March 21: The New Herodians Strike Back

Elon and China; Mass protests in Istanbul; How MDMA blocked Oct. 7 trauma

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The Big Story

After weeks of rumors, legal wrangling, leaks, counterleaks, and threats, the Israeli cabinet voted early Friday to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service, Ronen Bar, on the grounds that the lack of trust between Netanyahu and Bar was inhibiting Shin Bet’s ability to fulfill its mission. If the move goes through—still an open question—it would, as Benjamin Netanyahu’s critics are fond of pointing out, represent the “first time in Israeli history that the government has fired the head of the domestic security agency,” to quote from The Times of Israel.

But that’s not the only thing that’s unprecedented about the Bar affair. The government is allowed to fire Bar; Bar, however, is refusing to go. Instead, he, and the broader anti-Bibi opposition mobilized during the judicial reform protests of 2023, are attempting to use the conflict with Netanyahu to force what they have not been able to force through elections or with the help of the Biden administration: a change in government. Bar refused to attend the cabinet meeting at which he was to be dismissed, and instead circulated a letter attacking his firing as illegal (due to alleged process violations) and the motivations behind it as corrupt. Bar wrote that the “hasty and sudden dismissal attempt” was an attempt at “undermining” the Shin Bet’s investigation into Netanyahu aides for allegedly taking money from Qatar, and thus was “entirely tainted by improper considerations and personal and institutional conflicts of interest of the highest order.” This “poses a direct threat to Israel’s security,” Bar added, and weakens it “internally and against its enemies.”

In his campaign to keep his job, Bar has found powerful allies in the anti-Bibi establishment. On Friday, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a temporary injunction against Bar’s dismissal; shortly thereafter, Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara sent Netanyahu a letter informing him he was prohibited from firing Bar, appointing a temporary replacement, or even interviewing alternate candidates for the job, pending a final ruling on the case from the Supreme Court. Rhetoric about an impending “constitutional crisis,” borrowed from American Democrats in their messaging against Trump, has proliferated, as have threats and predictions of impending doom. Former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak said in multiple interviews Thursday that Netanyahu was leading the country to “civil war,” and on Friday, the Israeli High-Tech Headquarters, a technology and venture capital industry group, pledged that if Netanyahu leads Israel into a “constitutional crisis, we will shut down the companies and launch a public struggle together with all of Israeli society,” per The Jerusalem Post. The Israel Business Forum, meanwhile, threatened to “shut down the Israeli economy” if Netanyahu proceeds with firing Bar.

All of this—the threats, the “civil war” rhetoric, the coordination between opposition politicians, business and nonprofit groups, and elements of the state—should be familiar from the anti-Netanyahu protests of early 2023. At the time, Tablet was critical of what Tony Badran dubbed Israel’s “Herodian” faction, or the slice of the Israeli elite that sought to ally with the Biden administration against Netanyahu and the Israeli right, for which they were willing to accede to the broader Obama-Biden imperial project of realignment with Iran and its proxies.

The same faction is now being activated by Bibi’s attempt to dismiss Bar, but with two key differences. The first is that Israel is at war. Whatever Bibi’s personal failings, his role in the disaster of Oct. 7, or his prewar entanglement with Qatar, he has been a better-than-expected warlord over the past year and a half, almost single-handedly devastating the Iranian “axis” while resisting the efforts of the Biden administration and its Israeli clients to overthrow his government and force Israel into a suicidal accommodation with its enemies. The wartime context also makes Bar’s list of accusations—corruption, threatening the security of the state—seem positively absurd if not outright subversive. President Truman justly relieved General Douglas MacArthur of command for far less.

The second difference is in who occupies the White House. The Biden administration was explicit in its desire to oust Netanyahu and its support for the Israelis trying to do so. Donald Trump’s relations with Netanyahu have ebbed and flowed over the years, but we are doubtful that his administration will throw its weight behind an attempted anti-Bibi color revolution.

That means, practically, that we expect Netanyahu—who has survived for so long under much more objectively unfavorable circumstances—will find a way to keep on surviving. But whether he can continue to prosecute a war with this much chaos at home is anybody’s guess.

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The Rest

→The Pentagon met with Elon Musk today, in a briefing that both The New York Times and Wall Street Journal independently reported on Thursday was supposed to include top-secret information on the U.S. military’s plans for a war with China. Both papers cited two “U.S. officials”—it is unclear if they were the same officials—who said that Musk would receive a presentation on the Pentagon’s operational plans, or “O-plans,” for a war with Beijing, presumably on the grounds that it would be necessary for Musk to be privy to what weapons systems would be used in a war with China, so that DOGE wouldn’t cut them. But in comments to the press on Friday, President Trump said that he had contacted White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after reading the reports to ensure that Musk would not be briefed on anything sensitive. “Certainly you wouldn’t show that to a businessman,” the Journal quotes Trump as saying. “Elon has businesses in China.”

→Tens of thousands of people marched in Istanbul on Friday to demand the release of mayor and opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was arrested on Wednesday. İmamoğlu, who was expected to be named the presidential candidate of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, this weekend, was detained Wednesday over alleged corruption and “terror ties,” apparently a reference to his alleged receipt of support from a pro-Kurdish group during his 2024 mayoral reelection campaign. The arrest is only the latest blow against Turkey’s most popular opposition politician; earlier this week, Istanbul University stripped İmamoğlu of his degree over alleged paperwork errors related to his transfer into an English-language business school more than 30 years ago—a move that, if not successfully appealed, would bar him for running for president under the Turkish Constitution, which requires presidential candidates to have university degrees. In the face of the protests, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has warned that it is “illegal” to protest an “ongoing legal investigation” and sought—apparently with Elon Musk’s help—to disable opposition social media:

→Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened on Friday to permanently annex portions of Gaza if Hamas refuses to release more hostages. “If the Hamas terror organization continues to refuse to release the hostages,” Katz said in a statement reported in The Times of Israel, “I instructed the IDF to capture additional areas, evacuate the population, and expand the security zone around Gaza for the protection of Israeli communities and IDF soldiers, through a permanent hold of the area by Israel.” He added that added that in order to induce Hamas to free the hostages, Israel would apply “all military and civilian pressure, including evacuation of the Gaza population south and implementing U.S. President Trump’s voluntary migration plan for Gaza residents.”

→Trump aides released a memo obtained by Politico yesterday that proposes a plan to replace the U.S. Agency for International Development with revamped foreign aid programs that would be more focused and better positioned to challenge China. The three-pronged plan includes the following items:

1. Changing USAID’s name to U.S. Agency for International Humanitarian Assistance and curbing the agency’s focus to health, hunger, and disaster response. The new agency would operate beneath the State Department.

2. Placing the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency beneath the control of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to promote private sector investment.

3. Moving all “politically oriented” programs, from promoting democracy to female empowerment, to the control of the State Department.

Read the full memo here: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000195-b000-d8a1-a3b7-f33601720000

→Following a meeting between its national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed and President Trump on Tuesday, the United Arab Emirates committed to a 10-year, $1.4 trillion investment framework in the United States, according to Reuters. The framework will dramatically boost the UAE’s existing investments in the U.S. economy in AI infrastructure, semiconductors, energy, and manufacturing. After the meeting between bin Zayed and Trump, Vice President JD Vance closed the deal in a dinner with other UAE officials.

→Cortney Merritts, the ex-husband of former congresswoman and squad member Cori Bush, was charged with two counts of wire fraud Thursday for filing sham applications worth $20,000 during the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection and Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs, according to The Washington Post. Merritts allegedly filed the sham applications with the Small Business Administration in 2020 and 2021 that enabled him to collect money intended to help businesses make payroll during the pandemic. The indictment documents allege that the accused repeatedly applied for business loans for a company he said he operated while lying about both its revenue and number of employees. He allegedly forged the documents to get a bigger loan. Prosecutors alleged in a statement that Merritts used those funds for his own personal enjoyment. The indictment was signed by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for D.C. and President Trump’s nominee to serve as the top attorney for D.C. An attorney for Merritts said he plans to plead not guilty.

→In a lengthy Instagram post Thursday, former UFC two weight classes champion Conor McGregor finally hinted at his run for president of Ireland and urged his country to implement the European Union Migration Pact. The Migration Pact aims to create a common European response to mass migration by strengthening border management, streamlining asylum processes, and promoting unity among European states in dealing with the migrant crisis, according to the European Commission’s Office of Migration and Home Affairs. It should be said that the role of president in Ireland is mostly a ceremonial role, serving as a representative of Ireland at home and abroad, and that the prime ministry is the country’s true seat of power. Nevertheless, McGregor could use the position as a bully pulpit to influence the country’s immigration policy.

→Is rolling balls the best antidote to trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder? A new study that looked at the lingering psychological impact of the violence on Oct. 7 on its survivors found that survivors of the Nova music festival massacre who had taken MDMA especially, but also to a lesser degree LSD, may have been better protected from the traumas of the horror that they witnessed, BBC reports. Though not yet peer reviewed, the preliminary results suggest that users of the drug on Oct. 7 might have had more positive mental states in the months following the massacre. “There's talk that a lot of these substances create plasticity in the brain, so the brain is more open to change. But what happens if you endure this plasticity in such a terrible situation—is it going to be worse, or better?" asked professor Roy Salomon, one of those leading the research.

The research followed the recoveries of more than 650 survivors, two thirds of whom were on either MDMA, LSD, or psilocybin during the massacre. MDMA proved to be more protective in the face of trauma—Salomon said that survivors who were on MDMA were sleeping better and experiencing less distress than people who weren’t on it. MDMA therapy has been studied for its efficacy in the treatment of PTSD before, but only Australia approved it as a treatment.

→Cultural Decline Moment of the Day:

DoorDash announced yesterday that it is partnering with Klarna, the “Buy Now, Pay Later” online financial service company that filed for its initial public offering last week, to offer customers a “buy now, pay later” service for the food that they order, according to Axios. You’d think that in a country where its citizens carry an average debt of over $100,000, according to Business Insider, that we’d be looking to resolve debt and credit issues and not exacerbate them, but DoorDash is banking on Americans’ frivolity when it comes to accruing debt. “Buy Now, Pay Later” watch dogs worry that this merger will lead to Americans being saddled with what is called “phantom debt,” or debt that can’t be tracked by Wall Street. “Buy Now, Pay Later” platforms like Klarna don’t report loans to credit agencies and have resisted calls for better disclosure even as their market is projected to climb to $700 billion by 2028, according to Bloomberg. The hidden loans are masking a complete picture of the average financial health of the American household.

→Quote of the Day

The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men. In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience. The young agents and editors didn’t come up in that culture.

That’s a literary agent speaking to Los Angeles-based writer Jacob Savage for an article in Compact magazine that provides evidence for a substantial bias against young white male writers held by the contemporary publishing industry. Savage says that the”literary pipeline” was effectively shut down in the 2010s and 2020s; he points to facts such as that The New York Times’ “Notable Fiction” list has only included two white male writers below the age of 43 since 2021. Esquire, a men’s publication, Savage says, has featured 53 millennial writers on its year-end fiction list since 2020, and only one of them was a white man. If you’re a white man, your childhood dreams of being the next Bret Easton Ellis or David Foster Wallace amount to little more than a pipe dream given the current biases of the industry.

Read the rest here: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-writer/

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