The Big Story
Early Wednesday morning, the Israeli government approved a hostage deal with Hamas. Here is what we know:
Hamas will release 50 hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners and a four-day cease-fire. The Israeli hostages will all be civilian women and children; Israel will not release any prisoners convicted of killing Israelis.
For every 10 additional hostages released by Hamas, the cease-fire will be extended by one day, up to a maximum of 10 days. Hostages and prisoners will be exchanged at a fixed ratio of three Palestinians for one Israeli.
The International Committee of the Red Cross will visit the hostages who have not been released as part of the deal and provide them with medical care.
The first batches of hostages are to be released at 5 a.m. Thursday. The cease-fire will take effect at 10 a.m. Thursday.
According to Hamas, Israeli air movement over southern Gaza will be suspended completely and limited to six hours per day over northern Gaza for the duration of the cease-fire.
Also according to Hamas, civilians will be allowed to move from southern Gaza to the north via the Salah Al-Din Road.
BREAKING: A vehicle exploded Wednesday at the Rainbow Bridge on the U.S.–Canadian border crossing in what law enforcement officials say was an attempted terrorist attack, according to Fox News. The explosion killed the two people who were in the vehicle and caused minor injuries to one other person, reportedly a border officer. As of The Scroll’s publication time on Wednesday, there were conflicting reports about whether the vehicle, which blew up at approximately 11:15 am ET, was attempting to enter the United States or Canada. According to one witness, the car accelerated after being waved past a checkpoint and reached an estimated 100 mph when it hit a barrier near a second checkpoint and detonated. Both Fox News and the New York Post cited law enforcement sources saying that explosives were found in the vehicle after the blast.
Read more: https://www.foxnews.com/us/ny-vehicle-explosion-reported-rainbow-bridge-niagara-falls-injured
IN THE BACK PAGES: Thanksgiving optimism from Tablet editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz
The Rest
A note to readers: The Scroll will be taking off Thursday and Friday. For The Rest today, we’ve collected some of our favorite items from the past six weeks of war coverage. Happy Thanksgiving, and we’ll be back with a full edition on Monday, Nov. 27.
Also, a note of apology: we failed to credit Tzvi Kilov by name as the author of yesterday’s Back Pages essay. Tzvi is a writer from Atlanta, Georgia who explores the wild frontiers of authentic Jewish thought at:
→.10/8 — As news of the wholesale slaughter of Israeli civilians broke over the weekend, protestors gathered in Western cities to express their support—for Hamas. Crowds in downtown Toronto came together to shout “Allahu Akbar” and “Free Palestine!” At least 5,000 people showed up outside the Israeli embassy in London, cheering the attacks, waving Palestinian flags, and carrying signs calling for sanctions on Israel. In Sydney, people waving Palestinian flags chanted “Gas the Jews” and “Fuck the Jews” outside the city’s iconic opera house. In light of the Sydney protests, Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur issued the following warning to Australians:
It’s not just Australians and Canadians, though. In New York City, at a rally outside the Israeli consulate endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), listeners cheered a speaker who boasted that Israelis had been having a “great time” at “some sort of rave or desert party” until “the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters”—a reference to the Supernova festival at which more than 260 Israelis were killed.
That speaker, it turned out, was activist journalist Eugene Puryear, who earlier in the week appeared as a guest on the podcast hosted by Briahna Joy Gray, the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. After footage of the rally went viral, DSA-affiliated New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a statement condemning “the bigotry and callousness expressed in Times Square on Sunday.” Other elected New York Democrats close to the DSA, including Congressman Jamaal Bowman and state Sen. Julia Salazar, declined to comment on the rally.
→10/17 — Iran helped plan Hamas’ attacks at a meeting in Beirut, except the U.S. government says it didn’t. U.S. intelligence doesn’t keep tabs on Hamas, according to U.S. sources—except Hamas’ leaders are allowed to live in Qatar, the site of a major American military base, so they’ll be easier for the United States to keep tabs on. Egypt says it warned Israel, but not the United States, of an impending attack from Gaza, even though it’s the United States, not Israel, that pays Egypt tens of billions of dollars per year for access to intelligence. Hamas paragliders trained in Lebanon, where the United States pays the salaries of the armed forces and the U.S. ambassador is a noted paragliding enthusiast, yet the United States says it missed any signs that the terror group was planning something. If you believe all that, then The Scroll has some NFTs to sell you.
For everyone else, Tablet’s Lee Smith brings some clarity:
The continuing proliferation of conflicting and contradictory stories leaked by U.S. intelligence services regarding what they knew—and, more importantly, didn’t know—about the planning for Hamas’ assault on Israel, is more than just a D.C. bureaucratic comedy act. Taken together, the profusion of leaks suggests there are people in offices and agencies across the Beltway who are worried they’ll be blamed for missing signals and human intelligence outlining plans for the largest one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/biden-administration-tries-hide-knew-impending-massacre-leaving-iran-untouched-hamas-lee-smith
→10/17 — Stat of the Day: $2,807,000
That’s the amount the Palestinian Authority will pay to the families of the Hamas militants killed during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to the Israeli NGO Palestinian Media Watch. Under the PA’s “pay for slay” welfare programs, Palestinians killed while fighting Israelis are classified as “martyrs,” entitling their families to a onetime $1,511 grant and a monthly stipend of $353 for life—even in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which is still claimed by the PA. The PA budget for these payments is in turn heavily subsidized by hundreds of millions of dollars of European and U.S. aid. On Oct. 11, a federal judge in Texas ordered discovery in a lawsuit alleging that the Biden administration’s payments to the PA violated the Taylor Force Act, a federal law passed in 2018 that prohibits the United States from funding the PA until it ends its support for terrorism. “Recent production of records,” wrote Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk in the discovery order, “shows that the Government knew its economic support fund (ESF) funding in the West Bank and Gaza was benefiting Palestinian terrorists.”
Read more here: https://www.jns.org/pa-to-immediately-reward-families-of-oct-7-terrorists-with-nearly-3m/
→10/18 — A former intern for the Anti-Defamation League was among the New York University students caught on camera ripping down posters of Israeli hostages on NYU’s campus. Yazmeen Deyhimi, a junior who was featured last year in a New York Times style section piece about clubbing in a barbershop basement, admitted to tearing down the posters in an apology posted on Instagram, after being outed by fellow students. The ADL, which was once run as an organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism in the United States, is morphing under its current leadership into an arm of the Democratic Party’s political machine; it has become a champion of progressive causes and consequently struggled with junior staffers who reject the organization’s pro-Israel stance. This March, leaked audio from an ADL Zoom chat showed President Jonathan Greenblatt under attack from young ADL staffers over his criticism of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement.
Read the rest here: https://nypost.com/2023/10/17/nyu-student-that-ripped-down-israeli-hostage-posters-is-former-adl-intern/
→10/19 — About 300 protestors were arrested in the U.S. Capitol yesterday during a demonstration opposing Israel’s war in Gaza and demanding the U.S. government push for a cease-fire. The demonstration, which featured a speech by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–MI) repeating the discredited story of an Israeli airstrike killing hundreds of Gazan civilians at the Al-Ahli Hospital, was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and If Not Now (INN), described by The New York Times as “Jewish anti-Zionist groups.” While these groups are certainly anti-Zionist, it would be more accurate to call them “generic progressive groups with Jewish branding,” considering who funds them. According to website NGO Monitor, JVP received $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund between 2019 and 2023 and $75,000 from the Tides Foundation in 2019. For the much-smaller INN, those numbers were $160,000 and $45,000, respectively. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is not exactly known for its Jewish philanthropy. As Sean Cooper reported for Tablet in “Bending the Jews,” the fund has limited its donations to groups—such as JVP, INN, and Bend the Arc—that can be relied on to put a “Jewish” gloss on the coalitional priorities of the modern Democratic Party, like opposing voter ID laws and astroturfing protests against Ron DeSantis. The Tides Foundation, meanwhile, is part of the Tides network, a Democratic dark-money group funded by Peter Buffett and other progressive billionaires, on the board of which sit several former Obama officials.
Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/warren-buffett-black-lives-matter
→10/24 — Quote of the Day:
Hamas death squads failed to be their best selves.
That’s Washington Post columnist Jason Willick with a tongue-in-cheek gloss on a line by former Barack Obama aide Ben Rhodes in a New York Review of Books essay recommended by the ex-president. The real line? “Israel has legitimate security concerns and has the right to go after the military wing of Hamas, a faction that has proven to be the worst version of itself.” Say it ain’t so, Ben! Rhodes is perhaps best known today for creating the “echo chamber” that the Obama administration used to sell the Iran deal to the American public, but he is also an accomplished media critic. As he told The New York Times Magazine in 2016, explaining why he found the American press so easy to manipulate, “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Read more here: https://twitter.com/jawillick/status/1716544960642633833
→10/27 — The Adalah Justice Project, a “grassroots” anti-Israel group whose executive director praised the Oct. 7 terror attacks as “the oppressed rising up,” is a subsidiary of the Democratic dark-money giant the Tides Network, The Washington Free Beacon reports. Adalah is one of Tides’ many “fiscal sponsorships,” a legal arrangement that allows the sponsor to direct money to an organization without that organization having to register as a nonprofit with the IRS, which would trigger disclosure requirements. In practice, this means there is no legal distinction between Adalah and Tides. The Free Beacon reports that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given Tides $710,000 in earmarked funds for Adalah since 2018. Tides has also received large sums from George Soros (including $225,000 for “pro-Palestine initiatives”), Pierre Omidyar, and other progressive billionaires, though it is unclear whether Adalah made use of these funds. Adalah executive director Sandra Tamari told Yes! magazine on Oct. 11 that “Hamas’s attack was resistance to an intolerable situation that has been taking place in the Gaza strip.”
Tides, Soros, and the Rockefellers are also major donors to Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, which sponsored the Oct. 18 anti-Israel rally at the U.S. Capitol.
Read the rest here: https://freebeacon.com/democrats/this-grassroots-anti-israel-group-is-actually-part-of-a-left-wing-dark-money-behemoth
→11/1 — Here are some highlights from Hamas’ 2014 guidelines for Gazans posting on social media:
“Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.”
“Avoid publishing pictures of rockets fired into Israel from [Gaza] city centers. This [would] provide a pretext for attacking residential areas in the Gaza Strip. Do not publish or share photos or video clips showing rocket launching sites or the movement of resistance [forces] in Gaza.”
“Avoid entering into a political argument with a Westerner aimed at convincing him that the Holocaust is a lie and deceit; instead, equate it with Israel’s crimes against Palestinian civilians.”
“The narrative of life vs. the narrative of blood: [When speaking] to an Arab friend, start with the number of martyrs. [But when speaking] to a Western friend, start with the number of wounded and dead.”
“Do not publish photos of military commanders. Do not mention their names in public, and do not praise their achievements in conversations with foreign friends!”
Read the rest here: https://www.memri.org/reports/hamas-interior-ministry-social-media-activists-always-call-dead-innocent-civilians-dont-post
→11/6 – Several employees of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which has received nearly $1 billion in U.S. funding since President Joe Biden took office, celebrated Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis, according to a new watchdog report. The report from IMPACT-se, which monitors U.N. schools in the West Bank and Gaza, found that at least 14 teachers employed by UNRWA praised the Oct. 7 attacks on their private social media accounts. In one particularly striking instance, an UNRWA elementary school posted a video of a school rally on its official Facebook page, featuring a young boy accompanied by an UNRWA administrator calling for victory for Hamas’ “jihad warriors” and invoking Muhammad’s defeat of the Jews at Khaybar. The report also identified at least 100 Hamas terrorists who are graduates of UNRWA schools.
Read more here: https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/11/06/un-agency-staff-celebrated-oct-7-massacre-part-terror-strategy-at-root-hamas-attack-watchdog-says/
11/16— Quote of the Day 1:
Decolonize: The active and intentional process of unlearning values, beliefs, and conceptions that have caused physical, emotional, or mental harm to people through colonization. It requires a recognition of systems of oppression.
Quote of the Day 2:
What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers.
The first is from the U.S. National Security Agency’s internal DEI glossary, published in May 2022 and obtained by the Daily Wire on Wednesday, a document that also includes entries on white fragility, white privilege, white supremacy, whiteness, and settler colonialism, as well as on pronouns such as ze and zir. The second is what Teen Vogue writer Najma Sharif posted on X on Oct. 7, in reference to the gruesome footage of Hamas’ massacres that was just then reaching the United States.
TODAY IN TABLET:
A Dark Thanksgiving, by Andrew Fox
My son had the courage of his convictions about Israel at school. We both paid a price.
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.
Happy Thanksgiving 2023. We’re Going to Be OK.
I’m not joking
We’re going to be just fine.
By “we” I mean America. And by “just fine” I actually mean great. Better than ever, really.
If I were making a case for American decline—and, Lord knows, that’s a cottage industry these days—I would have no shortage of stats to choose from. Our government is comprehensively corrupted. Millions of us are numbing ourselves with porn and apps and opioids. Not only have we lost faith in all of the institutions that once stirred our passions and our commitments, but we were right to do so. It’s easier to imagine a second Civil War than another American renaissance.
Except that would be wrong. When I look at America, and when I visit America, and when I talk to Americans, I see a very difficult short-term future followed by a glorious horizon.
I understand that many readers are too shocked to do anything other than stoke their own outrage or wallow in despair. Others are turned off by anything that’s intangible, think only fools get taken by talk of the eternal and the unseen. I respect you, but need you to realize that you would’ve been wrong about America at every other pivotal moment. You would have been wrong about it in, say, 1774. Looking at General Washington’s ragtag army, 80,000 strong at its peak, you might’ve opined that these foundlings hadn’t a chance against His Majesty’s men, more numerous and better trained and heavily armed. In 1859, you might’ve observed reality and sighed that our experiment with unity, such as it was, is kaput. In 1963, you might’ve predicted that a berserk America was off the rails, never again to return to its senses.
If, however, you’re willing to entertain the possibility of optimism, I’m here to explain why it is, in fact, the most rational position to have in this very moment.
***
Observe the history of every other nation, more or less, and, at some point, the social contract theory creeps in. The idea behind it is simple: Human beings, each an atomized individual, band together and trade away some of their liberties in return for collective security. I will allow the state to collect taxes and set rules, and the state, in turn, will protect me from my neighbor should he rise up to smite me. It’s a fine idea, except, you know, being all wrong: As one famous French philosopher quipped, the social contract theory was composed either by men who had no children or who had forgotten their own childhoods. Because look at a child, any child, and you realize that we’re not merely atomized individuals, unrooted in family or faith or community. And you realize, too, that a contract is terrible precisely because it offers no theory of change and growth: Sign on the dotted line, and you have no choice but to follow the precise same contours for ever and ever.
A covenant is a very different beast. A covenant makes you sign first and then, God willing, grow up and prove yourself worthy of your word. Abraham, the ur-covenanter, strikes his deal with God and is then tested again and again and again until he evolves to become the man God always knew he could be. A covenant is another way of saying, “I believe in you, so please don’t prove me wrong.”
It’s no coincidence that the Hebrew name for the United States is Artzot Ha’Brit, the lands of the covenant. Every century or so, America renews its covenant with its creator, and no renewal looks like another. We entered this covenant first in 1776, proclaiming liberty throughout all the land. We renewed it in 1861, fighting a bitter war to erase the stain of slavery. And in 1964, we rose again to make sure we don’t slide into bigotry and bile. Do the math, and you realize we’re due to have another renewal pretty soon.
What would it look like? There’s no real way of telling, not without risking prophecy’s sweet intoxication that turns prudent people into prattling morons. It would likely be jagged, and maybe even violent. But the renewal itself doesn’t matter much; what counts is what comes next, which, traditionally, is a century or so of American flourishing. Our goodness and our greatness are intertwined; reaffirm one, and the other will follow.
And everywhere I travel in America these days, I see Americans reaffirming goodness. They’re not the hollow collegians, cramped in the airless quarters of their intolerant madrassas, chanting for Hamas. They’re the young fathers in Texas, building a school dedicated to classical Western and Jewish values, fixing much that is broken about the educational system the old fashioned way—by building something new. They’re the moms down in Florida who saw that their girls needed a more wholesome way to spend their afternoons and launched a new youth movement dedicated to community service. They’re the Catholics of the back-to-the-land movement, an agrarian alternative to the profound brokenness of American cities. They’re the young Chabad couples spreading light and faith and Jewish values in every corner of the country. They’re normal Americans who love this country in an uncomplicated way because they believe that it is special, that its specialness is divinely ordained, and that our job as Americans is to repay the privilege of being citizens of this incredible country by making sure our friends and neighbors, too, bask in its warmth and its light.
Pay close attention to American history—and that’s what we do come Thanksgiving, isn’t it?—and you’ll see that the story of giving thanks and spreading light is the American story. It’s the story of D-Day and the moon landing, of Antietam and Valley Forge, of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act. All of the above were extraordinary in the literal sense of the word—they required courage and conviction that ordinary people making ordinary calculations lack. But we’re not ordinary. We’re Americans, covenantal creatures to our core, stuffed, to paraphrase our national poet, with the stuff that is coarse and stuffed with the stuff that is fine. We contain multitudes. And we’re going to be just fine.
While I wholeheartedly commend Mr. Leibovitz’s optimism with regard to this country’s future, and cling to his every word in hope against hope, I struggle to see that future without an extraordinary amount of upheaval and chaos.
First, the institutions created to protect and defend the Constitution of the US - all of them - are so riddled with a veritable black mold of corruption, busy desecrating every semblance of the Rule of Law, and individual freedom they can, that to just “undo” all their perversions will require an unimaginablely Herculean effort.
Second, Mr. Leibovitz writes as someone who has read and studied history. The generations coming up have not only not so much as read any actual history, they have not even been taught it. Conversely, they’re being marinated in plethora of anti-American hatred and garbage that too will have to be totally crushed and replaced.
Are there great Americans willing to do the work that’s going to be required to right this ship of state? Absolutely, without doubt.
But it is going to messy, ugly and most likely violent.
These creatures who have captured and are killing our once great nation are not going to go quietly.