Sep. 6, 2024: Fake Activist Achieves Real Martyrdom

U.S. troops to leave Iraq; New jobs reports; Tim Walz praises Michigan protesters

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The Big Story

Today’s Big Story is a guest post from Tablet’s Armin Rosen.

On Friday, a 26-year-old Turkish-born American citizen named Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was shot and killed at a demonstration in a village south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank. Nablus is about 40 minutes down the road from Tubas and an hour and a half away from Jenin, strongholds of Iran-supported Palestinian militant groups and recent focal-points of the largest IDF operation in the West Bank in over two decades. The IDF has found frequent reason to operate in central Nablus since October 7th, and has carried out drone strikes there at least twice during the war—it is also the home-town of the attempted Hamas suicide bomber who accidentally blew himself up in Tel Aviv last month. In mid-August, Hamas and the IDF clashed in Nablus's Old City; around the same time, Israeli forces killed two Hamas operatives in the city who were released during the November 2023 pause in fighting.  

It is inherently risky for any civilian to deliberately enter an active conflict zone—according to the IDF’s early version of events, Eygi was embedded with demonstrators who were throwing rocks at Israeli army personnel. A purported image of Eygi shared by pro-Palestinian accounts on Telegram showed her in a facemask and baseball cap, hardly the safest self-presentation for someone without apparent military training who has decided to wander into a battlefield. But Eygi is reportedly an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, which has a deliberate strategy of setting off deadly confrontations with the IDF.

A good overview of the ISM can be found in a 2011 report from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, a kind of in-house think-tank for the Israeli intelligence community. The ISM’s founders include a former Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine operative, and a physics professor who was once an activist for the Iraqi-linked Arab Liberation Front. The ISM continues this legacy of secular nationalist militancy through using “direct action” tactics to assist in acts of Palestinian “resistance:” During the second Intifada, ISM activists served as voluntary human shields during the standoff between the IDF and Hamas fighters at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, and served the same function during the siege of Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. ISM activists traveled to southern Lebanon during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, giving the IDF additional opportunities to accidentally kill citizens of western countries. Their roll of martyrs includes Rachel Corrie, killed attempting to obstruct an Israeli bulldozer amid combat in the Gaza Strip in 2003—and also Vittori Arrigoni, an Italian kidnapped and murdered by Gazan Salafists in 2011. As the Amit Center report puts it, the ISM “specialized in hindering IDF operational activities” by physically inserting its activists between the army and its intended targets, whether it's a violent demonstration or the home of a suspected terrorist. The ISM was part of the coalition, overseen by a Turkish Islamist charity, that launched the 2010 Gaza flotilla, which ended in a deadly battle between Israeli Navy SEALs and pro-Palestinian extremists.

A group that actively pitches itself as a supporter of resistance against the military of an American ally likely has nonprofit status in the United States. The ISM has a documented relationship, and common leadership, with the California-based Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees, a 501c(3) that operates a lot like a fiscal sponsor would. 

The ISM exploits the idealism of young activists in order to drum up outrage in their countries of origin when one of them inevitably gets shot or run over in the course of a combat scenario they haven't been prepped for—those killed and injured under the ISM banner have come from Great Britain, Australia, Ireland, Sweden, and of course the United States. With the Turkish foreign ministry denouncing the Israeli “murder” and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announcing Friday that “we deplore this tragic loss,” Egyi’s death is the group's latest tactical success.

— Armin Rosen

IN THE BACK PAGES: What do you do when your therapist hates Israel?

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The Rest

→The U.S. and Iraqi governments have reached an agreement that would end the U.S. military presence in Iraq by the end of 2026, according to a Friday report in Reuters citing U.S. and Iraqi “sources familiar with the matter.” Details on the agreement are somewhat scarce, but the deal appears to call for a withdrawal of most of the 2,500 U.S. troops currently in Iraq by the end of next year, with a smaller deployment staying on in Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, until the end of 2026 “to facilitate ongoing operations against Islamic State in Syria.” 

In an email to The Scroll, Tablet News Editor Tony Badran writes of the agreement as it is currently being reported:

In the Obama vision for co-managing the region with Iran, the presence of U.S. troops is designed to consolidate jointly managed Iranian realms against internal and external challenges. The U.S. military was therefore allowed to remain in Iraq precisely, and exclusively, for the purpose of putting down any insurrection from the defeated Sunni segment of Iraq. Whatever ends up negotiated between the U.S. and Iran in Iraq can continue to provide a caveat for that, allowing for U.S. support should the need arise. In that sense, the model of the U.S. presence in Iraq now shifts to resemble more the one we have in Lebanon: a small advisory presence to support continued investment in the security forces that operate as auxiliaries to the IRGC-led militias (Hezbollah in Lebanon and the various mini-Hezbollahs in Iraq).

→Chart of the Day: 

That chart, made by the Heritage Foundation’s E.J. Antoni using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ August jobs report, shows that from August 2023 to August 2024, the U.S. economy added 1.2 million jobs for foreign-born workers while losing 1.3 million native-born workers. The report, released Friday, shows a decent 0.4% month-over-month increase in wages and a modest decline in unemployment. However, Antoni notes that all of the net job growth in August came from part-time jobs (+527,000), while full-time jobs decreased by 438,000.

→Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan rule Friday that Donald Trump’s sentencing in his felony “hush-money” case will take place on November 26, three weeks after election day. In May, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for classifying as a “legal expense” reimbursement payments made to his lawyer. Normally this would have been a misdemeanor, but Bragg claimed it had been done in furtherance of another crime—in this case, another state law that makes it a misdemeanor to “conspire to promote the election of any person to public office by unlawful means,” with the unlawful means here being a violation of the federal election law that state prosecutors have no authority to enforce and that no state prosecutor anywhere in the country had charged as a direct or predicate crime against anyone, ever, for anything. Naturally, Merchan’s decision not to jail the Republican nominee on these charges eight weeks before the election prompted accusations of impropriety. Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe wrote on X, “The decision by Justice Juan M. Merchan means voters will be left in the dark this November about whether the former president will face time behind bars.” Indeed it does, Mr. Tribe. Indeed it does.

→Quote of the Day: 

I think, first and foremost, what we saw on Oct. 7 was a horrific act of violence against the people of Israel. They have certainly, and the vice president said it, have the right to defend themselves, and the United States will always stand by that. But we can’t allow what’s happened in Gaza to happen. The Palestinian people have every right to life and liberty themselves. We need to continue, I think, to put the leverage on to make sure we move towards a two-state solution. I think we’re at a critical point right now. We need the Netanyahu government to start moving in that direction. But I think those folks who are speaking out loudly in Michigan are speaking out for all the right reasons. It’s a humanitarian crisis. It can’t stand the way it is, and we need to find a way that people can live together in this. And we’ve said it and continue to say it, getting a cease-fire with the return of the hostages, and then moving toward a sustainable, two-state solution is the only way forward. 

That’s Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz in a Thursday interview with a Michigan National Public Radio affiliate.

→Tim Walz has also funneled millions in federal funding to a Minnesota medical research institute that partners with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky reports. As a congressman, Walz helped secure more than $2 million in funding for the Hormel Institute, a biomedical research facility housed in the University of Minnesota, and has repeatedly toured and touted the institute. Hormel, in turn, has repeatedly collaborated with WIV on biomedical research, including for a 2020 study on COVID-19, and Hormel’s former executive director of 18 years, Zigang Dong, stepped down in 2019 amid an FBI investigation into his failure to report foreign backing when applying for grants. Dong now works at a university in China. 

Admittedly, the revelation that a congressman sought pork for a local biomedical facility is not, in itself, groundbreaking news. However, Walz himself has drawn scrutiny for visiting China on more than 30 occasions (including for his honeymoon), often on government-subsidized trips, and has extolled the Chinese system as one in which “everyone is the same and everyone shares.” We’d also remind readers of our reporting on March 7, on two Chinese-national researchers who were dismissed from Canada’s highest-security pathogen research facility, the Winnipeg National Microbiology Laboratory, for stealing research and passing it along to Chinese institutions, including the WIV. A Canadian intelligence investigation found that one of the researchers was a covert participant in the Chinese Communist Party’s Thousand Talents Program, which recruits diaspora Chinese experts to spy and steal from Western institutions on behalf of the CCP. 

→In a Friday article in Axios on Kamala Harris’ media-avoidance strategy, Alex Thompson and Mike Allen compile nine areas in which Harris has “shifted views or her current policy is unknown.” Those nine are:

1. Banning plastic straws (she was for it and now is against it)

2. Outlawing new gas-powered cars by 2035 (she was for it, now unknown)

3. Banning fracking (was for it, now against it)

4. Mandatory “assault weapons” buyback (was for it, now unknown)

5. Decriminalizing border crossings (was for it, now against it)

6. Reparations for slavery (was for it, now unknown)

7. Building a wall (was against it, now supports the February Senate immigration bill, which includes wall funding)

8. A federal jobs guarantee (was for it, now against it)

9. Medicare for All (was for it, now against it)

Harris herself, of course, hasn’t commented on any of this—her alleged current positions all come from statements by campaign staffers and surrogates, not the candidate herself. 

→Over at his Substack “The Dossier,” Jordan Schachtel has a post on Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with podcaster Darryl Cooper. There’s a bit on the contents of the podcast itself, but the point we’d like to highlight is that Carlson’s interview with Cooper is just the latest iteration of what’s now become an undeniable pattern for Carlson since leaving Fox News. Here’s Schachtel:

I can’t help but notice that a significant chunk of his guest roster since leaving Fox has been a who’s-who of rabid Jew-baiters. Recently, he brought on a PLO pastor who glorified the October 7th massacre, and gave him unchallenged space to demonize the world’s lone Jewish state.

[He’s also brought on Rep. Thomas Massie to rail against the “Israel Lobby,” country singer John Rich to explain how the Rothschilds are responsible for American Christian Zionism, and, back in 2022, Kanye West, editing out the rapper’s antisemitic asides — TS]. 

This has become Tucker’s schtick over and over again. He seemingly doesn’t have the cojones to directly attack Jews and Israel, so he strategically launders this indecent effort through his guests, who use his massive platform to attempt to smear and degrade my coreligionists. With this approach, Tucker takes little risk and he can still link arms in public with major right-wing figures.

Read the full post here: 

Tucker Carlson and the attempted mainstreaming of right-wing Jew-hatred

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The MAD Files, by David Mikics

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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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When Your Therapist Hates Israel

Differing opinions about Oct. 7, Gaza, and antisemitism are straining relationships between clinicians and their clients

by Jay Deitcher

Like many Jews around the world, Rosie found herself spiraling post-Oct. 7, watching news 12 hours per day, debating folks online, and feeling her friendship circle dwindling. After she posted about the massacres online, she lost clients of her Kingston, New York, tarot-reading business.

“The day of Oct. 7, I completely shut down and went into survival mode,” said Rosie. “I was not OK.”

During her third session with a new therapist, Rosie (we’re using therapy clients’ first names to protect their privacy) broached the subject of the massacres, and her emotional distress. The non-Jewish therapist told her flatly, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Rosie is far from alone. Post-Oct. 7, many Jewish clients across the political spectrum have attempted to process Israel-related issues in therapy, yet had their feelings dismissed—often, though not always, by non-Jewish therapists.

At the same time, Jewish therapists have felt clients—again, often but not always non-Jewish— projecting onto them the views they imagine their therapists have on Israel and Gaza, distancing themselves without discussing where anyone actually stands on the issues. And Jewish therapists have even had trouble finding safe spaces to connect with other therapists. Therapeutic relationships are being torn apart from all sides, bringing into question what role a therapist’s opinion has in a therapy session and how important is it for a therapist and client to share similar views and backgrounds.

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Finding a Jewish therapist was essential for a client named Rachel after working with her previous therapist through middle school, high school, and college. “The therapist knew everything about me,” she said, including that her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. After Oct. 7, when Rachel broke down in tears about the antisemitism she was witnessing, her therapist told her that the videos she’d watched from the massacres were “spliced together” and “fake.”

“What about the 16,000 dead Palestinians?” her therapist asked.

“My brain kind of just shut off,” Rachel told me. “She was just talking, and I was in a bubble, like, ‘What is happening here? People are tearing the kidnapped posters off. How could you just be so cold-hearted?’”

“I need to leave this conversation,” she remembered saying to her therapist. “I don’t feel safe.” Her Zoom session ended with the click of a button.

Soon Rachel found a new therapist who shared her Jewish background. “After Oct. 7, I need to make sure that [my therapist is] Jewish,” she said, “because [non-Jewish therapists] don’t understand, they won’t understand it.”

There are plenty of cases where clients have advocated for themselves and the therapists have put in the work to mend the relationship. For a client named Erica, a schism occurred when she was venting over Zoom about misinformation being spread about Jews being colonizers, and her therapist told her, “Well, I don’t believe in treating humans like animals.”

Erica’s therapist was Jewish. They both descended from Holocaust survivors. Her therapist knew that she looked at situations with nuance and was empathetic toward Palestinian civilians. And because they had grown so “connected” over their decade-plus relationship, his comment stung more.

“Oh my God,” Erica thought. “I feel a very strong implication that you’re saying I do believe [in treating humans like animals]. I don’t see a reason to continue our conversation if that’s how you feel,” she recalled telling her therapist. “I think we’re done.”

Their session ended abruptly. Then her therapist reached out a few weeks later and acknowledged that he wasn’t in “a therapeutic mindset at the time,” Erica recalled. He had suffered a loss in his family, and he admitted that he “was not receiving everyone’s pain or frustration in the most professional manner.”

Her therapist didn’t take back anything he said about Israel, but acknowledged what he said was inappropriate, and Erica felt that her therapist genuinely yearned to continue working together. There are topics she doesn’t broach with her therapist because they both know they don’t see eye-to-eye on them, but that understanding puts them on the same page.

Working through these difficult discussions can strengthen therapeutic relationships. “We’re both happy to have patched things up,” Erica said. Their conversation brought them closer, she said, because it was an acknowledgement that they were both struggling with current events. They weren’t alone.

***

It’s not just clients who’ve been affected by these political divisions. Clients and therapists alike—no matter where they stand on issues of Israel and Gaza—are filtering the news through their lived experiences. “If you’ve been a victim of sexual assault, if you’ve been trafficked, if you’ve experienced antisemitism or discrimination against immigrants, when people see imagery as horrific as what we’re seeing, it’s human nature to relate to it,” therapist Halina Brooke told me. “Of course, people are going to have really strong feelings and really steadfast ideas.”

Therapists are human, said Brooke: “If something’s affecting our own community, we are a lot more likely to dig our heels in. Our blind spots become a lot more opaque.”

To help recognize blind spots, the best practice is for therapists to bounce ideas and cases off peers. But many therapists feel unsafe processing their work with peers in such a polarized climate, and it’s affecting the quality of therapy.

Since the attacks, therapy organizations that claim to be progressive, such as the social justice-oriented Inclusive Therapists, have flooded social media with watermelon emojis, referring to the war in Gaza as genocide. Other groups have been criticized in long Reddit threads for being too supportive of Israel (“So frustrated with ‘liberal’ therapists,” one thread is titled). Suddenly, stating you are anti-Zionist is a prerequisite to being added to therapist listservs, and there was even a Zionist therapist blacklist being passed around, made up mainly of Jews. Safe places where therapists go for support have veered to one extreme or the other, leaving clinicians feeling alone. “A lot of Jewish therapists have found that it’s very hard to continue feeling safe and comfortable in consultation groups that aren’t Jewish affinity spaces,” Brooke said.

This is exacerbated because clients themselves will jump to conclusions about therapists’ views on the conflict based on their Jewish background, with non-Jewish clients deciding that a therapist with a Jewish-sounding last name must be “too pro-Israel,” and distancing themselves or ghosting them completely.

“It’s a lot easier to work with someone with different political opinions than it is to work with someone who makes assumptions about you because you’re Jewish,” Brooke said. “For most Jewish therapists, this is the first time, perhaps in our whole career, where we’ve had people really push on and try to dissect our identities and demand an explanation for our political affiliations [and] our really complicated views on things domestic and abroad.”

It is causing therapists to have to look at how they feel about the issues and decide how much they want to disclose. They have to get to know themselves better as clinicians and recognize their limitations so they can work on them. “It gives us an opportunity to become more sturdy within our own identities,” Brooke said.

A half-decade ago, Brooke launched the Jewish Therapist Collective to support and advocate for Jewish therapists. This September, they are starting a weekly consultant group for non-Jewish therapists to meet with Jewish therapists so they can become more culturally competent. This December, the organization is planning a trip to Israel to connect with Israeli therapists, study trauma and PTSD, and visit the Nova festival site and kibbutzim affected by the Oct. 7 attacks. Their site includes a directory of Jewish clinicians. “People don’t realize that they want a Jewish therapist until they stumble on some cultural incompetence with a gentile therapist,” she said.

Therapists are “ethically mandated to not discriminate against anyone and to treat people regardless of how they come,” Brooke said. “On the flip side, we have an obligation not to cause harm to clients if we have a situation where our bias might compromise our ability to care for someone.”

Even though it may seem easier if a client and therapist share similar views, a strong therapist is able to empathize with a client’s perspective, even if it’s not their own, said Nava Silton, psychologist, professor, and author of Scientific Concepts Behind Happiness, Kindness, and Empathy in Contemporary Society. Having different perspectives allows the clinician the opportunity to learn.

There are cases where a therapist needs to recognize that they are not a good fit for a client, Brooke said, such as if a clinician’s child has an eating disorder, and working with clients in similar situations would trigger them.

“It’s important to remember that clients aren’t coming in to be treated for their political views,” Brooke said. “They’re usually coming in because they have a crippling anxiety or difficult depression or grief issues.” Therapists should focus on client goals, not what’s going on in the Middle East. If a therapist can’t get past the politics, it’s on them to find a clinician who can, and they shouldn’t put any blame on the client, she said.

Similarly, it’s an issue if a therapist’s views are so in line with a client’s that they spend sessions venting about the news. “It can feel really good to sit with someone who might share your vantage point, and you can feel seen by each other,” Brooke said. But instead of spending sessions discussing current events, therapists need to tap into their support systems to discuss politics on their own time.

If a therapist is overstepping into inappropriate territory, it’s not on the client to coddle them, Brooke said. She recommends the clients say to them, “I’ve noticed this and it’s important that we talk about it if we’re going to move forward together.” Then set boundaries. “If the therapist tries to tell you that your perceptions or experiences, especially of bigotry like antisemitism, are wrong, or they get defensive, that’s a sign to walk away,” Brooke said.

It’s also not OK for therapists to use clients to educate themselves about Judaism or Israel, especially if that isn’t what the client wants to discuss, said Silton. If this happens, she recommends the client states what they do want to spend the session discussing and directing the therapist back to their goals.

If a therapeutic relationship ends, clients shouldn’t dismiss the growth that they made, Brooke said. “You can walk away from the relationship and be like, ‘OK, that was an important chapter, and I got a lot out of that, but that therapist just hit a wall and couldn’t grow with me in this other way.’”

Because so many people don’t understand the ways antisemitism presents itself today, many get defensive if antisemitism comes up.

“Don’t take it personally. If your therapist falls short, just know that it’s not you,” Brooke said. There are good therapists out there, even if it might take some time and work to find them. “Know that you’re worth it. You are worth continuing to look [for the right therapist]. You are worth being bold and setting your boundaries and keeping them.”

Situations like this offer an opportunity for therapists to rise to the occasion, said Brooke. “It’s not on the client's shoulders to make the therapist grow, but the client needs to know that bringing this stuff to the therapist is going to either help them be the therapist they promised they would be, grow into that therapist or realize that they have a shortcoming that you both needed to know about.”