Nov. 25: The Lebanon Deal Is Terrible

Tablet author to lead FDA; Soros partner to Treasury; Iranians murder Chabad rabbi in Dubai

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The Big Story

According to Sunday reports in Kan, Haaretz, and Ynet News, Israel has agreed “in principle” to a U.S.-backed, 60-day cease-fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon. While the proposal has not been finalized, Israel has “okayed the main tenets” of the agreement, according to The Times of Israel, and has conveyed its approval to Lebanon. Israeli ministers are reportedly set to approve the truce tomorrow. 

We’ll quote here from the summary of the three reports in TOI (emphasis ours):

Haaretz reported that the proposal will include three stages: a truce followed by Hezbollah removing its forces north of the Litani River; an Israeli pullout from southern Lebanon; and finally, Israeli-Lebanese negotiations on demarcation of contested border areas.

It said an international body led by the U.S. will be tasked with monitoring the ceasefire, and that Israel expects to receive a letter from Washington affirming its right to act militarily should Hezbollah break the terms of the ceasefire amid no action by Lebanon’s military and international forces.

And Kan, on Netanyahu’s plan to sell the deal to the public, said the aim is to present the truce not as a compromise but as beneficial to Israel.

In other words, primary responsibility for keeping Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon will fall to the U.S.-subsidized Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which is a de facto auxiliary for Hezbollah for the obvious reason that the Hezbollah-run Lebanese government controls it. The other security guarantor (the “international forces”) will be the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, which is also a Hezbollah auxiliary. Since 2006, UNIFIL has completely ignored its mandate to ensure the “demilitarization” of southern Lebanon and has instead acted as…

(a) a front for laundering international funds to Hezbollah, since UNIFIL pays “Hezbollah operatives and supporters to act as contractors and provide other services,” as Tony Badran explained for Tablet earlier this month; and

(b) a human shield for Hezbollah, colocating its bases with the terror group’s infrastructure. This latter function, already public knowledge, has become undeniable since Israel’s recent invasion of southern Lebanon, as seen here: 

Yes, that’s a Hezbollah position located within sight of a UNIFIL observation post, though distinguishing between “Hezbollah” and “UNIFIL” is something of an exercise in pedantry. Israel Hayom reported in October, citing Israeli security sources who had interrogated captured Hezbollah operatives, that Hezbollah bribed UNIFIL personnel to use UNIFIL positions and “took control of UNIFIL cameras in compounds near the Israeli border and used them for their own purposes.” And since Israel’s invasion, UNIFIL “peacekeepers” have routinely entered fighting zones to block the Israelis from engaging with Hezbollah units. Which should not come as a shock, either, given that, as Badran notes, a “high-ranking Irish UNIFIL officer” told the French press in 2018 that the “Indonesian Blue Helmets constantly report Israeli movements to various Lebanese actors,” i.e., Hezbollah and its LAF allies.

But don’t worry. If the U.S.- and internationally-funded Hezbollah auxiliaries fail to constrain Hezbollah, Israel can file a complaint with Washington—which, under the soon-to-be jettisoned Obama-Biden faction, is also on Hezbollah’s side. So at least they have that going for them.

The deal is, frankly, idiotic on its face, and it is especially puzzling why the Israelis would agree to it now, only a few months before the hostile Biden administration leaves office. The answer to that questions appears to be: U.S. blackmail.

An Israeli official told The Times of Israel that “Israel had no choice but to accept a ceasefire, out of fear that U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration could punish Israel with a United Nations Security Council resolution in its final weeks.” The same official added that “Israel is missing the capabilities it needs from the U.S., including 134 D9 bulldozers.” And it’s likely that the Israeli leadership was spooked by the recent International Criminal Court arrest warrants targeting Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, given that current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), acting at the behest of the White House, has blocked a bill sanctioning the ICC from being taken up in the Senate, and that State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday that each country will have to make up its own mind on whether or not to comply with the warrants. (Republicans have threatened to sanction U.S. allies for attempting to enforce the warrants.) Presumably, the White House could have made life even more difficult for Bibi if he refused to play ball.

One can take some encouragement from Netanyahu’s comments in October that the “agreements” are not worth the paper they are printed on:

The agreements, documents, proposals and numbers—[UNSCR] 1701, 1559—with all due respect, are not the main point. The main point is our ability and determination to enforce security, thwart attacks against us, and act against the arming of our enemies, as necessary and despite any pressure and constraints. This is the main point.

That is indeed the main point, but it nevertheless strikes us as a terrible idea to agree to the creation of a U.S.-led “international body” with the power to decide when and how Israel is allowed to act against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel can likely count on having a friend in Washington for the next four years, but Trump won’t be in power forever. If and when the Democrats return to the White House, Israel may discover that it has just ceded an important part of it sovereignty to an enemy.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Jem Hanan on how the war in the Middle East is playing out in the world’s most popular form of graphic art—manga

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The Rest

→Donald Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate John Hopkins physician (and Tablet author) Dr. Marty Makary to serve as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under his Health and Human Services secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Makary, though not an opponent of vaccines in general, was a vocal critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, mandatory masking, and other public health shibboleths during the pandemic, and he shares Kennedy’s skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry and focus on the need to address chronic disease. In a seemingly contradictory move, Trump nominated Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox contributor who regularly praised Dr. Anthony Fauci and criticized Florida’s laissez-faire approach to COVID-19, as surgeon general. Luckily, nobody listens to the surgeon general, while FDA commissioner is a real job.

Read Dr. Makary’s article in Tablet here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/was-covid-vaccine-safe-pregnant-women

→Trump also announced Scott Bessent, the CEO of the macro hedge fund Key Square Group, as his nominee for Treasury secretary. Bessent was widely regarded as the “conventional” pick for Treasury, and stock markets surged on the announcement, though some supporters of the president-elect have noted with concern Bessent’s connections to financier and progressive megadonor George Soros, with whom Bessent worked for more than a decade, eventually becoming a partner at Soros Fund Management. As Tablet’s Armin Rosen reported in November 2023, Bessent made a foray into conservative publishing with All Seasons Press, which developed a disturbing habit of suing its authors—including Tablet’s Lee Smith and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. As Rosen reported, Bessent was a large donor to progressive candidates and causes from the early 2000s until 2013, when he apparently began his shift right. The pick, however, has earned plaudits from the likes of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who told CNN on Sunday that Bessent was an “excellent choice.” 

→An emissary for Chabad, Rabbi Zvi Kogan, has been kidnapped and murdered in Dubai by suspected Iranian agents. Kogan, who owned and operated a kosher grocery store in the Emirati capital, was reported missing on Thursday; his body was found on Sunday. On Monday, authorities in the United Arab Emirates published the names and pictures of the three suspects in the murder, all of them Uzbek citizens. According to various reports in the Israeli and Emirati press, summarized in The Times of Israel, the men were recruited by Iran for the attack and then fled to a third country, believed to be Turkey, from whence they were quickly extradited back to the UAE. Israeli officials praised the “swift action” of the Emiratis and have pledged to help bring the perpetrators to justice. 

→“Elite Human Capital,” pictured:

That’s a screenshot from a video published by Prahlad Iyengar, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after he was banned from campus earlier this month for publishing a manifesto in a student webzine calling on those protesting the “genocide” in Gaza to abandon pacifism and instead begin “wreaking havoc.” The article was accompanied by a flyer from the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine that featured the slogan WE WILL BURN THE GROUND BENEATH YOUR FEET. Iyengar was arrested in May when police cleared a student protest encampment but apparently had been allowed back on campus for the fall, despite several warnings from the university that those arrested in the encampment would face suspension.

→A Zionist group is compiling a list of terror-supporting foreign students who could be eligible for visa revocation and deportation under the Trump administration, Jon Levine reports for the New York Post. The organization, Betar, claims to have identified about 30 foreign students who have violated the terms of their visas, either by engaging in illegal protest activity or by voicing support for a designated foreign terrorist organization. Among the targets is Cornell graduate student Momodou Taal, a descendant of the authoritarian ruler of postcolonial Gambia. As we reported on Oct. 10, Taal was able to leverage a public pressure campaign from Sen. Bernie Sanders and sympathetic faculty and journalists to avoid suspension over an illegal protest at a campus career fair in September, despite being warned in the spring that further disruptions would lead to expulsion and the revocation of his student visa. Betar claims to have been in contact with sympathetic senators, including John Fetterman (D-PA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), and with unnamed “prospective” appointees in the Trump Department of Justice. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Dark Humor, by Lisa J. Wise

What I inherited, and what I want—and don't want—to pass on

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Israel vs. Palestine in Manga

The conflict in the Middle East is playing out in the world’s most popular form of graphic art

by Jem Hanan

Since Oct. 7, comic artists, both Japanese and Israeli, have used manga as a medium to convey their thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war and its consequences, speaking to Japanese, Israeli and Palestinian, and global audiences. Through manga, all of these artists hope to voice their sometimes complex, sometimes unrefined, but always honest feelings about the events surrounding Oct. 7 and after. As the mangaka Guy Lenman explained, “I knew from the start I wanted to create comics about that, because this is my art, this is my talent. I will use it for good, I hope.”

Manga is no stranger to political expression, having cemented itself in the cultural zeitgeist of Japan after World War II. The influence of American comics is evident in early popular manga, an obvious example being Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. Like most manga, Astro Boy was adapted into an anime, achieving massive national success. Underlying the flashy, bug-eyed characters of the era was a country’s attempts to cope with the military defeat and atomic destruction it suffered, wounds that were still fresh in the minds of artists and their audience. As Japan grew into a confident postwar society, manga became a full-fledged cultural phenomenon, fragmenting into vastly different genres, from romance to horror, read by all ages and all genders, in what became a multi-billion-dollar industry with global reach and significance.

In the early 2000s, anime and manga began to trickle into the media of other countries, one of them being Israel, where Nippon Animation aired adaptations of beloved and classic Western stories, such as Peter Pan, on Israeli cable television. Although an odd departure from its source material, these productions still effectively captured the hearts of many a young Israeli viewer, one of them being Guy Lenman. Although he later pivoted to a grungier, less stylized iteration of Japanese cartooning (citing inspiration from the style of Fullmetal Alchemist), Lenman says that the adaptations were the first to make him realize that he “really enjoyed the anime style.”

Lenman started posting his personal manga-influenced art online, sometimes depicting fantastical creatures and other times one-page comics illustrating small moments in his life. He gravitated toward sci-fi fantasy stories, eventually founding Freelines Studio with his colleague and longtime friend Nimrod Fridman. The two got their big break at the 13th Japan International Manga Award, where they won first prize for their manga Piece of Mind. The comic deals with questions of humanity, one’s true self, and empathy, themes that Lenman says he imbued into his latest work—a manga for an anthology featuring the work of 12 graphic novelists titled In the Heart of October 7th.

Through his anthology, Lenman aims to share the stories of everyday people on Oct. 7. He chose to focus on the lives of his parents-in-law, Marcel and Dror Kaplun, who were murdered by Hamas on their kibbutz the morning of Oct. 7. At first, Lenman and his wife believed that the two were taken as hostages, since Hamas released videos of Marcel and Dror being attacked, but neither of their bodies were found. However, as investigations continued, Marcel’s body was recovered, and soon after, a salvaged piece of a hipbone was identified as belonging to Dror.

Lenman says that going into the project, it was particularly important to him to portray the whole truth—he said to himself, “The truth is so horrible and so horrifying and so terrible, you will not show anything (unless) you know for a fact it happened.” Lenman investigated the videos released by Hamas in excruciating detail, taking note of each and every one of the terrorists’ actions and directly translating the Arabic spoken. I asked Lenman why it was so important for him to be this meticulous about telling Marcel and Dror’s story, even if it meant reliving the terror of that day again and again. He answered with the following:

A lot of artists, because of the heinous acts of Hamas, drew them as demons; there’s so much anger. I thought, that’s not right for me. I wanted to show them as people who did terrible things, because we are all people and we are capable of that. I think lots of people want to avert their gaze when they see really horrible stuff because either it's too hard to take in, or it makes the world more gray, and we want to think about the world as black and white—there are good people and bad people. Lots of people are desperately trying to find out "who are the bad guys and who are the good guys" and they’re so divided. Of course, there are horrible acts committed by people, but it’s not that simple. If you want to form an educated opinion, you have to face the reality and really study it. Then, at least form your opinion about the affair. It’s a complicated issue. Human nature is complicated.

The Japanese medium allowed Lenman to tell a story that was not only essentially Israeli but also fundamentally human. And yet, a cultural exchange involves not one but two parties. So what do the Japanese mangaka make of the events of Oct. 7?

When Netflix’s Unorthodox debuted on the platform, it enthralled an already established Japanese mangaka: Makoto Tanaka. While her career started with comics depicting life after attending a music university, it eventually morphed into one exploring, and sometimes even romanticizing, Jewish and Israeli culture. “I have been publishing information about Jewish culture and Israel since 2022,” said Tanaka, as stated on her personal website. Tanaka’s works began to include manga featuring trips to Israel, El Al airlines, and chibi style (a style of manga caricature with big-head, small-body proportions) Hasidic rabbis, sidelocks and all.

After Oct. 7, Tanaka’s artistic agenda shifted to the events concerning the Israel-Hamas war. Anime girls with shocking, tekhelet-blue hair swathed in bright yellow ribbon, manga panels commemorating fallen IDF soldiers, and characters draped in the Israeli flag soon flooded Tanaka’s Instagram. Her patriotism eventually caught the attention of the Israeli Embassy, which commissioned her to produce a manga about the life of now-released hostage Noa Argamani.

According to the Israeli ambassador to Japan, Gilad Cohen, Tanaka’s manga “is a unique project that was created with the aim of continuing to raise the awareness of the issue of the hostages in Japan.” In some ways, Tanaka seems to serve as a link between the Israeli and Japanese governments, partaking in government initiatives to unite the nations behind a common cause: the release of the hostages.

Other manga artists in Japan have expressed solidarity with Palestine. An example of this is the Japanese mangaka community’s adoption of the Twitter movement #WithHandala. Handala was originally the conception of Palestinian cartoonist Naji Salim al-Ali. Growing up in a refugee camp, al-Ali drew political cartoons that became renowned for their scathing critique of Arab and Israeli regimes and were published in newspapers across the world. One of his characters, Handala, a 10-year-old boy, is perpetually shown standing with his back turned to the viewer and his hands clasped behind his back—a silent, enduring witness to the events taking place in the Middle East. The character has since become synonymous with the Palestinian cause.

The first use of Handala as a figure for cartoonists to show their support for the Palestinian people was spearheaded by Francesca Ghermandi. Ghermandi, an Italian illustrator herself, amassed a group of 80 Italian cartoonists to draw their own characters in Handala’s iconic posture.

After its publication, the Italian collection piqued the interest of three Japanese artists—Tokushige Kawakatsu (a mangaka), Mariko Matsushita (a painter), and Zohre Miha (a photograph artist)—who organized their own Japanese iteration of the Handala project. “Seeing this campaign in Italy, we planned this project in the hope that we could create an appeal with the cooperation of Cartoonists in Japan, along with Handala, to appeal for the back of their own characters,” the three wrote in a published statement. The mangakas of Japan could join the movement by posting the back of their character in Handala’s fashion on X with the hashtag “withHandala.” #withHandala blew up, with many well-established mangakas partaking in the movement. One of these artists was Kamome Shirahama, creator of the popular manga series Witch Hat Atelier, which has amassed a cult following over the course of its serialization with an anime adaptation on the horizon. Shirahama posted a drawing of the series’ main character, Coco, in the Handala pose, captioning it “I join Handala in calling for an immediate ceasefire. #withHandala.” [“ハンダラと共に即時停戦を求めます。#withHandala”; translation]. As of October 2024, the post has received 2.4 million views.

Returning to its roots, manga is once again conveying the sentiments surrounding war through the same bold lines and large eyes as it did over 75 years ago. This time, however, it has also created a unique space for discourse between cultures that may seem at odds with each other. Artists like Lenman, Tanaka, and the participants in the #withHandala movement reveal the remarkably perennial and culturally transcendent characteristics of manga, which speaks to children and adults alike in a language that uniquely belongs to the art form.