June 6: Overmatch in Lebanon

Hamas to reject ceasefire; DOJ prosecutes gender medicine whistleblower; 80th anniversary of D-Day

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The Big Story

Early Thursday, Hezbollah released a video in which it claimed to have damaged or destroyed an Israeli Iron Dome missile defense battery. Shortly before The Scroll published on Thursday afternoon, open-source analysts confirmed on X that the battery was, in fact, a decoy. Still, the destruction of an Iron Dome decoy on an Israeli military base means that Hezbollah’s missile succeeded in penetrating Israeli air defenses, which makes the strike, in analyst Michael Doran’s words, “a big deal.” 

Why? Because Hezbollah has an arsenal of somewhere between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets, many of them long-range and guided, parked just north of Israel’s border. With their massive arsenal of drones and missiles, Hezbollah and the broader Iran-led Axis of Resistance may already have effective “overmatch” against Israeli and U.S. defensive systems—a military term meaning, in the words of Ret. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., that “you have the ability to attack, and your defender will not be able to mount a successful defense.” 

Whatever advantages the Axis already had, they’ve been heightened by the status quo that the Biden administration has imposed on Israel for the past eight months: tit-for-tat strikes across Israel’s northern border, with the Israelis prevented from “escalating” by taking decisive offensive action to remove the Hezbollah threat. This has allowed the Axis to probe Israel’s defenses without fear of devastating retaliation and develop countermeasures—as evidenced not only by the potential Iron Dome hit but also by a recent string of successful Hezbollah drone attacks that Israel has failed to intercept, including one in Hurfeish earlier this week that wounded 10. It has also effectively shrunk Israel’s territory, depopulating the north of at least 60,000 civilians. 

The situation is rapidly becoming intolerable for Israel, which must drive Hezbollah back from the border or risk slow dismemberment. Unfortunately, Israel’s erstwhile superpower patron has decided to place Hezbollah under its protective umbrella. Thus the news Thursday that the Biden administration has been quietly warning Israel against even a “limited” operation in Lebanon, which, according to “U.S. officials,” “would likely push Iran to intervene” and could even see Lebanon “flooded with militants from pro-Iranian militias in Syria, Iraq and even Yemen.”

The Americans’ preferred solution? A “diplomatic” arrangement with Hezbollah, which would make the repopulation of northern Israel contingent on the repopulation of southern Lebanon and see tens of millions of American taxpayer dollars flowing to the so-called Lebanese Armed Forces, which operate as Hezbollah’s U.S.-funded auxiliaries and counterintelligence arm. 

That’s a bad deal. As Tablet’s geopolitical analyst wrote in our Tuesday Big Story:

Publicly defying the U.S. and occupying Lebanon up to the Litani is a relatively moderate, defensive move in the face of an Iran that has achieved a highly advantageous strategic position on Israel’s borders while also being on the verge of going nuclear, all with U.S. backing. Lebanon, not Gaza, has always been the minimal, unavoidable war that needs to be fought for Israel’s survival in order to keep a nuclear Iran at a minimal distance. 

Put differently, the clock is ticking for Israel to reestablish deterrence in Lebanon before it’s too late. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Shabbos Kestenbaum on being a Jew at Harvard

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The Rest

→Hamas is expected to reject the latest Israeli cease-fire proposal for failing to guarantee a permanent end to hostilities, according to a Thursday report in The Times of Israel. Citing the Saudi outlet Asharq News, TOI reports that Hamas circulated a memorandum to other Palestinian factions on Friday explaining its reasons for rejecting the proposal. According to the document, the Israeli proposal “fundamentally differs” from the proposal announced by Biden on Friday and “does not guarantee a permanent ceasefire”—which was included in Phase 2 of the Friday proposal that Biden attributed to the Israelis.

→On Thursday morning in Israel (late Wednesday on the East Coast), reports spread rapidly of a fresh IDF massacre—this time in the form of an airstrike on an UNRWA school in the Nuseirat “refugee camp” in central Gaza that allegedly killed 40 people, including 14 children and nine women, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures repeated by the BBC. This time, however, the IDF was relatively quick to respond. As Tablet contributor Andrew Fox notes on his Substack, citing IDF statements from Thursday morning:

On 6th June, the IDF identified Hamas fighters gathering in the grounds of an UNRWA school. After twice delaying the strike due to civilian presence, they fired two, 250lb GBU-39 missiles. They are accurate to one metre. The strike was so precise, that only the rooms targeted were destroyed. Pictures in other rooms in the building remained on the walls. The IDF suggests that 20-30 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters were killed.

Read the rest of the post here:

A lesson from Gaza

→And here, from Andrew’s X account, is a translated lecture from Major Yehuda Kfir, an IDF military engineering specialist, on lessons from Hamas’ underground warfare: 

→The Biden Department of Justice is indicting a doctor, Eithan Haim, on four felony counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for leaking to the press last year that Texas Children’s Hospital was performing sex-change operations on children as young as 11, despite publicly claiming that it had shut down its child gender clinic, Christopher Rufo reports at City Journal. The charges have not yet been made public—Haim’s lawyer notified Rufo that U.S. marshals had summoned Haim to appear in court to face indictment on Monday—but likely relate to purported violations of the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which bars doctors from disclosing medical information without a patients’ consent. Rufo, who published Haim’s initial story, claims that Haim redacted all of the whistleblower documents he provided in order to preserve patient anonymity. Allegations of “HIPAA violations,” however, have become a common weapon among trans activists on social media attempting to silence journalists and healthcare providers who raise alarms about unethical practices in gender medicine. 

→Today marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the landing of the Allied invasion forces in Normandy in what is still the largest amphibious assault in history. More than 150,000 troops from the United States, Britain, and the British Commonwealth landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944; at least 4,414, including 2,501 Americans, were killed within the first 24 hours. In 2020, The Atlantic republished a 1960 account of the first wave at Omaha Beach by military historian S.L.A. Marshall, who interviewed survivors from the landing. His account (read it here) gives a sense of the carnage in Able Company, the first troops to hit the beach:

Along the beach, only one Able Company officer still lives—Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who is hit in the heel as he quits the boat and hit in the belly by a second bullet as he makes the sand. By the end of ten minutes, every sergeant is either dead or wounded. To the eyes of such men as Private Howard I. Grosser and Private First Class Gilbert G. Murdock, this clean sweep suggests that the Germans on the high ground have spotted all leaders and concentrated fire their way. Among the men who are still moving in with the tide, rifles, packs, and helmets have already been cast away in the interests of survival.

To the right of where Tidrick’s boat is drifting with the tide, its coxswain lying dead next to the shell-shattered wheel, the seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and sixteen men, noses toward the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand.

Operation Overlord was not merely an exercise in heroism; it was also, as economic historian Adam Tooze argues in a fascinating 2017 historiographical essay, “Blitzkrieg Manqué or a New Kind of War?”—perhaps the most impressive operation in the history of military logistics. As Tooze writes:

Behind the pilots and the gunners and the radio men and the spotters was a giant force, literally half the army, responsible for sustaining this modern, “rich man’s” war. In the American way of war, wrote one official Army historian, “it was hard to say which was more important—the gun that fired the ammunition at the enemy or the truck that brought the ammunition to the gun position.” Airmen were no good without air bases. As the front moved forward the Engineer Command of IX TAC built sixty new air bases across France in August and September [1944] alone. Each fighter group supporting 90 planes involved a ground staff of 1,000 men and a wagon train of ground equipment. Certainly never before had armies waged war with the material and logistical intensity that the Allies did in 1944, never before had the labour of war come so close to replicating that of an entire modern society on the move. 

And for a more personal touch, Jacob Siegel drew our attention to this 2004 clip from 60 Minutes host Andy Rooney, who landed on Utah Beach as a war correspondent:

 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Evolution of the Israeli Kitchen, by Dana Kessler

How—and why—a generation of women got everyone to eat their fruits and vegetables

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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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Harvard’s Golden Age Turns to Mud

Being a Jew at Harvard is way worse than you think

By Shabbos Kestenbaum

“I was called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.”

Thus said Harvard’s 2024 commencement speaker, Maria Ressa. Fittingly, her deployment of antisemitic tropes in front of tens of thousands of students, professors, and families at graduation last week encapsulated the absolute chaos that has engulfed Harvard University for the last year.

Even as I took my seat at commencement, I was handed a newspaper, The Harvard Crimeson (a pun on the country’s oldest newspaper, The Harvard Crimson) which accused Jews of racism for arguing that calls for an intifada are a direct call for violence. The 10-page paper went on to defend chants of “from water to water Palestine is Arab,” “from the river to the sea,” and “globalize the intifada.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, just the week prior, dozens of students and faculty gathered by the gates of Harvard to gleefully exclaim “intifada, intifada, coming to America.”

This of course followed an almost monthlong illegal encampment of students and professors in the center of Harvard Yard demanding a complete and total divestment from “the Zionist entity.” Although the participants used bolt cutters in an attempt to break open Harvard’s gates, depicted our Jewish President as a devil replete with horns and a tail, violated all time, place, and manner restrictions, called for the violent destruction of the Jewish state, and established a self-appointed security system that monitored and recorded Jews like me on our way to class, they were handsomely rewarded.

In exchange for packing up their foul-smelling tents and open-air laundry, all graduate and almost all undergraduate students had their suspensions revoked. The encampment leaders will meet with senior university officials to discuss a Palestinian studies department, and the Harvard Management Corporation, which oversees Harvard’s $50 billion endowment, will invite them for a seat at the table to discuss divestment, and President Garber personally asked for reinstatements and an expeditious disciplinary process.

That same week, the Harvard antisemitism task force, led by a professor who has repeatedly labeled antisemitism at Harvard as “exaggerated,” quietly updated their timeline. Rather than submit recommendations to combat Jew-hatred during the spring semester as promised, the task force now has a revised date of fall 2024.

Although both the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA) and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released damning reports pertaining to the systematic silencing of Jewish and Israeli voices on campus, the university has yet to announce or implement a single policy in response.

In fact, although the reports found that a Jewish student was spat on, an Israeli student was asked to leave class as her nationality made classmates “uncomfortable,” another Israeli was assaulted at the business school, a staff member taunted me with a machete and challenged me to debate the Jewish involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Harvard didn't acknowledge these incidents publicly or failed to address them for months.

On the contrary, Harvard recently announced its policy of neutrality, refraining from issuing statements pertaining to public policy or affairs. Just the day before this announcement, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, which in late April was told to “cease all organizational activities for the remainder of the Spring 2024 term,” called for escalating protests to an “open intifada in every capital and city.” Although this university has made it its business to opine on all societal issues from George Floyd to Ukraine, open threats against Jewish students will no longer be denounced.

Paradoxically, this comes as Harvard is fighting in court to dismiss, with prejudice, our lawsuit that alleges pervasive and systemic antisemitism. Their argument? “Harvard is committed to combating antisemitism and ensuring that our Jewish students, faculty, staff, and alumni know they are safe, valued, and embraced in our community.” Reality tells a different story.

Despite countless op-eds and interviews, seldom are the personal experiences and stories of the students themselves highlighted. As a result, too often Harvard professors themselves belittle the plight of Jewish students and publicly denounce not the antisemitism, but the mere accusations of antisemitism, on campus.

As a Jewish student at Harvard University, I have had my learning interrupted by students calling for the globalization of the intifada, sat directly next to classmates who praised the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, listened to 34 student groups blame the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Jews themselves, been exposed to countless death threats, and perhaps most infamously, had a university president who described calls for Jewish genocide to be “context-dependent.”

According to Hillel International, in the 1970s, Jews accounted for roughly 25% of Harvard’s student population. In 2023, that number is estimated to be lower than 5%. For Ivy League institutions across America, the percentage plummets are relatively equivalent. Even President Gay’s historic inauguration ceremony, which I proudly attended and which was centered around the causes of “courage” and “diversity,” had no kosher food.

While Harvard took the extraordinary step to raise the Ukrainian flag on its campus following Russia’s illegal invasion of the country, we were told a similar display of solidarity would not be permitted, and the request to fly the Israeli flag after the Hamas attacks was denied. Although Claudine Gay, as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, immediately sent out an email forcefully condemning the murder of George Floyd and the racial undertones that allowed for it to happen, no equivalent response, certainly not one with such moral clarity, has been issued to Jewish students.

Indeed, the antisemitism and Hamas sympathies are not confined to Harvard students. They extend to, and are promoted by, Harvard faculty.

Earlier in the year, close to 100 Harvard faculty and staff published a cartoon depicting the hand of a Jew, imprinted with the Star of David and the dollar sign, holding nooses around the necks of an Arab and a Black man.

To this day, these faculty have not been disciplined in any way. They continue to teach and spread their poison with impunity. In many cases I have been a student in their classroom, pass them in the hallways, and see their names featured prominently on lectures.

Only days later, Harvard proudly hosted antisemite Noura Erakat, who participated on a panel with internationally designated terrorist and senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad who has promised to repeat Oct. 7 “again and again ... October 7, October 10, October one-millionth.”

In early April, Harvard deployed 24/7 private security to stand guard in front of the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s “Apartheid Wall.” The wall was replete with offensive Holocaust imagery and a quote from the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. However, when it came to Chabad installing a menorah during Chanukah, not only did Harvard not provide any security, but also instructed that it be removed each night.

But back to commencement.

While I resigned myself to the hourslong spectacle of each successive speaker lambasting the “genocide in Gaza” and “complicity of the [Harvard] administration,” I was shocked, but not surprised, to see close to 1,000 students, faculty, and supporters interrupt the commencement and stage a mass walkout. While yelling about divestment and the supposedly draconian measures of temporarily suspending a handful of antisemitic students, the group demonstrated their hallmark tactic: making the narrative about themselves while ruining a public event for everyone else.

Conveniently, Harvard will no longer have to comment on, let alone denounce, the disaster that was commencement.

While I can provide countless more examples and infuriating testimony, I will conclude with these words: I have seldom experienced such disdain and contempt for a minority group as the way in which Harvard treats its Jewish student population.

This is the reality of being a Jew at Harvard in 2024.