March 14, 2024: Schumer to Bibi: Drop Dead

Blinken rejected Qatari offer to expel Hamas; Hamas kills Gazan clan leader; U.S. held secret talks with Iran over Houthis

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The Big Story

Frustrated by Israel’s refusal to back down from a planned Rafah invasion and fearful of backlash from progressive and Arab American swing-state voters, the White House and its congressional allies are stepping up their campaign to push Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of office. 

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the quiet part out loud in a speech on “a pathway to peace,” delivered on the Senate floor. Touting his identity as the highest-ranking elected Jewish official in U.S. history, Schumer said that Netanyahu had “lost his way” and that his coalition “no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7.” Lumping Netanyahu in with Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as obstacles to peace and warning that a Netanyahu-led Israel will become a “pariah,” Schumer called for new elections in Israel. He added that if Netanyahu’s government remains in power and continues to push “dangerous and inflammatory policies that test U.S. standards,” then “the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage.” Schumer’s speech comes only a few days after the release of a U.S. intelligence assessment predicting massive anti-Bibi protests in Israel and calls for new elections. 

Aside from the now-standard diplomatic malpractice of openly calling for regime change in an allied country in the middle of a war, the Schumer line—which is merely a more frank statement of the White House line—is plainly false. Netanyahu certainly has problems: He is not well-liked in Israel, and the Oct. 7 attack happened on his watch. But the White House’s increasingly open hostility to not only Bibi but also Israel’s core strategic goal of defeating Hamas appears to be driving Israelis into Bibi’s arms. 

Just this week, for instance, shortly after opposition leader Benny Gantz returned from being humiliated by senior White House officials in Washington, Gantz’s National Unity Party coalition partner, Gideon Saar, dissolved his alliance with Gantz and asked to join the Netanyahu-led war cabinet. A poll released this week from Israel’s Channel 14 News showed Netanyahu leading Gantz 47%-37%, his best result since Oct. 7. And a Tuesday poll from Channel 12 News showed Israeli support for Biden evaporating: 44% of Israelis would prefer that Trump win in November, compared to 30% in favor of Biden. In December, 40% of Israelis backed Biden and 26% preferred Trump. Admittedly, that same Channel 12 poll showed Gantz with a substantial lead over Netanyahu, 41% to 29%, but on the issue currently causing the most friction between Israel and the United States—Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah—polling consistently shows Israelis backing their own government’s position against that of the United States. 

Meanwhile, as Washington steps up its threats to “play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage,” it is declining to use its “leverage” against the parties responsible for the war. On Wednesday, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration had reapproved a sanctions waiver allowing Iran to access $10 billion in frozen funds earned through Iraqi government payments for Iranian energy imports. Contrary to administration talking points, which claim that this is merely a continuation of waivers issued since 2018 by Trump to allow Iraq to “keep the lights on,” the Biden administration has expanded the waiver to allow Iraq to send the money to Iranian-owned accounts in Europe and Oman, where it can be converted to euros and used to purchase humanitarian goods—meaning that the waiver effectively subsidizes the Iranian government’s budget. 

We frequently quote from Tony Badran and Michael Doran’s 2021 Tablet essay “The Realignment” because it offers an excellent analytical framework for understanding how Obama-Biden Middle East policy works beneath the seemingly endless layers of obfuscation and spin. Here’s another quote, in which Badran and Doran predict how the Biden administration will use the Palestinian issue to kneecap Israeli opposition to the United States’ pro-Iranian posture:

Demands on Israel to take impossible actions will flow like a gusher, allowing Washington to pose as the champion of Palestinian rights against the recalcitrant Israelis.

With the stage thus set, an echo chamber of “independent” voices in the media will deliver a harsh reproach to Israel, which the Biden team will have scripted but will prefer not to deliver directly. “The United States needs to tell Israeli leaders to cease provocative settlement construction and … oppressive security practices,” wrote Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, in The New York Times on April 27. This was an early warning. As the tensions between Jerusalem and Washington mount, voices shriller than Brennan’s will decry the Israelis as corrupt and cruel warmongers, sabotaging not just peace diplomacy, but also mom and apple pie.

It is perhaps ironic that it now falls to the “highest-ranking elected Jewish official in U.S. history” to deliver the Biden team’s harsh reproach, but that’s the tough thing about politics. You either make yourself useful to the party, or the party will find someone else who will. 

Read more here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/realignment-iran-biden-obama-michael-doran-tony-badran

IN THE BACK PAGES: Liel Leibovitz argues that ‘Dune: Part Two’ is a ‘spiritually empty spectacle’ for ‘fans of Kamala Harris.’ We kinda liked the film—but read Liel and see what you think

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The Rest

→The emir of Qatar offered to expel Hamas leaders from Doha shortly after Oct. 7, only for U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to instead ask Qatar to use its contacts to “secure a hostage deal,” according to a Thursday report in The Times of Israel, which cites “two officials familiar with the matter.” According to the report, Emir Tamim bin Hamad al Thani made the suggestion in an Oct. 13 closed-door meeting with Blinken, asking the secretary of state if it was “time for the U.S. to ask Qatar to expel Hamas’ leaders.” Blinken reportedly did not answer the question directly but said that it would be better for Qatar to focus on securing the release of the hostages. According to a Tuesday report from The Times of Israel, however, Hamas has only recently begun to make concessions during hostage negotiations as the Qataris have threatened to throw the terror group’s leaders out of Doha, apparently of their own accord. An official—it’s not clear from what country—told The Times of Israel Thursday that “Qatar would be prepared to expel Hamas leaders if asked by the U.S.” but that “no such request has been made since the October 13 meeting.” 

→Hamas has killed the leader of the Palestinian Doghmush clan in Gaza City, allegedly for “stealing” aid and for being in contact with the Israelis, according to Arab media reports cited in The Times of Israel. We reported on Monday that a Hamas-linked website had announced that any Palestinian civilians found to be communicating with Israel would be considered guilty of “collaboration” and “betrayal.” Scattered media reports have indicated that the IDF and Shin Bet have attempted to enlist Gazan clan leaders free of Hamas connections to manage aid distribution and administer parts of Gaza during the immediate postwar period. The Doghmush clan issued a statement on Thursday saying that members of Hamas are legitimate targets. 

→The United States held secret talks with Iran in Oman over the Houthis’ attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, according to a Thursday report in the Financial Times. Per “U.S. and Iranian officials,” the talks took place in January and were led on the U.S. side by White House Middle East adviser Brett McGurk and Iran envoy Abram Paley. According to the report, the purpose of the talks was to “convince Iran to use its influence over Yemen’s Houthi movement to end attacks on ships in the Red Sea.” The White House’s dispatch of high-level delegations to beg the Iranians to rein in their proxy attacks seems to contradict the U.S. intelligence estimate, leaked to Politico in early February, that “Tehran does not have full control over its proxy groups in the Middle East.” 

→British Petroleum and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) have suspended their plans to purchase a 50% stake in Israeli natural gas company NewMed Energy “due to the uncertainty created by the external environment,” according to a Wednesday statement from NewMed reported by CNBC. Israel and the United Arab Emirates signed a landmark free-trade deal last March—Israel’s first with an Arab state—and the original $2 billion BP/ADNOC purchase offer was made shortly thereafter; its finalization amid the ongoing Gaza war would have been a political coup for Israel. The NewMed statement said that BP and ADNOC had “reiterated [their] interest in a proposed transaction” but also that “there can be no certainty that discussions will resume or that an agreement will be reached in future.”

→Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is putting together a group of investors to buy TikTok if Congress passes legislation forcing the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell its stake in the company, The Wall Street Journal reports. Mnuchin did not offer further details on the potential consortium but said that he thought the “legislation should pass and I think [TikTok] should be sold,” adding that “it’s a great business.” The WSJ notes that the purchase price for the company could be more than $100 billion, limiting the pool of potential buyers, and that the Federal Trade Commission would likely object to another social media giant acquiring the company on antitrust grounds. 

→On March 4, the American left-literary magazine Guernica published an essay by Israeli writer and translator Joanna Chen. The author, who refused to serve in the IDF and spent her free time volunteering to help Palestinian children receive medical care in Israel, details her struggle to stay committed to coexistence in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and to continue practicing empathy for her Palestinian friends. You’ll never guess what happened next: At least 15 people resigned from Guernica’s all-volunteer staff in protest, including the fiction editor, Ishita Marwah, who called the essay a “pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.” Another Guernica writer, Joshua Gutterman Tranen, posted on X that a passage in which Chen describes briefly pausing her volunteer work with Palestinians—“How could I continue after Hamas had massacred and kidnapped so many civilians?” she wrote—was “genocidal.” Guernica has since retracted the essay, and the page that used to host it now reads, “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.”

→Quote of the Day: 

Section 241 requires the mere existence of a conspiracy, not any demonstration of actual harm. As such, internet memes seem like a particularly inappropriate medium to expand § 241 to. The nature of memetic discourse online is inherently collaborative, with large groups of often anonymous individuals conspiring to “own” other groups of individuals they disagree with politically through the use of satirical images. A great deal of politically charged online and offline discourse will be threatened if the conduct in Mackey becomes part of § 241’s purview. Should every internet poster who has ever taken part in creating an edgy meme during an election season—even those who intended to interfere with their political enemies by “owning” them with “Avoid the Line”-style misinformation memes—be subject to § 241 prosecution? The potential chilling effect on free speech would be high, far outweighing the prevention of dubious injury in such cases.

That’s from a new article in the Harvard Law Review on United States v. Mackey. Douglass Mackey, a MAGA shitposter who operated under the Twitter alias Ricky Vaughn, was convicted last year of engaging in “conspiracy to deprive people of their rights” under 18 U.S.C. § 241 and sentenced to seven months in prison for posting the following meme in the run-up to the 2016 election:

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals will begin hearing Mackey’s appeal of the conviction on April 5. 

Read the rest here: https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-137/united-states-v-mackey/#footnote-ref-62 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Exile or Diaspora? by Pierre Birnbaum

A famous debate between the 20th-century Jewish historians Salo Baron, Yitzhak Baer, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi eerily prefigures the current rise of political antisemitism in America

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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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The Dune We Deserve

Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is a spiritually empty, imaginatively bereft upscale spectacle, engineered for fans of Kamala Harris and subscribers to The New Yorker

By Liel Leibovitz

Make way for brotherhood. Make way for man.

Brotherhood was the name of a colony in Kitsap County, Washington. In 1898, a journalist named Cyrus Field Willard, enthralled by a utopian novel he’d read, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, purchased some land on Burley Creek by Puget Sound and got busy. In nearby Skagit County, the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth had already established a socialist commune called Equality the previous year. The Brotherhood people imagined that soon Washington state would turn socialist and soon after that, America. With that pleasant prospect in mind, they built their commune in a large circle and made their living fishing, chopping wood, and rolling cigars.

The first lesson Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. learned, then, was that some folks took their faith very, very seriously. His aunts, fervent Catholics, gave him another variation on the same theme.

And then came the dog.

It was an enormous Alaskan malamute. Having spotted the toddler, the animal lunged at him with mauling on the mind. The boy jumped back, and the beast’s tether was too short to allow it to reach its prey. But looking into the dog’s slavering maw, young Frank learned another lesson he’d never forget: Nature is real, indifferent to your feelings, and, often, out to get you.

Even if you know none of these biographical details—and leave it to us obsessive nerds to comb the childhoods of our idols for any premonitions of greatness—you’d have no trouble surmising them by reading the novel that Herbert, hardened by a few more decades of life, eventually delivered. Faith, nature, and realness ooze from every page of Dune, making it not only a literary masterpiece but also a test of sorts to anyone contemplating it seriously, which, presumably, includes the Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, whose Dune: Part Two just hit theaters.

What sort of test? For that, let us turn to the Dune universe itself. Early on in the book—and, if you’re in that kind of mood, in Villeneuve’s Dune, the 2021 release that captured roughly half of Herbert’s book, leaving the other half for this year’s installment—its young hero faces a similar ordeal. He’s Paul Atreides, the young and handsome son of one of the galaxy’s poshest royal bloodlines. As the story begins, he’s visited by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the she-pope of the Bene Gesserit, a shadowy order of women who run the world behind the scenes. Curious about the contents of the boy’s character, she holds a poisoned needle to his neck and presents him with a plain looking box, ordering him to place his hand inside. When he does, he feels indescribable pain—as if, Herbert tells us, maybe with that hungry hound still in mind, someone was peeling off his skin and reducing his bones to crumbs.

To overcome his ordeal and save his life, Paul recites an old Bene Gesserit mantra which has since become one of Dune’s most quoted passages. “I must not fear,” he tells himself. “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Now imagine you’re a filmmaker charged with bringing this scene to life. Sure, you can instruct your young star—in this case, the cherubic Timothée Chalamet—to contort his face from impossibly handsome to merely very good looking, and crosscut these contortions with images of sand and fire while having someone whisper ominously in the background as Hans Zimmer drowns all else in some melodic Middle Eastern ululation.

But that would be an affectation, not a revelation, which is a distinction that Villeneuve’s predecessors—his is the third attempt to film Dune—understood perfectly well. First came the inimitable Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who made his name with delightfully surreal art house hits like El Topo. “I wanted to make something sacred,” he said of his vision of Dune, “a film that gives LSD hallucinations without taking LSD, to change the young minds of all the world.” And if you’re out to change young minds, you might as well change a few lines in the book, too, ending it not with the transformation of young Paul into the Muadib, a prophet who would lead his people, a desert tribe called the Fremen, into jihad—Herbert borrowed the Arabic word, as it fit his vision of a bloody holy war perfectly—but with Paul’s death and the transformation of the desert into a beautiful forest with rainbows and light and joy, “a world illuminated,” Jodorowsky explained, “which crosses the galaxy, which leaves it, which gives it light—which is consciousness—to all the universe.”

It’s all perfectly idiotic, of course. It’s also completely sincere, which is why Jodorowsky’s Dune remains a cult hit despite having never been made. Spending millions before shooting one single second of film—including granting Salvador Dali a salary of $100,000 per hour, and indulging Mick Jagger’s similarly extravagant demands—Jodorowsky eventually abandoned the project. It didn’t matter much: The artists he trained, including the sublime and terrifying H.R. Giger, fed off his vision and were inspired by the way he, like Herbert, took faith and nature at their word. Nothing about Jodorowsky’s doomed Dune was metaphoric, allegoric, linear, or commonsensical. His was a world of visions and transcendence, and of violence that didn’t need to be fetishized to be understood and digested. It simply existed, like that hungry dog in Herbert’s backyard.

Picking up Jodorowsky’s mantle, David Lynch failed, spectacularly, at converting Dune from book to film. His trial, released in 1984, is wonderfully incoherent, which earned him Siskel and Ebert’s “biggest disappointment of the year” award but also Frank Herbert’s praise. The author realized better than anyone how resistant his ideas were to the sublime simplicity of the silver screen, and applauded Lynch for tossing story and structure aside to make room for pure feeling.

It was into this troubled and hopeless history that Villeneuve gingerly sauntered, armed with an uneven filmography that included some chestnuts (Sicario) and some bloodless bores (Blade Runner 2049). A perennial critical favorite, Villeneueve makes the sort of films that folks who took semiotics classes in grad school are apt to love: just beautiful enough, just engaging enough, not too difficult to follow and yet a little aloof in a way that suggests that if you only thought about them a bit harder, you’d break on through and plunge into new depths of meaning. He is not a maniacal guru, like Jodorowsky, or a daring visionary, like Lynch. He is Canadian.

It was tempting, then, to forgive Villeneuve Dune the first. A poutine of a film, it was mushy and lumpy but overall savory, with a lot of exposition being delivered gamely by a superb cast and shot with style and care. But that film was also a promissory note, a guarantee that soon the director will deliver on what we’d all come to Dune to see: the battles, the giant sandworms that roam the desert planet of Arrakis, the rise of the Muadib. In part two, Villeneuve did the best he could to deliver. And that’s precisely the problem.

Walk into Dune: Part Two without having watched its predecessor or read the book, and you’ll be … just fine. Villeneueve masterfully adapts the story to make perfect sense, delivering characters whose motivations are clear, whose relationships are architecturally streamlined, and whose story arc is kinetic. In the world of Dune, alas, that’s a death sentence, because faith is rarely as simple or as straightforward as Villeneuve’s shiny manifestations.

Without burdening casual readers with the intricacies of a very complicated plot, two immediate examples come to mind. The first is the Reverend Mother. In Herbert’s imagination, the order she leads, the Bene Gesserit, is an extraterrestrial take on the Catholic Church. Though Herbert firmly rejected the religious zeal of his devoutly Catholic aunts, he imbibed much of the insight that comes from embracing religious people not as specimens to be studied but as relatives to be loved and understood. Like the Church, the Bene Gesserit coexist with a faltering and sinful empire, and like the Church, too, they must generate the earthly circumstances to keep their spiritual yearnings viable. The result is an order of extraordinary women, sometimes cruel but deeply faithful, true believers whose pursuit is of prophecy; power is merely a means to an end.

Such purity, of heart if not of deed, cannot, of course, exist in a culture that hates religion as much as ours, which is why the Bene Gesserit, in Villeneuve’s telling, become monomaniacal witches interested solely in peddling political influence. Whereas the book’s Reverend Mother delivers profound and uneasy one-liners like “hope clouds observation,” the movie’s version looks and sounds like she wandered off the set of Game of Thrones, a power-hungry sadist who takes pleasure in lording it over the simpletons who do not possess her cunning, connections, or resources.

An even more blatant departure is Chani, the female Fremen warrior who becomes Paul’s concubine. In the book, she’s fiercely loyal, not so much to her man as to the spiritual promise he represents. She stands there and watches, uneasily, as Paul makes plans to marry the daughter of another gilded imperial family in an attempt to stave off galactic war. But this is 2024, and no vision of female agency is permitted unless it goes full Beyonce and asserts its independence, repeatedly and in the most obvious, performative ways.

Portrayed by the terrific Zendaya, Villeneuve’s Chani may as well be wearing a “smash the patriarchy” T-shirt: She quarrels with Paul endlessly, doubts his religious revelations, and is generally a downer. In one notable but inevitable-seeming departure from the novel, she wastes not a second after his proposal to another woman before dashing off, hopping on a sandworm, and riding away to freedom and independence.

Who, after all, in 2024, can imagine a world in which anyone believes in any cause higher than girl power? Who can conceive of a moral order predicated on anything other than the dictates of intersectionality? Not Villeneuve, which means that his Dune: Part Two, as splendid as some of its details are to contemplate, is as completely and utterly sterile as any new luxury hotel in Dubai.

Without instilling in his characters the realness of belief—that is to say, without allowing his Fremen to be Fremen, not modern, solipsistic creatures that yowl about the future being female—what the director of our latest Dune has given us is the digital equivalent of a sandstorm: awesome while it lasts, then wiped away without a trace. Even nature has been sliced into metaphor: Those sandworms, so menacing in Herbert’s novel, have, in Villeneuve’s telling, been so thoroughly tamed as to be nothing more than toothy Ubers, summoned for a ride with the click of a button, more convenient than terrifying.

What do you get when you rob faith of its magic and meaning and reduce it to metaphor? First, a very boring film. And second, license to make the film mean just about anything you want. The consistently craven New Yorker even managed to review the film as a metaphor for Israeli aggression post-Oct. 7. “The movie,” cackled the world’s once-greatest magazine, now the upscale prose equivalent of Kamala Harris, “pitting Fremen fundamentalists against a genocidal oppressor, can scarcely hope to escape the horror of recent headlines.” Actually, as The New Yorker knew back when it was run by much smarter and more soulful men and women, great works of art can escape the headlines with ease, because they are committed to big ideas, not slick and comforting conventions. They make us uncomfortable, as Frank Herbert’s book did when it ended with the Muadib realizing that his followers were about to shed much blood and plunge the universe into decades of violence. Villeneuve ends his with Chalamet triumphant. The goodies have defeated the baddies. The damsel rescued herself, of course. Nothing more to see here, folks. Not a stick of furniture is out of place.

One day, inshallah, we’ll get the Dune film adaptation we deserve, a Dune that takes faith seriously and isn’t afraid to go a little gross and a little crazy trying to understand how and why we humans believe the things we believe. But as long as our pop cultural industries remain in the hands of men and women drained of all serious religious and moral imagination and intention, we’re better off with books.