What Happened Today

December 11, 2023

Dec 11, 2023

The Big Story

A consensus is emerging in the Israeli press that Hamas has been significantly weakened and may be on the brink of collapse. “Signs point to Hamas’s rule weakening and the barrier of fear against the terrorist group breaking,” according to a Sunday story in the center-right Jerusalem Post, which noted several recent incidents of Palestinian civilians publicly voicing their anger at Hamas leaders, looting UNRWA warehouses, and throwing rocks at Hamas militants. Amos Harel, writing in Israel’s center-left daily Haaretz, conveyed a similar message, quoting a senior IDF officer who said there are “signs of breaking in Hamas,” including the mass surrenders of Hamas fighters documented in widely circulated photos last week. To drive home the point, Shin Bet released video of an interrogation of Hamas’ former minister of communications, Yosef Almansi, in which he called Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar a “madman” and claimed that the people of Gaza want Sinwar “destroyed”—which appears to be the Israeli plan, according to Axios’ Barak Ravid. On Sunday, Ravid reported that the IDF’s military operation “now focuses on capturing or killing Sinwar.” “We will break them with or without eliminating Sinwar,” one Israeli official told Ravid, “but if we kill him it will happen much faster.”

Hamas may indeed be breaking on the battlefield. The most widely circulated estimates are that the Israelis have killed about 6,000 Hamas fighters, out of an estimated prewar total of 30,000, and significantly attrited the terror group’s battlefield commanders, which may explain not only the recent mass surrenders but also Hamas’ seeming inability to offer the stiff resistance that the Israelis had initially anticipated and encountered in previous incursions into Gaza. They have also destroyed some unknown but significant proportion of Hamas’ military infrastructure. But the IDF has had less success in eliminating the group’s senior leadership in Gaza, including Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, to say nothing of the Hamas leaders living in Qatar, Lebanon, and Turkey. Hamas may not be able to meaningfully contest the IDF’s control of Gaza now, but if the war ended tomorrow, the group would still have perhaps 15,000 fighters and all of its senior leaders. That’s more than enough to reconstitute itself as a governing force, especially once the Qatari reconstruction money starts flowing.

These are important considerations, since the triumphalist messaging coming from what appear to be coordinated leaks to the Israeli press is playing out against the background of a rapidly ticking clock on the IDF’s ground operation. Last week, the United States vetoed a near-unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza (the United Kingdom, which abstained from the vote, was the only other country not to vote in favor). In theory, Israel can do without diplomatic support; what it can’t do without is U.S. resupply for munitions. Which means it’s a problem for the IDF that, according to The Economist, “several sources have confirmed that during his recent visit to Israel Antony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, told the Israelis that they would have to wrap things up by the new year.”

Publicly, at least, both Israeli and U.S. officials have sought to downplay any tensions over strategy or timelines; an Israeli official told The Times of Israel Monday that there is “100% agreement from the US on our goals for the war both in public and private.” Maybe Hamas really is on the verge of collapse, and maybe the Israelis really will kill or capture more of the group’s senior leaders in the coming weeks. But with Washington seeming increasingly impatient to bring an end to the “active phase” of the operation, Israeli leaders may also be preparing the Israeli public—as well as Arab leaders, who have been privately telling the Israelis to keep going until Hamas is destroyed, according to multiple reports—to accept that reality. That will mean selling whatever the IDF has achieved by then as a decisive Israeli victory, whether it really is one or not.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Adam Andrzejewski argues that it’s time for Congress to open Harvard’s books

The Rest

→After mounting pressure from donors and board members following her embarrassing performance in a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism last Tuesday, UPenn President Elizabeth Magill resigned on Saturday. Now it appears that Harvard President Claudine Gay could be the next one on the chopping block. In addition to facing calls to resign from high-powered donors such as Bill Ackman, Gay now stands accused of plagiarism: On Sunday, Christopher Rufo and Chris Brunet co-published an investigation showing that Gay appears to have lifted sections of her 1997 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation nearly verbatim from the work of other scholars. Inadequately paraphrasing academic sources may seem trivial in comparison to Gay’s other sins, such as creating a climate of cult-like political orthodoxy only to rediscover the value of free speech when faced with student radicals literally celebrating the mass rape and murder of Jewish civilians, but these two stories are in fact one and the same. The flip side of the transformation of the Ivies into finishing schools for socializing elites into a radically illiberal and anti-American ideology is the elevation of a class of “experts” selected on the basis of their ideological loyalties and demographic characteristics and credentialed through their mastery of fake knowledge. What Gay appears to have forgotten is that even pseudo-scholars need to cite their sources.

Read more:

Christopher F. Rufo

Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?

Harvard president Claudine Gay has problems. Touted as the first black woman to run the nation’s most prestigious university, she assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal. As dean and then president, Gay has been accused of…

2 years ago · 338 likes · 154 comments · Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet

→George Soros gave nearly $50 million to the pro-Iran think tank formerly run by Biden’s disgraced Iran envoy, Robert Malley. A New York Post investigation found that Soros’ Open Society Foundations had given $46.7 million since 2016 to the International Crisis Group, where Malley served as president until joining the Biden administration in 2021. The ICG was at the center of the scandal surrounding the Iran Experts Initiative, an Iranian influence operation that tapped Iranian expat academics to push regime talking points and advocate for the Iran nuclear deal in the Western press. Two of the experts named in the Semafor story, Ali Vaez and Dina Esfandiary, are currently employed by ICG. Malley hired a third, Ariane Tabatabai, to work with him on the State Department’s team to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Iran. Malley was suspended by the State Department in June and is currently under investigation by the FBI for mishandling classified information. Tabatabai has since moved to the Pentagon, where she retains her security clearance.

→Israeli War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday that Israel “will need to remove the threat posed by Hezbollah along the northern border.” The United States has repeatedly warned Israel not to “escalate” in Lebanon, despite repeated cross-border attacks from the Lebanese terror group, which led to the wounding of six IDF soldiers in northern Israel on Sunday. But as Amos Harel reports in Haaretz:

National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi said on Saturday … that should Hezbollah refuse to withdraw its Radwan forces north of the Litani River by diplomatic means, Israel would have to take other measures to dictate a new reality. Israel is making fairly clear threats against Hezbollah here, in an attempt to spur the international community toward a quick diplomatic arrangement. But the military suspects, as does Hanegbi, that the chances of that are limited.

Which brings us to our quote of the day…

→Quote of the Day:

This conflict should be a doubling down on reminding us that if we don't go towards regional integration, peace, and security—this is the alternative.

That’s Amos Hochstein, speaking Thursday at an Atlantic Council event in Dubai.

Readers of Tablet will remember that Hochstein was the U.S. official who led the U.S. effort to broker a 2022 maritime agreement between Israel and Lebanon that heavily favored Lebanon (i.e., Hezbollah). Tablet’s Tony Badran breaks it down:

What the Israelis perhaps have yet to recognize is that the U.S., as part of its Realignment with Iran, treats Lebanon as an American protectorate, which means Hezbollah enjoys a U.S. protective umbrella. That is the framework that the Biden administration made official with the maritime deal in 2022, where it inserted the U.S. between Israel and Hezbollah. The administration described that arrangement as a manifestation of “regional integration”—the practical implementation of Obama’s Realignment policy. That Amos Hochstein, the official who brokered the maritime deal and is waiting to restart its land border second half, doubled down on the policy of “regional integration” should leave no doubt in the minds of Israeli officials as to what U.S. policy is, and why the administration has been publicly warning Israel against preemptively striking Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The administration will move to initiate a land border process to entangle Israel with Hezbollah diplomatically, pressuring Israel to make land concessions along the border and in the Golan Heights. In return, everyone will pretend that one unit of Hezbollah will retreat a few miles north—which is what UNSCR 1701 called for in 2006 and failed to do ever since. In other words, the U.S. is orchestrating a net win for Hezbollah.

→For a sense of what the IDF is dealing with in Gaza, here’s our Thread of the Day, courtesy of John Spencer of West Point’s Modern War Institute:

→As part of its campaign to fight disinformation, the U.S. government is funding a group whose founders have pushed anti-Israel disinformation, The Washington Free Beacon reports. On Oct. 1, the State Department awarded $573,000 to MenaAction, a Virginia-based nonprofit, for two grants: one to help train Jordanian journalists to spot “fake news” and another to “amplify media and society against disinformation.” But in since-deleted posts on X, two of MenaAction’s cofounders, Chris Aboukhaled and Mohammed Abu Dalhoum, pushed false claims that Israel was responsible for the Oct. 17 explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital, which the U.S. and Israeli governments and several independent journalistic investigations have determined was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket. Who could have seen this coming? Well, here’s Scroll editor Jacob Siegel on Oct. 19:

→The latest draft text of the National Defense Authorization Act has restored Department of Defense funding for EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that might have helped cause the COVID-19 pandemic through its risky U.S.-government-funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The House and Senate had separately passed provisions banning EHA (which has received $26 million from the DoD since 2020) from receiving any further Pentagon funding, but the new version of the bill merely prohibits funding for EHA projects in China—a “slap on the wrist,” according to Justin Goodman of White Coat Waste Project, since the DoD’s current grants to EHA do not appear to involve work in China. The Senate and House Armed Services Committees, which authored the latest draft of the NDAA, also removed language banning DoD from funding gain-of-function research, which was included in the draft bill passed by the House.

TODAY IN TABLET:

Yidl, Get Your Gun, by Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman

But don’t forget your God

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.

It’s Time for Congress to Open Harvard’s Books

The U.S. tax code and federal contracts swell the coffers of wealthy Ivy League universities that teach hatred is OK. Taxpayers should cut them off.

By Adam Andrzejewski

In their congressional testimony last week, the presidents of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania refused to denounce terrorism or explain whether calls for the genocide of Jews represent harassment or bullying on their campuses. Parents who watched this spectacle are wondering where the $80,000 a year they pay in tuition is going, and whether the “education” their children are receiving is worth the price tag. American taxpayers who can hardly afford an Ivy League education but are equally disturbed by the moral rot they're seeing might be even more alarmed to discover that they are personally underwriting it.

While parents should be free to pay for any form of education they want, the fact is American taxpayers contribute more to Harvard than the parents of Harvard students do. Prohibitively expensive universities that turn out students who believe that open antisemitism and championing terrorism are forms of “social justice" do so on the taxpayer’s dime. That’s because they all enjoy tax-exempt status as “educational” public charities. But are these institutions in fact serving the public interest? And how much are the lessons that students are learning at these wealthy “public charities” costing the American taxpayer?

The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit government-spending watchdog which I direct, examined 10 universities—the Ivy League, plus Stanford and Northwestern. We found that during a five-year period from 2018-22 these wealthy universities collected $45 billion in taxpayer subsidies, special tax treatment, and federal payments. In fact, these universities collected a stunning $33 billion in federal contracts and grants. It therefore seems these schools are more federal contractors than educators—with federal payments exceeding undergraduate student tuition.

Additionally, the universities we surveyed profit handsomely from “nonprofit” tax breaks amounting to a benefit of roughly $12 billion. Wealthy universities pay only a 1.4% “excessive endowments” tax on their gains whereas wealthy individuals pay up to 23.4% on their capital gains.

The University of Pennsylvania, whose then-president (she resigned on Saturday), Liz Magill, seemed to smirk at the idea of being questioned by Congress, collected $3.7 billion in U.S. government grants and contracts, mostly for research, between 2018 and 2022. Over the same five-year period, Penn’s endowment ballooned to $21 billion from $13.4 billion.

What is Penn doing with the U.S. government money it deposits into its swollen coffers? In September 2023, UPenn helped sponsor the Palestine Writes Festival, which organizers claim is “dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.” However, the event showcased multiple writers deemed antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League, most famously Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, and, initially, poet Refaat Alareer. After the Oct. 7 massacre and reports that at least one baby’s remains were found in an oven, Alareer tweeted “with or without baking powder?”

Just days before Oct. 7, then-UPenn President Liz Magill had refused to move the event off campus. In the eyes of many donors, Magill then failed to sufficiently condemn or even bother to regulate or police ensuing protests that included chants of “from the river to the sea”—a call for the ethnic cleansing of Jewish citizens of Israel—and vandalism of school property. Angered donors include billionaire Cliff Asness, former trustee Vahan Gureghian, and venture capitalist David Magerman. In a letter to Magill, Magerman wrote, “I am deeply ashamed of my association with” the university. “I refuse to donate another dollar.” Investor Steve Eisman went so far as to demand his name be removed from a scholarship, telling CNBC, “I do not want my family’s name associated with [Penn], ever.”

An aide to House Committee on Education and the Workforce chairwoman Virginia Foxx said that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was invited to the hearing, but had declined over a scheduling conflict. Nevertheless, Columbia’s own lightning-rod moments won’t soon be forgotten. Business school assistant professor Shai Davidai gathered students and asked them to record a 10-minute declaration in hopes they would spread it across the globe on social media. He called Shafik a “coward” for allowing pro-Hamas chants and rallies to go unchecked. “Imagine not being able to go to your work because your boss does not value your life, because your boss supports pro-terror organizations,” he said. His message for parents was brutal: “we cannot protect your child.”

Columbia’s five-year, taxpayer-funded haul? $5.8 billion in U.S. taxpayer money—while its endowment swelled to $13.3 billion from $10.5 billion.

That brings us to Harvard. Donor Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, has helped spearhead the revolt of donors and Ivy League parents after dozens of university groups signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas’ barbarism. Through open letters shared with journalists and exhaustive posts on X, Ackman has chronicled antisemitism at Harvard, calling the situation “dire and getting worse.”

Here’s just one example at Harvard: at a so-called “die in,” protesters physically surrounded an Israeli graduate student, blocking his vision and ability to navigate the campus. His fellow students grabbed at him, shoved him, and shouted "shame!", boxing him in and intimidating him. While reports were filed with the university police department and the FBI, Harvard would not comment on internal disciplinary actions.

Harvard has collected $3.3 billion in federal contracts and grants. With a $50.9 billion endowment, Harvard obviously doesn’t need taxpayer money to coddle discrimination or antisemitism. But then why is it receiving federal money to begin with—not to mention massive federal tax breaks on its endowment?

Following the congressional hearing, multiple UPenn students filed a lawsuit against the school for running afoul of civil rights law by failing to apply its code of conduct against anti-Israel agitators, hiring “rabidly antisemitic professors” and ignoring requests for help from Jewish students. Speaking to reporters at the Capitol complex, plaintiff Eyal Yakoby said, “36 hours ago, I along with most of campus, sought refuge in our rooms as classmates and professors chanted proudly for the genocide of Jews while igniting smoke bombs and defacing school property.”

If none of this sounds particularly charitable, there is plenty to be done about it. Currently, these institutions can both fundraise from vast alumni networks while also raking in billions from the government. While donors pad the endowments that ostensibly keep the lights on, prestige-building research is funded to the hilt by taxpayers. But the same body that held this tense hearing also holds America’s purse strings.

In addition to examining the tax-exempt status of institutions that tolerate open antisemitism and other expressions of radical bigotry, House appropriators need to go line by line with a red pen through the $7 billion doled out each year to these 10 wealthy universities. A laundry list of projects are either wasteful, wacky, driven by radical ideology, or all of the above. In 2022, Penn spent over $700,000 studying “structural racism and discrimination in pandemic vaccine allocation.” It spent $2 million of our tax revenue to “support the preservation of cultural heritage sites” of minorities in northern Iraq.

In 2012, Columbia famously spent $5.7 million on fake voicemails from the year 2065, after the world has supposedly been decimated by climate change. Cornell in 2014 took $1 million for a study, "Where It Hurts the Most to Be Stung By a Bee."

More fundamentally, lawmakers should revisit what it means to be a public charity in the tax code. As others have observed, these wealthy universities are “hedge funds with schools attached.” Why such wealthy institutions should continue to enjoy public sponsorship while incubating discrimination, racism, and antisemitism and advocating on behalf of terrorists seems like a good question for Congress to answer.

Public funding of any type of discrimination simply cannot be tolerated.

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