March 6, 2024: Benny Gantz, American Piñata

A Biden-Trump rematch; Trump lawfare update; Menendez bribed by Qatar

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The Big Story

The Biden administration is desperate for a cease-fire in Gaza. And, if reports about administration official berating Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz during his recent trip to the United States are any indication (see yesterday’s edition), the White House is increasingly angry at Israel for failing to make it happen.

That’s despite Hamas rejecting a U.S.-drafted, Israeli-approved cease-fire proposal last week, and following it up today with this:

These demands are, quite frankly, delusional. But Hamas still seems to be banking on the Biden administration bailing it out from the consequences of its disastrous decision to launch a genocidal war against its much larger and stronger neighbor.

Normally, such a strategic miscalculation would prove fatal, but Hamas knows it has powerful friends in Tehran, Doha, and Washington and that they’re doing their best. As the pro-Hezbollah newspaper Al-Akhbar reported Wednesday, concerning the recent visit of U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein to Lebanon, Biden officials appear bullish on the prospects of a Ramadan cease-fire. Via Google Translate, emphasis ours:

Al-Akhbar learned that the American envoy, who left the day before yesterday night for Cyprus and moved from there yesterday to the enemy entity [i.e., Israel], kept one of his prominent aides in Beirut to continue meetings with [Lebanese Speaker of Parliament] Nabih Berri and [Prime Minister] Najib Mikati, and through them with Hezbollah. The sources said that Hochstein told some of those who met him … that he had great confidence in the imminent announcement of a truce in Gaza, and he wanted to exploit it to launch negotiations with Lebanon to stabilize the truce that would inevitably take place after the cease-fire in Gaza.

Indeed, during his Monday visit to Israel, on the same day that a Hezbollah rocket killed a foreign worker and wounded seven others in Margaliot, Hochstein told the Israelis that “a diplomatic solution is the only way forward” and that “a temporary cease-fire is not enough.” The next day, Hezbollah launched a massive barrage of rockets into northern Israel. It was, perhaps, a signal that the group understood the message of Hochstein’s visit, which is that “Hezbollahland is an American protectorate,” as Tablet’s Tony Badran told The Scroll in an email. 

So, is Hochstein’s confidence warranted? Has the tongue-lashing of Gantz delivered the desired message? Will Hamas—and the Biden administration—get its hoped-for cease-fire? In an email with The Scroll, Tablet News columnist Lee Smith suggests no:

Bringing Gantz to DC looks like a strong move to about 10,000 people around the world—anti-Bibi activists in Israel and DC who are keen to collapse Bibi's government. To everyone else it just gives evidence Biden is weak and has no control over the man who is actually making decisions. Key data point to remember is that Blinken said in mid-December that Israel has until New Year’s to finish up the operation. Nearly three months later and Israel is operating in Gaza with success.

Israel, meanwhile, is pushing out stories in its own media showing that it is ramping up domestic arms production to reduce its dependence on the United States. As Smith goes on to say, “The more the Biden team shows it is trying to rein in Bibi, the weaker it will look when it is clear it can’t stop Bibi. In short, if Hamas is ‘confident’ the U.S. will bail it out, that’s because all they have left is hope.”

Tablet’s in-house geopolitical analyst offered a similar perspective:

Two points:

1. It has been my estimation that the majority of the hostages have been dead for weeks, after the first hostage release strengthened Bibi and made Hamas again look like monsters. Even if some are alive, the probability that they can release a few dozen tortured, abused hostages at this point without a win already locked in is minimal. So the U.S. is basically pressuring Israel to buy a pig in a poke and give Hamas a win to “save Arab honor” and then “pivot” to “rebuilding Gaza” under a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority backed by Hamas. In other words, an even bigger win for Hamas.

2. The U.S. invite to Gantz is therefore an expression of frustration by shallow, spoiled children posing as sophisticates. By inviting Gantz to DC, 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.” 

It’s bad foreign policy—and bad domestic politics. The White House is signaling that it wants Israel to accept a negotiated settlement that would leave Hamas in power, but also that it’s incapable of achieving that outcome, while it continues to offer Israel a modicum of military, diplomatic, and rhetorical support for what the left flank of its party regards as a genocide. In short, Biden is simultaneously alienating pro-Israel voters and the Democratic Party’s pro-Hamas/Iran/China activist base, all while telegraphing that his administration is weak, feckless, and divided against itself. 

Oh, and prices are still high. So at least he’s got that going for him.

IN THE BACK PAGES: The Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon on the signs and symbols of Jew-hatred that defined him

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The Rest

→Super Tuesday was yesterday, and the results all but confirmed that the 2024 presidential election will be a rematch of 2020. Donald Trump defeated Nikki Haley in the Republican primaries in 14 out 15 states that voted on Tuesday, losing only Vermont, and Haley suspended her campaign Wednesday morning. In other news, the North Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary was won by Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Black MAGA holy roller with a history of incendiary proclamations. The allegations that he’s a “Holocaust denier” are fake (they stem from selective quotations of a Facebook post denouncing Weimar gun control as a precursor to the Holocaust), but he’s still delivered plenty of howlers, such as this one, on the Marvel movie Black Panther: “It is absolutely AMAZING to me that people … can get so excited about a fictional ‘hero’ created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist. How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?”

→Polling for November, meanwhile, paints a grim picture for the incumbent, which has put the onus on the Democrats’ various lawfare gambits to disqualify Trump, convict him of a crime, or financially cripple him before the November election. But those aren’t going well either. Here are the six cases against Trump in reverse order of their current importance (we’re paraphrasing Byron York of the Washington Examiner):

1. The 14th Amendment disqualification campaign: lost 9-0 at the Supreme Court on Monday

2. Fani Willis’ RICO prosecution in Georgia: Willis is likely to be disqualified over improperly hiring her boyfriend as a prosecutor and then lying to the court about it.

3. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified-documents case: Although legally the strongest case, this one seems extremely unlikely to be settled before November.

4. The New York civil case: This one succeeded in imposing a $454 million judgment against Trump. It’s a major burden, but still—it’s only money.

5. Smith’s 2020 election interference case: Smith is fighting tooth and nail to have this one decided before November, but he must wait on the Supreme Court to rule on Trump’s immunity claims. The court could also throw out two of Smith’s four charges when it rules in Fischer v. United States, a separate Jan. 6 prosecution. 

6. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s 34-count felony prosecution for falsifying business records. This one was widely considered the weakest legal case against Trump, but now it’s likely the Democrats’ best shot at securing a criminal conviction before the election.

Read the rest here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/2903874/trump-lawfare-update/ 

→Embattled U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) received bribes—suitcases full of cash, gold bars, and a new Mercedes-Benz—to work on behalf of Qatar as well as Egypt, according to a new superseding indictment filed by federal prosecutors on Tuesday. According to a write-up of the indictment at NorthJersey.com, Menendez introduced the Arab American businessman Fred Daibes to a member of the Qatari royal family in 2021 and helped broker a multimillion-dollar Qatari investment in one of Daibes’ New Jersey real estate properties. In exchange, Menendez, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, took actions to benefit the government of Qatar, including by issuing press releases praising Qatar and supporting pro-Qatar Senate resolutions. 

For a reminder of what sort of actions the Qatari government considers beneficial, we’d point readers to a January interview in The Jerusalem Post of former Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Adnan Al-Ameri. We’ll quote at length:

“When you work for their news channel, they need you to promote their Muslim Brotherhood agendas, and if you’re not there ideologically, they’ll make sure to buy you off.” […]

“There’s a lot of propaganda going around there, much of it dictated by the regime itself. Ahmad Alyafei, the executive director, even had a direct telephone line to the Amiri Diwan (the sheikh’s main executive office). I witnessed several times how anchors would meet for lunch, and they were told to tweet this or say that.”

As for his former co-workers, he added: “Much of the staff there are of Palestinian descent. Of course, they’re all aligned with Hamas. No Fatah loyalists are to be found there, nor anyone who doesn’t affiliate with Hamas or Qatar’s agendas.”

→In a Tuesday press briefing accompanying the American hectoring of Benny Gantz, U.S. State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller helpfully distilled decades of U.S. foreign policy failure into a single quote: 

We’re also going to have to defeat the ideology behind Hamas and that is not something that can be accomplished on the battlefield. It’s something that we have learned in the United States in our long history with counterterrorism. … Ultimately you have to beat that idea with a better idea—a broader political resolution that will address the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.

Right—just like how we expelled ISIS from Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, with “better ideas.” 

→Speaking of which, here’s how the aid delivery is going without the IDF security detail:

 On X, @imshin shares a TikTok from a Gaza civilian who explains, “Here, the people who don’t need the aid are the ones who receive it. And the people who need it, don’t see it, they don’t even know anything about it.”

→The New York Times reports that Donald Trump met with Elon Musk in Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday, part of the former president’s search for new major donors to shore up his 2024 campaign. According to the paper, “It’s not yet clear whether Mr. Musk plans to spend any of his fortune on Mr. Trump’s behalf. But his recent social media posts suggest he thinks it’s essential that Mr. Biden be defeated in November—and people who have spoken to Mr. Musk privately confirmed that is indeed his view.” In a Wednesday X post, Musk said, “I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.”

→With special credit to Smith College President Sarah Willie-LeBreton, here’s our Cringey, Cowardly Email of the Day, sent after the college received reports of mezuzahs being stolen from door frames and swastika graffiti appearing on campus: 

→A seminar organized by the U.K. Foreign Office’s top Middle East research analyst instructed British civil servants that Israel is a “white, settler colonialist nation,” that calling Hamas terrorists is “an obstacle to peace,” and that there is “no future without Hamas,” The Jewish Chronicle reports. The seminar, titled “Israel/Gaza: What’s Next for Hamas” and co-hosted by four academics, took place last Wednesday and was attended by roughly 100 British government officials. According to attendees, the hosts also described Oct. 7 as “resistance” to “occupation” and, when pressed about the Israeli hostages, said that Palestinian security prisoners were “hostages, too.” The academics had previously submitted a paper to the House of Commons arguing that Britain’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization had helped “create the conditions” for Oct. 7 and that the U.K. government could be “complicit in war crimes committed during Israel’s punitive war on Gaza, including potentially the charge of genocide.” In a statement, a Foreign Office spokesman said that “many of the views expressed by the academics in the seminar were wrong and contrary to the government’s position.”

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

A Life Held Hostage, by Tamara Berens

Sagui Dekel-Chen was taken by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7. Without him, a family, a community, a country, is incomplete.

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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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Peace Is Written With a Swastika

On the signs and symbols of Jew-hatred that defined me

By Eduardo Halfon

There was a kid in my third-grade class, in Guatemala, who flippantly called the few Jewish boys Israel, and the few Jewish girls Sara. To him, I was no longer Eduardo, but Israel.

Although I knew that his was an antisemitic taunt, I was still too young to fully grasp its meaning. It took me years to understand that the boy had copied it from the Germans (and probably, as I’d later find out, learned it from his father or grandfather). Specifically, that this very practice had been a law in Nazi Germany: the second article of the Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names, established in 1938, which officially gave the name Israel to any Jewish man with a non-Jewish first name (there was, of course, an authorized list), and officially gave the name Sara to any Jewish woman with a non-Jewish first name.

Israel and Sara. An entire people reduced to two names.

***

The boy’s name was Franz Peter. Or maybe it was Peter Franz. Be that as it may, he was much taller and stouter than me, and had hair so white and skin so fair that sometimes, in the sun, he gave the impression of suffering from albinism. We lived in the same neighborhood of Guatemala City, rode the same bus to and from school. One afternoon, sometime in the late 1970s, we met by chance out on the street, both of us on our bikes, and Franz asked me if I wanted to come see his magazine collection. We arrived at his house in no time at all (I’d been there only once before, invited to one of his birthday parties, at the end of which all of us kids received a live chick as a parting gift). We left our bikes lying on the front lawn and went inside. But as soon as I started climbing the wide ostentatious staircase and saw the antique silver and wooden crucifix hanging on the wall, I felt like an intruder.

Franz locked his bedroom door. He got down on his knees, reached under the mattress, and pulled out an old beekeeper’s suit; I don’t remember how he got it, or maybe he never told me (it was possibly stolen). Then, with his head already tucked inside the white veil, he reached under the mattress again and pulled out a flimsy cardboard box and started showing me magazines. Almost all of them were about soccer, though there were also two or three comic books and a more scientific publication with pictures of naked women from some Amazonian tribe. But suddenly Franz put his hand inside the cardboard box and reached for a thinner, smaller magazine, perhaps half-letter size, with a cream-colored cover and black lettering and with the other pages rustically tied together using a string of yarn, and he began talking to me about the pamphlet he was holding like a treasure in his hands. From the tone of his voice, now sharper and more excited, I understood that that old and well-hidden pamphlet was the main reason why he’d invited me to his house. Franz, still disguised as a beekeeper, kept talking to me—he was now saying something about his grandfather and his father—and I was still trying to decipher the image on the cover. In the center, there was one word composed of three thick black letters placed in the middle of an imperfect, trapezoidlike square with an equally thick black border. But the word made no sense to me. Pax, it seemed to say, though not quite. It took me a few seconds to finally understand that one of the letters—the third one—was not a letter but a symbol, and that at the bottom of the cover, just below the black and imperfect square, there was a single short phrase in smaller capital letters.

Paz se escribe con swastika, it said in Spanish. Peace is written with a swastika.

***

I had forgotten that pamphlet, and I had also forgotten that afternoon at the home of the beekeeper Franz Peter or Peter Franz—until a few years ago.

While in New Orleans, a professor from Tulane University invited me to visit the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, whose fourth floor houses an extensive collection of Latin American books and historical documents. After a couple of hours of purposeless prying around, happily lost among the stacks and cabinets, we found a bundle of magazines and documents published in Guatemala in 1939 by the Official Information Service of the German Legion. And there, in that bundle, I again saw the same pamphlet barely held together with yarn. The same black swastika instead of the Z.

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A Spanish journalist once asked me to name him the unread books that had influenced me most as a writer. What were the books that I had never read, the Spanish journalist asked me again, so as to be clear, which had influenced me most as a writer? A ludicrous question, I thought, but I then thought it was also a brilliant question. And sitting in front of the Spanish journalist, I immediately knew my answer: the Torah and the Popol Vuh. I’ve never read either of them, but there are no two books that, as a man and as a writer, have influenced me more.

When I mentioned to a friend this bizarre question-and-answer exchange with the Spanish journalist, she asked me why I didn’t just read both books now? Why did I still doggedly insist on not reading them? And I told her, with as much gravitas as I could muster, that if I did read them now I’d undoubtedly explode.

The truth, however, is that I don’t feel I need to. I already carry both of them with me, written somewhere inside me. The book of the Jews and the book of the Guatemalans, if I’m allowed that oversimplification, and if I can call books those two monumental works that represent and define my two worlds—the two great columns upon which my house is built. But a house that for some reason, ever since childhood, I needed to destroy or at least abandon. I can’t explain why I always felt that way, as if something was forcing me to run off and disappear.

I’ve spent an entire lifetime running away from home.

***

My father parked his fire-red Datsun 280 under a huge and lonely palm tree lost in the middle of a parking lot somewhere in Guatemala City. My brother, desperate in the cramped back seat, kept rushing me and kicking me from behind, and so I opened the door and got out of the car.

It was Sunday, still very early in the morning. My father was already standing behind the Datsun, taking his things out of the trunk. He said something to my brother and me as he closed it and the three of us started walking silently toward the entrance, my brother on one side of my father and I on the other.

The only sounds at that hour of the morning were the shrieking din of a flock of parakeets up in the palm tree and the clinking of my father’s clubs in the golf bag and the metallic scraping of his cleats on the dry pebbles. Without realizing it, I started walking faster, if not running, but my father shouted at me from behind and so I had to stop and wait for them. I was too excited. It was my first time there. It was the first time my father had brought us with him. The three of us continued walking together and it took us what seemed like an eternity to cross the parking lot. But in the final stretch toward the front door of the clubhouse, already on a narrow asphalt path, it was my father who now accelerated his steps (or at least that’s how I remember it, as if he was escaping from something or rather escaping toward something). I had remained behind them, alone, still on the asphalt path, my gaze downward. My father ordered me too firmly to hurry up, holding the door open and waiting for me to enter. My brother echoed my father, standing beside him. But I ignored them. I had only recently learned to read capital letters and I still stopped at any sign or lettering to practice. My father again shouted something at me, but I just kept trying to decipher the big black letters on the white background of a sign driven into the grass just off the asphalt path, until I finally managed to read the full sentence.

Se prohíbe la entrada a perros y judíos.

No Dogs or Jews Allowed.

I turned to my father, asking for help, but he just told me it was nothing and grabbed my hand awkwardly and pulled me tight and the three of us entered where we were not allowed to enter.

***

Today I find it hard to believe that I ever really saw that sign.

I know that I was shown the hidden swastika in the privacy of the bedroom of Franz the beekeeper, who openly and not-so-jokingly called me Israel. But it’s difficult for me to accept, albeit naïvely, that such an antisemitic sign could still be displayed in public in the Guatemala of the late 1970s. It occurs to me that maybe I never saw it that one Sunday morning with my father and brother and I only have the image of the sign created in my imagination from my father’s telling me of it, from my father’s voice? Maybe it was he, an avid golfer, who described it to me and thus left it tucked away in the secret vault of my memory? I recently mentioned the sign to my father, and he replied almost angrily that he didn’t remember anything. He didn’t remember going with us to the golf club on a Sunday morning, and he didn’t remember telling me about the sign, and he didn’t remember there even being a sign in the golf club’s front lawn.

Do I remember it better than my father, then? Or did my childish imagination invent an entire scene—complete with a fire-red sports car and the metallic sound of cleats on stony pebbles and the hysterical screams of a flock of parakeets—from the mere idea of a sign? Had that sign just existed in my mind? Is the imagination so bold and capricious that it can invent a memory and then turn it into something we perceive as real? In any case, it doesn’t much matter. The sign existed. I saw it or I imagined it, which for a child is the same thing.

I can still see me standing there that Sunday morning and reading the black, all-caps sentence written on the sign and immediately understanding that for the members of that club, and for some if not all of my fellow Guatemalans, there was no difference between me and a dog.

I must have been 6 or 7 years old when I found out that the sign existed, either because I saw it along with my father and brother on a cold Sunday morning, or because my father described it to me one day that he now no longer remembers. And since then I’ve never been able to forget it. Not so much due to the sign itself, but to the feeling of rupture that it left inside me. From that moment on—from that one black, hateful sentence—my two worlds became forever separated, and I was outcast from both of them.