestinian Authority and remained committed to murder and terrorism. A year after he had murdered my son, Al-Sharif blew himself up on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda street, killing five and wounding 192 Israelis.

Over the years since David was murdered, I have visited his grave hundreds of times. I told him about the lawsuit his father and I filed against American organizations we believed were fundraising fronts for Hamas. I shared with him the good news when we won that lawsuit in 2004 and were awarded a $156 million judgment. And I wept for him as the same organizations found guilty of providing material support to the terrorists quickly disbanded rather than comply with the court’s ruling. Then I was told that many of the same terrorism supporters went on to play very similar roles in very similar organizations, only with different names.

I’m not a lawyer and not a legal expert, but I know a mockery of justice when I see one, which is why my husband and I decided to file another lawsuit and insist that justice prevail.

But it’s not the legal proceedings I’ve been thinking about since Oct. 7. It’s not even hearing that some of the very same people who provided support to my son’s killers are now training young college students, not much older than David was when he was murdered, to once again hate and assault Jews. Rather, it’s that so little seems to have changed since my son was shot for no other reason than being Jewish. The same terrorists who helped plan my son’s execution are now overseeing the murder and kidnapping of other young Jews. The same newspapers that, back then, minimized our suffering as understandable collateral in a complicated conflict continue to draw false equivalences and refuse to condemn the murderers for what they are. The same so-called defenders of human rights and dignity seem to extend sympathy to all but the targeted Jews.

You’d think that all this causes me nothing but anguish. But that’s not the case.

When I lost David, I swore to myself that his death shall not be in vain. That even though I cannot bring him back to me, hold him once more in my arms, tell him again how proud I am of him and how much I love him, I can—and will—not only hold the perpetrators and their helpers accountable, but also continue to warn the world about what happens when we let evil men do evil things without standing up for what’s right.

And the horrors of Oct. 7 reminded me that my work here is far from done.

I will continue to do whatever I can to remind anyone listening that Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization, not a legitimate national or religious group; that it is still holding American citizens hostage; and that it continues to murder innocent Israelis and Americans, just as it murdered my boy. And I will continue to remind them, too, that the Hamas terrorists who pull the trigger and plan attacks, are aided by men and women all over the world who raise funds, spread propaganda, and take other similar actions to support the killers in their work.

My goal is as simple as it is sacred: to make sure no other mother ever goes through the same ordeal as me. I can think of no more worthy thing to do with my remaining years, and, since Oct. 7, as I watched protesters cheering for Hamas in American cities and colleges, my task, alas, has grown urgent.