May 16: The ‘Day After’ Scam

U.S. calls for Arab peacekeeping force; Arab League calls for UN peacekeeping force; Government radical resigns from government, cites radicalism

---

---

The Big Story

Yesterday, we briefly touched on Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s public message to Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, in which Gallant ruled out Israeli civilian or military control of postwar Gaza and upbraided the prime minister for his failure to plan for the “day after” in Gaza. Gallant, a career IDF man who clashed with Netanyahu over the latter’s proposed judicial reforms last summer, was clearly speaking for elements of the Israeli security establishment. The Times of Israel reported earlier this week, for instance, that IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi “tore into” Netanyahu over the weekend “for failing to develop and announce a so-called ‘day-after’ strategy,” and that Netanyahu had fought with Shin Bet head Ronen Bar after Bar revealed that he had been holding “strategic deliberations” with Gallant. 

Gallant, in turn, has been in back-channel talks with the White House, as The Washington Post’s David Ignatius revealed in his Wednesday column. Ignatius wrote:  

Biden administration officials say Gallant has taken a larger role in U.S.-Israeli dialogue in recent months, as relations have soured between Netanyahu and President Biden. One U.S. official described Gallant as an “indispensable” problem-solver in the increasingly tense debate about how to end the war in Gaza.

The Ignatius report also quoted several Israeli defense and security officials who said they were already working with their U.S. counterparts to set the stage for a return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. Here’s Ignatius again:

The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, is already assessing possible recruits for a Gaza security force from the more than 8,000 people there who are linked to the Palestinian Authority, Israeli and American officials told me. In going through the names, Israelis are asking “how many are too Hamas, too old or too dead,” one official explained.

Lee Smith explains the American endgame in great detail in today’s Back Pages. But why is Gallant going along with it? We asked Tablet’s geopolitical analyst, who explained via email:

Gallant is a warfighter, not a politician. A big part of his job as Defense Minister is to get along with his U.S. counterpart, Lloyd Austin, in order to keep the munitions flowing. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been holding back key munitions since December, ostensibly because of the lack of an Israeli plan for “the day after” in Gaza. In turn, the lack of U.S. munitions is a key impediment to Gallant’s desire to secure the north of Israel by pushing Hezbollah back in southern Lebanon. 

Given the above, it’s easy to see why Gallant has become frustrated with the absence of the “day after” plan that the Americans say they want so badly. It is also easy to see that Gallant lacks the political sophistication to be prime minister, since the whole idea of Israel being somehow responsible for the welfare of Hamas and its supporters as a consequence of responding to Hamas’ attack is pure blather—and either way, Americans will never approve an Israeli operation in Lebanon. Therefore, in exchange for nothing, Gallant has allowed himself to be used as a human shield for Benny Gantz and his U.S. backers in their plan to unseat Netanyahu—who already distrusts Gallant.

Look for Netanyahu to replace Gallant, who after all was the serving Defense Minister on October 7th. One possible replacement is former General Ofer Winter, who is seen by a large majority of coalition voters as an honest and effective warfighter untainted by October 7th, and whose name was recently floated for the post by Yair Netanyahu. Separating Netanyahu himself from the operational and intelligence failures of October 7th would seem to be smart politics—especially as a prelude to elections, which it seems entirely possible that Netanyahu would win. Because Winter is a favorite of both Bibi’s religious Zionist coalition partners and of Russian secularist political boss Avigdor Lieberman, there could also be other political moves afoot short of new elections.

Tony Badran, meanwhile, explains why talk of political arrangements for the “day after” in Gaza is just that—blather:

Territories like Lebanon and Gaza are not states. They're buffer zones, provinces, pathways for the armies of regional power centers, etc. To believe that Israel’s priority—the condition for the success of its military operation—is to design a political arrangement for how to govern these territories is ridiculous on its face. More to the point, it’s a trap. It’s not just that the administration is using the Obama Syria playbook to hobble Israel’s military operation by demanding they first present a white paper on the “day after.” It’s that this very concept is intended to solidify the administration’s plan, which is to turn Gaza into another Lebanon—a U.S.-managed and -protected special province in a condominium with Iran—and to force regional and international “stakeholders” to underwrite it. That's the definition of “regional integration.”

IN THE BACK PAGES: Lee Smith on why the White House is offering to trade Sinwar for Rafah

---

The Rest

→The United States is holding talks with Arab states about a postwar peacekeeping force in Gaza, according to a report in the Financial Times. The report names Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco as countries “considering” the initiative. Saudi Arabia has already ruled out participation. According to one unnamed Western official, the Arab states insist that the peacekeeping force be U.S.-led … but the Biden administration is not willing to deploy U.S. troops in Gaza. The Arab states have also reportedly demanded that Washington recognize a Palestinian state as a condition of their participation. What, in this arrangement, would Israel get in return? Not much, for the obvious reason that no Arab state is going to allow its troops to be seen shooting at Palestinians to protect Israel. So the plan is—but we repeat ourselves—a version of Lebanon, where international “peacekeepers” serve as de facto human shields for terrorists.

→Separately, but relatedly, the Arab League on Thursday called for the establishment of a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Palestinian territories. In the so-called Manama Declaration, the 22 members of the league called on the United Nations to deploy forces in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem until the establishment of a Palestinian state. The declaration also called on “all Palestinian factions”—including Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad—“to join under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization.” As we reported in Monday’s Big Story, the United States has expressed its tacit approval of ongoing Chinese efforts to broker a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement under the umbrella of the PLO, which Hamas’ leadership has also endorsed as part of its plan to become the local Hezbollah equivalent in a postwar Gaza remodeled along the lines of Lebanon. 

→Stat of the Day: 450,000

That’s how many Palestinians have been “forced to flee” from Rafah since May 6, according to a Wednesday statement from U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development Director Dan Dieckhaus. (UNRWA puts the figure at 600,000.) For months, of course, the United States’ official line was that Israel shouldn’t go into Rafah because it had no “credible” plan to evacuate the civilians there. Now that the civilians are evacuating, the U.S. line is to complain that people are being “forced to flee.” 

→A staffer at the Department of the Interior on Wednesday became the “first Jewish political appointee” (per the Associated Press) to resign over Biden’s “continued support for Israel’s genocide,” in the words of her resignation later. The letter, from Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the department, is a laundry list of NGO Borg buzzwords, citing the discredited statistic of 15,000 dead children, equating the Nakba to the Holocaust, and variously accusing Israel of “genocide,” “apartheid,” “collective punishment,” “ethnic cleansing,” engineering a “famine,” and dumping Palestinians in “mass graves.” (She also claims, in a bid for Jewish authenticity, that her Jewish ancestors changed their names at Ellis Island—which, as we explained in our Jan. 18 edition, is an urban legend that appears to have originated with The Godfather II.)

The AP write-up of Call’s resignation mentions that Call was a “longtime activist and advocate for Israel” prior to joining the government. This appears to be a reference to Call’s ongoing membership in IfNotNow (INN), the Rockefeller- and Tides-funded nonprofit dedicated to ending “American Jewish support for the occupation.” INN has frequently collaborated with Jewish Voice for Peace in anti-Israel protests, including the Nov. 15 riot at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. 

On X, Kyle Shideler explains the game:

→The Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday temporarily suspended EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), the nonprofit at the center of the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 virus’ origins, from receiving federal funds, and opened a disbarment procedure that could see the organization banned from receiving public funding the future. EHA worked with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses and in effect acted as an intermediary between the U.S. government and the WIV, allowing federal research funds to reach the Chinese lab. EHA’s president, Peter Daszak, also played a central role in organizing the effort in early 2020 to discredit the lab-leak theory via a letter published in the influential medical journal The Lancet—which failed to disclose that Daszak himself had been involved in WIV coronavirus research. Subsequent reporting and congressional investigations have revealed that Daszak misled his U.S. government funders about the risky nature of the research he planned to conduct at WIV, the biosafety conditions that this research would be conducted under, and the level of oversight that EHA would exercise over researchers at WIV. An interim staff report from the House Committee on Oversight and Responsibility released earlier this month recommended that the DOJ open a criminal investigation into Daszak for prior false statements to Congress. 

→Hunter Biden’s “sugar brother,” Kevin Morris, is running out of cash. According to a report in Politico, Morris—a wealthy entertainment lawyer who has paid Hunter’s back taxes, purchased his art, and lent Hunter at least $6.5 million since meeting him in 2019 at a Joe Biden campaign event—is “completely tapped out,” in the words of an anonymous “person close to Morris.” CNN reported in October that Hunter had racked up $10 million in legal bills, an amount that has likely increased in the intervening months as Hunter prepares for two trials: one in Delaware on federal gun charges and one in California on federal tax charges. 

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Left’s Campus Protest Scam, by Michael Lind

From Black Lives Matter, to climate change, to the war in Gaza, the demand to hire more identity studies faculty and consultants is a constant

---

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.

---

Sinwar in Exchange for Rafah

Why is the Biden administration dangling the Hamas chief in exchange for stopping the Gaza war? Because the terror group’s survival is key to the administration’s larger project in the Middle East.

by Lee Smith

The Biden team’s offer to trade Yahya Sinwar, the man believed to be the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, for guarantees that the Israeli military stay out of Rafah points to two disturbing truths about the current conflict in the Middle East. The first is that the U.S. knows plenty about what the Hamas terror group is doing and has done. The second is that Washington has been keeping key information—like the terror leader’s whereabouts—from the Israelis, thereby prolonging the war that it claims to decry.

The implications of the administration’s offer, relayed in a recent Washington Post article, has Israelis and U.S. pro-Israel activists livid. Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, for instance, posted on X, “I am shocked and sickened by reports that the U.S. is withholding from Israel vital information on the whereabouts of senior Hamas leaders in Gaza. Is the administration still our ally?”

The Biden administration is making the offer because all its efforts to end Israel’s war have failed and if Rafah falls, Hamas is likely to fall, too. It seems there’s no other way to preserve a pillar of what the White House calls “regional integration”—a euphemism for the U.S.-Iran alliance system that Barack Obama has tried to impose on the Middle East for the last decade.

Leaks that the Biden administration is withholding actionable intelligence on Hamas’ paramount leader in Gaza confirm that, as Tablet reported shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre, the administration had a wealth of intelligence on the terror group and its plans. If U.S. intelligence agencies are confident that they know where Sinwar is squirreled away now, in the chaos of wartime, they also knew what he was doing in the lead-up to the massive attack.

The administration’s efforts to disclaim any foreknowledge of the attack were always absurd. The U.S. has not only its own unrivaled collection of signals intelligence but also significant intelligence channels in Qatar, where Hamas leaders are based; in Lebanon, where Hamas fighters trained under the supervision of Iranian officials; and Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza and allows Hamas to smuggle weapons through the terror group’s extensive tunnel network. Further, detailed open-source reporting, especially in The Wall Street Journal, months prior to the attack showed that top Iranian officials were visiting Lebanon to coordinate major operations with Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.

And yet, according to reports shortly after Oct. 7, there was no evidence U.S. spy services shared with Jerusalem their intelligence on Hamas. The Biden administration rationalized its failures by claiming there was nothing exceptional about its findings, much of which was gathered in areas where the U.S. prevented or discouraged Israeli intelligence from operating. As one U.S. source told the press, “I think what happened is everyone saw these reports and were like, ‘Yeah of course. But we know what this will look like.’” In other words, the Biden administration knew there was something big in the works; the only question is whether it had any indication of the full scope of the Oct. 7 operation.

The Washington Post article is best understood in connection with two recent New York Times articles. The first alleges to explain why Biden lost his patience with Ιsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and turned against Israel—because Rafah was a step too far. The piece describes a Feb. 11 phone call between an “exasperated” U.S. president and Bibi during which “for the first time, the president who had so strongly backed Israel’s war against Hamas was essentially threatening to change course.”

The narrative that the Times report means to push is false. There was no “evolution” of Biden’s position. In reality, the administration has been trying to deter Israel from Day One. Less than 24 hours after the Oct. 7 attack, Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted his support for a cease-fire, before Israel even began its counterstrike.

What the article really shows is how the administration has become increasingly frustrated that its efforts to derail Israel have failed. Starting in the earliest days of the war, Biden helped resupply Hamas by requiring Israel to “surge” fuel, food, and other “aid” into Gaza even while public reporting made it clear that much of the aid was going directly to Hamas, which shoots at Gazan civilians to protect its Biden-sponsored bounty.

As the Israelis prepared to move on Rafah in early February, the White House told Israel to present plans to protect civilians, allow Hamas to control aid convoys, and arrange for moving hundreds of thousands of Gazans out of harm’s way—measures designed to limit Israel’s warfighting capacity while strengthening Hamas’ will and ability to resist. But for Biden, changing the rules of war beyond those ever observed by the U.S. and other Western forces still wasn’t enough. The administration joined Hamas’ propaganda efforts by raising daily alarms about a nonexistent “famine” in Gaza, citing the terror group’s baldly falsified casualty numbers as fact, and threatening Israel with prosecution for war crimes at the International Criminal Court.

Acting as defense counsel and PR firm for an Islamist organization that massacred over 1,200 people and still holds U.S. citizens hostage is psychopathic—or evil, if you prefer—but it wasn’t enough to satisfy the White House. The administration’s latest demand, retailed by Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and other Biden aides, is that Israel must come up with plans for the “Day After”—i.e., must be responsible for how its enemy will conduct its political arrangements after it’s routed. This Biden demand appears to be a variation of Colin Powell’s so-called “Pottery Barn” rule—if a military power breaks a society, it’s obliged to own it.

The most generous reading of Powell’s rule is that the ex-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who served two combat tours in Vietnam, intended to make American policymakers think very hard about using military force. In practice, worrying about how to fix unfixable places cost thousands of American lives and trillions of U.S. dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By seeking to impose the same perverse strategy on Israel, the White House’s intent is to hobble a traditional American ally fighting an existential war on its borders.

U.S. policymakers who have proved repeatedly over the last half century that they are incapable of winning wars now insist that Israel must not win them. “Sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talked about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” State Department official Kurt Campbell said recently. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.” Nonetheless, despite all the administration’s efforts to save Hamas, Israel is winning its war—or else Biden aides and allies wouldn’t be going all out to stop them.

***

In further support of the Biden administration’s program of deterrence, Obama faction oligarchs, like George Soros, Bill Gates, and the Pritzker family, spent millions of dollars funding pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout the United States. These rallies were designed in part to echo the anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel organized by Biden officials and allies, whose goal was first to topple the government and then, after war broke out, to end it leaving Hamas intact.

In America, the purpose of mass demonstrations, still ongoing after several months, is to indicate grassroots support for saving Hamas, and thus frame Biden support for Palestinian terrorists as a response to “public pressure.” If some of the youthful demonstrators appeared to be at odds with the White House—“Genocide Joe,” the protesters chanted—the fact is that their desired outcome was the same as the administration’s. And compared to mobs of frenzied kids calling for spilling Jewish blood “from the river to the sea,” the White House’s efforts to impose a cease-fire indeed seem measured and moderate.

But the propaganda campaign messaging that the dynamic and fearless pro-Palestine youngsters had turned America against the evil Zionists hit a wall with New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Angry to have his patriotism tested by demonstrators replacing the American flag with the banner of a terror enclave, the former policeman learned that outside forces, including foreign governments, were funding the protests. No NYC law enforcement official could afford to tolerate the disruption of the city’s life for months by violent, antisemitic, flag-burning protesters seizing control of bridges, highways, commuter rail terminals, airports, and now universities.

When the NYPD started making arrests at the Columbia, NYU, and CUNY campuses, they found that half of the demonstrators were not students but paid agitators—many of them in their 30s and 40s. In other words, while terrorizing a traditional Democratic Party constituency, middle-class Jews, the protests showed there was in fact no organic support for demanding Israel back off an Ιranian-backed terror group that killed 30 Americans and is holding another five hostage. In fact, according to an April Harvard/Harris poll, support for Israel, which has been waning under a concerted publicity campaign led by the White House in concert with its activist allies, skyrocketed back up to 80% once Americans saw kaffiyeh-clad activists hoisting terror banners and calling for genocide.

Biden’s last instrument of deterrence was to stop supplying arms to Israel, which would at last, presumably, bring Netanyahu to heel. Instead, the Israeli public rallied around the prime minister when he vowed to go into Rafah regardless and finish the job, even if Israelis had to fight with their fingernails.

With the White House all out of sticks, it had no other option but to offer Jerusalem a carrot, Sinwar. After all, Israeli officials swore that the war wouldn’t be over until they had Sinwar in chains or had buried him. By handing over the top terrorist, Biden could end the war and keep the Israelis from going into Rafah.

The second Times article, published Sunday, sourced to U.S. officials and Hamas operatives, shows how Sinwar has become expendable. It presents him as a rogue at odds not only with the Palestinian public but even his own organization. According to the article, “U.S. officials say that Mr. Sinwar has shown disdain for his colleagues outside Gaza, who were not informed about the precise plans for Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7.”

After Oct. 7, the administration was determined to distance Iran from any operational role in the attack. But now Biden officials are claiming that Hamas leaders based in Qatar, like Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal, were also in the dark. Accordingly, compared to Sinwar, Haniyeh and Meshaal are moderates.

“While the outside leadership has at times been more willing to compromise,” a Biden aide told the Times, “Mr. Sinwar is less ready to concede ground to the Israeli negotiators.” Indeed, according to a colleague of Sinwar’s, “other leaders might not have instigated the Oct. 7 attack, preferring to focus on technocratic matters of governance.” The Hamas man continued: “If someone else had been in his position, things might have gone in a calmer way.” As it turns out, the moderates in Hamas didn’t even know about Oct. 7—and surely, they would have done things differently.

Israel’s plans for the “Day After” are clearly irrelevant, since Biden and his aides have formulated their own scenario: Hamas “technocrats”—i.e., the leadership in Doha—will constitute the Iranian-backed component in a Palestinian unity government in tandem with the U.S.-backed faction that now rules the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas, therefore, is a pillar of the U.S.-Iran condominium in the Middle East. This includes Lebanon—where Washington funds the army and intelligence services, which are run by Iran’s asset, Hezbollah—as well as Iraq and Syria, where U.S. forces are deployed to protect Iranian allies and proxies from the regional Sunni majority.

If Israel finishes off Hamas, the Biden administration’s efforts to complete Obama’s Middle East security architecture will collapse. From that perspective, Team Biden prefers to sacrifice Sinwar and save Obama’s most important strategic initiative, which aims to override the traditional U.S.-led order of the Middle East and give birth to a new and unholy anatomy, tying America to an anti-American terror-state that embodies Jew hatred.

The problem for Biden is that he is trying to realize a vision that is fundamentally unstable, not to mention insane. Iran is weak, and so are its proxies—or else the White House wouldn’t have to expend so much energy deterring Israel.

It can hardly be lost on any careful reader of this recent White House information operation that the powers now being attributed to Sinwar belong rather to the American government. Sinwar, writes the Times, “has emerged not only as a strong-willed commander but as a shrewd negotiator who has staved off an Israeli battlefield victory while engaging Israeli envoys at the negotiating table.”

But Sinwar hasn’t been near any negotiating tables; he’s been hiding in tunnels inside Gaza. Rather, it is the White House that has prevented an Israeli victory, and it is Biden aides who have thwarted Jerusalem with their diplomatic entreaties to formulate a plan for feeding Palestinians, moving them to safety, and ensuring their political rights with a plan for the “Day After.” Were it not for Biden’s repeated interventions, Hamas might have been destroyed months ago—and many lives on both sides might have been saved.

The most important takeaway from Biden’s offer of Sinwar in exchange for Rafah is that Barack Obama’s vision of a new Middle East, which the Biden administration has insisted on following, entails tying the U.S. not only to an obscurantist anti-American and Jew-hating terror regime but to a military force and its proxy armies that, like U.S. policymakers, can’t win wars. Like his former boss, Biden is intent on saddling America with a deadly loser. Israel’s decision then isn’t just about whether to take Sinwar or forfeit Rafah, but whether to crash Obama’s project, or to let Hamas survive along with the programmatically apocalyptic delusions of its superpower backer.