June 10: An Israeli Raid and a Palestinian Journalist

The Unity Intifada goes to Washington; Americans turn against gender ideology; Alcaraz wins the French

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The Big Story

Israeli police counterterrorism forces rescued four living hostages on Saturday in a daring broad-daylight raid in central Gaza that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised as “the most impressive operation” he has seen in his 47-year career.

According to an account published on X on Monday by Times of Israel correspondent Lazar Berman, on Saturday morning, teams of Israeli commandos disguised as Palestinian civilians approached two residential buildings in the Nuseirat “refugee camp”—identified in May as containing the hostages—for a simultaneous assault. One building, containing female hostage Noa Argamani, was stormed without incident, but a fierce firefight erupted in the second, containing three male hostages, in which the Israeli squad leader Arnon Zamora was fatally wounded. The shooting alerted Hamas militants to the presence of the rescue team, and at that point, things got hot. According to a detailed Monday account in The Wall Street Journal:

[The shootout] expanded into a full-on gunbattle on the packed streets of Nuseirat between the commandos and responding Israeli forces and militants, the Israeli military said. With the teams’ cover blown, the Israeli Air Force began striking dozens of militant targets in a bid to divert Hamas’s attention and give the hostages a fighting chance to get out.

In the crossfire, a vehicle packed with special forces and hostages was hit and disabled, said David Tsur, the former commander of Yamam, the Israeli police team that carried out the extraction. An Israeli armored vehicle then swooped in to rescue the rescuers, but it too was disabled by fire, so another force arrived to deliver the hostages to helicopters waiting to take them to Israel, reported Army Radio, an independent news organization run by the Israeli military.

Israeli troops, aircraft, armored vehicles, and Navy ships kept up continuous gunfire, airstrikes, and shelling to enable the rescuers and hostages to escape to the beach, where they were evacuated via helicopter, with Tsur comparing the scene to the Battle of Mogadishu depicted in Black Hawk Down. This, according to Israeli officials, accounted for the high Palestinian casualty numbers, which the IDF estimated at about 100, most of them militants. Hamas figures widely quoted in the international media put the casualty figures at 274 dead and more than 700 wounded. 

During the predictable swell of outrage over this latest IDF “massacre,” however, something interesting happened. One of the civilian “martyrs” from Saturday’s operation was a “journalist,” Abdullah Al-Jamal, whose death was initially highlighted on Saturday by Scroll content generator Ramy Abdul of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. It soon emerged, though, that this “journalist” had been hiding the three male hostages in his family home. Early reports that Al-Jamal was an employee of Al Jazeera proved to be false; he had contributed once to Al Jazeera as a freelancer. However, Jamal was an employee of The Palestine Chronicle, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) headquartered in Washington State, where it is registered as People Media Project. Al-Jamal was also, according to Facebook and LinkedIn screenshots uncovered by Eitan Fischberger, the spokesman for the Hamas Ministry of Labor, and a “militant” in the group, per Israeli officials. 

So what is The Palestine Chronicle/People Media Project, the U.S.-based nonprofit employing a Hamas official as its Gaza “correspondent”? Its reported gross income in 2023 was less than $50,000—more typical of domestic Islamist-linked nonprofits, which generally run on small donations, than of the billionaire-backed left-wing NGOs behind, for instance, the campus protests. The principal officer listed on the group’s tax forms is John Harvey, a self-identified “Buddhist priest” and Washington State-based pro-Palestine activist. But the driving figure behind the group appears to be its president and board member, Ramzy Baroud, the former managing editor of Middle East Eye and deputy managing editor of Al Jazeera online (several of the group’s other board members are current and former Al Jazeera contributors). Baroud, as Jordan Schachtel points out on X, is also a senior fellow at the Turkey-based Center for Islam and Global Affairs—a think tank founded and led by one Sami Al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who pled guilty to conspiring to receive funds for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was deported to Turkey in 2015.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Tablet presents: The Sinai Awards

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The Rest

→A few hours after the rescue mission in Nuseirat, supporters of various elements of the Axis of Resistance—Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—were bringing Unity Intifada to the White House steps:

The so-called People’s Red Line protest in D.C. appears to have been organized by our old friends in the Shut It Down for Palestine movement, the network organized by affiliates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and funded by the wealthy Chinese Communist Party propagandist Neville Roy Singham. (Amusingly, The New York Times, which did the initial reporting on Singham’s CCP connections, quoted a spokesperson for the Palestinian Youth Movement in its write-up of the protests but did not mention PYM’s connection to the Singham network, nor the organizing role of Singham vehicles such as PSL and the ANSWER Coalition.)

Many of the protesters wore keffiyehs and other face coverings, in violation of a D.C. anti-Klan law prohibiting masked protests, and video circulated on social media showed protesters assaulting U.S. Park Police and vandalizing public monuments—both of which could be charged as felonies and/or serve as grounds for deportation of noncitizens. Luckily for the protesters, no arrests were made. 

→Americans today are 11% more likely to say that gender is determined by “sex assigned at birth” than they were seven years ago, according to a recent poll from Pew. In 2017, Pew found that only 53% of Americans believed that gender is determined by biological sex, while 45% said it can be changed. By April 2024, however, 65%—two-thirds—said that gender is determined by sex, compared to 34% who said it can be changed (and that’s despite Pew using the activist term “assigned at birth,” which implies that doctors “assign” a baby’s sex arbitrarily). As Byron York notes in a Monday column for Washington Examiner, this shift comes even though Biden, an 81-year-old Irish Catholic, has done more to promote transgenderism than any president ever. As York writes:

Last year, the White House, as part of its observation of Transgender Day of Visibility, an event that included the White House Roundtable Affirming Transgender Kids, released a list of 42 actions and policy initiatives the Biden administration has undertaken to support transgender people. The list included Justice Department civil rights enforcement actions, “intervening legally when states violate the rights of transgender youth and their families,” signing a “historic executive order to advance equality for LGBTQI+ people,” expanding access to “gender-affirming care,” and much, much more.

While two-thirds of the American public is now skeptical of transgenderism, the ideology remains popular with the Democrats’ core constituency. Among Biden voters with a college degree, only 30% agreed that sex is determined at birth, compared to 47% of Biden voters without a college degree, 64% of Black Biden voters, and 92% of college-educated Trump voters. 

→There’s internal grousing at The Wall Street Journal over the layoffs and coverage decisions of Editor in Chief Emma Tucker and her British deputies, according to a Monday story in National Review quoting several current and former WSJ staffers. Much of the discontent is related to generic news-business concerns, such as Tucker’s handling of a recent round of firings (despite the WSJ’s profitability). But the staffers also complained about her coverage and “content” decisions, including that Tucker is pushing the newsroom toward clickbait while cutting investigative resources; that she, as a Brit, lacks understanding of American politics and culture; and that she is less interested than her predecessors in fighting the creep of left-wing bias into the paper’s news coverage. Some staffers, for instance, alleged that Tucker doesn’t have the “patience” for resource-intensive investigations and prefers “quicker-turn stories that rely more on leaks from political opposition researchers”—another symptom of the subordination of journalism to partisan politics—while others described the sort of stories Tucker singles out for praise: 

Tucker holds regular all-hands meetings, where she highlights stories that she values. Staffers say she often praises lifestyle stories with snappy headlines that get lots of clicks, like recent features on polyamory and having “great sex” on vacation.

Read it here.

→Carlos Alcaraz, the 21-year-old Spanish tennis sensation, defeated Germany’s Alexander Zverev in five sets on Sunday to claim his first French Open title and third Grand Slam title overall. Alcaraz, who has now won the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open, is the youngest man in history to win the career surface slam—i.e., a major title on hard, clay, an d grass courts—and is an Australian Open victory away from the Career Grand Slam (winning all four majors). Rafael Nadal holds the record for the youngest Career Grand Slam in the Open Era, winning it at age 24; Roger Federer did not achieve the feat until age 27, and Novak Djokovic not until age 29. On the women’s side, Poland’s Iga Świątek defeated Italy’s Jasmine Paolini to claim her fourth French Open and fifth major title overall.

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The Sinai Awards

36 People Who Have Made the World Freer for the Rest of Us

By The Editors

The following names belong to people who’ve made the world freer in the past few years—not necessarily calmer, or safer, or prettier—or whose work in previous years laid the groundwork for others to be able to fight for freedom in this moment.

To honor Sinai recipients, Tablet commissioned artist Judi Harvest to create a unique award, which you can see in the picture above. Handmade by traditional glass artisans in Italy from a lost-wax mold of a genuine piece of matzo baked in the Venice Ghetto, it is a beautiful, translucent emblem of the struggle toward freedom.

There is a Jewish mystical concept, rooted in the Talmud, called the Tzadikim Nistarim—or, as it came to be known via its Yiddish vernacular, the Lamed Vovniks. It refers to a Jewish belief that at all times there are 36 special people in the world; were it not for them—all of them, if even one were missing—the world would come to an end. All of which is our way of saying: We thank God for each of these human beings, and think you should, too.

Read about our award winners here.