July 29: The Majdal Shams Massacre

Maduro steals third term; Biden pushes court reform; White women for Harris

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The Big Story

On Saturday, an Iranian-made rocket fired from Lebanon struck a soccer field in the Druze town of Majdal Shams in northern Israel’s Golan Heights, killing 12 children in the most horrific single attack since Oct. 7. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have both denied Hezbollah’s responsibility for the attack, with Lebanon calling for an “international investigation” into the incident. But Israeli and U.S. intelligence—as well as common sense—point to the Iranian-backed terror militia, which has fired rockets and mortars into northern Israel for 10 months, as the only possible culprit. 

Tablet staff writer Armin Rosen, who has visited Majdal Shams several times, wrote to us via email on the psychic stakes of the attack:

Although it is a Druze community where relatively few of the residents are Israeli citizens, it is also a microcosm of Israel’s value proposition to a century’s worth of Jewish immigrants: Once you’re under our flag, the violence, backwardness, and dysfunction of wherever you were coming from no longer apply. Majdal Shams’ tranquility, the ability of a visitor to ski and hike while theocracy and actual combat were taking place a few miles to their east and west, was a reminder of both the reality and fragility of Israel’s accomplishment. It is one of those richly Israeli dark ironies that the murder of children in a notably peaceful community of non-Jewish noncitizens now casts such a grim light on the actual psycho-political stakes of the entire post-Oct. 7 period. The national psyche is the real battlefield here. If the country can’t get back to its usual imperfect yet sustainable condition of normality, Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Khamenei will have won, no matter what the “day after” looks like.

So how will the Israelis respond? On Sunday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry proclaimed that Hezbollah had “crossed all red lines” with its slaughter of a dozen children; later that evening, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed that Hezbollah will “pay the price” for the attacks. Also on Sunday, the Israeli security cabinet authorized Gallant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to decide on the “manner and timing” of the Israeli response, per a report in The Times of Israel. Current reporting, however, indicates that this response is likely to be contained. The Times of Israel reported Monday, citing comments from anonymous Israeli officials, that Israel will attempt “hurt Hezbollah but not drag the Middle East into an all-out war.” Two officials said that the IDF was preparing for, at most, “a few days of fighting.”

Israel has its reasons to want to defer a major escalation with Hezbollah. The terror militia is a far more formidable opponent than Hamas, and it likely possesses the capability to overwhelm Israeli air defenses with rocket and drone attacks, at least for a time. Even among the growing number of Israeli leaders who regard the status quo as unacceptable and favor a war with Hezbollah, there is disagreement over how and when to strike. As Judith Miller reported for Tablet last week:

Some analysts say that now is the right moment to strike. The threat from Hamas has been severely degraded, if not neutralized. The north is already evacuated and the Israeli Defense Forces are already mobilized and in fighting mode. Many Israelis, terrified by their country’s obvious vulnerability, favor striking Israel’s enemies sooner rather than later, suggesting that a war with Hezbollah would enjoy strong public support. The assassination of so many senior Hezbollah commanders suggests that Israel’s operational intelligence is far better in Lebanon today than it was in 2006, when the IDF had only 10 days’ worth of targets to strike.

On the other hand, Miller wrote:

Other analysts argue that current conditions are not ideal for a large-scale war, albeit for different reasons. “Not now,” said Tamir Hayman, the former head of Israeli military intelligence who now heads Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Hayman said it would be better to wait a couple of years. Israel, he said, now lacked the resources, international legitimacy, or Washington’s approval for such a war. Israel should strike Hezbollah “when we’re ready.”

As Miller suggests, and as we’ve emphasized several times in the past (see here, here, and here), Israel’s reticence to escalate is also a deliberate product of White House policy. Since immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks, the White House has repeatedly dissuaded the Israelis from escalating in Lebanon, including by withholding arms shipments that would be needed in an Israeli-Hezbollah war. As David Milstein noted today on X, broadcaster Mark Levin last night shared this list—likely sourced from the Israelis—of weapons currently being withheld or slow-walked by the Biden administration. 

Michael Doran, in an article for Tablet, has dubbed the White House tactic of delaying arms shipments the “Italian strike”—a European term for halting operations by meticulously adhering to bureaucratic rules. As Doran wrote in June:

Hezbollah represents the most formidable direct military threat that Israel faces. A full-scale conflict with it will burn up an enormous amount of equipment and ammunition in a very short period, and it risks drawing Iran more directly into the war. … The purpose of the Italian strike is to force the Israelis into dependence on the United States, to deny them the ability to make long-term plans—namely, plans regarding Hezbollah and Iran.

Even as it cripples the Israelis’ ability to fight Hezbollah by denying the IDF weapons, the White House is attempting to strong-arm Israel into a diplomatic “process” led by Lebanon envoy Amos Hochstein. This process conditions peace in northern Israel on the achievement of a cease-fire in Gaza—precisely the negotiating position of Hezbollah and the broader Iranian Axis of Resistance. 

Indeed, on Sunday, Axios’ Barak Ravid reported that Hochstein had phoned Gallant after the Saturday attack to convey U.S. opposition to any Israeli strikes on Hezbollah assets in Beirut. According to the report, Hochstein told Gallant that while Israel had a “right to defend itself,” it must also “avoid an all-out escalation and minimize civilian casualties.” A U.S. official quoted by Ravid added that “an IDF strike on Beirut is a potential red line for Hezbollah.” Note well the role being played by the United States here: The White House is not Israel’s ally against Hezbollah, but a mediator between Israel and Hezbollah. Decisive Israeli action, in other words, would require openly defying the White House. 

As for hopes, floated in some quarters, that the Israelis might be waiting for a friendlier U.S. administration, Lee Smith explains to The Scroll in an email:

I keep hearing that the Israelis are waiting to see if Trump wins, in which case they will have more latitude to act, but it’s possible Trump will not win, in which case they will have much less room to act, not only compared to a Trump administration, but also compared to now. Harris will never be more vulnerable. If she wins, she will be even harder on Israel than Biden, if you can believe it. The Israelis will be cut off from resupply, and even if they can find a way around that—rebuild their own arms industry, etc.—there will be diplomatic and political efforts to hobble Israel, led by a Harris White House. If Harris loses, the outgoing administration will punish Israel on its way out, as Obama did with his clandestine push to pass U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 in December 2016.

Lee argues that Israel’s window for action is now:

Right now, she’s still finding her balance. Maybe she will never find it, but the fact is she will be gathering momentum heading into the convention in two weeks, and after the DNC the wind at her back will be virtually every U.S. institution not openly aligned with Donald Trump. This administration is not now and never has been worried about getting dragged into a regional war with Iran. It legalized the regime’s bomb, which is a token of friendship, not enmity. What the White House is worried about is what worried Obama about the Syrian war: that it would collapse the grand project of regional realignment with Iran. Maybe Hezbollah and Iran will open the gates of hell on Israel—who knows? There is no question that after the convention, the window for accomplishing Israel’s aims in the north—like establishing deterrence enough to allow people to move back to their homes—will have narrowed if not closed.

Read Miller’s full article on Israel’s calculations in Lebanon here. 

And read Doran on the Italian strike here. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: The winning entry from Tablet’s First Personal Essay Contest

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The Rest

→Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro narrowly “won” a third consecutive six-year term on Sunday, in what most outside observers allege was an election marred by widespread fraud and other voting irregularities. On Monday, The Washington Post reports, Venezuela’s Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE) declared that Maduro had won with just over 51% of the vote, compared to 44% for opposition candidate Edmundo González, “despite independent exit polling and partial results suggesting González captured twice as many votes as Maduro.” CNN reports that irregularities included opposition witnesses being denied access to CNE headquarters and the CNE halting the transmission of vote counts from local polling places to the central location. While some of Maduro’s allies, including the left-wing government of Brazil and the Communist government of Cuba, have offered tepid support for the official results, the governments of Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Uruguay—as well as the United States and several EU states—have all cast doubt on Maduro’s victory. In a post on X, Argentine President Javier Milei said his country would not “recognize a fraud” and called on the Venezuelan military to “defend democracy and the popular will.”

→In a Monday morning X post, President Biden unveiled several proposed “reforms” that would radically overhaul the U.S. Supreme Court:

None has any chance of passing prior to elections in November, which means that the proposal should be primarily understood as a form of messaging. The message being delivered is that the court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority, is a corrupt and partisan institution that, unless it is brought to heel, poses an enduring threat to “our democracy.” 

→The U.S. Department of Justice has agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit with former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was fired in 2019 for over a series of inflammatory texts about Donald Trump sent while he was one of the FBI’s lead investigators into the alleged Trump-Russia collusion. Stzrok, now a regular contributor to MSNBC, exchanged the texts in the summer of 2016 with his fellow FBI agent and lover, Lisa Page, who is also receiving a payout in the settlement. At the time, Strzok was assigned to the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign, nicknamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” which we now know was a false product of opposition research conducted by the former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. In the text messages, Strzok, who referred to Trump as a “fucking idiot,” promised Page that the FBI would never allow him to become president. For instance, here was one text exchange on Aug. 8, 2016:

Page: [Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!

Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.

A week later, on Aug. 15, Strzok wrote to Page:

I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in [Andrew McCabe’s] office—that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 …

Strzok sued the DOJ in 2019 for wrongful termination and for violating his privacy with the release of his text messages. At the time, the DOJ told him to take a hike. In its initial court filing in response to Strzok’s lawsuit, the department wrote, as quoted by Zachary Evans in National Review: 

Your excessive, repeated, and politically charged text messages while you were assigned as the lead case agent on the FBI’s two biggest and most politically sensitive investigations in decades, demonstrated a gross lack of professionalism and exceptionally poor judgment. Your misconduct has cast a pall over the FBI’s Clinton Email and Russia investigations and the work of the Special Counsel.

Now, however, the department is paying out a total of $2 million to Strzok and Page—presumably as a delayed reward for a job well done. 

→Are Donald Trump and J.D. Vance “weird”? We’ll let you make up your own minds on the objective question, but we do know that calling them weird (Vance in particular) is now the Harris campaign’s main line of attack. The “weird” line appears to have been introduced by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during an interview last Tuesday, which inspired the Harris campaign to adopt it in a Thursday press release. Since then, there’s been a genuine fire hose of “Vance is weird” content, including, to cite just a few examples:

• “Suddenly, The Election Is About Weird v. Normal” —“The Bulwark,” 7/29

• “Critics Question J.D. Vance’s ‘Weird’ Defense of Wife Usha After White Supremacist Attack” —Huffington Post, 7/28

• “JD Vance Has a Bunch of Weird Views on Gender” —Politico, 7/24

• “Schumer: Trump Probably Regrets Picking ‘Weird’ J.D. Vance” —Rolling Stone, 7/28

Tom Elliott, a former journalist and the founder of Grabien, a news clip database, said in a Monday X post that according to his company’s data, CNN and MSNBC had broadcast the “Vance is weird” line 150 times on Saturday and Sunday alone. 

→What’s not weird, apparently, is segregating your voters into racial affinity groups and subjecting them to lectures like this one, from one of the featured speakers at Thursday’s “White Women: Answer the Call” Zoom rally, presented here as our Quote of the Day:

Don’t make it about yourself. As white women, we need to use our privilege to make positive changes. If you find yourself talking over, or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or—God forbid—correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can put our listening ears on. So, do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have to push for systemic change. 

The text doesn’t really do justice to how strange the soliloquy is, so we’d encourage you to watch the video here. In addition to the “White Women: Answer the Call” rally, the Harris campaign has held or plans to hold racial affinity Zoom rallies for Black women, Black men, and white men. The third, titled “White Dudes for Harris” and featuring appearances by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and actor Mark Hamill, will take place at 8pm eastern tonight. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Pantyhose are Like Torahs, by Shalom Auslander

Why the hell were these magical garments reserved for women?

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Flirting in Yiddish

In the winning entry from our First Personal essay contest, a woman finds romance in the language of a lost world

by Kitty Hoffman

Vilst geyn tantsen?

He invites me to dance, laughter in his eyes and that sardonic yearning that speaks to me of lost worlds, of self-mocking humor, of survival. Mih ken lachen a bissel, he promises. We can laugh a little, enjoy our vitality, and briefly forget the tragedy that has brought us all together.

The 1980s marked the start of International Gatherings of Survivors and Second Generation, and we, the sons and daughters, are in Washington to honor our parents and their fellow remnants of a destroyed world. We wander bewildered among faces that remind us of a home we never knew, faces that hope against hope to reclaim some buried but never fully forgotten dream of an unaccounted-for family member who might have survived, undiscovered for half a lifetime.

For the first time in our lives we’re surrounded by those who are like us, who have the same Yiddish inflections. We’re surrounded by people who remind us of our parents. It’s only now, as we’re among each other for the first time, that we realize how much we’ve missed each other all our lives.

Even as we dance, we have one foot in the world of our parents and grandparents, a world that was destroyed before our time, we who were born in DP camps and other temporary post-destruction places of transit, on the way to somewhere else, where new lives would begin.

There’s an energy among us that’s hard to define, a kind of procreative fervor; we circle each other, we who will forever be defined as children. Regardless of our personal romantic status, of whatever love and commitments we may have, here there’s a resonance of life energy that we can’t deny. Especially among those of us who haven’t yet had children, the reproductive urge is unmistakable and undeniable. There are so many lives to replace, so many souls wanting to come back and finish their work. We’re here because of a shared legacy of death; and yet the strongest feeling is of life, of an urge to life that is overpowering and even thrilling.

The cadences of Yiddish fill the hall, the corridors, the dining rooms. Yiddish, the language of the lost world. I’ve never been in a place where so many together were speaking this language, the language of my lonely childhood home, the language of my parents and their survivor friends. Yiddish is mein mamaloshen, my first language, the one I spoke as a kid, the language in which I am most myself. And it is strange to realize that I never felt fully a woman until, at the age of 33, I am invited to dance in this language from a dead world.

***

I remember being taught to read Yiddish in afternoon school, the teacher using the pictures of the boy and girl, the house and street, to guide us as we tried to make sense of the strange foreign letters. I had always found it easy to read in English. But these complicated dark letters that looked like pictures, that moved in the wrong direction, confused and frightened me. I saw them rarely; in the book from which my father read every spring while I sat absorbed in pictures of slaves building pyramids and Pharaoh’s men cracking whips; in the letters above the wide double doors of the old shul where I glimpsed the men, wrapped in strange white shawls, chanting and swaying.

But mostly the letters made me think of tears, large dark curly tears that curved and marched and pointed along the page, with tiny little tears under them to mark their position. Like my mother’s tears, when she covered her eyes and blessed the yahrzeit candles in memory of her dead, or when she locked herself in another room and thought that no one could hear her. I always knew when my mother had been crying, because I could see a far off look in her eyes, a softness in her face, that wasn’t there at any other time. At those moments I knew that even though my mother seemed to be with me in the room, she was really far away, across the world, in a time before my own.

***

He reaches his hand out, waiting for an answer with a slightly self-deprecating smile. All around us, people are dancing and laughing. He looks like those aging European men, those friends of my parents. He has the short stocky powerful build, the broad face and thick nose, the wiry, somewhat wild hair that hints at the energy barely contained by his intense gestures and rapid speech. Like me, he is North American, the product of a secular and optimistic culture. He is overachieving and successful by the world’s standards, like so many of us children of survivors. And yet underneath, betrayed by a certain sadness around the eyes and a hint of yearning in the voice, is the knowledge of tragedy, the awareness of life’s fragility, the understanding that all joy and beauty and love can be lost in an instant.

I’d resisted men like him all my life—men who reminded me of what I wanted to forget. My mother had often told me about the great love of her life. “Of course it wasn’t your tateh,” she said, dismissing the very idea with a brief wave of her hand. “He was just the one who was there, after the war.”

My mother was always careful to explain herself, to make sure I understood what had been at stake. “Who had time to think about love, then; we all just had to make a new family.” She had her own way of saying it—a nayeh fehmily—in that weird combination of Yiddish and English she spoke in those days, when we’d only been in Canada a few years. “Who had time to think about love?” And anyway, all the ones my parents had loved had been killed, they had to make do with whoever was left, whoever they could find.

I would sit in the kitchen with my mother, and she would tell me stories about the one she’d really loved. But where he was, what happened to him, whether my mother ever learned if he ended up alive or dead, these details were not the point of the story. The point was about the kind of love and romance that were only possible in her own girlhood, before the world showed its true colors. She never said so, but I understood that love and romance weren’t really possible for me, either. They belonged to the kind of life that only the innocent Canadians could have, the ones who didn’t know what life was really like. And so I gravitated to those “real Canadians,” as she called them, hoping that their innocence would rub off on me, would cover the dark knowledge at my core.

But here was this guy of my own generation, talking to me in Yiddish. Flirting. Until this moment I had only seen 60-year-olds, my parents and their friends, flirting in Yiddish. No one younger used the language—only a handful of Hasidim who would never flirt, or at least not in public, and certainly not with anyone but their wife. These were the phrases of my childhood, of my parents and their lost world, the language I had to leave behind if I were to make a new life in a new place. And yet today they were touching my woman’s heart in a new way, a part of my heart that I’d learned to keep hidden, that had no place to reveal itself. I could feel a soft fluttering in my chest, an odd combination of excitement, fear, and sadness. A memory of life yearning inside the knowledge of destruction.

***

Sometimes I imagine I’m back there again, talking Yiddish. Answering the man with the long-forgotten features who evoked the vanished world. Trying to picture a different life trajectory. What if I’d followed the language of my secret heart, allowed myself to respond to the cadences of ghosts? At the time it seemed like the past, a step back into a world that was no longer, that could not be. And yet, I felt most alive in the stirrings of that moment, felt that the familiar words I heard and answered were unmediated experience, language echoing the energy of life.

I imagine the uninflected letters—the powerful letters of creation—floating in the air above us. I see the black letters rising, colliding with the ashes, watched over by the spirits who have no resting place. My partner and I dance below.

But in fact I declined the offer years ago. Played at the flirtation a bit, but continued on my path of make-believe, the performance of a modern Jewish life—a life in English. I left the deepest reality behind, in fleeting moments of flirting in Yiddish.