May 19: ‘Gideon’s Chariots’ Begins

Iran nuclear talks stall over enrichment; Qatar's conservative influence play; Lee Smith remembers Michael Ledeen

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The Big Story

Following the end of President Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East and the collapse of the latest round of hostage negotiations in Doha, Israel is following through on its threats of a new major offensive in Gaza, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots.” On Sunday, the IDF announced that it had begun a “broad ground operation throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip” intended to “increase and expand our operational control in Gaza.” Other statements from IDF officials and Israeli political leaders have suggested the ultimate purpose of the new offensive is to “seize” and “retain” key areas of Gaza with the ultimate goal of defeating Hamas and “conquering” the territory—though officials, including IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, have also said that Israel remains open to a deal that would secure the release of some of the hostages.

The below graphic, published by the UK newspaper The Sunday Times and reportedly based on leaked IDF documents, suggests that the immediate goal of the new offensive is to split Gaza into three civilian zones, separated by IDF-occupied corridors that would control the movement of Palestinians along the strip’s north-south axis:

If true, this would help contextualize the other big piece of Gaza news from the weekend, which is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved the delivery of a “basic quantity of food” into Gaza to “enable the expansion of intense fighting to defeat Hamas.” Militarily, the move makes no sense, because Hamas relies on the confiscation and reselling of aid, including food, to generate cash to fund its operations, as The Wall Street Journal confirmed in a report in April. Politically, however, it seems clear that Netanyahu judged the move necessary to secure continued U.S. support. Late last week, for instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States was “troubled” by the humanitarian situation in Gaza, while Trump mentioned during his Middle East trip that people there were “starving.” In his remarks justifying the resumption of aid, Netanyahu said that pressure over the aid issue was approaching a “red line” and that even pro-Israel U.S. senators were telling him, “We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war … but we can’t be receiving pictures of famine.”

The prime minister’s office said that “Israel will act to deny Hamas the ability to seize control of the distribution of humanitarian aid in order to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas terrorists.” Previous efforts to do so have failed, of course, but the new plan appears to be to work with the United States (via U.S. companies and security contractors) to hand out the aid at IDF-controlled distribution points, thereby cutting Hamas out of the equation. That should, in theory, be easier to accomplish if the IDF does indeed occupy large swathes of the strip and establish control over Palestinian movement throughout Gaza, per the above plan, though it also risks granting Washington additional leverage over Israeli decision-making by increasing its entanglement in aid delivery; you can imagine how the Tucker-Don Jr. vertical might respond to U.S. security contractors getting killed in an ambush.

By the same token, the United States’ direct involvement in aid-delivery mechanisms meant to bypass the United Nations cuts against the idea, popular in certain quarters, that the renewed offensive represents a unilateral Israeli action in defiance of the Trump administration’s wishes. For instance, an unnamed “source”—likely Israeli, though it’s not quite clear from the report—told The Washington Post Monday that “Trump’s people are letting Israel know, ‘We will abandon you if you do not end this war,’” while someone in the administration leaked to Axios that Vice President J.D. Vance had decided against a trip to Israel out of concern that it would be “perceived … as validation for Israel’s expanded operation.” Both outlets, of course, have been favored destinations for leaks from the “restrainer” wing of the administration, though these leaks have generally countersignaled administration policy—not reflected it.

Would Trump prefer an end to the war? In all likelihood, yes. And it’s not hard for us to believe the president asked Netanyahu to allow more aid to Gaza. But that is not the same as saying that Trump is going to color-revolution Bibi or “abandon” Israel if the cease-fire talks led by Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff don’t pan out in the near term. Even Witkoff told Arab mediators last week that the United States has no plans to force Israel to wrap up the war, according to a Thursday report in The Times of Israel. Trump himself, asked by Bret Baier if he was “frustrated at all” with Netanyahu, answered, “No. Look, he’s got a tough situation. You have to remember there was an Oct. 7 that everyone forgets.”

—Park MacDougald

IN THE BACK PAGES: Lee Smith remembers Michael Ledeen, who passed away on Sunday

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The Rest

→Could it actually be time for Israel to end the war? Some pro-Israel voices in the United States have floated the idea that Israel’s recent assassinations of Gazan military leaders—including Hamas’ de facto Gaza commander, Mohammed Sinwar, and the commander of its Khan Younis battalion, Mehdi Kawareh—offer it a chance to end the fighting on its terms. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for instance, wrote on X on Sunday that “I believe now is the right time for Israel to pursue an agreement to end the war,” citing the Israeli public’s growing war weariness and the need to prepare for potential military action against Iran. Schanzer doesn’t say it outright, but we suspect he’s also thinking that ending the war would buy the Israelis credit with the Trump administration. But if the goal is to defeat Hamas, then now is precisely the wrong time to wrap things up, as the analyst “Dan Linnaeus” explains on X:

→Iran nuclear talks, meanwhile, appear to be hitting an impasse. In an interview on ABC’s This Week, Witkoff again repeated that the Trump administration’s “red line” was uranium enrichment. “We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability,” Witkoff said, explaining that any enrichment capacity “leads to nuclear weapons.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated the zero-enrichment position in a press conference on Monday. The Iranians, for their part, have spent the past few days publicly lashing out over what seems to be a hardening U.S. negotiating posture. On Saturday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denounced Trump as a “liar” and said that his remarks in Saudi Arabia were “a source of shame for the American people.” On Monday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry accused Washington of having “a lack of seriousness and goodwill” in negotiations, while Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, in response to Witkoff’s remarks, “No matter how many times they repeat it, our position will not change. Our stance is clear: we will continue enrichment.”

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→Qatar has ramped up its efforts to influence conservative media following Trump’s election, according to a recent investigation by Robert Schmad in the Washington Examiner. The paper’s review of lobbying disclosures revealed that between Jan. 1, 2024, and election day, “just over 10% of communications sent by Qatari foreign agents to the media were directed to conservative outlets or commenters,” but that since the election, more than half of Qatari outreach efforts have been directed at right-wing outlets, including Tucker Carlson Network, Just The News, Fox News Digital, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and the Washington Examiner. The records show only attempted outreach, not whether the outreach was successful. But Schmad reports that at least two outlets, Fox News and the New York Post, ran stories painting Qatar in a positive light shortly after being contacted by one of the registered foreign agents on the list, GRV Strategies. As we noted earlier this month, GRV Strategies is the lobbying firm of Garrett R. Ventry, a powerful Republican operative and former “representative” of Omeed Malik—Donald Trump Jr.’s business partner in 1789 Capital, the venture capital firm backing Tucker Carlson Network, and Executive Branch, a Washington, D.C., private club with a $500,000 membership fee.

Read the rest here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/investigations/3414894/conservative-media-targeted-qatari-foreign-influence-operations/

→In what should come as a surprise to exactly zero readers of The Scroll, the Examiner story also revealed that Tucker Carlson’s March interview with the Qatari prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, was facilitated by a “legal consulting” firm called Lumen8 Advisors LLC, which receives $180,000 per month from the Qatari Embassy. Here’s the relevant portion of Lumen8’s Foreign Agent Registration Act filing, which Eitan Fischberger posted on X:

The filing was signed by Rebecca Diaz-Bonilla, who describes herself on her website as an “international communications consultant.” Her husband, Mariano Diaz-Bonilla, formerly worked at Goldman Sachs and at Skanska, a global construction company, and lists Lumen8 Advisors LLC as his affiliation on the website of Thomas Aquinas College, a conservative Catholic private college where he is a member of the Board of Governors.

→NBC News reported on Friday that the Trump administration is in discussions to relocate 1 million Palestinians to Libya in exchange for the United States unfreezing billions of dollars in Libyan funds. The report cites “five people with knowledge of the efforts,” though after the report was published, a State Department spokesperson told the outlet that the report was “untrue” and that “such a plan was not discussed and makes no sense.” So our best guess is that the talks are taking place, somewhere, at some level, but haven’t risen to the level where they can be acknowledged officially. Which means that the most likely outcome of these talks is nothing. But hey, Trump did say last week in Qatar that the United States should “take” Gaza and turn it into a “freedom zone.” So at least somebody—maybe somebody in Libya—is taking the president’s plan seriously.

→Quote of the Day:

In some of these cases, the “there” you’re looking for is not there.

That was FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino in a Sunday interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, discussing the investigations into the two assassination attempts last year against then-candidate Donald Trump. Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel, who also sat for the interview, declined to discuss the second assassination attempt, given that the suspect, Ryan Routh, is still living and actively under prosecution. But Bongino effectively confirmed that there was no wider plot or conspiracy surrounding the first assassination attempt, by Thomas Matthew Crooks, in Butler, Pennsylvania. “It’s not there,” Bongino said. “If it was there, we would have told you.” Bongino also said, in the same interview, that Jeffrey Epstein had—contrary to widespread speculation—“killed himself.”

→Former President Joe Biden, 82, has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form of prostate cancer” that has “spread to his bones,” CBS reports, citing a statement issued by the Biden family. In the statement, the family said the cancer had a score of 9 on the Gleason scale—a 1-10 scale, with 10 denoting the most aggressive form—and was Stage 4, meaning it had spread beyond Biden’s prostate. Cancer experts cited in the CBS report and in The New York Times were upbeat about Biden’s treatment prospects, though the latter outlet noted in an aside that the cancer, having spread to the bones, is now “uncurable.” Scott Adams, the right-wing commentator and creator of the comic strip Dilbert, announced on his show Sunday that he has the same cancer as Biden—i.e. Stage 4 prostate cancer—and that he expects “to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”

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Michael Ledeen, 1941-2025

by Lee Smith

Michael Ledeen died Sunday at the age of 83 after a long illness. He was a scholar and author of dozens of books on subjects ranging from communism and fascism to the Middle East and Italy. He loved Italy, Naples in particular, which he saw as something like the heart of the world, full of life, chaos, and excellent food.

He first invited me to lunch at Tiramisu, one of his favorite spots, just off Dupont Circle, sometime after I’d just come to Washington. I wanted to ask him questions—lots of people went to Michael with questions about things, contemporary or ancient, American or foreign, sacred or profane. Sometimes it seemed like he knew everything you wanted to know about anything—Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, the opposition to the Iranian regime, the landscape of Mantua, the Latin poet Virgil’s hometown. And so, from the start, I loved spending time with Michael because he made himself available to questions.

That may sound strange, but people who’ve spent time in Washington know that very few people in Washington answer questions—who knows what you might be giving away? And to be fair, there aren’t too many people who really ask questions. Not even journalists, because to be seen as not knowing something is an evident vulnerability. So, as often as not, a Washington lunch is two people not really talking. When I got to spend time with Michael, it was me asking him questions. And I reckoned it a great gift.

He worked as a political adviser in key U.S. institutions at crucial times in our history, but to my mind he was primarily a writer, someone who comes to understand a thing by speaking with people for the purpose of explaining it to others. He spoke with the dead, too—he asked them questions. He wrote an ongoing series of columns in which he summoned the ghost of the CIA’s famous counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton and asked him to illuminate contemporary events. (Here’s one where he asked the Cold War giant what he thought of Israel’s 2009 Gaza campaign.)

I want to say that his death marks the end of one era of American greatness—the broad-chested and quick-witted Reagan-style of big American life and talk and romance—but he isn’t really gone because I’m thinking all the time about the about what he wrote or said or a question he answered for me. For instance, on Saturday, the day before he died, I was remembering the time at lunch at Tiramisu we’d gotten into a long conversation about antisemitism and out of exasperation I said something to the effect of, “I don’t get it, what drives it, what’s driven it for so long?” And he said, “but that’s the point—nothing motivates antisemitism, there is no reason for it. It’s irrational. It’s a form of madness”

We call the man who helps us understand things like that—about madness and history and reason and duty—a mentor, but what is that? In the Odyssey, Telemachus seeks counsel from his father’s friend, Mentor, about his father’s fate. In other words, he wants to know where he has come from and where he must go to live a meaningful life. Michael Ledeen helped many, including me, to ask those questions. May he always stand as an example for those asking what it means to live a meaningful life, like his.