May 22: U.S. Meets With Iran to End War, Oust Bibi

Strategic messaging 101; Did Egypt ruin cease-fire talks?; Ireland, Spain, and Norway to recognize Palestine

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The Big Story

A source close to recent U.S.-Iranian talks in Oman claims that the two sides discussed their “shared desire” to topple the current Israeli government and end Israel’s campaign in Gaza, according to a Tuesday report from Middle East Eye’s anonymous Tehran correspondent. 

The talks, led by National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk on the U.S. side and then Deputy Foreign Minister Bagheri Kani on the Iranian side (Kani became acting foreign minister following the death of Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in a helicopter crash on Sunday), “focused on three subjects,” according to the report:

A shared desire for a change in government in Israel; ending Israel’s war on Gaza; and preventing the conflict from spreading elsewhere in the region.

In other words, “regional integration” in action: the United States and Iran deciding together who gets what in the Middle East. 

The report also reveals that McGurk met with Iran’s envoy to the United Nations, Saeid Iravani, prior to the talks in Oman. In that meeting, according to one source, McGurk relayed that President Joe Biden would not begin a new round of talks for a revived nuclear deal until “after the election,” complaining that he (Biden) had faced “too much pressure and humiliation” after the failure of talks in 2022. However, according to the same source, McGurk also quoted Biden as saying that “the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) is dead, and we will negotiate after the elections, provided it is a comprehensive negotiation that goes beyond the JCPOA, covering regional issues as well.”

Given that this account comes from a single anonymous source quoted by an anonymous correspondent, it’s fair to take it with a grain of salt. But the Middle East Eye story fits well with what we’ve observed of the Biden administration’s Israel policy over the past seven months—namely, that the White House’s primary concern is to prevent Oct. 7 and its aftermath from derailing the broader Obama-Biden project for a détente with Iran. Accomplishing this entails preventing Israel, a U.S. “equity,” from destroying Hamas, Iran’s “equity” in Gaza. 

McGurk’s alleged promise that negotiations can resume after the November election also dovetails with statements from National Security Council policy adviser Sterlin Waters, captured on hidden camera in a new Project Veritas sting operation published Tuesday. During what he no doubt believed was a date, Waters, a deputy to Anne Neuberger, the NSC’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and technology, stated that “if Biden won again, he could be much more forthright about saying [to Israel] … ‘You’re not going to continue to lie and bomb and kill all these kids without facing serious consequences.’ But that is a second-term decision bandwidth, not a first term, you know.” 

Waters attributed Biden’s reluctance to more openly break with Israel to the “powerful Jewish influence” in both major parties and a fear that “the powers that be” could “placate [sic] the Biden administration as antisemitic,” causing him to lose in November. Waters mentioned that Biden had already taken a major risk by openly threatening to withhold arms shipments to Israel, which prompted this exchange:

Project Veritas: That was risky, because now Jews will get really, really upset.

Sterlin Waters: In their own communities, they’re hearing, like, “Oh, I’m taking that as America is turning against us,” and no, we [the administration] are supporting human rights as we’ve tried to do for so long. 

Waters also defended the strategy of pretending to support Israel until after the election:

SW: Maybe [Biden] votes with his conscience and possibly lose[s], but if he did that and then Trump won, in the long run, did he actually help?

PV: So he has to keep things quiet for now?

SW: Yep.

Read the Middle East Eye report here. 

And watch the Project Veritas video here. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: The lesson of Oct. 7, argues Eugene Kontorovich, is an ugly one: The more brutal the Palestinian terror, the more support there is for Palestine

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The Rest

→In its decade-long dance with Iran, Team Obama-Biden has perfected the art of “strategic messaging,” described by Tony Badran in Tablet as “allowing cynical or clueless members of [the] administration to strike seemingly contradictory poses” that all serve to advance the same goal. The “strategic messaging” concept can help us make sense of two seemingly contradictory stories sourced to top administration officials that appeared within a few hours of each other on Tuesday evening. 

The first, in The Times of Israel, quoted a “senior administration official” praising Israel’s updated plans for a limited Rafah offensive in place of the full-scale ground invasion initially envisioned by the Israeli leadership. Praising the Israelis’ success in evacuating nearly a million civilians from Rafah, the official suggested (but didn’t confirm) that the Israelis could potentially operate in Rafah in a manner that did not cross the Biden administration’s red lines. As the official told TOI: 

I have to say after coming out of Israel these past couple of days … it is pretty clear that the Israelis are taking [U.S.] concerns seriously.

The same official talked up the White House’s push for a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, promising that Riyadh is “prepared to do an awful lot” in exchange for an Israeli commitment to an eventual Palestinian state. However, to get that deal, Israel must wind down its war. “There are disagreements within the Israeli system on this, which is natural,” the official said—a not-so-subtle hint that the obstacle to a deal is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The second story, “Biden admin openly hammering Israel’s military strategy in Gaza,” which appeared in Politico, delivered precisely the opposite message. Top U.S. officials, Politico reported, “say Israel’s government has failed to hold parts of Gaza after clearing them, has turned the civilian population and the rest of the world against it with widespread bombing and inadequate humanitarian aid, and enabled Hamas to recruit more fighters.” The story quotes U.S. intelligence estimates that Israel has killed 30-35% of Hamas’ fighters and destroyed no more than 35% of the terror group’s tunnel infrastructure, and warns that Israel’s inadequate delivery of humanitarian aid has spread “famine-like conditions” and risked driving “thousands” of new recruits “into Hamas’ arms.” In other words, victory in Gaza is impossible.

Let’s attempt a translation. To the American press, the message is, “These bloodthirsty Israelis won’t listen to us and are ignoring even our impartial and expert military advice in favor of some irrational Old Testament fantasy of revenge.” To the Israeli press, the message is, “We care about you and want to help, but first you’ll have to help yourselves by getting rid of Netanyahu.”

→The Scroll presents Schrödinger’s Iran, a story in two parts:

Part One: 

Intelligence officials have calculated that Tehran does not have full control over its proxy groups in the Middle East, including those responsible for attacking and killing U.S. troops in recent weeks, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

That’s from a Feb. 1 article in Politico, from when the administration needed an excuse not to retaliate against Tehran after one of its proxies killed three U.S. service members in Jordan in late January. 

Part Two:

The U.S. thinks Iran has a lot of influence over its proxies in the region.

That’s from a May 17 article by Barak Ravid in Axios, when the administration needed to explain why it was secretly meeting with the Iranians in Oman.  

→The Egyptians “duped” U.S., Qatari, and Israeli officials by quietly changing the terms of the cease-fire proposal they offered to Hamas, according to a Wednesday article in CNN. Citing “three people familiar with the discussions,” CNN reports that Ahmed Abdel Khalek, the top deputy of the Egyptian intelligence chief, inserted Hamas’ demands into a cease-fire proposal that had been accepted by the Israelis, but informed neither the Israelis nor the other negotiators that he had done so. Hamas then announced on May 6 that it had accepted the proposal—only for the Israelis, Americans, and Qataris to discover that the proposal in question was entirely different than the one the Israelis had agreed to. This story could, of course, be ass-covering by U.S. or Qatari officials, but given the Egyptians’ strong interest in preventing Israel from entering Rafah and exposing their complicity in smuggling arms and supplies to Hamas, we wouldn’t put it past them to try to brazen their way into a deal. 

→The United States also ventured a rare public criticism of Egypt on Wednesday, blasting Cairo for preventing aid from crossing the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza. A senior administration official told The Times of Israel: 

What should be going into Kerem Shalom is the U.N. assistance, which is now in Egypt. Egypt is holding that back until the Rafah crossing situation settles out. We do not believe that aid should be held back for any reason whatsoever. Kerem Shalom is open. The Israelis have it open. And that aid should be going through Kerem Shalom. 

According to another U.S. official, Egypt would be willing to reopen the Rafah crossing, which is also currently closed, if the Palestinian Authority or an “international organization” replaced the IDF there. The PA, however, rejected an Israeli offer to manage the gate that would have “conditioned PA involvement on its officers not identifying themselves as being from the PA.” 

→A U.S. Department of Defense spokesman said Tuesday that no humanitarian aid has been formally delivered from the U.S.-built pier in Gaza, which opened operations on Friday. Asked during a Tuesday press conference whether any of the 569 tons of aid transported to Gaza through the pier had been delivered to the people of Gaza, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said, “As of today, I do not believe so.” Ryder also acknowledged that several trucks of aid had been diverted or stolen by a gang of locals before reaching their intended destination. A Gazan quoted in the story put it best, telling CNN, “I don’t understand this floating pier or what it indicates and what its purpose is.”

→Norway, Ireland, and Spain announced Wednesday that they would recognize a Palestinian state by May 28. In a speech to the lower house of Spain’s parliament, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that the move was a decision for “peace, for justice, and for coherence” and that “the more of us there are [recognizing a Palestinian state], the sooner we will achieve a cease-fire.” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, meanwhile, stated that “there cannot be peace in the Middle East if there is no recognition.” Israel recalled its ambassadors from all three countries on Wednesday and summoned each country’s ambassador to Israel for a reprimand. 

→Video of the Day: 

That’s Fox News reporter Bill Melugin speaking to a group of men from countries such as China, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and India who illegally crossed the U.S. border near Jacumba, California, early Wednesday morning. As Melugin notes in an accompanying X post, many of these men are “special interest aliens,” meaning that they come from countries with national security concerns and should, by law, be subject to additional vetting from the Department of Homeland Security. Melugin reported last week that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, had rejected his Freedom of Information Act request seeking “the nationalities of people on the terror watchlist arrested by Border Patrol in recent years.” In its statement denying the request, CBP claimed that “the privacy interests of the individuals in the records you have requested outweigh any minimal public interest in disclosure of the information.” 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

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The Ugly Lessons of October 7

The bloodier the terror attacks, the more stark the eliminationist rhetoric, the more support for a Palestinian state

by Eugene Kontorovich

Hamas’ grisly terror raid on Oct. 7 has proved to be the single most stunningly successful act in gaining support for the Palestinian cause—not among Israeli or American voters, of course, but among top Democratic policymakers, and their counterparts across the Western world. One might think that a campaign of unrepentant killing, torture, rape, and hostage-taking would be disqualifying for a national independence movement. But in Washington, Hamas’ ongoing crimes have resulted in much of the weight of the U.S. government being brought to bear on advancing the cause of Palestinian statehood, and its correlate, the punishment and demonization of the Jewish state.

Months of U.S. backing for the Palestinian national cause have produced glorious results for Palestinian diplomacy. Whereas less than two years ago, at a meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas, President Biden had declared that “the ground is not ripe” for renewing negotiations between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the Oct. 7 massacres made Biden change his mind—and make the establishment of a Palestinian state with all deliberate speed a central priority of U.S. Middle East policy. Since Oct. 7, four countries have recognized the “State of Palestine,” with three European states indicating their intent to do so in May. That is more recognition than the PA has won in the entire past decade (notably, only one country moved to recognize Palestinian statehood during the Trump administration).

International institutions, seeing that Israel’s protection by the U.S. has been lifted, have also showered gifts on the perpetrators of Oct. 7. In recent weeks, the U.N. General Assembly voted to upgrade the Palestinians’ status, giving them privileges reserved for member states. On Monday, the International Criminal Court charged Israel’s prime minister and defense minister with committing war crimes, placing them on a par with the terrorist leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar—a huge diplomatic coup for the terrorist group that creates a moral equivalence between it and Israel. Had Oct. 7 only managed to revive the trial of Jews for killing babies, it would have still been a triumph.

Indeed, in his first three years in office Biden was careful to avoid overtly repealing any of President Trump’s historic pro-Israel initiatives, preferring a more indirect approach that nevertheless signaled the administration’s preferences and end goals. In recent months, the administration has dropped all pretenses—making it clear that Iran, not Israel, is its favored regional client. Israel is forbidden from restoring peace to the country’s north by attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, or from offering anything more than a token response to a massive direct attack by Iran.

A similar about-face applied to the question of Israel’s borders. In November 2019, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo clarified that the United States did not view Jews residing in Judea and Samaria (“West Bank settlers,” as they are called) as a violation of international law; two months later he “disavowed” the so-called Hansell Memorandum of 1978, which used shaky legal reasoning to declare Jewish communities in the historic Jewish heartland to be illegitimate. In June 2023, the State Department circulated foreign policy guidance to relevant agencies ending bilateral scientific and technological cooperation with Israeli institutions in Judea and Samaria, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, even as it maintained that it had not reinstated the Hansell memo.

This past February, however, the administration let it all hang out. Without bothering to present any legal analysis, Secretary of State Blinken declared that Jewish communities in those areas that had been ethnically cleansed by Jordan after 1948 were illegal (“inconsistent with international law”), going further than even the Obama administration, which had used the lesser epithet “illegitimate.”

Last month, the administration indicated it might require that Israeli-made products from Judea and Samaria no longer be labeled as “Made in Israel.”

The green light from the White House has in turn given new life to efforts by the country’s thriving networks of billionaire-backed progressive NGOs to isolate and stigmatize the Jewish state. Two years ago, the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement—a campaign by activists from a network of state-sponsored anti-Israel NGOs—was pronounced dead. In the 20 years since it was invented at a U.N. confab in Durban, South Africa, BDS had made a lot of noise but scored few wins outside of minor academic associations. Indeed, 36 states passed laws that treat boycotts of Israel as a form of discrimination. Even Ben & Jerry’s ice cream had to walk back their boycott of Israel a couple of years ago.

Things look quite different now as the Biden administration has injected BDS with new life and made it unofficial U.S. policy. On college campuses, Democratic Party strongholds, Israeli professors and artists describe a widespread and growing de facto academic boycott. Boycotts of and divestment from Israel are core demands of the activists that have taken over college campuses this spring.

Fearing donor backlash and legal exposure, no university has yet taken the step of divesting from Israel, though some have made performative statements in this direction. However, they've generally allowed the pro-Palestinian mob to harass Jews on campus without fear of serious consequences, with the stated goal of driving Zionist faculty and students off campus. The recent wave of campus protests are the domestic mirror image of the administration’s foreign policy, which elevates and rewards Palestinian terror: The more grotesque, openly antisemitic and eliminationist the violence, the higher the reward.

Universities may have balked at divesting from Israel, at least not right off the bat, but that's small potatoes when you consider that sanctions against Israel have become official U.S. government policy. In February, the White House began implementing a new sanctions regime against Israel, which, like those imposed on terrorists and leaders of rogue states, freezes the bank accounts of designated Israelis and denies them visas to the U.S. However, unlike U.S. sanctions on terrorists and their state sponsors, the sanctions imposed on Israel are not necessarily predicated on any violent or illegal conduct. Rather, they’re based on a vague and elastic category of "actions that threaten the peace” in the West Bank. This could mean whatever the Biden administration wants it to mean, including undermining the two-state solution. Moreover, the Biden executive order makes anyone in the U.S. who donates to groups that support Judea and Samaria communities, which the Biden administration sees as undermining the two-state solution, possible targets for sanctions—without any prior notice.

Whether it’s obscuring attacks by Palestinians against Jews in Judea and Samaria in order to gin up the numbers of so-called “settler violence,” or the pouring of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to Hamas-controlled Gaza or the terror-subsidizing PA, the underlying theme of U.S. policy is constant: Palestinian violence and terrorism is rewarded.

Taking this perversion to its logical conclusion, the administration has also moved to punish the IDF and curtail its ability to combat terrorism. In April, the administration was set to sanction the Netzach Yehuda battalion of the IDF—backing off only after a strong backlash both at home and from its allies in Israel. Undeterred, the administration capped off the month by pausing munitions shipments to Israel.

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This remarkable string of successes for the Palestinian cause demands explanation. Certainly the Palestinians have not come closer to what is required for statehood. The springtime of Palestinian political success did not come from any of the things prior diplomatic initiatives such as the Oslo Accords encouraged: renouncing terror, fully and internally acknowledging Israel’s legitimacy, democratic reforms, or rescinding anti-Jewish policies.

Instead, it came from murder on a scale never previously accomplished. Murder of the most wanton and barbaric kind, rape and torture, mass kidnapping of civilians from babies to Holocaust survivors, and the ongoing mistreatment, exploitation, and execution of hostages. This, combined with a cynical exploitation of their own population, turns out to be the recipe for advancing Palestinian political demands. The process was deliberate: Hamas leaders have declared that their goal was precisely to grab global attention. This shows they have an instinctive understanding of the Western psyche, and of Washington's political posture, to intuit that the attention they would get would, for all practical purposes, be positive.

To be sure, the phenomenon is not new. The Palestinian national movement's bid for global attention in the 1970s was predicated entirely on terror, including, most famously, a series of civilian airliner hijackings. But at least in the 1970s, there was the illusion that terror was simply a way to get attention for political demands that would surely moderate over time, when brought into sustained contact with reality. Yet the opposite turns out to be the case. It is when their violence became exceptionally barbaric and sadistic, and was linked to an openly eliminationist political program, that the Palestinians galvanized the broadest elite support.

It bears noting here that the attraction of Western progressives to medieval violence is quite specific. The ISIS or al-Qaida variety, for instance, did not lead to calls among progressive elites to champion their political agendas or recognize their pseudo-states. Rather, this enthusiasm is reserved for specific perpetrators: Iran and the Palestinians.

The lesson for aspiring ethno-religious terrorist groups, then, is not that they would be assured recognition if they can only match the gruesomeness of Oct. 7. Uighurs and Kurds: Don’t try this at home. If you're not the IRGC, an Iranian proxy, or a Palestinian group, don’t bother applying.

The flip side of this equation is even more obscene. Washington rewards Iranian and Palestinian terrorism under the moniker of "de-escalation." That is to say, Iran and the Palestinians get to have their cake and eat it too: Their barbarism advances their agenda, and any attempted retaliation against them is condemned and constrained.

Which leads us to the heart of the matter, namely what Iran, Hezbollah, and Palestinian terror groups all have in common with each other and not with ISIS. By itself, the specific identity of the perpetrators of gruesome violence does not account for Western advocacy on their behalf. That is explained only by the specific identity of the victims: Jews. This is the common thread that ties together support for Palestinian barbarism abroad and for antisemitic mobs at home.

This brings us to the Biden administration’s diplomatic program, which aims to start the countdown for a Palestinian state in time to take credit for it in November. Much of the professional diplomatic and political class that has pushed for this outcome for three decades remains fully committed to it. As with the term “de-escalation,” the Biden administration uses Orwellian doublespeak to justify its push to establish a Palestinian terror state, like, “peace,” “security,” and “stability.” But what the pattern of the past eight months has doubtless conveyed to the Palestinians and their Iranian patrons is that more slaughter of Jews, especially those that will provoke a strong Israeli response, is the surest way to obtain more of what they want.

Supporters of Palestinian statehood have long maintained that if such a state were to attack Israel, the international community would support decisive Israeli actions to neutralize the threat. But the U.S. response to the Oct. 7 attack from Gaza, as well as to the subsequent attacks from Lebanon and Iran, which are states, shows the opposite. The atrocities a Palestinian state could inflict on an Israel reduced to the 1949 boundaries would make Oct. 7 look like a bar fight. The current U.S.-led international posture shows quite definitively that Israel will face pressure to make even more territorial and security concessions, until the Jewish state is no more. That has been the explicit goal of the Palestinian national movement since its inception, and it remains so today.

A reasonable observer can only conclude that the goal of “a Palestinian state” for both the Palestinians and their Western partisans has never been about achieving peaceful coexistence with Israel, which has been eminently achievable at every point in time beginning with the U.N. partition plan, which Israel accepted and the Palestinians and their Arab state backers rejected. The only “Palestinian state” that is acceptable to its partisans is one that replaces Israel on the map. When the White House, European governments, progressive NGOs, academic boycotters, the U.N., and other august bodies announce their support for Palestinian statehood, that is precisely what they are supporting.