What Happened Today: April 10, 2023
Israel's multi-dimensional deterrence doozy; RFK Jr. runs for President; Many informants in the January 6th throng
The Big Story
Last Thursday, Hamas launched 35 rockets from Lebanon into Israel, in supposed retaliation for Israeli police clearing out some 400 Palestinians who the police say had barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque and stockpiled stones, fireworks, and explosives there. Of the 35 rockets fired into Israel—the largest barrage from Lebanon since 2006—25 were intercepted, and only one Israeli sustained a minor injury. Overnight Thursday to Friday, a second barrage of 40 rockets flew into southern Israel, this time from Gaza, prompting Israel to respond with surgical strikes in Lebanon and Gaza, which exposed the core security dynamic in the skirmish in which Hamas captures the media spotlight while Iran drives the fighting behind the scenes. Tablet’s Tony Badran explained the phenomenon after a previous round of fighting in December 2021: “Israeli officials understood that it was Iran and Hezbollah who allowed Hamas (assuming it was Hamas or even a ‘Palestinian faction’) to fire those rockets during the last Gaza war, and that by doing so they were engaged in a probing exercise designed to test Israel’s response. Iran and Hezbollah wanted to see if they could extend the rules of engagement that Israel has agreed to in Lebanon.” Essentially, Badran argues, Israel has ceded the terms of engagement to the Iranian triad in exchange for a fragile quiet.
This dynamic has solidified under a Biden administration that has made it a priority to distance itself from the current Israeli government while appealing to Iran in the hopes of restarting a nuclear agreement. So far that has included brokering a natural gas deal that benefits Lebanon and Hezbollah over Israel, as well as functionally paying the salaries of the Lebanese Army in recent months.
Amid the rocket barrage, Israel is also experiencing a new wave of terrorist attacks. Two sisters, Maia and Rina Dee, aged 20 and 15 respectively, were killed last Friday in a shooting attack in the Jordan Valley that also took the life of their mother, Leah, after her battle to survive in the hospital. Later Friday night, an Italian tourist was murdered and seven others were wounded when a terrorist drove a car into the promenade in Tel Aviv.
Embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is blaming the current wave of attacks on the previous government, adding, “I tell you tonight, people of Israel, we will rebuff these threats and we will defeat our enemies. We’ve done so in the past and we’ll do so again.”
Read More: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-738898
In The Back Pages: The IDF’s Flawed Analytical Framework for Hamas and Hezbollah
The Rest
→ Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed paperwork on April 5 to run for president as a Democrat, challenging incumbent Joseph Biden for the party’s nomination for president. The Kennedy scion—son of Robert F. Kennedy, who was himself in the running to be the Democratic party’s nominee for the presidency, before he was assassinated—is an environmental lawyer and vaccine-safety advocate whose views about the potentially harmful side effects of vaccines have attracted considerable controversy. Kennedy Jr. is a political progressive, arguably to the left of Biden on many issues, including U.S. intervention abroad. In a recent tweet, Kennedy wrote, “The Neocon projects in Iraq and Ukraine have cost $8.1 trillion, hollowed out our middle class, made a laughingstock of U.S. military power and moral authority, pushed China and Russia into an invincible alliance, destroyed the dollar as the global currency, cost millions of lives and done nothing to advance democracy or win friendships or influence.” Kennedy Jr. has also criticized the government’s stated intention to introduce central bank digital currency, calling it a “slippery slope to financial slavery and political tyranny.”
Last Thursday and Friday, leaked Department of Defense documents were making the rounds on the internet, and the implications for the current geopolitical situation are significant. The material reveals, among other things, that Ukraine is running out of anti-aircraft munitions and may run dry by May 3; NATO is trying to build up the Ukrainian forces ahead of a planned counteroffensive; the United States has intelligence sources high up in the Russian government; and U.S. signals intelligence is spying on allies including South Korea, Ukraine, and Israel—where, documents suggest, the Mossad was encouraging the recent protests against Netanyahu, which his office denies. But here are the real questions: Are the documents authentic, and why are they being leaked now? The Ukrainian government is accusing Russia of planting the leaks to dispirit Ukrainian troops, and Russian talking heads are saying the same about Western motives. Ukrainian sources have told CNN that they have to change battle plans due to the leak.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/explain/2023/russia-ukraine-war-documents-leak
→ On Friday, Army Sergeant Daniel Perry was found guilty of the murder of BLM protestor Garrett Foster, whom Perry shot five times in an encounter during a protest in 2020. On July 25, 2020, Perry drove into a large crowd of BLM protestors in Austin while driving his Uber route, at which point Foster approached the car carrying an AK-47 rifle. Perry claims he shot Foster in self-defense, fearing for his life because he says Foster raised the rifle. While the Austin police initially found it to be a “justified homicide,” and the lead detective in the case has accused the DA’s office of manipulating his testimony to send the case to trial, Perry is now a convicted murderer. Notably, Perry had written multiple messages to friends in the months leading up to the shooting saying he might kill some of the protestors and that, due to Texas’ self-defense laws, he could get away with it. Perry, who is Jewish, also wrote on social media, “I am afraid of being attacked by people of this certain movement who happen to compare my people (Jewish people) to termites.” Gov. Greg Abbott has said he plans to pardon Perry if the request hits his desk.
→ While it was reported in November that the FBI had eight informants inside the Proud Boys organization prior to Jan. 6, 2021, new revelations show that informants were on the ground at the Capitol and that there were a lot more of them than was previously known. In a new court filing on behalf of one of the Proud Boys defendants, Dominic Pezzola, his legal team wrote that the FBI admitted that there were eight FBI informants present on Jan. 6, 2021; as well, the D.C. Metro Police apparently had “at least 13 undercover plain clothes agents” there that day, and there were also 19 “sources” from Homeland Security Investigations, adding up to at least 40 law-enforcement sources embedded during the riot.
→ As the quasi-peaceful, quasi-unified world order crumbles in a sea of debt, broken promises, and war, the fractures have shown up most clearly in the world of international shipping. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the World Trade Organization warned of the separation of the “global economy into two separate blocs”—a NATO bloc and a Sino-Russian bloc. Already, tankers carrying Russian petroleum products have been rerouted around their former European buyers to buyers in North Africa, India, and China. More than 10% of all tanker tonnage is now carried by a “shadow fleet” of non-aligned tankers that don’t conduct trade in U.S. dollars and are not insured by Western insurers. In the short term, the separation of trade routes by bloc is driving up shipping prices, which is good for the companies involved, but a further division of trade will mean a shrinking global GDP over the long term and less profit for everyone.
→ The Swiss government has stopped recommending COVID-19 vaccination for all its citizens, including those at highest risk from COVID-19. The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health says that, at least for spring/summer 2023, “Nearly everyone in Switzerland has been vaccinated and/or contracted and recovered from COVID-19. Their immune system has therefore been exposed to the coronavirus. In spring/summer 2023, the virus will likely circulate less. The current virus variants also cause rather mild illness.” Switzerland joins England and Denmark, which have pulled booster recommendations for all healthy citizens under age 50.
→ In JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s shareholder letter, published April 4, he leaned hard into the battle against climate change, saying that global growth must “go hand in hand” with “science-based climate targets.” Dimon wrote that progress and investment specifically aren’t happening fast enough and that if the government has to seize private land under “eminent domain” in order to build new green energy projects, it may need to do so. Interestingly, Dimon has previously noted that fighting oil and gas production is a bad idea, especially because it encourages countries to revert to coal power, which is “dirtier” than oil and gas.
→ Zichrono Livracha Ben Ferencz was 103 years old when he died last Friday in Florida. Romanian-born Ferencz will be remembered as one of the men who brought the Nazis’ crimes to light as the lead prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial against 22 members of the Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s mobile killing units that murdered over a million Eastern European Jews. Ferencz managed to find extensive documentation of the crimes that the meticulous Nazis left behind and used their own words against them in court. Ferencz spent his career fighting for restitution for survivors and also helped in the founding of the International Criminal Court in 2002.
→ It’s about to get a lot sweatier at the Met Opera. The Met is trying to freshen things up with more contemporary operas, including the latest, “Champion” by Terence Blanchard, which tells the true story of bisexual boxer Emile Griffith and his legendary and tragic bout with Benny Paret in 1962. Both singers portraying the men have undergone extensive boxing training; Ryan Speedo Green, a bass-baritone who is portraying Griffith has lost 60 pounds for the role. He says this is just the kind of project he wants to work on to popularize his art form. “It’s not just some viking lady with a helmet and spear,” Green told The Wall Street Journal. “Champion” premiers tonight at the Met.
→ Dear Scroll readers, we hope you are having a wonderful Holy Week, whatever your faith, and a blessed Pesach. Due to the holiday, we will be publishing a “Best of The Scroll” edition tomorrow, nothing Wednesday and Thursday, and our normal Scroll on Friday. Thank you for continuing to tune in, and a special welcome to all the new readers we’ve already added in 2023.
TODAY IN TABLET:
A Kosher Revival in Columbus by Max Littman
After kosher food options in Ohio’s capital took a hit last year, community groups came together to create new places to eat and shop
Poems for Taxi Drivers by Jake Marmer
Sean Singer’s latest collection of prose poems offers a glimpse into the world of blue-collar gig work
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.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, December 2021
The IDF’s Flawed Analytical Framework for Hamas and Hezbollah
Is Israel finally bringing its public posture toward Hezbollah closer to reality?
By Tony Badran
On Dec. 10, a large explosion rocked the Palestinian camp Burj al-Shemali outside the southern Lebanon city of Tyre. The site of the explosion was a center belonging to the Palestinian terror group Hamas that includes a mosque and a health clinic. Residents told local media that a fire from the blast spread to the mosque, where it triggered the explosion of weapons stored inside.
On the surface, the explosion served as a reminder of Hamas’ habitual use of civilian structures for military purposes and of the group’s military activity in Lebanon. But, more important, the incident highlighted that Israel may finally be breaking with its shortsighted public posture that Hezbollah bears no responsibility for Hamas’ activity. Shortly before the explosion at Burj al-Shemali, there were long overdue signs of Israel developing a new willingness to acknowledge reality and hold Hezbollah responsible for attacks carried out in the country the group controls.
In 2018, Israel publicized an assessment of Hamas building training camps and weapons facilities in Lebanon with assistance from Hezbollah, but its posture toward Hezbollah in Lebanon mostly impeded its willingness to take any overt action to deter the buildup. Then the issue resurfaced this past May, during the brief war between Israel and Hamas. While the fighting was focused in Gaza and southern Israel, on three separate occasions that month, an unidentified group, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at the time maintained was a Palestinian faction, fired rockets at Israel from southern Lebanon. Most of them landed in the Mediterranean or failed to make it into Israeli territory. The IDF responded with artillery shelling, and that was the end of it. No second front opened up in the north, and Hezbollah didn’t join the fray.
After the May war ended, there were two more such rocket attacks, in late July and in early August. The last one saw a slight escalation in Israel’s response as the IDF used airstrikes in addition to artillery fire, but struck nothing of value. In turn, Hezbollah decided it needed to respond in order to preserve what it calls the deterrence equation, which says such Israeli strikes inside Lebanese territory cannot be left unanswered. Its response was therefore formulaic: a barrage of 20 rockets deliberately fired into open terrain in the Golan Heights. Once again, Israel and Hezbollah had performed their dance, and it ended there. There were no other rocket attacks by this so-called Palestinian faction.
While the attack-counterattack sequence was a predictable feature of the status quo, the Israeli response over the past six months was significant for how absurd it was. The messaging that came out of Israel about the power dynamics in Lebanon and what the proper Israeli course of action should be, presumably informed in part by the IDF, pushed two main points. First, that Hamas’ activities, although assisted and supervised by Iran, actually presented a challenge for Hezbollah. That is, Hamas supposedly was looking to operationalize a second front against Israel irrespective of or even against Hezbollah’s preference, which could in turn embroil Hezbollah in a conflict it didn’t necessarily want. Second, that Israel’s response to any provocation from Hamas in the north should be in Gaza, not necessarily in Lebanon, so as not to play into Hamas’ hand.
What this messaging was about, really, was Israel’s posture toward Hezbollah. Israeli officials understood that it was Iran and Hezbollah who allowed Hamas (assuming it was Hamas or even a “Palestinian faction”) to fire those rockets during the last Gaza war, and that by doing so they were engaged in a probing exercise designed to test Israel’s response. Iran and Hezbollah wanted to see if they could extend the rules of engagement that Israel has agreed to in Lebanon—Israel avoids striking in Lebanon, Hezbollah does not activate the Lebanese front—to Hamas (or an “anonymous” party). This would establish a precedent in which Hamas—or, for that matter, any unnamed faction—could harass Israel from Lebanese territory under Hezbollah’s protective umbrella. Israel would be dissuaded from retaliating with serious strikes inside Lebanon by the risk of setting off a broader war with Hezbollah. The gambit was to influence Israel’s operational calculus in Gaza and the West Bank, and even in Jerusalem, as Hezbollah stated explicitly during the May war. More generally, it would allow Iran and Hezbollah to heat things up with Israel, from Lebanon, cost-free.
The IDF’s response to the attacks between May and August on the one hand signaled Israel’s refusal to accept an alteration to the existing rules. On the other hand, it communicated that Israel was not interested in changing them itself. Against that backdrop, all the presumably IDF-informed commentary reinforced this posture: Israel sees Hamas’ operations in Lebanon as independent from — or even intended to embroil — Hezbollah. By endorsing the fiction that Hamas is an independent actor in Lebanon capable of going rogue, Israeli officials justify not countering aggression from Hezbollah. The nominal benefit of that tactic is that it avoids allowing minor incidents to escalate into a larger war—but at the cost of allowing Iran and Hezbollah to manipulate Israel’s self-deterrence and push the envelope.
There are signs, finally, that Israel has potentially reevaluated this approach and is bringing its public messaging closer in line with reality. A week before the Dec. 10 explosion at the Burj al-Shemali camp, an unsourced report in Israel’s Yediot Ahronot laid out the latest, presumably official assessment of Hamas activities and plans in Lebanon and their relation to Hezbollah and Iran. The report retained some of the standard silliness, but significantly, it held Hezbollah responsible for Hamas’ activity. The report stated plainly that Hezbollah oversaw the establishment of whatever capability Hamas is said to be building in Lebanon and added, correctly, that the Shiite group had a veto over any movement by Hamas it did not approve of. It then went on to say that any Hamas attacks from Lebanon will require “a strong Israeli response in Lebanon,” even as it reiterated that neither Hezbollah nor Israel were interested in a major conflict.
Is this a meaningful shift? And, if so, why now? While subtle, this modification is in accord with another message Israel has conveyed: Should Hezbollah press ahead with local production of precision-guided missiles, the IDF would jettison the existing rules and target the assembly facilities in Lebanon. As for timing, it’s not entirely clear why this is happening now except that perhaps Israeli officials recognize that they are running out of time.
After a decade of misreading the United States’ intentions on Iran, the Israelis are now watching in horror as the same Obama administration crew is leading them, once again, toward the endgame of a nuclear Iran. Forced to reckon with the fact that it will be up to Israel to deal with that threat, the Israeli government is now openly talking about plans for a strike on Iran’s nuclear program.
The Israelis will do whatever whenever and however necessary at their picked time to eradicate the Iranian nuclear program