May 8: Havana’s Man at Columbia

White House confirms military aid delay; Federal agencies resume contact with Big Tech; Steve Albini, 1962–2024

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The Big Story

The Communist government of Cuba has trained and supported some of the far-left organizers behind the anti-Israel protests in the United States, according to an investigation by Madeleine Hubbard published in Just the News on Tuesday. 

In our May 1 Big Story, we identified Manolo De Los Santos—executive director of The People’s Forum, the left-wing Manhattan event space that has played a leading role in the anti-Israel protest movement and is funded by the wealthy Chinese Communist Party propagandist Neville Roy Singham—as a potential Cuban asset, based on his past residence in Cuba and history of public writing and statements in support of the Cuban regime. Just the News’ report lends further credence to our suspicion. Hubbard reports that in addition to being based out of Cuba for several years, De Los Santos has regularly visited Cuba since at least 2009, has “a long history of collaboration with top Cuban officials, including Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel,” and has been featured prominently in Cuban state-owned media. He has also campaigned, in the United States, for the defeat of the “genocidal blockade” of Cuba and collaborated with several other U.S.-based pro-Cuban organizations, such as the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples, the National Network on Cuba, and the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, which is also funded heavily by Singham. 

The Just the News story also highlights Calla Walsh, co-chair of the National Network on Cuba, who was indicted in February for an attack on an Israeli defense contractor in New Hampshire. Walsh has spent “years” traveling to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, a group used by Cuban intelligence to recruit American radicals. (As we noted on May 1, Susan Rosenberg of progressive nonprofit Thousand Currents and Michael Novick, the web registrar for Torch Antifa Network, both former members of the Weather Underground, are also veterans of the Venceremos Brigade.) Another member of the Venceremos Brigade, Onyesonwu Chatoyer of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, has hosted a “Zionism Is Against Africa” webinar in collaboration with Students for Justice in Palestine, Al-Awda: The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, and Black Alliance for Peace. Black Alliance for Peace member Erica Caines, in turn, traveled to Cuba with Chatoyer earlier this year and was a featured speaker at a “Black Freedom Struggle & Palestine” webinar hosted by the Activist News Network in January. 

While Cuban involvement in the protests would appear to be relatively minor compared to the scale of involvement from, say, American billionaires, one can put this reporting alongside what we already know about Chinese influence—both through cutouts such as Singham and through manipulation of the TikTok algorithm—as well as the likely influence of Hamas and the broader Iranian-led Axis of Resistance, both through domestic Islamic networks through hard-left radicals. As Steven Stalinsky noted in The Wall Street Journal on April 22, student activist groups such as Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a continuation of Columbia’s banned SJP chapter) have hosted talks from Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine leaders, and a Jan. 21 New York City event hosted by the Workers World Party read out an official Hamas statement and screened statements from PFLP, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Houthi officials. Famously, SJP stated, in its “Resistance Toolkit” distributed to all nationwide SJP chapters on Oct. 8, that it was “part of” the Hamas-led resistance, not “in solidarity” with it. 

The U.S. oath of office requires all members of Congress and federal employees to swear to defend the Constitution against “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” We’re frankly more worried about the domestic enemies, but the foreign ones—give them credit—are trying their best. 

Read it here: https://justthenews.com/accountability/watchdogs/cuba-spent-years-training-anti-israel-activists-behind-campus-protests?s=09 .

IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub explains how the White House is using Benny Gantz to ensure Israel’s defeat in Gaza

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The Rest

→In a statement late Tuesday, the White House confirmed that it had paused a shipment of Boeing weapons to Israel, including Joint Direct Attack Munitions and Small Diameter Bombs, over concerns about Israel’s Rafah operation. The delay had been reported in Axios on Saturday and confirmed by Politico on Tuesday, but the Tuesday statement marks the administration’s first public confirmation of the move. “As Israeli leaders seemed to approach a decision point on [the Rafah] operation, we began to carefully review proposed transfers of particular weapons to Israel that might be used in Rafah,” a White House official said Tuesday. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed in congressional testimony Wednesday that “we’ve paused one shipment of high-payload munitions.” 

→In a Wednesday meeting with CIA Director William Burns to discuss ongoing hostage negotiations, Israeli leaders—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Mossad chief David Barnea, and Shin Bet head Ronen Bar—informed Burns that the pause in weapons shipments was giving hope to Yahya Sinwar and undermining the prospects for a hostage deal, according to The Times of Israel. The Israelis also responded to Burns’ suggestion that he still sees an “opportunity for a deal with Hamas” by telling the CIA chief that Hamas’ latest proposal, reportedly drafted with Burns’ knowledge, “crosses all red lines in every parameter and is unacceptable.” 

→The U.S. pier in Gaza, which was completed yesterday but has not yet been moved into place, came under fire from Hamas rockets twice on Wednesday, according to Almog Baker of Israel’s Channel 13 News. No casualties or damage have been reported.

→Federal agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have resumed their contact with social media companies over censoring alleged disinformation in the run-up to the November presidential election, according to Monday remarks by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chair Mark Warner (D-VA). Warner told reporters that contacts had resumed in March, around the time that the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri. Several of the justices, Warner said, appeared sympathetic to the government’s argument that its attempts to encourage social media companies to take down “disinformation” were not “coercion” but only “persuasion” and therefore did not violate the First Amendment. As we’ve reported here and at Tablet, however, much of the alleged “disinformation” censored by social media giants at the behest of the government—such as the claim that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab—were true or likely true. On the other hand, claims that certain stories were foreign-sourced disinformation—such as the idea, endorsed by 51 top former intelligence officials, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian propaganda—were false. 

→Two Republican congressmen have alleged that Biden’s Iran envoy and architect of Obama’s Iran deal, Robert Malley, was placed on leave and had his security clearance suspended last year for transferring classified information to his personal email account and downloading it onto his phone, where it was hacked. The allegations come from a letter, first reported Tuesday in The Washington Post, to Secretary of State Antony Blinken from Sen. James E. Risch (R-ID) and Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX), asking the State Department to confirm what they had discovered about Malley in the course of their own investigation. Risch and McCaul further allege that “a hostile cyber actor” was able to gain access to Malley’s phone. Josh Rogin of the Post connects this alleged hacking to articles that appeared in the Iranian regime-controlled Tehran Times last August, which cited internal State Department documents on U.S. Iran strategy that Malley was involved in drafting. Malley, who was placed on leave in June 2023, was responsible for hiring the Iranian influence agent Ariane Tabatabai into the State Department, Semafor reported in September. 

→At the risk of sounding like a broken record regarding outsiders training student protesters, here’s drone footage of students at Emory University drilling riot tactics ahead of expected confrontations with police, courtesy of @visegrad24 on X:

→Legendary rock producer and musician Steve Albini died Tuesday at his home in Chicago at the age of 61. According to The New York Times, the cause of death was a heart attack. Albini founded several bands, including Big Black, Shellac, and the controversially titled Rapeman, but he was most famous as a producer and audio engineer. Albini worked on thousands of albums during his production career, including several defining rock albums of the 1990s, such as Nirvana’s In Utero, the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. Albini was also an outspoken critic of the music industry and a vocal supporter of independent, challenging, and often commercially nonviable music. His recording studio, Electrical Audio, founded in 1995, refused to accept royalties from bands and paid Albini a flat daily fee. 

Albini’s production was best known for the heavy electric guitar in songs such as “Where Is My Mind?” and “Rape Me,” but this track, from the Albini-produced Josephine by Magnolia Electric Co., is one of our personal favorites:

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Those Who Escaped, and Those Who Remained, by Glynn Dynner

European Orthodoxy faces the Holocaust

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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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The Gantz Megillah

How America is using ex-IDF Chief Benny Gantz as its Trojan horse to impose U.S. demands—and ensure Israel’s defeat in Gaza

by Gadi Taub

In the eyes of the Biden administration Hamas is the smaller problem. The bigger problem is Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. is willing to live with Iran's proxies everywhere, as part of its “regional integration” policy—i.e., appeasing Iran. But they are unwilling to live with Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The stubborn Netanyahu clearly does not want to learn from his would-be tutors like U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken how to "share the neighborhood” with genocidaires in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Tehran, whom his electorate understands to be bent on murdering them.

If the Netanyahu problem is too big to contain, then it follows that it must be solved. And it seems that the Biden administration has zeroed in on what Tony Badran has called a Herodian solution: finding a local proxy who will impose the U.S. agenda on a reluctant Israeli electorate.

King Herod the Great won his throne because the Roman Empire stepped in and helped him defeat his Israelite adversaries. The American empire wants to help install Benny Gantz as Israel’s next prime minister for the same reason: The plan is for the administration to help him defeat Netanyahu, then for him to assemble a dovish coalition that will return Israel to the two-state track negotiations—which, though unlikely to produce two states, would nevertheless help “de-escalate” in Gaza, the last hot spot in the region where Iran’s power is actually challenged.

Since the whole Democratic Party’s Middle East policy is at stake, the pressure on Israel has been relentless. Never before has an American administration worked so systematically to undermine Israeli democracy and sovereignty, an effort that is especially shocking in the context of an existential war for survival following a heinous, large-scale terrorist murder spree. Wars provide opportunities, and it seems clear that the opportunity that the Biden administration saw in the Oct. 7 attacks had less to do with ensuring Israel’s security than it did with stifling any remaining resistance to Washington's pro-Iran regional integration policy.

The U.S. is holding Israel on a leash by rationing the American-made ammunition on which the war effort depends; it has forced us to supply our enemies with “humanitarian aid” which Hamas controls and which sustains its ability to fight; the U.S. is building a port to subvert our control of the flow of goods into Gaza; it refrained from vetoing an anti-Israel decision at the U.N. Security Council at the end of March; it leaked its intention to recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally; it allowed Iran to attack us directly with a barrage of over 300 rockets and drones without paying any price whatsoever; and then told us that Israel’s successful defense against that strike (which was mostly stopped by a combination of superior Israeli tech and faulty Iranian missiles that crashed all over the Middle East, and to some extent by U.S. interceptors) should be considered “victory”; it consistently protects Hezbollah from a full-fledged Israeli attack; it did all it can to prevent the ground invasion of Rafah, which is necessary for winning the war; it is trying to stop the war with a hostage deal that would ensure Hamas' survival.

The U.S. is not protecting Israel from the kangaroo courts in The Hague which now threaten to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others. Instead, it is goosing those warrants, in part by itself threatening to impose sanctions on a unit of the IDF, thus subverting the chain of command and pressuring IDF units to comply with American demands rather than with orders from their superiors. At one point, Secretary of State Blinken outrageously asked for a one-on-one meeting with IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi (he was refused), treating the commander of Israel’s armed forces as if he was answerable to a delegate of a foreign power.

Meanwhile, the entire Democratic Party apparatus from Joe Biden on down has continued directly attacking Netanyahu in the harshest, most personal and demeaning terms, publicly proclaiming their contempt for Israel’s wartime leader. Biden called Israel’s elected prime minister “a bad fucking guy,” while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to explain to Israelis they made the wrong choice in their elections. Senior Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler went Schumer one step better, proclaiming Netanyahu to be the worst Jewish leader in “2,000 years”—i.e., in the period since Herod.

The White House appears to be pushing prominent Jewish Democrats to attack Israel’s prime minister in order to avoid charges of being “anti-Israel” or “antisemitic”—a charge that could damage Democrats in key states like Florida, Arizona, and Michigan as Jewish voters see their children pushed off campuses by a combination of anti-Jewish DEI bureaucrats and pro-Hamas mobs. But it’s not hard to see through this ploy. In fact, the White House has its own proxy mobs of demonstrators inside Israel, which it regularly encourages to take to the streets at key moments. According to the leaders of the Never-Bibi demonstrators, the White House is in constant touch with them for coordination.

What all of these shockingly openly subversive moves against a key U.S. military ally have so far not produced is the desired result—a subservient government run by the would-be King Benny. The American candidate for the Herodian role kept straying from the script (which is reportedly why he was summoned to Washington to be reprimanded).

There were reasons for his straying, though. Whenever the attack on Israel's sovereignty, democracy, or even on Netanyahu personally, became too blunt, Gantz who understands his electorate well enough, rallied to defend Israel’s sovereignty and our right to choose our own government. This is not because Gantz has given up on replacing Netanyahu: It's just that he knows he cannot win an election in Israel by appearing to join the U.S. in attacking Israel's most vital interests or in undermining our independence. Most importantly, any attempt to topple Netanyahu in the name of imposing a two-state solution is bound to backfire, especially with the post-Oct. 7 Israeli electorate.

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Now, however, it seems that Washington and its would-be Herodian candidate are finally on the same page. This may be because the administration learned how to drape its attacks in the clothes of Israel's interest: Emphasize “Saudi normalization” and “international coalition,” downplay “two-state solution,” stress "saving the hostages,” tone down talk of ending the war, and so on. Or it may be that Gantz has received assurances from the U.S. that it will turn its maximum pressure campaign against Netanyahu all the way up, by facilitating the delivery of ICC indictments. Whatever the reason, Gantz has finally thrown down the gauntlet.

Gantz announced his open challenge to Netanyahu in a strained, grammatically tortured tweet burdened by the need to pretend that his new position is not a betrayal of his old one. It is a jumble of contradictions revolving like space debris around a dying star. It reads:

The incursion into Rafah is important in the long struggle against Hamas. Returning our hostages, who were abandoned by the government of October 7, is of far greater importance. If a responsible deal for the return of our hostages, with the backing of the whole security establishment, and not conditioned on ending the war, will be prevented by the ministers who led the government on October 7, then the government would no longer have the right to continue to exist and direct the war.

The gist of it is not hard to decipher: Let’s end the war but call it something else. Otherwise, we’ll topple Netanyahu. But the packaging is no less instructive. First Gantz accepts the terminology of the permanent Never-Bibi protest, which keeps blaming this government for having “abandoned” us on that terrible Shabbat. Gantz further emphasizes that the responsibility lies solely with Netanyahu and his government of Oct. 7—that is before Gantz and his party joined the coalition.

That's precious, because Gantz himself was an active party to, and in important cases the main author of, the misconceptions that led to the failure of Israel’s defenses on Oct. 7. He was deputy IDF chief of staff, IDF chief of staff, minister of security, and also “alternate prime minister” with Netanyahu.

As chief of staff, Gantz drastically cut the IDF’s ground forces in line with the vision of “a small technological army” based on the false assumption that large-scale ground wars are a thing of the past. He was the highest-ranking member of a security establishment that pushed their belief that Hamas could be pacified by allowing in Qatari money and letting Gazans work inside Israel. As minister of security, Gantz oversaw the inauguration of the high-tech security barrier on the Gaza boarder, which he assured the West Negev residents will protect them from Hamas and allow them to flourish, and that, he said, will be “our great victory” over the terrorists. So confident was Gantz in the effectiveness of the high-tech barrier that he ordered disarming civil defense squads in small villages and kibbutzim in the Negev due to repeated theft of assault firearms. We know what that led to. The places that disregarded Gantz’s orders and retained their weapons were able to hold out longer and save many more lives.

But Gantz’s tweet was more than an exercise in self-absolution for people with short memories. He also inched toward adopting the reframing of Israel’s war aims so as to make returning the hostages Israel's foremost goal, even at the price of defeat in the war. Returning the hostages is “of far greater importance” than invading Rafah now, he proclaimed, offering the fig leaf that Rafah can be invaded at some other point in time, “in the long struggle against Hamas.”

Lastly, Gantz created a dichotomy between “the whole security establishment,” which endorses a deal, and the “ministers who led the government on October 7,” who are against it. The security establishment is presumably rational and professional, and the “ministers who led the government on October 7”—including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, it seems—are a bunch of heartless right-wing amateurs. Except, of course, the job of the security establishment is to be in charge of security. After Oct. 7, the massive failure of 20 years of security establishment doctrine is fully out in the open. Unsurprisingly, Gantz’s tweet received a very uncomfortable ratio of comments to likes.

Still, Tony Blinken had reason to be satisfied. At long last, Gantz seems willing to play the role the administration has assigned him: exploiting the rift in Israel's society by unequivocally taking the side of the small but powerful Never-Bibi faction, in a bid to replace Netanyahu at the helm.

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Tony Badran wrote “The New Herodians” back in the days of the struggle over the reform of the judiciary. Netanyahu was already a thorn in the side of Biden's “regional integration” policy, since he insisted that Iran's drive to attain nuclear weapons must be stopped by any means necessary. The Biden administration pretended to care about judicial reform, but, as the Democrats’ critique of the Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court clearly suggests, it is not because they are for all-powerful judiciaries. The issue was always Netanyahu.

What Badran argued about the American intervention back then is doubly true now that the interventions are so much more crude. But his argument was not just a critique of American hypocrisy and anti-democratic tactics. The comparison with Herod was meant to teach a lesson about the price Judea payed for Herod’s strategy. The alliance with the Roman giant ensured Herod’s victory over his Jewish rivals in internal Judean politics, but the cost was the loss of Jewish independence altogether.

Herod gained power and prestige, and his family became intimate with Rome’s rulers—but none of that saved Israel. Instead, the Herodian policy eventually turned the land of Israel into a province of the empire under direct Roman rule. Judea’s loss of independence from Rome led in turn to the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile for two millennia for most of the Jewish people, leading to a situation of existential powerlessness in the face of expulsions and pogroms which culminated, within living memory, in the Holocaust. So how did the Herodian strategy turn out for the Jews? Not well.

Can such a nightmare return? Yes, it can. It is not at all clear that Israel can survive four more years of a Democratic administration determined to carve out a Palestinian terror state in the heart of the land of Israel, as part of an “integrated”—that is, Iran-dominated—Middle East. If it is to survive at all, Israel must break the noose that Iran is assembling around us, and which the Biden administration is actively promoting and protecting. Once Iran actually gets nuclear weapons, the danger will increase exponentially.

But it is also not clear that the attempt to install Benny Gantz at the head of a dovish coalition, subservient to the administration, can actually work.

True, the U.S. has a lot to work with. Israel's progressive elites are small but formidable, as they have demonstrated in defeating an elected government in the struggle over judicial reform. And that elite still believes in a two-state solution and is very much on board with the American plan to impose it against the majority's will. Israel's left long ago gave up on persuading the electorate to support the creation of a Palestinian state, and is entirely comfortable with the use of extra-democratic means to impose its desired solutions on its domestic foes. Like the Hellenized elites of Herod's day, it sees imperial domination as a way to support its own idea of Jewishness allied with power against the retrograde elements in its midst.

Gantz’s tweet underscores that the elite power base, which is entrenched in the upper echelons of the military and security establishment, supports the cease-fire plan. This group already exercises great influence on the way the war is waged. It has worked to undermine the possibility of Israeli long-term control of the Gaza strip and has dragged its feet against Netanyahu’s promise to enter Rafah. Then there is also the almost unanimous support of the press, whose major role here has been to demonize anyone who opposes surrender to Hamas via a hostage deal as heartless. There is also our all-powerful Supreme Court and highly politicized law enforcement agencies, and finally, the business community and especially its high-tech sector whose entrepreneurs tend to lean to globalist views and are funding the ubiquitous billboard campaign that blames Netanyahu for everything (and no one else for anything).

But there is also one deep flaw in the plan to impose the American policy via an alliance of elites under the figurehead of Gantz. Gantz’s popularity rests on ambiguity, which is why he persistently declined to answer questions about his views on the question of a Palestinian state. His only path to victory is by striking a hawkish security pose, and remaining vague about two-state negotiations. That’s because the hawkish majority in Israel has only grown after Oct. 7.

This majority will be furious with Netanyahu if he does not deliver victory. But to capture the disaffected vote, you can’t offer defeat, let alone a nonexistent two-state solution. There are still some 100,000 evacuees who cannot return home to the western Negev or to the north near the border with Hezbollah in Lebanon. No hostage deal will convince them they will now be safe. Moreover, Israelis saw what a determined band of terrorists can do from tiny Gaza. They will not easily opt for a government willing to give the much better armed and trained terrorist Palestinian Authority a chance to do the same from the far bigger area of Judea and Samaria, perched above Israel's vulnerable coastal plain.

While King Herod’s power relied on making his ties with the all-powerful Rome as conspicuous as possible, rubbing shoulders with the would-be rescuers of Hamas is bound to be a liability for Gantz with his potential voters. And once the U.S. recognizes a Palestinian state, as is rumored to happen this summer, Gantz’s electoral intrigues will become a historical footnote—while the U.S. campaign against its Middle Eastern ally continues.