March 19, 2024: Pier Pressure

‘An integrated political plan’; Bolsonaro faces decade in prison for lying about vax; ‘The Deep State Is Awesome’

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The Big Story

In a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Joe Biden ruled out U.S. support for any Israeli ground operation in Rafah, according to the account provided by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at a Monday press conference. Calling a ground operation in Rafah a “mistake” that would “lead to more innocent civilian deaths” and “further isolate Israel internationally,” Sullivan said that “the key goals Israel wants to achieve in Rafah can be done by other means”—to be discussed by a “senior interagency team” that Netanyahu has reportedly agreed to send to Washington. 

Don’t expect much from that “senior interagency team,” however. Netanyahu may be offering a diplomatic sop to his erstwhile patrons in Washington, but the prime minister made clear over the weekend that the IDF is going into Rafah whether the Americans like it or not. He reiterated that position in comments before the Knesset on Tuesday. Indeed, defying the White House is becoming easier for Netanyahu as the Biden administration is abandoning the fiction of its support for Israel while throwing its weight behind efforts to thwart the Israeli goal of eradicating Hamas in Gaza—justified, of course, in the language of “values,” human rights, and concern for civilian life. 

On Monday, for instance, Israel’s Channel 14 News reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development had transferred control over the White House’s “humanitarian pier” in Gaza to Qatar and a Hamas-linked construction company. According to an English translation of the Hebrew television report posted on X by Caroline Glick, Qatar agreed to finance the pier on one condition, which the United States accepted over Israeli objections: that the pier be built by the Gaza-based Al Hissi construction company, which is the “primary supplier of engineering, electricity, and infrastructure for Hamas” and “a subsidiary of” the terrorist group. The company has also worked with Doha on Qatar-financed construction projects in Gaza. “So here we’ve arrived at a point where the Qataris will have control because they’re the financiers,” said Channel 14’s Arab affairs correspondent, Baruch Yedid. “This is good for Hamas because their company is operating it.”

If the U.S.-backed, Qatar-financed-and-controlled pier is, in fact, a play to establish a Hamas-friendly “international” presence in southern Gaza under U.S. protection, that would help make sense of the recently released IDF footage showing the construction of a separate, Israeli-approved jetty in northern Gaza to allow for the delivery of aid from Cyprus—effectively undermining the U.S. rationale for constructing its pier while also beating the Americans to the punch.

The jetty in northern Gaza. Photo from @sentdefender on X

We asked Tablet’s geopolitical analyst for a read on the situation. The rest of the Big Story is a quotation, lightly edited and formatted for readability: 

“Bibi and Biden are playing politics on top of a first-order opposition of goals. Biden’s primary goal is preserving the U.S. alignment with Iran. His secondary goals are preventing Israel from occupying Gaza, installing a U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority in Gaza as a prelude to Palestinian statehood, and preventing an Israeli war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel is opposed to the U.S. alignment with Iran and sees all three U.S. secondary goals as direct threats to its national security. 

“So, what Bibi is doing with Cyprus and his jetty is intended to prevent the U.S. from inserting itself directly into Gaza, which would be a strategic and practical disaster for Israel. 

“What’s interesting strategically in this scenario is not just the gap between stated U.S. support for Israel and its underlying policy of rapprochement with Iran, which U.S. policymakers like Jake Sullivan are entirely aware of—it was Jake who personally began the practical process of realignment when he was sent to Oman to meet with Iranians more than a decade ago now—but the mis-alignment within the ‘secret’ U.S. policy itself, which some U.S. policymakers are loathe to admit to themselves. 

“Namely, that the ‘Palestinian Authority’ is a fiction and the controlling powers in Palestinian society are the Israelis in the West Bank and Hamas/Iran in Gaza. There is therefore no such policy as ‘strengthening the PA to take power in Gaza.’ The ‘PA in Gaza’ is a fig-leaf for Hamas, unless Israel utterly destroys Hamas, which U.S. policy is bent on preventing. 

“So, the actual U.S. policy in Gaza envisions turning Gaza over to Hamas, under the cover of a ‘technocratic government’ in which Hamas ‘joins’ the Palestine Liberation Organization and ‘accepts the two-state solution.’ [Newly appointed PA Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa declared his intention to form a “non-partisan, technocratic” government on Tuesday—PM.] Washington will then pivot to re-linking Gaza and the West Bank and undermining Israeli control there, which means turning over ‘Palestine’—a fictional, external construct—to Iran. The model here being current U.S. policy in Lebanon. 

“The end-point of U.S. policy is therefore to surround Israel with U.S.-Iranian satrapies in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, after which they will move on to Syria, and Israel will be stuck in the jaws of a nutcracker, which the Americans have dubbed ‘regional integration.’”

IN THE BACK PAGES: Judith Miller interviews the Israeli who helped save Yahya Sinwar’s life and spent “hundreds of hours” talking to the October 7 mastermind in prison

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The Rest

→Quote of the Day: 

When the president visited Israel on Oct. 18—the first U.S. president to make a wartime visit to Israel, I might add—he said both privately and publicly that the United States has learned a vital lesson over the course of several wars: A military plan cannot succeed without an integrated humanitarian plan and political plan.

That’s from Sullivan’s Monday press conference. As we’ve made clear, we do not believe the United States wants Israel to succeed, so pointing out that this is bad advice is somewhat beside the point. It is nonetheless notable that the Biden administration has consistently, since Oct. 7, upheld the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan as a source of valuable “lessons” for the Israelis. That’s—how we should put this?—ironic, because one of the primary lessons of those wars, in The Scroll’s view, is how quickly battlefield victory can be transformed into strategic defeat by attempting to use war as a vehicle for “integrated humanitarian … and political” plans aimed not at achieving tangible battlefield successes but at socially engineering social and political outcomes in other people’s lands. 

→Following Monday’s IDF raid on al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which had been occupied by Hamas militants (including the head of Hamas’ directorate of internal security), outlets including Al Jazeera, Voice of America, and the Committee to Protect Journalists ran with claims that the IDF had “beaten” and “detained” an Al Jazeera “journalist” named Ismail al-Ghoul. While we can’t say with any certainty what happened to Mr. Ghoul, Eitan Fischberger did some digging on Ghoul’s internet history, and what he found at the very least calls the aptly named Ghoul’s journalistic credentials into question:

• Ghoul’s official journalist social media accounts on X, Facebook, and Telegram were all created between November 2023 and February 2024.

• But Ghoul has a personal Facebook account dating back years, in which he posts praise of Hamas Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar and martyrdom photos of Palestinian gunmen killed by the IDF.

• In an old, disabled X account, Ghoul lists his affiliation with the Hamas-run news outlets Felesteen and Al-Resalah.

• Ghoul then worked for several “media production companies” in Gaza before joining Al Jazeera immediately after Oct. 7.

• Ghoul made posts on his deactivated X account praising terrorism among West Bank youth and likening Israel to COVID-19, writing that “the greatest epidemic is the Israeli entity and every Arab trying to normalize it.”

Read the full thread here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1769836495722987533.html 

→Meanwhile, Hamas’ leader in Doha, Ismail Haniyeh, accused Israel on Tuesday of trying to sabotage hostage talks with the raid on al-Shifa, which also confirmed the Israelis’ “intent to obstruct the recovery of life in Gaza and dismantle essential elements of human existence,” per the terror honcho. Mossad chief David Barnea returned to Israel from Doha on Tuesday, but left behind “technical teams” to hash out a potential agreement. The New York Times reported that the proposal on the table involved a 42-day pause in exchange for 40 Israeli hostages, but that Israeli officials “expected it would take a long time to reach an agreement.”

→Brazilian federal police indicted former President Jair Bolsonaro for “criminal association” and “falsifying health data” for forging his and his family member’s COVID-19 vaccination records so that they could travel to the United States in 2022. In what could be a preview of the future of the United States, both Brazil’s sitting president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and former president, Bolsonaro, are or have been embroiled in sprawling criminal investigations instigated by their rivals. Lula was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for corruption, though the conviction was later annulled by Brazil’s Supreme Court due to jurisdictional concerns and allegations of bias against the lead prosecutor. Bolsonaro, meanwhile, faces up to 15 years in prison for lying about his vaccination record, is under investigation for attempting to overturn the results of the 2022 election, and has been barred by a court from running for office until 2030 for “undermining confidence in the country’s voting system.”

→In a Monday court filing, Donald Trump’s lawyers disclosed that he has failed to secure a bond for the nearly half-billion-dollar penalty assessed against him by Judge Arthur Engoron in his New York civil fraud case—a bond he needs to appeal the ruling before the March 25 deadline. According to a report on the filing in The New York Times, Trump has approached 30 companies to provide the appeal bond, but not one has agreed to do so, since Trump would need to provide them with more than $500 million in cash and cash-equivalent assets as collateral—an amount that the former president, whose wealth is mostly tied up in real estate, cannot produce on short notice (especially after having to post a $91.6 million bond to appeal the judgment in E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit). Trump’s lawyers have asked the New York state appellate court to block enforcement of the judgment during his appeal.

→Yesterday’s Big Story covered Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court case challenging the U.S. government’s collusion with Big Tech companies to censor content related to the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, in which government lawyers have argued that their ability to “persuade” tech platforms to remove “harmful” content is critical to preserving the “safety” of Americans. In our Thread of the Day, lawyer Jenin Younes, a Tablet contributor and a party to the case, explains why nebulous safety concerns do not justify government censorship: 

→On a related note, here’s former Scroll editor Jacob Siegel with our Post of the Day:

The video in question—the title is a clue to the faux-naive condescension that permeates the whole production—profiles a mission manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center, an assistant in the water division of the Environmental Protection Agency, and a regional director at the Department of Labor and finds … that “Trump is teaching us to expect the worst from people in government, when the truth is, they’re actually some of our best.” So if you have a problem with, say, the FBI laundering Clinton-campaign oppo research into the legal system to undo the 2016 election or urging Facebook and Twitter to censor embarrassing reporting about Joe Biden’s son to influence the 2020 election, what you’re really saying is that you’re a Trumpist who wants to drink lead-polluted water, force children to work in factories, and allow asteroids to crash into Earth. 

→The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Texas can begin enforcing a state law, S.B. 4, that makes it a crime in Texas to illegally cross the border and allows state law enforcement to conduct deportations. The ruling, which is provisional, came via the court’s rejection of an emergency application from the Biden administration asking the court to vacate an administrative stay issued by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which blocked enforcement of a preliminary injunction against the law from a federal district court judge in Texas. That’s a lot of legalese, but the point is: Texas passed the law, a judge blocked Texas enforcement of it, an appeals court overruled that judge, and the Supreme Court just sided with the appeals court—so the law can be enforced pending a final ruling from the appeals court. The court has not yet ruled on the merits of the Texas law. A similar Arizona law was struck down 5-3 in 2012 on the grounds that it usurped the federal government’s authority to regulate immigration; Texas has argued that its law differs from the Arizona law, but it has also urged the Supreme Court to overrule its 2012 decision if necessary. 

→Stat of the Day: 11

That’s how many U.S. embassies have been fully or partially evacuated during President Biden’s less than four years in office—a record for a U.S. presidential administration, The Daily Signal reports. Here’s the full list, with full evacuations in bold:

• Burma (March 2021)

• Afghanistan (August 2021)

• Ethiopia (November 2021)

• Ukraine (February 2022)

• Belarus (February 2022)

• Russia (February 2022)

• Nigeria (October 2022)

• Chad (November 2022)

• Sudan (April 2023)

• Niger (August 2023)

• Haiti (2021, 2022, 2023, March 2024)

Trump presided over three evacuations during his four years as president, while Obama presided over eight in eight years. 

Read it here: https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/18/biden-sets-record-for-most-embassy-evacuations/

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Bernstein in the Desert, by Shalom Goldman

Before Leonard Cohen and Frank Sinatra, the great composer and conductor’s legacy of impassioned Zionism helped make a mark on the new country, while informing his contributions to American music

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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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Saving Sinwar

An Israeli who spent ‘hundreds of hours’ with his country’s most deadly foe assesses his next move

By Judith Miller

The Palestinian in the clinic at one of Israel's highest security prisons near Beersheba had a persistent pain in the back of his neck. He trembled and had trouble walking. Yuval Bitton, then a 28-year-old dentist just a year out of medical school, suspected that his patient might be suffering from a C.V.A., an ischemic cerebrovascular accident, resulting from a life-threatening brain tumor. “He needs to be hospitalized, immediately,” Bitton advised the prison doctors.

Dr. Bitton’s diagnosis was quickly confirmed at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. The surgery took hours. The prisoner survived. When he returned to the prison, he thanked Bitton and the rest of the prison medical staff for having saved his life—in excellent Hebrew.

The year was 2004. The patient was Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian who in 2017 would become the leader of Hamas in Gaza and subsequently the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel in which 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians died and 240 were taken hostage.

Bitton described the fateful incident and what he said were “hundreds of hours” of conversations with Sinwar in prison in the ensuing years when I met him last week in a peaceful garden in a Tel Aviv suburb, a world away from the Israeli prisons in which the Hamas leader was held for 22 years prior to his release in 2011.

“Even then, he looked and carried himself like a leader,” Bitton recalled. “He was thin, tough, and very extreme.” There was tension in jail between the militant Islamists of Gaza and those from the West Bank, which was ruled by the Palestinian Authority initially headed by Yasser Arafat and then by his successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Sinwar viewed even the most militant members of the Palestinian Authority as soft and undisciplined. Above all, they were traitors to Islam for having agreed to share with the Jews holy land that God had given exclusively to Muslims.

Sinwar and his lieutenants, Tawfik Abu Naim and Rawhi Mushtaha, now all senior Hamas figures, were “like an army” inside the prison, Bitton recalled. An Islamic band of brothers, they enforced rules, gave orders, and held secret elections for Hamas’ “majlis,” its ruling council inside the prison. They communicated with one another and with fellow militants outside the jail through messages and tiny plastic cellphones smuggled into the jail by visitors—lawyers, wives, babies. The contraband was concealed in diapers, in women’s bras, and in their vaginas.

“In those days, we didn’t routinely or thoroughly search women or babies or even surveil conversations between lawyers and their clients,” Bitton said, recalling these early examples of suicidal democracy. “We were so naive.”

Sinwar studied his enemy assiduously. He read Israeli newspapers, took classes in Jewish history through the prison’s “open university,” and spoke to Bitton about Hamas’ goals—the expulsion of all Jews from Palestine, the duty to implement God’s laws as given to Muhammad on all sacred Muslim soil. Numerous efforts to recruit him in prison failed. “The struggle continued inside the prison,” Bitton said. Sinwar was not married then, and he had few visitors. “Hamas and the struggle were his life.”

***

Sinwar’s life has been shaped by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, he got his bachelor’s degree in Arabic studies from the Islamic University of Gaza, which was founded in 1978 by two men who a decade later would create Hamas. He grew close to one of them—Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’ co-founder and spiritual guide—and rose quickly in the Hamas ranks.

Having initially been arrested in 1982 for what Israel termed subversive activities, he was rearrested in 1985. Released again, he and Mushtaha founded Munazzamat al Jihad w’al-Dawa (MAJD), an organization responsible for rooting out Palestinian collaborators with Israel and other rival factions. Sinwar excelled at his job, earning himself the nickname “Butcher of Khan Yunis.” In 1988 he was arrested again for planning the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and the murder of four Palestinians he considered collaborators. According to Israeli press accounts, he had acknowledged during his interrogation having strangled two of the Palestinians, inadvertently killing another during his interrogation, and shooting the fourth who had tried to escape. He was said to have led investigators to the orchard where the bodies were buried. In 1989, Israel sentenced him to four life sentences.

Under normal circumstances, a man with such a violent resume would not have been released. But after Israeli Staff Sergeant (then-Corporal) Gilad Shalit was kidnapped in 2006, negotiations with Hamas inside and outside of prisons began. Bitton himself was involved in the talks with Sinwar and other Hamas negotiators. Brokered by German and Egyptian mediators and signed in Cairo in 2011, the deal agreed to Shalit’s return in exchange for the phased release of 1,027 Israeli-held prisoners, including some 315 Palestinians who were serving life sentences for having been convicted of the worst crimes. Among them were Sinwar and his two lieutenants.

Hamas’ leaders considered Israel’s willingness to release over 1,000 Palestinians for a single Israeli soldier a victory. Most of the prisoners were ecstatic about their release. But Sinwar denounced the trade. “He was furious, even though he was among those scheduled to be released,” Bitton recalled. He told me that releasing Shalit for a thousand Palestinian prisoners was “not enough.” All of the Palestinians in Israeli jails had to be released. He sent messages to Hamas’ leaders in exile urging them to reject the deal. But he was overruled by Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas leader and the founding commander of its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassem Brigades (Israel assassinated al-Arouri in Beirut on Jan. 2, 2024).

“Sinwar didn’t care how many Palestinians would die for their cause,” Bitton recalled. For Sinwar, “there was no flexibility, no room for compromise.”

While some Hamas leaders were political, Sinwar thought only about military operations and war. “He was always crystal clear: The struggle against the Jewish state must continue, no matter what he had to do.” If it meant agreeing to close the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza and arresting jihadists suspected by Cairo to enhance security coordination with Egypt, a main supply route to Gaza, that was fine. If it meant trying to reconcile with the Palestinian Authority, which Hamas had violently ousted from Gaza in 2007, by temporarily renouncing violence to pursue “peaceful, popular resistance” to Israeli occupation, which he also did in 2018, so be it. If it meant appearing on Israeli TV to call for a truce with Hamas, in Hebrew, he volunteered. His objective never wavered, though: Do whatever must be done to fight another day and free all Palestinians from jail. Sinwar believed that Israel’s prisons were “a grave for us. A mill to grind our will, determination, and bodies,” he said after his own release.

Having spent hours listening to Sinwar, Bitton had vigorously opposed his release, he disclosed. “I knew he was trouble, and that he would create even more trouble for us outside,” he told me. But he, too, was overruled by higher authorities—in this case, the Shabak, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, then headed by Yuval Diskin. “I wasn’t the head of Shabak,” he said somewhat ruefully. “I was just the head of intelligence in a prison.

Days after his release, Sinwar publicly blasted the deal he had opposed in jail. He also urged Palestinians to kidnap more soldiers to secure the release of his Islamic brothers in jail. “He told me that he had an Islamic duty to ensure that no Islamic fighter would be left behind,” Bitton recalls.

Bitton ultimately paid a personal price for the decision to let Sinwar go free. His 38-year-old nephew Tamir was wounded, kidnapped, and killed by the Hamas terrorists Sinwar sent to southern Gaza on Oct. 7. “I knew when I saw the photo of Tamir that he wouldn’t make it,” he said. “There was too much blood.”

***

Three weeks after Oct. 7, Sinwar once again proposed that all Palestinians in Israeli jails be released in exchange for the hostages Hamas had kidnapped during its killing spree and barbaric assault. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection was fast and furious. Sinwar, Netanyahu said, was a “dead man walking,” vowing to kill Israel’s No. 1 target in its massive offensive. Israel offered a bounty of $400,000 for information about his location. But Sinwar has so far escaped Israel’s wrath.

Last November, the Israeli Defense Forces claimed to have trapped the Hamas commander in an underground bunker after surrounding Gaza City. He escaped. Later, Israeli officials claimed he was in a tunnel in Khan Yunis. Social media carried photos at the time of a shadowy figure fleeing into a tunnel with his children and the wife he had married after his release from jail. Again, he escaped.

The Israelis now say he is moving constantly within the tunnel network in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city where 1.2 million Palestinians have fled for safety. His presence there, and Israel’s assertion that four Hamas battalions remain there ready to fight, are part of the justification Israel has offered for its planned land offensive in Rafah, Gaza’s main supply area on the Egyptian border. Israel’s military claims to have destroyed or damaged 19 of Hamas’ 24 battalions, each consisting of about 1,000 soldiers.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 29 that Sinwar had sent a message to exiled leaders claiming that Hamas was winning the war in Gaza and that international pressure would soon force Israel to stop the fighting because of the high civilian death toll, which according to unverifiable Hamas and United Nations estimates, now stands at over 31,000 Palestinians. Israel estimates that it has killed approximately 13,000 Hamas fighters.

Safe in Qatar and Turkey, Hamas’ leadership outside Gaza took a different view: They concluded that Israel was crushing the group and seizing ever more ground, despite increasing pressure from the West for Israel to agree to a cease-fire. Yet according to the Journal, Sinwar assured his confederates that despite Israel’s tactical successes, Hamas’ four remaining battalions in Rafah were fully prepared to withstand a likely ground assault, and that Israel would ultimately yield to Hamas’ demands.

According to the Journal, Egyptian intelligence officials who have received Sinwar’s messages think he has “lost touch with reality.” Yet the success of Sinwar’s bloody Oct. 7 offensive and his presence on (or under) the ground in Gaza gives him credibility and authority that Hamas’ external leadership lacks. Practically speaking, the fighting will end when Sinwar says it does, so his assessment of Hamas’ strategic position and of Israeli psychology is the one that matters.

Whether Sinwar has become demented or merely diabolical, Bitton said, the Hamas leader’s hard-line stance does not surprise him. In his desire to rid Palestine of Jews for good, Sinwar has been nothing if not consistent.