July 24: Bibi Wins

SEC builds Orwellian database; Was Kamala "border czar"?; Trump and Abbas

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The Big Story

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress on Wednesday, delivering a blistering speech defending Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza. Over the course of nearly an hour, Netanyahu recounted the horrors of Oct. 7, praised the bravery (and diversity) of the IDF, attacked anti-Israel protesters as “Iran’s useful idiots,” outlined the measures Israel was taking to protect and feed Gazan civilians, and urged the United States to back Israel in a regional alliance against Iran based on the Abraham Accords. Bibi’s “powerful” speech, wrote The New York Times’ David Sanger in a live reaction, “sounded more like an American president giving a state of the Union Address.” It was received as such by the lawmakers in attendance—mostly Republicans, who provided the Israeli leader with thunderous applause throughout his address. 

Netanyahu was careful to avoid overt displays of partisanship, praising President Joe Biden and his administration for their support for Israel. But he managed to work in several subtle criticisms of the administration’s policy, including in a portion of the speech about Israel’s successful evacuation of civilians in Rafah—an operation the White House had repeatedly warned against on the theory that it would provoke a humanitarian disaster. As Noah Pollak observed on X: 

Netanyahu also praised the fraternity brothers from the University of North Carolina for defending the American flag against anti-Israel radicals—one week after some of those brothers spoke at the Republican National Convention:

Bibi’s audience loved it. But the audience was mostly from the GOP, plus some special guests like Elon Musk. According to the count of Axios congressional reporter Andrew Solender, roughly half the Democratic congressional caucus skipped out on the speech, including the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin (IL), and Vice President Kamala Harris, who was attending a campaign event in Indianapolis (Harris is scheduled to meet with Bibi tomorrow). Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) did attend—but held up a sign reading “war criminal.” 

Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington also awoke the domestic intifada crowd from their monthslong slumber. On Tuesday night, radicals apparently affiliated with the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) infiltrated the Watergate Hotel, where the Israeli delegation is staying, and released maggots and other insects into the Israeli conference room. A Wednesday report from Joseph Simonson and Andrew Kerr of The Washington Free Beacon confirmed that the U.S. Secret Service, which was responsible for protecting the Israeli delegation, allowed the PYM activists into the hotel.

Footage from Tuesday-night protests outside the hotel showed activists discussing the specific floor and room that Netanyahu was staying in, suggesting that information was being leaked to them from the inside. And there were some of the by-now familiar expressions of “anti-Zionism,” such as from this charming gentleman, who shouted, “We’re gonna kill all of you” to the “Jewish motherfuckers” inside the hotel:

PYM, as the Free Beacon notes, is a fiscal sponsorship of WESPAC, a tax-exempt non-profit in Westchester County, New York, that also sponsors Within Our Lifetime and is likely cheating on its taxes, according to previous reporting from the Free Beacon. PYM is also one of the “conveners” of the #ShutItDownforPalestine (SID4P) activist network, along with the People’s Forum and the ANSWER Coalition, both of which are fronts for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). As we explained in our May 15 edition, the SID4P network is heavily subsidized by the fortune of Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based tech mogul and self-proclaimed “Maoist” with personal and business ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s global propaganda arm.

On Saturday, the SID4P protesters—some of them waving Hamas flags—fought with police outside of D.C.’s Union Station, where they tore down an American flag and lit it on fire before raising a Palestinian flag in its place (Credit Andrew Leyden on X):

To an extent, Netanyahu was preaching a powerful sermon to the choir, to use a Christian metaphor. But the contrast between Bibi’s message and that of his critics protesting outside was powerful in its own way. On the one hand: Israel, America, and “civilization.” On the other: Hamas, Iran, flag burning, and Jew hatred. It was perhaps appropriate that neither Biden nor Harris, who have alternately praised and indulged the terror supporters now flooding the streets of the U.S. capital, bothered to show up. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Karen Chernick reviews an Israeli photography exhibit on the Nazi-sympathizing architect who built Israel’s nuclear facility

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The Rest

→The Securities and Exchange Commission is finalizing a database to track all of Americans’ stock and equity investments in real time, according to a report in National Review. The database, called the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), has been quietly under development since 2012 and, upon completion, would be “the largest database in the world outside of the National Security Agency,” per a July 1 letter from Advancing American Freedom, a conservative watchdog founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr told National Review’s Zach Kessel that the CAT would eviscerate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, allowing SEC employees to go on “fishing expeditions” to probe individuals’ finances, even when there is no allegation of wrongdoing. Barr also said it was “guaranteed” that the contents of the database will fall into the hands of foreign adversaries, since “far more secure agencies [than the SEC] have been successfully hacked.” 

→Was Kamala Harris ever the “border czar”? It’s a live question, since polling consistently shows that a majority of Americans are angry over the Biden administration’s handling of the southern border. But the answer depends on who—and when—you ask. In a Wednesday article, Axios reported that “the Trump campaign and Republicans” are attempting to tag Harris as the “border czar,” a title that she “never actually had.” But while it’s true that Harris never formally held the title of “border czar”—no such title exists—she was put “in charge of [the] border crisis” (Axios, 3/21/21). That led, quite naturally, to Harris being dubbed the “border czar” in the press. For example:

• Axios (4/14/21): “The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has reached crisis levels. Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the ‘root causes’ that drive migration.”

• The New York Times (4/14/21): “Ms. Harris will also soon be taking over work from a departing official with years of experience. Last week, Roberta S. Jacobson, the former ambassador to Mexico chosen as Mr. Biden’s ‘border czar,’ said that she would retire from government.”

Following considerable mockery on social media, Axios updated its Wednesday article to reflect that it was “among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ back in 2021.” 

→Image of the Day, Part I: 

That, shared on X by Times of Israel reporter Jacob Magid, is Trump’s response to a letter from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas offering condolences for the attempt against the former president’s life. It made us laugh. Trump is scheduled to meet with Netanyahu on Friday. 

→Image of the Day, Part II: 

This graphic, from a July 10 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, shows U.S. and allied naval interdictions of Iranian-made ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, anti-tank and anti-ship missiles, and missile components bound for the Houthis in Yemen. As one of its first official acts of foreign policy, the Biden administration, in February 2021, removed the Houthis from the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

→Stat of the Day: $508 million

That’s how much California state funding the Los Angeles Unified School District received in 2023 for 50,000 “ghost students,” or students who remain on the books but no longer attend public schools, according to a June study from Reason Foundation. The money for ghost students is a product of “hold-harmless” policies, which seek to stabilize public-school funding in the face of declining enrollment by pegging it to historical enrollment numbers. But, as a Wednesday National Review article on the study notes, these policies ensure that inflation-adjusted spending on public schools continues to grow, even as enrollment declines. In California, for instance, public-school enrollment fell 5.1% between 2020 and 2022, while inflation-adjusted funding grew by $11.6 billion—much of which was spent on hiring “mental health” professionals and doling out “appreciation bonuses.” 

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The Ex-Nazi Sympathizer Who Built Israel’s Secret Nuclear Site

A new photography exhibition delves into the secret history of the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, designed by star modernist architect Philip Johnson

by Karen Chernick

Note to readers: Substack limits our ability to display photos, but a slideshow from the exhibition can be viewed here.

Israeli photographer Tomer Ganihar did something curious over the past decade—he visited a building that even its own architect never saw in person. The building in question was the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, Israel’s nuclear facility, which is normally verboten to photograph or fly over. The architect was archmodernist Philip Johnson, who was known in his day as the designer of the famous Glass House and lately, also as a Nazi sympathizer.

Ganihar’s photographs of Soreq are now on view in Tomer Ganihar/Philip Johnson: Transparent Secrets, an exhibition that opened at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum in June. The show centers around Ganihar’s shots of two Johnson-designed buildings—Glass House which he built for himself as a residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949, and Soreq, built between 1958 and 1960. New Canaan, Old Canaan, as Ganihar and the curatorial team have put it.

“The whole concept of the exhibition is the issue of hiding in plain sight—Johnson in his Glass House where everything is transparent but there are many secrets, and here [in Israel], it’s ‘come see what we can’t show you,’” says Gilad Reich, co-curator of the exhibition and photography curator of the Israel Museum.

Ganihar began this project inspired by the story he’d heard about Johnson and Soreq from his uncle Daniel Havkin, an architect and dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at Haifa’s Technion. Like most Israelis, Ganihar never knew about the elite architectural pedigree of the nation’s most hush-hush strategic facility. While the State of Israel was initially very public about Soreq, making things like commemorative stamps and postcards of Johnson’s building (some displayed in the exhibition), policy quickly changed and Soreq became shrouded in secrecy.

“It’s a building that no one is supposed to see,” explains Reich. “And beyond the fact that no one is supposed to see it, it’s a completely afunctional building. In actuality, a reactor doesn’t require an architect—it requires an engineer.”

Ganihar decided to focus his research skills on producing photographs of Soreq. On his three visits to the facility (which he made after reaching out and receiving special permission), he created raw photographs of surprising angles and details. The result is a series of fragments and reflections, not standard architectural images where you can orient yourself just by looking at them.

Known for founding MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design and curating major exhibitions that introduced Americans to European modernist architecture, Johnson left MoMA in 1934 to pursue a full-time career as a far-right activist and journalist. He promoted Nazism in America and regularly wrote for Social Justice, an American fascist tabloid. Johnson visited Berlin often in the 1930s, meeting with senior Nazi officials and participating in Nazi party events including visits to Hitler’s rallies and Nazi youth camps. He heard Hitler address a rally in Potsdam in 1932, went to Rome to see the 10th-anniversary celebrations of Mussolini’s coup, and attended the 1938 National Socialist German Workers’ Party rally at Nuremberg. “You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it,” Johnson is quoted as saying about these rallies in his 1994 biography by Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work.

Johnson read Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi manifesto, Signale der Neuen Zeit (Signs of the New Era) and wrote positive reviews of English translations of Mein Kampf. In a letter that Johnson wrote to a friend while joining the Wehrmacht as a journalist to report on the German advance into Poland, he said, “there were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.”

It was only in the late 1940s that Johnson broke with the Nazis. By then, the FBI was investigating his potentially treasonous conduct: The exhibition includes a facsimile of an anonymous 1940 letter to J. Edgar Hoover stating that Johnson “is mesmerized by this evil that is trying to overpower the good in the world.”

During the 1940s and ’50s, Johnson worked at clearing his name by collaborating with Jewish patrons. He designed the Kneses Tifereth Israel synagogue in Port Chester, New York, pro bono, in 1954-56. Jewish businessman and philanthropist Samuel Bronfman’s daughter Phyllis Lambert was on the architect selection committee for the Seagram Building, the celebrated Manhattan skyscraper he helped design.

It was United Jewish Appeal Chairman Edward Warburg, a friend of Johnson’s from their Harvard days, who introduced the architect to Teddy Kollek and Shimon Peres, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s project managers for Soreq. Peres, then the acting director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, commissioned Johnson to design the building in 1958. When Israel received nuclear energy as part of the 1950s “Atoms for Peace” program under President Eisenhower, one of the stipulations was that an American architect design the reactor building. The Israelis were never obligated, however, to choose an American architect with Nazi inclinations.

It’s not entirely clear if Peres and Kollek knew about Johnson’s history of prewar pro-Nazi sympathies, which—to be fair—were not uncommon among large portions of the Anglo American elite before the war. “I think there’s coordinated and congruent opportunisms. Israel wanted a name architect for this building,” says co-curator Robert Storr, internationally renowned artist, curator, and critic. “Philip did not try to align his politics with his art. He was an opportunist, professed, and he just did what would enable him to extend his empire into new territories.”

In this instance, Johnson extended his territory into what he later called “my temple in the desert,” a faceted cylindrical structure whose at once ancient and modern looking design won Johnson a prestigious American Institute of Architects award.

Johnson didn’t visit Soreq before, during, or after construction, but later traveled to Israel twice in 1966 and 1970 with his friend Warburg. He was invited to submit proposals for the redesign of the national airport at Lod, and the plaza of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. (Neither moved forward.) And at no point during either of these visits did he go see Soreq, the one building he did design in Israel.

“From what we know, he didn’t even see it from the outside. Which is part of the complexity of this story—he designs a nuclear reactor which was a special incident for him personally, invests so much in its construction and builds an incredible building,” Reich recounts. “But he doesn’t make even minimal effort to see it, and this is a person who brought his own car during every visit to Germany.”

So who was trolling whom? Was the ex-Nazi fooling the young Jewish nation-state into thinking that he’d changed his antisemitic tune, or was Israel punishing Johnson for his racist past by having him design a monument to its rarefied military might? Maybe neither, or both. The exhibition dances around the question, but never answers it.

Johnson could never really whitewash his Nazi past because it was always part of his present. Storr knew Johnson personally, having interacted with him at MoMA in the 1990s. “Johnson clung to his early prejudices. Make no mistake: anti-Semitism was a permanent part of his Weltanschaung and of his professional ‘act,’” writes Storr in his essay for the exhibition catalog.

Storr recalls a particular incident in 1991 while installing an exhibition devoted to Art Spiegelman’s drawings for his graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus. Johnson said to Storr that he’d "got the Jews in" to the museum. Such cracks came easily to Johnson, Storr claims. “Adding virtually unlimited fuel from the reservoir of resentment filled by various discontents during the 1930s and ’40s was precisely what fascism did—on both sides of the Atlantic. It is happening again. Which gives the permissions granted to, and excuses made for and by Johnson a renewed importance, inasmuch as they set a still dangerous precedent.”

Perhaps another "crack" by Johnson that we should know is this one. Midway through working on the Soreq project, in 1959, he gave a lecture at Yale University and said: “We cannot not know history.” Johnson is a complicated part of the history of Soreq and, by extension, Israel; through this exhibition, we know more about it, even if we don’t entirely understand what the commission or the building meant to either the architect or his client.