June 11: Hamas Rejects Cease-Fire

Hunter Biden guilty on gun charges; The NYC intifada; Felony vandalism in Washington

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The Big Story

On Monday afternoon, the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) voted to adopt a U.S.-drafted resolution calling for Hamas to accept Israel’s latest cease-fire proposal in Gaza. The full proposal has not been made public, but a draft of the resolution posted on X by Times of Israel reporter Jacob Magid suggests that the deal has three phases:

1. Phase 1: An immediate cease-fire to be accompanied by the release of all elderly, female, and wounded hostages in exchange for Palestinian security prisoners, a withdrawal of the IDF from “populated areas in Gaza,” and the return of Palestinian civilians to the whole of Gaza. According to a Monday report by Israel’s Channel 12 News, the Palestinian security prisoners would include 150 prisoners serving life sentences, to be chosen by Hamas, in exchange for five female soldiers. 

2. Phase 2: “Upon agreement of the parties, a permanent end to hostilities, in exchange for the release of all other hostages still in Gaza, and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza”

3. Phase 3: The start of a “major multi-year reconstruction plan for Gaza” and the return of the remains of any deceased hostages

The draft shared by Magid also states that if Phase 1 negotiations last longer than six weeks, the cease-fire “will still continue as long as negotiations continue.” It is unclear how closely the text of the UNSC draft matches the content of the Israeli proposal.

According to reporting from Israel’s Channel 12 News, however, the offer from the Israelis accepts a full cease-fire prior to the release of all hostages and fails to insist on the elimination of Hamas as a governing force—though Benjamin Netanyahu has called this report “misleading.” Israel has not explicitly endorsed or rejected the UNSC resolution but has insisted that it remains committed to achieving all of its goals in the war, including the release of all the hostages and the destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capabilities. 

Whatever the exact nature of the proposal, it seems clear that Israel has made dramatic concessions to Hamas—and the United States. But even these generous terms do not appear to have been enough. Shortly before The Scroll closed on Tuesday, Axios’ Barak Ravid reported, citing Israeli officials, that Hamas had rejected the latest proposal for a deal, despite reports from earlier in the day that the group’s leaders abroad had accepted the terms included in the UNSC resolution. The clues to this apparent disconnect may lie in a Tuesday story in The Wall Street Journal, which reported Tuesday that Hamas’ Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, was urging the group’s leaders to demand even more maximalist concessions from the Israelis, calculating that more fighting and civilian deaths will redound to the terror group’s benefit. The report noted that Sinwar sees no need for a cease-fire unless it is on extremely favorable terms, as he “believes Netanyahu has few options other than occupying Gaza and getting bogged down fighting a Hamas-led insurgency for months or years.” 

The apparently generous offer from the Israelis, meanwhile, may reflect an attempt to wind down the war in Gaza in order to prepare for an escalation in the north. A Tuesday report in The Times of Israel, citing conversations with three Syrian officials, an Israeli official, and three Western diplomats, described the recent escalation of Israeli Air Force attacks in Syria—including the June 2 killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps adviser Saeed Abyar at a Hezbollah missile manufacturing plant outside of Aleppo—as an attempt to kill IRGC and Hezbollah commanders and disrupt Iranian-Hezbollah supply lines to weaken the Lebanese terror group prior to a potential war. “All those interviewed,” according to TOI, “said Israel’s moves suggested it was gearing up for a full-scale war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. … That could begin when Israel dials down its campaign in Gaza.”

Read the rest here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Tim Brinkhof profiles Tzvi Friedman, the DIY Haredi director of Killer of Men

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The Rest

→Hunter Biden was found guilty of three felony gun charges on Tuesday, becoming the first child of a sitting president to be convicted of a crime. Biden, who was convicted of lying about his drug use on a form used to purchase a firearm in Oct. 2018, a time when he was regularly smoking crack cocaine, now faces a potential 25 years in prison. He also faces a second trial on federal tax charges in September. Still, while Hunter’s legal troubles are no doubt embarrassing for the president, Special Counsel David Weiss, who is prosecuting both cases, has already done the Bidens several substantial favors. In National Review, Andrew McCarthy writes:

To recap, prior to Biden’s taking office, Weiss had had the Hunter investigation for over a year and done nothing on it—other than thwart the agents who were trying in good faith to investigate it. In the months prior to the 2020 election, he had taken no prosecutorial action despite the overwhelming evidence of Hunter’s gun and tax crimes. He had stood silently by when Biden-allied former intelligence officers and Biden himself claimed the infamous laptop data detailing Hunter’s plethora of wrongdoing was a Russian influence operation, even though Weiss’s FBI investigators had authenticated the laptop nearly a year earlier. He had stood silently by when the FBI nudged social-media organizations to suppress the laptop story as Russian disinformation.

Subsequently, through almost all of the first three years of the Biden administration, Weiss sat on his hands while the statute of limitations erased crimes stemming from Hunter’s monetization of his father’s political influence during Joe Biden’s tenure as Obama administration vice-president. Then, finally, Weiss colluded with Hunter’s lawyers to fashion a plea bargain that would (1) dispose of all remaining tax charges with no prison time, (2) disappear the gun case on a “diversion” arrangement for which Hunter was not eligible under DOJ rules, (3) negate the possibility of any future prosecution of Hunter on crimes arising out of his years of influence-peddling, and (4) endorse a statement of facts—patently drafted by Hunter’s defense lawyers—that portrayed his millions in revenue as traceable to his work as a high-end lawyer rather than as selling access to his father’s political power.

We only got to the current conviction thanks to the revelations of IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who exposed the efforts by the Justice Department and other federal officials to obstruct the IRS investigation into Hunter’s taxes, and to Delaware District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika, who rejected the plea deal that Weiss had crafted for Hunter. 

→After the weekend intifada in our nation’s capital, the freak show returned to New York City on Monday, with a “Day of Rage” organized by Within Our Lifetime. Highlights included representatives of Samidoun—a front for a terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, fiscally sponsored by a tax-exempt nonprofit, the Alliance for Global Justice—unfurling a “Long Live October 7th” banner in Union Square and waving Hezbollah and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigade flags on Wall Street outside an exhibit for the victims of the Nova Massacre (credit to FreedomNews.TV for both images):

The Union Square protest also featured a franker-than-usual expression of admiration for “anti-Zionist” icon Adolf Hitler:

It feels like only yesterday that The New York Times was defending rehiring a Hitler-praising Palestinian journalist, Soliman Hijjy, to cover the Gaza war, less than a year after quietly letting him go over his praise of Hitler on social media. How time flies!

→But who funds Alliance for Global Justice, the nonprofit fiscal sponsor of Samidoun? We’ve previously noted that AfGJ has received millions from the Tides Center and Tides Foundation, as well as from the New Venture Fund, part of the Arabella Advisors dark-money network. It turns out, as Gabriel Kaminsky reports for the Washington Examiner, that the AfGJ has also received $139,000 from the outdoor retailer Patagonia since 2016 through the company’s tax-exempt private foundation, mostly for environmental causes, according to Patagonia’s disclosures. The company’s network of 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofits, known as the Holdfast Collective, has donated more than $71 million since 2022 to environmental groups—as well as to groups working to elect Democrats, according to a January report in The New York Times. 

→Yesterday we noted that no arrests were made during the weekend’s protests in Washington, D.C., which saw anti-Israel protesters assaulting U.S. Park Police, vandalizing federal monuments, and marching in masks and keffiyehs in violation of a local law against masked protests. Far be it from us, however, to suggest that blue jurisdictions don’t take vandalism seriously. For proof, just look to Spokane, Washington, where police arrested three teenagers last week on felony hate crime charges for riding their Lime electric scooters over a Pride Month street mural and “intentionally scooting their tires over the mural to create skid marks.” According to court documents, one of the teens also yelled, “Fuck you, faggot!” at a passerby. Lime, the company that operates the rental scooters, issued a statement condemning “these vile acts in no uncertain terms” and announced the establishment of a “no-go zone” around the Spokane Pride mural, meaning that any scooter driven near the mural will be remotely turned off. 

→Quote of the Day: 

The eye drops Collins bought shouldn’t have been on CVS shelves at all. A month earlier, FDA inspectors had found peeling paint, barefoot workers and fabricated test results that gave the appearance of product safety at the facility in India where they were made. Samples taken at the factory also found bacteria in crucial parts of the production facility. While the FDA had warned consumers not to use certain CVS eye drops on Oct. 27, the drugstore chain still had them for sale two weeks later, when Collins bought them.

That’s from a story in Bloomberg on the raft of health and safety issues with CVS-branded generic pharmaceuticals; the woman in the passage above, 78-year-old Joan Collins of Nassau County, New York, ended up hospitalized with a severe eye infection after using CVS eye drops. According to the report, CVS has had 133 recalls of store-brand drugs over the past decade, nearly one per month—significantly more than those of rivals Walgreens (70) and Walmart (51) over the same period. 

Read the full report here.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

My First Yizkor, by Judy Batalion

After my mother died, I stopped writing. I couldn’t start again until I understood what loss I was mourning.

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Kubrick’s Ghost Meets the Demons of the Talmud in Deepest Brooklyn

Tzvi grew up Haredi in Flatbush. Now he’s the director of 'Killer of Men,' an acclaimed new film produced by Cary Woods.

By Tim Brinkhof

Inspiration can strike a filmmaker in the unlikeliest of places. James Cameron came up with the premise for The Terminator in a sickness-induced fever dream on a trip to Rome, in which he saw a skeletal robot emerge from flames. George Miller’s journey to creating the Mad Max franchise began when he was working as a doctor, treating survivors of horrific car accidents. Charlie Kaufman famously wrote Adaptation while struggling to adapt New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief.

Twenty-five-year-old Tzvi, professionally know by his first name, stumbled upon the idea for his first feature, Killer of Men, after being locked out of his apartment in Sheepshead Bay, a neighborhood in far Brooklyn that tourists generally steer clear of. Tzvi had always felt there was something oddly compelling about its mountains of uncollected garbage, barbwired car parks, and tiny, empty shops with giant, neon signs like “ONLY CASH—GET PHONE NOW!!!” On camera, he thought, they would make for one hell of a backdrop.

Tzvi would later refer to Men—which ended up revolving around a psychopathic delivery guy who moonlights as a hitman—as little more than a tech demo, “a way to show what I could do with the means that were available to me.” What was available to him wasn’t much: a budget of circa $10,000, scraped together mostly by friends on the internet; a cast and crew cobbled together through favors from friends' Craigslist ads; and lunch catered by 7-Eleven. He wrote the screenplay to minimize production costs, incorporating only locations he knew he would be able to use for free.

Accounts of the chaotic shoot, which saw Tzvi being accused of drug theft and held at knife point, echo the disastrous productions of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, and to this day he still cannot believe he made it out alive. “One night I came home in tears,” he said over coffee at a Bushwick cafe. “I dropped onto my knees and prayed—to the God of my parents, to Stanley Kubrick’s ghost, the demons of the Talmud, whoever would listen.”

Still, “tech demo” feels like Tzvi is selling himself short. Those close to him also know that his humility and penchant for self-deprecation are rivaled only by his passion for and encyclopedic knowledge of the history of cinema. “His references just blew me away,” producer Cary Woods recounts of their first meeting, “he’d show me shots from his film and tell me how they were inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky and the like. It was impressive, especially once I learned he didn’t go to any film school, or even regular school for that matter. His grasp of the medium was so much more robust than any film school grad I ever met.”

In addition to producing films like Scream and Godzilla, Woods has a reputation for discovering talent well before anyone else in the industry sees their potential. He has helped launch the careers of protégés such as Harmony Korine (Kids), Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth), James Mangold (Cop Land), Doug Liman (Swingers) and M. Night Shyamalan (Wide Awake), all of whom went on to become accomplished filmmakers. In Tzvi, Woods saw many of the qualities that he’d originally seen in them: resourcefulness, perseverance, and an unshakable trust in their directorial vision.

Although Tzvi’s filmmaking career is still in the midst of takeoff, Woods seems to have gotten it right again. Men had its worldwide premier at 2023’s Woodstock Film Festival in upstate New York, where it was met with positive reviews. It was then picked up for sales by WME, and acquired by Quiver. Profiling Tzvi for an article in Filmmaker Magazine, film critic Scott Macaulay rightly praised his “impressive formal control” behind the camera.

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Tzvi’s approach to filmmaking is heavily influenced by his upbringing. He was born in 1999, into Flatbush’s Haredi community, an ultra-Orthodox enclave within Orthodox Judaism where religious law permeates every aspect of daily life, especially when it comes to interaction between the sexes. When a Haredi boy turns 13 years old, for instance, he can no longer associate with girls, and must keep his distance from them until his rabbis find him a suitable match. Men and women attend separate schools, where close reading of the Talmud is given prevalence over secular studies. Students are forbidden from owning smartphones, and listening to songs from Taylor Swift or Kanye West could result in expulsion.

Reprieve from these restrictions can be found only at home, depending on the piety of one’s parents. Tzvi’s permitted him the small sin of watching movies, though only the ones that they themselves had seen when they were younger. Frank Capra got the OK, but Tarantino was off limits.

Tzvi says he loved movies because they gave him an idea of what life outside his own community might look like. He recalls being astounded by his mother’s inability to hide her appreciation for onscreen romance even though it was considered taboo, and vividly remembers his father shedding a tear during the final sequence of It’s a Wonderful Life. For Tzvi, films helped bring out the “human side” of his parents. “That which we were too stoic to discuss face to face, we communicated via Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart.”

Once whetted, Tzvi’s appetite for cinema soon led him to the kind of films his community could never tolerate, not even behind closed doors. Films like Goodfellas and Star Wars, filled with gratuitous violence and escapist fantasy. In Haredi households, internet access is limited and websites like Netflix and YouTube are often blocked. After school, Tzvi and his friends would sneak into the local cinema, or torrent films on secret smartphones which they kept hidden underneath their mattresses.

The loneliness Tzvi experienced during his childhood permeates every aspect of Men, whose silent protagonist lives on the fringes of society—a place where everyone is a stranger to each other, and love and friendship are nowhere to be found. Although the story is not completely autobiographical—Tzvi says that the protagonist’s inner conflict, his coming to terms with the fact that he’s suddenly lost the ability to feel both pain and pleasure, was inspired by a conversation with someone he had met—its ultimate subject, a man living in liminal space, between birth and death, reads like a metaphor for Tzvi's own life: stuck between an estranged past in Flatbush and an as-of-yet-uncertain future in entertainment.

This duality is reflected in Tzvi's self-education. On the one hand, his filmmaking builds on and plays with shots used in other films, like Tarkovsky’s. The legendary Russian director, known for making Solaris, Stalker, and The Sacrifice, once compared directing a movie to composing a piece of music. Rather than telling a story through dialogue, Tarkovsky speaks to his audiences through images, the transitions and juxtapositions between them, and the rhythm with which they are edited together. Men, too, is light on conversation—the final draft of the screenplay only had around 74 pages, 30 less than the industry standard—with Tzvi relying primarily on visuals. As with Tarkovsky, every frame contains some form of movement, be that a subway train chugging along in the distance, or bluish flames escaping from the burner of a dilapidated stove over which the protagonist tries to burn his numb fingers.

On the other hand, Tzvi considers himself deeply indebted to his religious studies, specifically his readings of the Talmud. Raised to become a theologian like his grandfather, Tzvi knows the Talmud—a collection of “33 tomes, all of them written in Aramaic, containing stories and medicinal advice and legal advice”—as well as he knows his way around a camera.

To the chagrin of his teachers, Tzvi did not treat the Talmudic writers as sages so much as he treated them like storytellers. But that’s what they were in his mind, and the way he saw it, their techniques were as effective today as they must have been 1,500 years ago. He especially admired their inventiveness and tolerance for moral ambiguity: “The Talmud deals with a lot of gray areas the Bible does not cover. It says: If you embarrass someone, it's as if you kill them. And so, there’s loads of stories about the lengths that people in those times would go to not embarrass each other. They would jump out of windows so their friends who were down on their luck would not see them putting food on their table for them. The Talmud also says: Thou shalt not kill. But it also asks: Is it OK to kill someone trying to kill you?”

Above all, Tzvi appreciates how the Talmud raises more questions than it answers—a characteristic that, in his mind, also defines great cinema. “Some Talmudic stories suddenly stop,” he explains, “or they declare something confusing or contradictory without the writers explaining themselves. Nowadays, we are all affected by modernism. We live in a world obsessed with analysis; everything has to make sense and have a punchline that can be deconstructed. But when I was studying the Talmud as a kid, I never felt that was necessary. I just read the stories and experienced them for what they were because it was impossible to figure out what they really meant, what their authors had really meant. They are like an ancient surrealism: they feel right when you read them. You’re in awe of them, even though you don’t really understand why.”

Tzvi applied these same principles to Men, creating a film without a definite resolution that maintains an unbridgeable distance between audience and character. Meaning is not imposed by the director in a script that leaves no room for ambiguity but takes shape in the mind of the beholder simply through the act of beholding, making Men a work of cinema in the purest and most basic sense of the word.

“Kubrick said: If something can be written or thought, it also can be filmed,” Tzvi muses. “I’m not in a position to disagree with him, but I don’t think he’d disagree with me either when I say that you could also say the very opposite: If it can’t be written and can’t be thought, it can be filmed. Film can capture things that cannot be articulated. People make movies because they feel the only way to communicate their feelings is with an image. A movie can tell a story, but I don’t think that’s where the magic lies. The magic is the ineffable part of it. No words can do justice to the ending of a truly great scene, which transcends words or reason.”