June 27: On the Brink in Lebanon

"Dire" situation for Israelis at Harvard; The Gaza famine that never was; Trump leads in polls

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The Big Story

Is Israel’s war with Hezbollah finally here?

On Thursday evening, Israel’s security cabinet will meet to “discuss the possibility of total war against Hezbollah,” according to a report in The Times of Israel—just one week after the IDF approved operational plans for an invasion of southern Lebanon. At a meeting in Washington, D.C., this week, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned that Israel was capable of sending southern Lebanon “back to the Stone Age” in the event of a war—but that Israel preferred a diplomatic solution. And the chief of the Israeli Air Force, Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar, said Thursday that “Hamas in Gaza will be defeated soon” and that “we are ready to face Hezbollah in the north.” 

The United States is scrambling to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran’s prized proxy. A Thursday article in The Wall Street Journal described some of these diplomatic efforts, including meetings last week between White House envoy Amos Hochstein and Israeli and Lebanese leaders. According to the report in the Journal:

The ideas the U.S. is proposing to defuse the tensions include moving several thousand soldiers from the Lebanese Armed Forces into border areas vacated by Hezbollah, who would be required to pull back 7 kilometers from the border, according to current and former officials. In addition, [former State Department official David] Schenker said, a U.N. peacekeeping force already deployed in southern Lebanon could be expanded. Israel would agree to curtail flying warplanes and drones over Lebanon in return for a Hezbollah pullback, he said.

That is, to put it bluntly, a bad deal for Israel—ending its ability to operate in Lebanese airspace in exchange for replacing Hezbollah forces with the LAF, which operates as a de facto Hezbollah auxiliary, albeit with U.S. protection and U.S. taxpayer funding. The Americans have also—according to a Thursday article in YNet News, citing a report in the Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar—asked the Qataris to dispatch an official to Beirut to buy quiet from Hezbollah. 

U.S. officials quoted in the WSJ claimed to “completely reject” the “logic” of Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who claim that “until there is a cease-fire in Gaza the firing at Israel won’t stop.” On Thursday, however, Politico published an article, citing anonymous “senior U.S. officials briefed on [U.S.] intelligence,” endorsing precisely that logic. “A large-scale confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah is likely to break out in the next several weeks if Jerusalem and Hamas fail to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza, U.S. intelligence indicates,” the story claimed. As Tablet’s Tony Badran put it on X:

But the White House’s most important policy move on Lebanon, as Michael Doran observes on X, may be the effort to slow-walk arms deliveries to Israel, aka the “Italian strike.” As Doran explained in an article in Tablet last week, the slowdown came shortly after the director general of Israel’s Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir, visited Washington in January to ask for more weapons and faster delivery. The request, Israel’s Walla News reported at the time, was motivated not by the war in Gaza, but by concerns about the “ongoing tensions with Hezbollah along the northern border and with other Iranian proxy forces across the Middle East.” The White House told Zamir to take a hike. 

Why? Doran explains:

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 Israelis came to Washington to stock up, to be ready for the conflict should it erupt. The Americans, by contrast, seek to restrain them. 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.

In other words, as usual with the Biden White House, all roads lead back to Tehran. As Doran went on to write:

The administration has little hope that the American people will understand why it is preventing Israel from defending itself against attacks from Hezbollah and Iran. Publicly, therefore, it has drawn the line in the sand in Rafah and screamed about civilian deaths. Privately, however, it has its eyes locked like a laser on the Lebanese-Israeli border. If a full-scale war kicks off in the north, the Obama-Biden policy of achieving “equilibrium” in the Middle East by integrating Iran and its proxies into the regional order comes crashing down.

By going over Biden’s head with his video addressed to the American public, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have pushed the White House into partially changing course. Barak Ravid reported for Axios on Wednesday that “some” of the U.S.-Israeli supply issues had been resolved, though the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs—presumably intended for southern Lebanon rather than Gaza—remains on hold.

We frankly don’t know if war is imminent or what it will look like if it comes. However, we highlight what Lee Smith wrote to us in our June 7 Big Story:

I don’t see how Israel accomplishes its stated aim to move Hezbollah north of the Litani. Will UNIFIL ensure that? Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t know if Israel has the appetite for occupying Lebanon again. You can’t keep trying to do things you can’t or don’t want to do since that’s a recipe for failure. By contrast, over the last few decades, Israel has poured huge resources into its air force and special forces in preparation for an attack on Iran’s nuclear and conventional capabilities. Presumably, Israeli strategists counted on a warmer relationship with its onetime, superpower patron, including political and diplomatic support as well as plentiful resupply of arms. But if you’re waiting for outside powers to permit you to exercise your national sovereignty, there’s no point in drawing up any plans at all. 

To put that more bluntly, the only way for Israel to deter Iran’s proxies is to deter Iran directly—something better accomplished before Iran crosses the nuclear threshold. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Lee Smith on the phony Saudi–Israeli peace deal

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The Rest

→On Wednesday, Harvard released its task force’s interim report on antisemitism, which described the atmosphere on campus for Israeli students as “dire” and indicated that “Israeli or pro-Israel students” were subject to harassment and discrimination from fellow students and faculty members. The report recommended adding more kosher dining options, improving “communication” around harassment reporting, and further integrating antisemitism training into the school’s DEI practices. 

Also on Wednesday, Harvard released a report on anti-Muslim, -Arab, and -Palestinian bias, which had considerably more teeth. That report described a “deep-seated sense of fear” among students—characterized by a “state of uncertainty, abandonment, threat, and isolation, and a pervasive environment of intolerance”—and “insecurity” due to “damaging attacks from external agents, such as some high-profile donors.” It recommended the university focus special attention on countering doxxing, expand Palestinian studies and recruit more tenure-track Palestinian studies faculty, and “publicly highlight and clarify its adherence to fundraising best practices that protect academic freedom and institutional independence” (i.e., get those pushy Jewish donors to shut up). 

The anti-doxxing focus is particularly telling. As Tony Badran wrote for Tablet in January, the efforts of elite universities to provide “anti-doxxing resources” to students do not merely offer them arbitrary protection from the reputational damage that would normally accompany, say, signing an Oct. 8 communiqué defending the murder, kidnapping, and rape of Israeli civilians as legitimate “resistance” to “occupation”—a courtesy we doubt would be extended to students praising Anders Behring Breivik or Dylann Roof for “resisting” the “Great Replacement.” These efforts also—and perhaps primarily—help to protect terror-supporting foreign students by scrubbing the internet of information that could be grounds for the revocation of their visas—and the withdrawal of their tuition dollars. 

→In March, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—used by Western governments and international agencies to track food insecurity and famine risk—warned of “imminent famine” in Gaza and advised that famine was inevitable without a cease-fire. But on Tuesday of this week, three months after the initial warning, the IPC revised its estimate, admitting that “the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring,” Adam Kredo reports at The Washington Free Beacon. While in March the IPC projected that more than half of the Gazan population would soon face a “Phase 5” food shortage—the agency’s most severe designation—its latest update says 15% of Gazans are experiencing Phase 5 food insecurity. 

Read it here.

→Video of the Day:

That, courtesy of Aviva Klompas’ X account, shows Gaza protesters being removed from a Wednesday-night baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cleveland Guardians in Baltimore’s Camden Yards. It’s also a good example of how normal Americans react to what one man in the video refers to as “Palestinian bullshit.” 

→Chart of the Day: 

That’s from a Thursday article in The Wall Street Journal on the latest population estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau. In the year ending on July 1, 2023, according to the bureau’s estimate, the Hispanic population grew by 1.16 million, accounting for 70% of all U.S. population growth. More than one-third of the growth among Hispanics—437,000 people—came from migrants entering the country that year. The Current Population Survey, however, estimates that the foreign-born population increased by 5.1 million between March 2022 and March 2024, so we suspect that the Census estimate is, if anything, an undercount. 

→We normally don’t put too much stock in polling, but three new polls have come out this week that all show the same thing: Biden floundering. Yesterday, we mentioned the new Quinnipiac poll, which showed Trump leading 66-29 among white men and 49-45 (+4) overall. Today, a new New York Times/Siena poll showed Trump with a +4 edge, leading Biden 48-44. And a Gallup poll released Thursday didn’t ask directly about voting intentions but showed Trump with a +9 edge in net favorability (at 46-37). That same poll showed Trump with a +12 edge in whether Americans agree with him “on the issues that matter most to you”:

Writing in his “Silver Bulletin” Substack, pollster Nate Silver describes telling a friend two weeks ago that “it was certainly a close race, but we’d reached the point where it would be dishonest to call it a toss-up. Instead, I guesstimated … that Trump had a 55 to 60 percent chance of prevailing.”

Read it here:

The presidential election isn't a toss-up

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

A Very Young Dancer, by Jay Neugeboren

Tablet Original Fiction

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Biden’s Phony Saudi-Israeli Peace Deal

The point of the U.S. deal isn’t peace. It’s to prevent the two American allies from coming together, while subordinating them both to Iran.

By Lee Smith

For more than a year the Joe Biden administration has been parading what it calls a “historic agreement” in front of longtime U.S. regional allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. If it seems odd that a president who called Saudi a “pariah” state, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “asshole” now sees Jerusalem and Riyadh as the ingredients for a major foreign policy win in an election year, that’s because the agreement on offer is not a Middle East peace deal. Rather, it’s an instrument to consolidate the Democratic Party’s control of U.S. foreign policy while formally subordinating its two longtime Middle Eastern allies to Iran.

The Biden administration’s regional policy is charged with completing the project initiated by Barack Obama. The endgame is to fold traditional U.S. partners into a new Middle East hierarchy dominated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terror proxies, including Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. The new American-backed, Iranian-led regional order requires breaking Israeli sovereignty and getting Saudi to accept revisions to its 80-year-old relationship with Washington. While Netanyahu is resisting the yoke, the Saudis seem to be willing to submit in the hope that it won’t be too late to revise their status again when, or if, Trump returns.

“The deal buys time,” says a Riyadh-based senior Gulf affairs analyst who asked not to be named. “A year or two gives the Crown Prince time to work on his agenda for Saudi Arabia.” And in the meantime, says the analyst, “if you can reach a deal with the Democrats, you take it. The Republicans are already Saudi allies. But to make a deal with them means the Democrats will give you a hard time. The thinking here is that if you want to do a deal with the U.S., you have to do it with the Democrats.”

To realize Obama’s dream of regional realignment, the Biden team first zeroed in on the Trump-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and four majority Muslim states (Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan) known as the Abraham Accords. The Trump team had reversed Obama’s pro-Iran policies and isolated the terror regime, while freezing out its Palestinian proxies. Plus, Trump eliminated Iranian terror masters like Qassem Soleimani who had targeted U.S. troops, diplomats, and allied nations in a decadeslong campaign of bombings and assassinations.

Trump’s approach brought an unprecedented degree of peace and cooperation to the modern Middle East after the upheavals of the Arab Spring, the Syrian war, the civil war in Yemen, Hamas attacks on Israel, sectarian warfare in Iraq, and other bloody events fueled by Obama’s revisionist policies. Yet a regional order based on isolating Iran was anathema to the Biden team, many of them former Obama aides who returned to the White House eager to restore the Iranians and Palestinians to center stage, and push the Saudis and Israelis to the wings.

That’s where the idea of the Saudi-Israel deal came in. Contrary to what Biden media validators claim, it was never meant to expand the Abraham Accords, but rather to collapse them, for the purpose of making Iran first.

The prospective Saudi-Israeli deal that Biden is purporting to broker is usually portrayed as something like a three-way trade, with everyone walking away with something they want: If Israel agrees to a Palestinian state, it gets a normalization agreement with the Saudis, who win a defense and security compact with the White House, whose occupant enjoys a big election-year foreign policy win. And best of all, say Biden officials, the deal checks Iran.

But that’s not true. A closer look shows that the point of the deal is to advance Iranian and Palestinian interests, while collapsing Netanyahu’s governing coalition and convincing the Saudis that the only power that can protect them from Iran is the very same U.S. political faction that legalized Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Obama’s faction.

Saudi interest in expanding its ties to Israel is founded on the idea that Israel was the only regional power strong enough to stand up to Iran and hopefully eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. It rested on a shared Saudi and Israeli view that Iran was a serious threat and that a nuclear Iran would be an even greater threat—and that both countries had a vital interest in mitigating, or eradicating, the Iranian threat.

But the Biden White House, in line with Obama’s preferences, had the opposite goal: to gain Saudi acquiescence to Iranian primacy. To do that, Team Biden replaced the very real Iranian threat with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The purpose was to rearrange the place settings and put the Saudis and Israelis on opposite ends of the table.

Using the Palestinians as a spoiler is nothing new, of course: That has been their role in the region since they rejected partition in 1948. During the Cold War, anti-U.S. revisionist powers regularly used the Palestinian cause to undermine Riyadh, the oil-producing cornerstone of the Pax Americana, and thus by extension America itself. The Saudis, according to the anti-U.S. regimes, are nothing but quislings, Zionist stooges. So, within Arab company, the Saudis must at least pay lip service to Palestinian statehood, especially when the American president publicly links them for the first time in history to the Palestinians’ hated enemy. By using the Palestinians as a spoiler, the Biden team took a page out of the anti-U.S. regime handbook, thereby strengthening the Iranians’ position and knocking the Saudis off balance.

At the same time, the administration was also preparing a noose for Netanyahu. Maybe he really wanted the deal with Saudi, though it’s still not clear what Riyadh can offer Jerusalem except photo ops, water desalination joint venture projects, and unfulfillable vows to steer the global umma toward perhaps maybe tolerating a Jewish state in the middle of a Muslim-majority region. But since Netanyahu’s coalition partners reject any negotiations regarding a Palestinian state, it was clear that accepting the Biden administration’s conditions would collapse his government. The administration turned up the pressure by promoting his rivals Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz and fueling a hostile U.S.-Israel media campaign to corner Bibi.

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But the administration miscalculated. There is little support in post-Oct. 7 Israel for treating with a terror enclave whose civilian population mobilized to rape, torture, and murder Israeli families. No one in Israel thinks responding to Oct. 7 by leaving Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip—let alone the West Bank—is a sensible idea. Gantz’s recent withdrawal from the government after a stunningly bold Israeli operation to rescue four hostages, and his subsequent drop in public opinion polls, underscores the failure of the Biden administration’s ongoing campaign to unseat Netanyahu.

Still, the White House will doubtless continue to find other mechanisms to cripple the Israelis and rescue Hamas. Whether the Biden team had foreknowledge of Hamas’ operation, as increasingly seems to be the case, the fact is that in the aftermath it very quickly saw the carnage as an opportunity not to rethink its destructive policies but to double down on them.

The mass murder of civilians, including foreign workers, showcased what might happen, or continue to happen, to U.S. partners if they didn’t agree to be absorbed into Obama’s pro-Iran realignment policy. After Iran’s missile and drone strike on Israel in April, the White House strictly limited Israel’s ability to retaliate. And if Netanyahu and his war cabinet colored outside the lines, Biden officials threatened, maybe the air defense systems that swatted away Iran’s barrage wouldn’t work so well next time.

While the administration’s antics don’t seem to have changed Israeli thinking, they do appear to have made an impression on the Saudis, who seem as willing as ever to have the White House’s performative promises of protection.

“If anything happens to Saudi there are now guarantees,” says the Gulf analyst, even as he admits no one in Riyadh really knows what the deal means in practice. Most likely, what’s on offer from Washington more or less resembles what Obama offered in 2015 as he was closing the Iran deal—a big arms sale and vague assurances to protect the Saudis from the regime whose nuclear program Obama legalized. The crucial point—in fact, the tell—is that what Obama offered Riyadh a decade ago, and Biden is now, is what the Saudis already have.

Since the start of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, going back to the tail end of WWII, Washington’s role has been to protect Saudi while the kingdom pumps cheap oil to keep global energy markets stable, thereby ensuring America’s peace and prosperity. Even with the Cold War ended, George H.W. Bush kept America’s promise and dispatched U.S. forces to push Saddam out of Kuwait and defend Saudi oil fields.

It's not lost on the Saudis that Biden, like Obama before him, has conspicuously failed to uphold the American side of the bargain. Instead, the White House has turned a blind eye to Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists firing on Red Sea shipping. “No one trusts Biden,” says the Gulf analyst. But the White House wants the Saudis to scream uncle and ante up. For starters, Saudi can expect to be billed for reconstructing the ruins of Gaza, and southern Lebanon.

The White House isn’t just reselling the Saudis the same carpet they’ve already owned for the last 80 years. No, the new boss is renegotiating the old agreement. The Saudi deal is no longer with America, it’s with Obama and his faction, the New America, different, better, progressive. It’s Obama’s carpet now.

The White House’s obsessive attention to detail in restructuring the Middle East suggests that the Iran realignment strategy wasn’t devised to facilitate America’s military exit from the region, leaving Tehran as the strong horse to curate U.S. interests there. No, it means more empire not less. Thus, U.S. troops are in Iraq and Syria to protect Iranian allies and proxies—Iranian “equities,” as Obama put it.

Realignment is the diplomatic instrument ensuring the rise of America’s new progressive empire. In the progressive imperial vision, Saudi, the world’s gas station, is climate change’s ground zero. Israel is the ur settler-colonial ethno-nationalist state, run by Jews. Both need to be integrated into Obama’s new regional architecture. By giving Iran an American badge, realignment is a road map for regionwide conflagration, and a projection of the ongoing efforts to transform America at home.