May 12: Will Trump Knife Israel?

PLUS: Alana Newhouse on why you are not the media

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Dear Scroll Readers,

If you consume the news at all these days it’s likely that most of what you see on a daily basis is bullshit. Some of it pretty obviously so. When one prominent former cable TV host tells another that he called the Israeli government to demand an end to attacks on him by American Twitter users, you probably know that’s bullshit without us needing to tell you—not least because, if you’ve been reading The Scroll, you know the idea the Israelis could direct a successful campaign on American social media is bullshit on par with “Joe Biden is as sharp as a tack behind closed doors.”

Sometimes the bullshit isn’t quite so obvious. Sometimes it’s a story—“reported” and “fact-checked” by Pulitzer-winning newspapers—in which the facts are true but presented so as to create an impression that is mostly if not entirely false. Sometimes it’s an utterly trivial story hyped as an event of world-historical importance, or an important story dismissed as the preserve of cranks or simply ignored altogether. Sometimes it’s “news” that is in fact a foreign information operation, or a domestic information operation, or a domestic information operation disguised as news about a foreign information operation (hello, Russiagate). Sometimes it will be a fake story from the left that shadowy Zionist financiers are trying to drag the United States into another war. Sometimes it will be a fake story from the right that shadowy Zionist financiers are trying to drag the United States into another war. Social media is not much better at the best of times, and lately, it’s been getting worse and worse.

The point of The Scroll, according to our internal strategy document, is to give you, our readers, “a skeptical and discerning account of world events delivered by writers who they specifically expect to filter out overhyped media bullshit, expose the material interests and power politics behind PR language and ideological posturing, and cut through to underlying realities.” Another way of saying this is that it’s our job to cut through the bullshit—without fear or favor, as the old adage goes. Which means, specifically, that it’s not your job. Sure, some of you want to spend hours sifting through everything that’s reported in a day and making sense of the daily deluge of memes, propaganda, and social media meta-commentary in order to figure out what’s real. But for many of you, that sounds like a recipe for going insane. “You are not the media,” as Tablet Editor Alana Newhouse writes. We’re the media, which means we mediate between you and the world at large.

As you may have heard, starting June 1, Tablet will be relaunching as a subscription-based product. Subscribers will receive a gorgeous, monthly print magazine, edited by the Tablet team you've known for 16 years, plus some brilliant new additions. Your subscription will also grant you access to our premium digital content, including an enhanced version of The Scroll, which will be migrating on June 1 from Substack to the Tablet website. The Scroll will still be a newsletter, however, meaning that if you sign up, it will still be delivered every day to your email inbox just like before.

Until June 1, existing Scroll readers who subscribe will receive one free gift subscription to share with someone else (link HERE). In addition, you can use the discount code CHAITABLET to receive 18% off the price of your annual subscription.

We won’t be changing anything about our approach to cutting through the shit and telling you what matters. The only difference is, now we’ll be asking you to pay.

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The Big Story

For those of us who hoped that Donald Trump’s election would herald a return to the successful Middle East policy of his first term, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. The sky hasn’t fallen, exactly, but there’s been a steady drip of concerning news from in and around the White House suggesting the president is inclined to listen to those of his close advisors and family members who apparently see his first term as a record of failure and “neocon” sabotage. Much remains unknown, media reports are often unreliable, and hysteria usually doesn’t age well, so read any hot takes with an appropriate grain of salt. But the news hasn’t looked good, and it’s tended to look worse and worse by the day.

For instance, here are a few of the big storylines since our last full edition on Wednesday:

• On Sunday, Hamas agreed to release the Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander as a “goodwill gesture” ahead of Trump’s trip to the Middle East—the result of what appears to have been a side deal negotiated between the United States and Hamas, without Israeli involvement. Obviously, it’s a good thing that (a) that Alexander is now free and (b) that Israel didn’t have to release any security prisoners to get him. What we can’t say for sure right now is what the diplomatic implications of the deal will be. What seems clear is that Hamas, either at the request of Qatar or under Qatari pressure, consented to Alexander’s release in a bid to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States and to increase pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to consent to a cease-fire…

• …which is apparently how the gesture was sold to Hamas. The Times of Israel reports that a “non-governmental individual” acting as an intermediary between Hamas and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told “the terror group that the move would go a long way with the Trump administration and potentially open the door to Washington coaxing Israel to agree to a deal that would bring about an end to the war in Gaza in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages.”

• True to form, Witkoff revived an old Biden administration canard by telling Israeli hostage families that Netanyahu was pointlessly “prolonging the war,” according to a weekend report from Israel’s Channel 12.

• Also on Sunday, reports emerged that Trump—technically, the Department of Defense—was preparing to accept a $400 million Boeing 747 as a “gift” from Qatar, which Trump promptly confirmed on Sunday night in a Truth Social post and then again in a press conference on Monday morning. The jet, according to multiple press reports, will be used as Air Force One—Trump has long griped about Boeing’s inability to deliver him a new plane on time—and then will have its ownership transferred to the Trump Presidential Library at the end of his term, which would effectively make it a gift for Trump’s personal use. According to ABC News, Attorney General Pam Bondi—who received $115,000 per month to lobby for Qatar from 2020 to 2022—provided a “legal memorandum” to support the legality of the arrangement. The value of the jet, as Tablet’s Alana Newhouse observed on X, is about four times what the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC (which is not a foreign government), spent on the 2024 election, and that’s not even counting the more than $600 million that Qatar paid to Witkoff for the Park Lane Hotel in New York City, nor the other Qatari deals with the Trump organization and Trump family.

• In a Saturday interview with Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle, Witkoff slammed the “neocon element” that “believes that war is the only way to solve things,” one again aligning himself with the Tucker Carlson faction for whom “neocon” plainly means “Jew.” On the (moderately) more positive side, Witkoff—who had previously floated reviving the 3.67% enrichment limits of the Obama Iran deal—said in the same interview that “an enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again. That’s our red line.” Still, Trump said Monday, following the start of the latest round of U.S.-Iranian talks in Oman, that Iran has been very “reasonable” and “intelligent” in the talks so far, and Witkoff clarified over the weekend that Iran’s support for its terrorist proxies was a “secondary” issue.

• Late last week, Reuters reported that the United States had dropped its demand that Saudi Arabia normalize diplomatic relations with Israel as a precondition for U.S. approval of a Saudi civil nuclear program. That news was met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Israel and pro-Israel circles in the United States, despite the linkage of the two issues being a pre-Oct. 7 Biden administration innovation designed to wring concessions on the Palestinians out of Jerusalem.

There’s even more we could go into (i.e., the Houthi cease-fire, the incorporation of openly antisemitic social media influencers into a de facto administration comms shop), plus a whole host of single-source or unconfirmed reports in the Israeli and Arab press about the cratering Trump-Bibi relationship, Trump’s intention to recognize a Palestinian state, or whatever. Most of the latter, we assume, are either official disinformation from Arab government sources or misleading leaks from the Israeli opposition as part of the never-ending campaign to oust Bibi. But the overall impression is still clear enough, which is that Trump is willing to twist the Israelis’ arms, diplomatically go behind their backs and above their heads, and allow his subordinates to run them down in the establishment press, while allied “influencers” justify the policy with crude Jew-baiting on social media.

Indeed, by Sunday, things were looking sufficiently bleak that Netanyahu told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that “I think we will need to wean ourselves off American military aid,” according to a report in Maariv. Which is a good idea, as we’ve argued at Tablet for years. But if Bibi is serious about it, he probably should have floated during his latest meeting at the Oval Office, as Rod Sales points out on X.

In essence, the question is: Is it time to hit the panic button? One foreign-policy analyst we spoke to said yes, definitely:

People need to understand that there are no necessary limits to how far Trump will go. If Biden had done the shit Trump has been doing, the right would be up in arms. It’s literally the same shit. And Bibi saying it’s time to reconsider U.S. military aid shows how far this has gone.

Trump is doing an Iran deal, a Saudi deal, and a Hamas deal while making Qatar the official supplier to the Trump Royal Court—basically rebuilding a new version of the traditional American alliance structure in the region, minus Israel.

Bibi gets it now. The big question will be what he does after Trump’s visit is over. Namely, does he invade Gaza in force and hit Iran, or not?

On the other hand, at least some of the “bad news” is not as bad as it might look. For instance, Tablet News Editor Tony Badran told us that the demise of the Saudi-Israel deal is “good news,” despite what some in Jerusalem may be saying. “The Saudis aren’t interested,” Badran says, “and the Israelis don’t need it. If the price of admission is ‘the Palestinians,’ which is Obama policy, then the proper response is ‘No, thank you’—especially since, until further notice, it remains the president’s policy that Gazans should be removed from Gaza and relocated elsewhere.” (One could say something similar about Trump’s offer to mediate between Turkey and Israel in Syria—a good idea that has prompted considerable grumbling from the Israelis.)

But whether things are terrible or merely not great, the analyst is correct that the ball is now in Bibi’s court. Netanyahu did an excellent job managing the Biden administration’s pressure, but he has thus far been unable to adapt to a Trump administration that is clearly not behaving in the way he hoped it would. A Monday report by Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov, for instance, cited U.S. and Israeli sources who said the reports of a “rift” were exaggerated, but also noted that Jerusalem had developed something of an optics problem in Trumpworld:

A Trump administration source said the relationship remains positive and close, but also criticized Israel for not adapting to the president’s transactional approach to foreign policy. Gulf states are likely to announce major investments in the U.S. during Trump’s visit, while Israel has largely been asking the administration for help. Jerusalem could be putting a greater emphasis on jobs created by U.S.-Israel cooperation in the defense and technological sectors when they speak with Trump, the source suggested.

Not a good look for the man who complains constantly that the United States is getting “ripped off.”

Indeed, the prime minister who pulled off a series of brilliant coups under Biden—effectively reshaping the strategic landscape of the Middle East—now appears to be paralyzed. “Israel’s leadership has put itself in a weak, reactive posture since Trump won the election,” Jacob Siegel wrote in an email to The Scroll. “Instead of capitalizing on the U.S. regime change by taking independent action to set conditions in Gaza or vis-à-vis Iran, the Netanyahu administration has spent its time trying to parse every new Trump statement and then litigate them through the press. As a result, the Israelis look like whiny supplicants with their hands out.”

No doubt the Israelis hope, as we do, that Trump will come to his senses, return the Qatari jet, repudiate those in his circle who favor Obamaism from the right, and curb the worst impulses of his idiot son. But they would be fools to bet on it. As Siegel goes on to say, “The more Israel asks for from the Trump administration, the more it will handcuff itself. The alternative is to publicly support Trump initiatives and carry out the kind of strategic operations, like the one targeting Hezbollah’s leadership, that the Israelis excel at.”

In other words, don’t ask for the king’s permission and then sulk when it turns out you’re not his favorite courtier anymore. Just do what you need to do. If you act like an American dependency, on the other hand, you can eventually expect to be treated like one.

—Park MacDougald

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You Are Not the Media

And that’s good news

by Alana Newhouse

More than a decade ago, I gave a speech in Cleveland. During the Q&A, a man in the back asked me what I thought of the then-emerging Iran deal, and I hemmed and hawed my way through a bullshit answer that said nothing. As I was leaving, he approached me. “Listen,” he said firmly. “I’m a dentist. It’s my job to wake up in the morning and fix people’s teeth. It’s your job to tell me what to think about the Iran deal or Greenpeace or whatever. If my patient’s teeth end up falling out of their mouth, they’ll find another dentist. If your ideas about the world don’t help me better understand and navigate it, I’ll find another magazine. But that’s your job, and you have to do it.”

I thought about my dentist friend the day after Trump’s reelection, when Elon Musk posted on X, “You are the media now.” It isn’t the richest man in the world’s most liked post—that honor still belongs to 2022’s “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in”—but, with 1.2 million likes and 107 million views, it’s up there.

I wouldn’t enter a rocket-making competition against Musk or a baby-making one or a who-can-survive-on-less-sleep contest. He’s even been to Auschwitz more recently than I have. In fact, this isn’t about him at all. This is about you, and making sure you haven’t been confused by recent events.

You are not the media.

Thankfully, neither are the people who had been for decades. Those individuals and outlets—newspaper, magazine, and television brands that collectively controlled public opinion for decades—have been dethroned, and not a minute too soon.

So, who is the media now? Are we all meant to sit on X all day looking at videos from the latest hurricane to know whether we like our president or not? Is it now your responsibility to curate your TikTok feed so you can know what to think about taxes? Social media is a miracle, but when it comes to enlightenment, it turns out that you get what you pay for. In exchange for their zero dollars, Americans have been dropped—gradually, and then seemingly all at once—into an ocean of free propaganda and mental confusion.

You are not the media, because the media’s job is to mediate, which in this case means forming a usable and trustworthy connection between people and the world at large. Doing that for yourself is like being one's own therapist; it just doesn’t work. And while your ability to see that world more directly through your phone certainly tweaks the old definition of our profession, it doesn’t undo it. If anything, between government-sponsored spin, social media engagement farming, and deep fakes, there’s an even greater need for people whose job it is to wake up every day and tell you the truth—and before it’s too late for you to do anything about it.

For 16 years, Tablet’s central feature has been our ability to observe the world clearly—a skill that gave us a spooky ability to see around corners, which was especially useful as legacy outlets proved uninterested in acknowledging, let alone interpreting, obvious realities that people could see with their own eyes. We then took advantage of the web’s new instruments of accessibility and speed to bring that foresight to as many people as possible.

But now the internet is dying, in large part because it creates audiences that are broad but shallow—a majority of which these days are bots, driven by AI. On internet platforms, you may indeed feel like the media, but you are mainly its food.

By liberating you from the responsibility of being your own media, we are freeing you up to be something much more important and, frankly, much more radical in this moment: human.