March 11, 2024: Biden Wants Regime Change in Israel
Hamas warns civilians not to “collaborate” with aid delivery; DSA senator is living with New York Times producer; Nathan Glazer’s Salon des Refutés
The Big Story
After a brief five-month interval following the Oct. 7 massacre—orchestrated by Iran, which has acted with the financial and diplomatic support of the United States since Jan. 20, 2021—the Biden administration has returned to its regularly scheduled programming in the Levant: attempting to oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
To be fair, the president has not exactly been hiding his disdain for Bibi in recent weeks. There was the executive order sanctioning settler extremists from early February, which specified that the United States could sanction anyone “responsible for or complicit in” extremism, including by “failing to enforce policies”—a not-so-subtle threat to sitting members of the Israeli government. There was the summit with opposition leader Benny Gantz in Washington last week. And there’s been a string of increasingly hostile leaks, actions, and official pronouncements since then, including the “humanitarian pier” in Gaza, Joe Biden’s comments to MSNBC over the weekend that Netanyahu is “hurting Israel more than he’s helping,” and Kamala Harris’ Friday remarks to CBS that it’s “important” not to “conflate the Israeli government with the Israeli people”—the latter being the sort of language you’d expect from a U.S. official announcing an aid mission to some tin-pot dictatorship right after bombing them. Oh, and Barak Ravid reported Sunday that “Biden breaks with Netanyahu but sticks with Israel,” which is as good a sign as any that the White House has settled on an official message.
But just in case there was any ambiguity, New York magazine reported Saturday that the White House is asking its Israeli allies for help deposing Netanyahu. As an “Israeli expert frequently quoted by American officials” told New York (emphasis ours), “I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand that will collapse his coalition.” And the New York report is clear—contra the various administration flacks in the U.S. media presenting the White House’s “changing” posture as a response to the Feb. 29 aid convoy “massacre” or Israeli plans to invade Rafah—that Biden had decided to ditch Netanyahu “weeks” before the Michigan primary on Feb. 28.
Replace weeks with years, and we’d be in full agreement. In truth, the U.S. attempts to oust Netanyahu go back to the Obama administration and its plan to downgrade Israel from an independent U.S. “ally” to a client within an Iran-dominated Middle East, and continued with the Biden administration’s backing of the anti-Bibi judicial reform protests last year. As Tony Badran explained in Tablet in February 2023, when the Gaza war was just a twinkle in Ali Khamenei’s eye:
Netanyahu has already faced an attempt to unseat him funded by Obama’s State Department in the 2015 election. But in the years since, the Obama faction has developed a new playbook for political warfare against its domestic opponents, which now, inevitably, is deployed abroad.
The Obama faction’s sustained, multifaceted campaign against then-President Trump seamlessly fused the domestic and the foreign. The faction organized the campaign around the conceit of protecting “democracy” (or “our democracy,” with its implicit opposition to and delegitimation of any system, democratic or not, in which “the other side” wins) against the onslaught of “authoritarianism,” or more crudely, “Putin.”
The initial conceit, which drew its original force from the now-discredited conspiracy theory in which the Russian leader was alleged to have “stolen” the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton by buying ads on Facebook and through “bot farms” that amplified false stories (“fake news”) on Twitter, was then developed into a universal taxonomy that organizes foreign states into friends and foes: The forces of democracy against the club of regressive anti-democrats. People like Donald Trump and his pals—Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, Mohammed bin Salman, and, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu—are the foes of democracy, i.e., Putin’s friends. “Our friends” are those factions that align themselves financially or ideologically with the Democratic Party in the United States.
In turn, foreign allies of the empire’s ruling faction utilize this American-made conceit and its American-designed tools (the anti-Trump playbook), thus showing that they are de facto Democrats. According to the empire’s new system of classification, the domestic rivals that they run this playbook against are therefore identified as allies of the American ruling faction’s own domestic rivals, i.e., Republicans. All of international relations, and internal political competition within states, can therefore be neatly reduced to the question of Democrats versus Republicans.
Thankfully for Israel, the Biden foreign policy team is as inept as it is sinister. The announcement of the new official party line—pro-Israel but anti-Bibi—came only a few days after the White House summoned its preferred replacement, Benny Gantz, to Washington and submitted him to a public humiliation ritual (see our March 6 Big Story). As our geopolitical analyst put it, “By inviting Gantz to D.C., and then treating him like a piñata—and running to advertise that treatment in the press—they have made their supposed ally in Israel’s security cabinet look like a gimp and a flunky, thereby locking him in next to Bibi in support of an invasion of Rafah and providing other ambitious Israeli politicians with an object lesson in how the U.S. treats its Israeli ‘allies.’”
On that point: Biden announced in his weekend interview with MSNBC that an Israeli attack on Rafah is a “red line” for the United States. A Sunday poll from the Israel Democracy Institute, however, found that 74% of Israeli Jews, and 65% of Israelis overall, favor the IDF expanding its military operation in Rafah, which is why Gantz found himself explaining to his American patrons last week that “ending the war without clearing out Rafah is like sending a firefighter to extinguish 80% of the fire.” The White House brain trust might think that blaming Netanyahu for Israel’s reluctance to accept a U.S.-mandated defeat in Gaza is a clever way to preserve its regional integration framework and appease the radical elements of its base without alienating the broadly pro-Israel American electorate, but the “pro-Israel, anti-Netanyahu” line is a fiction—and an unconvincing one at that.
Read more here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/hezekiahs-mistake-israel-biden
IN THE BACK PAGES: A European court has ruled that countries can ban the practice of Judaism, Elliott Abrams writes
The Rest
→A Hamas-linked website has instructed Palestinian civilians that communicating with Israel or cooperating with Israeli aid deliveries will be considered “collaboration” and “betrayal”—crimes that typically carry the death penalty in the Gaza Strip—according to a report in Reuters. The announcement comes in response to reports that the IDF and Shin Bet are attempting to enlist Palestinian clans to administer areas of Gaza and coordinate aid delivery pending a more permanent governance solution in the territory. The website, Hamas Al Majd, quoted a “Palestinian security official” who said that Palestinian communication with the Israelis was a “betrayal of the nation that we will not tolerate.”
→That serves as a good introduction to our Quote of the Day, Part I, which comes from Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder’s response at a Friday press conference to reporter’s question about how the United States would ensure that aid delivered through its “humanitarian pier” won’t fall into the hands of Hamas:
In terms of Hamas receiving aid, you know, again, we’re going to work with NGOs, the U.N., and others, when it comes to the aid distribution piece, and do everything we can … without being on the ground to ensure that aid doesn’t go to Hamas. But I think the key point here is that if Hamas truly believes that the people, the Palestinian people are suffering, then why would they want to take this aid and use it for themselves to support their terrorist organization?
Don’t worry,: If Hamas steals this aid, then we’ll really know they don’t care about the Palestinian people. And after that, who knows? Maybe we’ll send them a very strong letter.
→SCROLL EXCLUSIVE from Tablet staff writer Armin Rosen:
According to online directory listings and publicly available voter registration records, Jabari Brisport, the far-left New York state senator and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, lives in the same three-bedroom Brooklyn apartment as Eric Krupke, a longtime producer for The New York Times’ popular podcast “The Daily.”
“The Daily,” which now has 3 million daily listeners, has been the Times’ latest locus of controversy. In late January, The Intercept, drawing off of leaked emails and Slack messages, reported that the podcast’s staff succeeded in spiking an episode about Hamas’ sexual violence against Israelis. The Intercept article, and a follow-up published in late February, led to an internal firestorm at the Times, which is now actively looking for the website’s source, according to a recent Vanity Fair report.
Brisport—perhaps the most anti-Israel politician in New York, with the possible exception of his friend and DSA comrade Zohran Mamdani—has repeatedly called Israel’s campaign against Hamas a “genocide,” referred to every Palestinian death in Gaza as an Israeli act of murder, and co-sponsored a failed bill with Mamdani designed to create a pathway toward revoking the tax-exempt status of charities with programming in Israel.
It is unclear how Brisport and Krupke know each other—neither responded to emailed requests for comment—and there is always the possibility that Brisport and Krupke vigorously debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while waiting turns to use the microwave. Perhaps it is a meaningless coincidence that one of the city’s leading opponents of Israel lives with a producer at a leading podcast during an internal flare-up over the denial of painstakingly documented atrocities committed against Israelis. In any case, the worlds of left-wing activism and media always turn out to be even closer than they already appear, whatever the specific consequences of this proximity might be. When asked over email whether the Times knew about Brisport and Krupke sharing an apartment and whether Krupke had any role in the shelved episode, Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander replied, “While we won’t comment on individual personnel or itemize editorial staffing for projects, our entire journalism operation—including our large audio team—is bound by ethical standards to safeguard against conflicts of interest that would impact the integrity of our news report.”
—AR
→Thousands of internal documents leaked from an Iranian company reveal that Russia has purchased at least 6,000 Shahed 136 suicide drones from Iran and received “extensive aid” in establishing domestic production lines for them, which Moscow has paid for with gold and advanced weapons. The documents come from a hack of the email servers of Sahara Thunder, a company known as a front for the Iranian Defense Ministry, by an anonymous hacker collective known as the Prana Network. As part of the deal, Russia has paid Iran some $1.75 billion—partly in gold, partly in cash, and partly in kind, in the form of “advanced Western anti-tank and aerial defense missiles that came into [the Russians’] possession.”
→The Oscars were last night: We didn’t watch (and we don’t understand why anyone would), but we are on X, which means we were exposed this morning to several of the evening’s “controversies.”
Item #1: Several attendees, including Billie Eilish and Mark Ruffalo, wore red cease-fire pins from the organization Artists4Ceasefire. As Tablet’s Isaac de Castro pointed out on X, though, the red hand on the pin has a certain symbolic resonance among Jews and Israelis—namely, it reminds them of the photo of Aziz Salha waving his bloody hands to a cheering crowd of Palestinians shortly after participating in the mob murder and mutilation of two IDF soldiers on Oct. 12, 2000:
Whether this resonance is intentional and malicious or simply accidental and stupid remains an open question—both possibilities are eminently plausible.
Item #2: Director Jonathan Glazer won the Oscar for Best International Feature for The Zone of Interest, an art-house Holocaust film that follows camp commandant Rudolf Höss as he lives a quiet home life just outside of Auschwitz without ever seeing the Jews being murdered inside (it’s about the banality of evil, get it?). During his acceptance speech last night, Glazer said, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
There’s been a lot of outrage from people saying that Glazer “refuted” his Jewishness, but that’s not exactly what he said—he said he “refutes” his Jewishness being used to justify Israeli occupation (of the West Bank?). Aside from his misuse of the word refute, that’s a perfectly coherent position, and Glazer is entitled to his opinion. What is reprehensible, however, is Glazer using the occasion of his own Holocaust movie winning an Oscar to deny the suffering of Jews murdered by aspiring modern-day Nazis by blaming those Jews for being modern-day Nazis. Which is also kind of banal, if you think about it.
→South Africa’s African National Congress Party could lose its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of apartheid in elections this May, according to public opinion polling. A February poll from the Brenthurst Foundation, a think tank, and the SABI Strategy Group showed the ANC’s support at 39%, down from the 58% the party won in the last round of parliamentary elections in 2019, and low enough that the ANC would be forced to govern in a coalition. The ANC’s 39% just ten points ahead of the Democratic Alliance, supported by South Africa’s English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites and Jews, which the ANC has traditionally trounced in the polls. It would appear that the ANC’s recent efforts to demagogue Israel at the International Court of Justice are not succeeding in distracting voters from the economic stagnation, endemic crime and corruption, and rolling electricity blackouts that have become the hallmarks of the past decade of ANC rule.
→Quote of the Day Part II:
I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.
That’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Angus Deaton in a recent article for the International Monetary Fund, “Rethinking My Economics.” Deaton is best known, alongside his Princeton colleague Anne Case, for coining the term deaths of despair to describe increasing mortality among American non-Hispanic whites from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases.
Read it here: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton
TODAY IN TABLET:
Israel’s Mental Health Tsunami, by Hillel Kuttler
In the aftermath of the Hamas massacre, rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD are climbing fast, even for those who weren’t directly affected. People who experienced earlier traumas—particularly sexual assault—find themselves newly triggered by the Oct. 7 attacks.
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.
Hunting Jews
Europe OKs banning the practice of Judaism
By Elliott Abrams
Antisemitism, or more bluntly hatred of Jews and Judaism, takes many forms. We saw one on Oct. 7, 2023, when hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza slaughtered well over 1,000 Israelis.
We saw another form on Feb. 13, 2024, when the so-called European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Belgium was entirely free to ban kosher slaughter.
The European Convention on Human Rights seemed like it might protect the Jews. The text of Article 9 (“Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion”) states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.” And Article 14 (“Prohibition of discrimination”) states that “The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.”
Clear enough? Not for the Jews. In the case called Affaire Executief van de Moslims van België et Autres c. Belgique, the court found that kosher and halal slaughter can be banned because a country or provinces in it (the ban applies to Flanders and Wallonia, but not to Brussels) had legislated rules requiring stunning the animal before slaughter. Now, it’s true that Article 9—about religious freedom—reads like it would protect shechita, or kosher slaughter, and says nothing about animals. The court acknowledged that “Article 9 of the Convention did not contain an explicit reference to the protection of animal welfare in the exhaustive list of legitimate aims that might justify an interference with the freedom to manifest one’s religion.” Quite so. In fact Article 9 states that “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
So how did the court torture that text into a meaning that did not protect the practice of Judaism? Simple—where there’s a will, there’s a way. “The Court considered that the protection of public morals, to which Article 9 of the Convention referred, could not be understood as being intended solely to protect human dignity in the sphere of inter-personal relations. The Convention was not indifferent to the living environment of individuals covered by its protection and in particular to animals, whose protection had already been considered by the Court. Accordingly, the Convention could not be interpreted as promoting the absolute upholding of the rights and freedoms it enshrined without regard to animal suffering.”
Gobbledygook eliminated, the animals trumped the Jews. And this, the court had to acknowledge, despite the fact that the provisions about freedom of religion are expansive—and do not even mention animal welfare. Let’s be clear: The court found that the practice of Judaism endangered “public morals.” This, on the continent where the very existence of Jews was not so long ago considered a threat to public morals. Nor is Belgium alone; kosher slaughter is also banned in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Slovenia. So far. The president of the European Jewish Congress, Ariel Muzicant, said after the February ruling that “We are already seeing attempts across Europe to follow this Belgian ban, now sadly legitimised by the ECHR.”
Now, this ruling would be bad enough taken on its own terms. But it cannot be. There is no country in Europe, not one, that bans hunting.
Think about that for a moment. Kosher slaughter, a critical element of Jewish observance and theoretically protected by the religious freedom clauses of the European Convention on Human Rights, cannot be tolerated. But in every single country in Europe forms of hunting are quite tolerable. Hunting—meaning, the shooting dead of animals who may die in pain and torment, is OK.
In 2021 the European Commission proposed banning hunting and fishing in “strictly protected areas” in Europe to promote biodiversity. No dice. The website of “Hunters of Europe,” in a posting titled “Move to ban hunting in 10% of the EU considered unjustified by Member States,” noted that “hunting will not interfere with the natural processes” of biodiversity loss and climate change.
Melanie Phillips wrote of a previous and similar court ruling that it sent “a devastating cultural signal. This is that the core principle of Western modernity, that minority groups can freely practice their religious precepts in a private sphere within which they pose no threat to the majority, has now been junked in Europe.”
As she noted, “The stag suffering painfully from a bullet wound, the mink dying of its injuries in a trap or the fox torn to pieces by a pack of hounds all meet a far more cruel death than does the animal slaughtered according to the rites of kashrut and halal.”
Phillips proposed a theory, that the “European strain of universalist Enlightenment thinking that forms the values of the European Union” contains a “vicious hatred of religion.” That anti-religious view had “given rise to the West’s predominant ideology of moral and cultural relativism, which has propelled the rise of paganism and the veneration of the animal and natural world at the expense of humanity. And that now has Jewish and Muslim religious practices squarely in its sights.”
I would not disagree with her view, but would add to it that accommodations meant to allow Jewish and Muslim life in Europe to flourish may be exactly what many Europeans do not want. Kowtowing to “animal rights” may reflect not only antisemitism, but as well Europe’s desire to deal with its rising Muslim population and the impact it’s having on European societies and cultures without saying so. Banning Jewish practice at the same time is a twofer: it is a way to appear more evenhanded, singling out neither Jews nor Muslims, and including Jews may be a way to avoid a Muslim backlash. For Muslims, whose population in Europe has grown so greatly in the last decades, there is little threat to survival. But for Jews in Europe, whose population has diminished so dramatically in the last 90 years, it is a far more serious blow.
As Muzicant, the president of the European Jewish Congress, put it, “Restrictions on fundamental aspects of Jewish religious freedom of expression, coupled with a background of massive increases in antisemitic attacks on Jewish communities, lead us to seriously consider whether Jews have a future in Europe.”
Rulings that elevate vague animal welfare notions over explicit protections of religious freedom, and that place the interests of animals over those of Jews under “public morals” standards, are bad enough. That this occurs in a continent where hunting remains legal everywhere really gives the game away. Not so long ago, hunting Jews was happening all over Europe. Today, hunting still seems to have greater protection than Jews do. As I noted at the start, antisemitism takes many forms.
Why is anyone shocked that an administration that has been appeasing Iran and attempting to micro manage Israel's war against Iran's lient Hamas is now seeking to do what it can to collapse a duly elected Israeli government that is supported by the majority of Israelis in its response to the events of 10/7?
I want to know what Len Blavatnik, the financier producer of Jonathan Glazer’s film, thinks about “refuting his Jewishness” and “hijacking the Holocaust” comments.