What Happened Today: April 19, 2023

Fox's $785m haircut; French anti-gov't publisher hit with terrorism charges; Netflix slashes envelopes

Apr 19, 2023

The Big Story

The largest-ever media defamation lawsuit settlement will see Fox News pay $785 million to voting-machine manufacturer Dominion, which sued the news outlet for $1.6 billion, alleging its hosts and invited guests continually made false claims that Dominion’s machines rigged the election for President Joe Biden. The settlement on Tuesday comes just as the trial was set to begin this week in a Delaware courthouse. Previously, Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said that preliminary evidence submitted before the trial had already proved that Fox knowingly broadcast false claims about the election-machine maker.

More often than not, defamation cases fail to reach trial because of the difficulty plaintiffs have in proving that a defendant knowingly published falsehoods. In this case, Dominion’s argument was bolstered by internal Fox emails that showed Fox hosts and executives wholly skeptical of any election fraud even as the outfit continued to amplify those claims on the air. Still, although Fox acknowledged the judge’s conclusion in a statement following the settlement, it will not need to make any on-air apologies per the terms of the agreement.

While Fox’s $4 billion cash on hand will easily cover the payout to Dominion, a separate $2.7 billion lawsuit against it from Smartmatic, another voting-machine company, could take another big bite out of company reserves, as the judge in that case just allowed the trial to continue.

In The Back Pages: Zionism’s Moment of Decision

The Rest

→Arriving by train from Paris for the London book fair, Ernest Moret, the 28-year-old publisher of Éditions la Fabrique, was arrested by U.K. police on terrorism charges stemming from Moret’s involvement in protests against the French government. The arrest has sparked widespread condemnation across the European and U.S. publishing communities. Sebastian Budgen, an editor of Verso Books in London, said the episode is evidence of the “increasingly repressive approach by the French government to the demonstrations, both in terms of police violence, but also in terms of a security clampdown.”

→Carpooling back to a parking lot in Elgin, Texas, after cheerleading practice, teenager Heather Roth accidentally opened the door to the wrong car. Upon realizing her mistake, she apologized to the 25-year-old man inside the vehicle. She returned to her own car, but the man pursued her, and after she rolled down her window to apologize again, he opened fire. Roth suffered minor gunshot wounds while her teammate, Payton Washington, 18, suffered damage to multiple organs and had her spleen removed. The man has since been apprehended.

→The absurd and obscene gun violence in the Texas parking lot comes just after a 65-year-old upstate New York man, long bitter that lost drivers have turned around in his driveway, fired two shots on a car of four young women, killing 20-year-old passenger Kaylin Gillis as the driver attempted to turn the vehicle around. That gunman was charged with second-degree murder on Monday. On Tuesday, an 84-year-old man was arrested for first-degree assault and armed criminal action after he fired two .32 caliber shells into the head of Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Kansas City student who knocked on the door of the wrong house while trying to pick up his siblings, who had been at a nearby residence with a similar address.

→Posed with an open mouth, the Tyrannosaurus Rex assembled from some 300 bones dug up from three U.S. archeological sites fetched $5.3 million this week at a Switzerland auction. Perhaps because it was the first T-Rex skeleton on the auction block in Europe, pricing agents anticipated a price tag as high as $8 million for the 38-foot-long dino. But some speculate that the so-called Trinity skeleton didn’t appeal to purist collectors because it’s a composite built from bones gathered in Montana and Wyoming over a five-year span.

→Young autistic children are being kicked out of childcare centers and preschools at a remarkable rate. According to a new UCLA study, roughly 1 in 6 autistic kids between the ages of 4 and 7 was asked to leave their preschool or daycare, frequently because of behavior issues. “These little kids were asked to leave school because they demonstrated behaviors directly related to their autism,” said professor Jan Blacher, who led the study. “They were being expelled from preschool for the very problems that they needed school for.” Many of the children had not yet been assessed for autism, the researchers found, suggesting that better teacher awareness could have prevented the dismissals.

→Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has called for the resignation of McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy and three other county officials, after a newspaper reporter’s clandestine audio recording of the officials caught them conversing about the possibility of assassinating two of the reporters at the newspaper, and speaking nostalgically about a time when Black people were lynched. Back in the day, one says, you could “take a damn Black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell.” Another man then says, “I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.” The comments were released by the newspaper, and the recordings have subsequently been turned over to the FBI and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, both of which have opened investigations into the matter.

→The stiff spine of the Women’s Tennis Association has started to bend: The women’s professional tour reversed its November 2021 decision to stop hosting events in China, a suspension originally instated in reaction to Beijing’s response to Peng Shuai, one of China’s biggest tennis stars, who had posted social media messages accusing a former top Chinese official of sexual assault. Peng’s comments were immediately censored in China, and after she briefly disappeared from public view while meeting in private with government officials, she seemed to reverse her allegations in comments to a French news outlet. The WTA said it would suspend holding events in China until it could meet with Peng privately, and called for a formal investigation, but neither condition has been satisfied. “We’re currently convinced that the requests that we put forth are not going to be met,” WTA Chairman Steve Simon told the press this week, adding that the tour can “make a positive difference” by resuming business in China while still “making sure that Peng is not forgotten.”

→Long used by veterinarians to sedate horses and large farm animals, xylazine has changed status to accompany fentanyl as a deadly street drug, leading Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to schedule the drug, commonly called tranq, as a schedule III substance. The move will both free up law enforcement to crack down on the illegal distribution of the substance and tighten rules for manufacturers of the drug. Shapiro, a former state attorney general and rising Democrat who’s been seen as a possible nominee for the party in a future bid for the White House, has long opposed the creation of supervised-injection sites where users take drugs under medical supervision. “We’ll see what authority I have as governor to take action [to ban the sites],” he said this week. Three other states have similarly reclassified tranq as overdoses from the drug continue to skyrocket around the country.

→After 25 years of red envelopes, Netflix will no longer deliver DVDs through the mail—a move that marks the true obsolescence of snail-mail movie services amid the dominance of online streamers. That’s sad news for the 2.7 million U.S. customers who, according to the most recent Netflix data from just a couple of years ago, were still using the delivery service.Netflix has been trying to turn around a recent downturn after net profits fell 18% last quarter, likely due to increased competition from other streamers. The company has said it could tap into a large source of unrealized revenue if it forced Netflix users borrowing log-ins from others to begin paying for the service themselves. At least 100 million people borrow access to Netflix, the platform said recently.

TODAY IN TABLET:

Ivy League Exodus by Armin Rosen

The number of Jews on major Ivy League campuses has been cut in half or more over the past decade by new elite doctrines that downplay merit in favor of amorphous definitions of ‘diversity’ and ‘privilege.’ But one Ivy may be bucking the trend.

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A new film explores the life of a mad, reclusive genius who depicted the vanished world of Yiddish America

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.

To mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, we are releasing Zionism: The Tablet Guide.

From primary essays by Zionism’s utopian founders to interviews with modern political thinkers and essays and commentary from Tablet's archives, this essential volume animates the currents and contradictions of an idea that both frightens and fascinates Jews and outsiders. Featuring an introduction by Tablet editor at large Liel Leibovitz and contributions from Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Shimon Peres, Noam Chomsky, George Steiner, Walter Russell Mead, Michael Walzer, Howard Jacobson, Matti Friedman, Dara Horn, Einat Wilf and others, this historic anthology deserves a place on the bookshelf of every politically-interested person, Jewish or not.

Buy your copy here.

We are delighted to offer Scroll readers a preview of the book, excerpting Liel's introductory essay below.

Zionism’s Moment of Decision

The massive protests preceding Israel’s 75th birthday have resurrected a century-old question that now demands an answer: A Jewish state or state for Jews?

By Liel Leibovitz

Having just returned from israel, the country where I was born and grew up, and of which I am still a proud citizen, I apologize for being the bearer of bad news: There will be no easy, sane, or rational end to the protest movement that erupted in response to the ruling coalition’s proposed judicial reforms. In fact, the content of those reforms has ceased to matter to anyone involved on either side. The government’s promise to temporarily halt the legislation and convene a broad-based committee tasked with finding a compromise under the supervision of President Herzog has barely registered with the protesters, and one major member of the opposition, the Labor Party, has already quit the negotiations. Nor did a string of gruesome terror attacks, coming at the heels of Passover, shift the collective focus away from taking to the streets. What is going on in Israel now has passed from the realm of the political to the metaphysical, which means that compromise is not possible. Instead, day by day, the arguments are getting louder and more cutting, and animosity is everywhere on display.

This is because Israelis realize, consciously or not, that they’re no longer arguing about a series of proposed bills designed to change the balance of power between the executive and the judiciary branches. Nor are they arguing about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. Nor does it matter whether Netanyahu continues to lead his coalition, or steps down, or offers Benny Gantz the job of Defense Minister. Nor does it have anything to do with Jewish or Muslim demography, or with a future Palestinian state—whether or not such an entity ever exists, or doesn’t exist, in any part of the West Bank or Jordan.

Israelis aren’t arguing about politics anymore. They are fighting about the future, not only of Israel but of Zionism, the miraculous movement that, in the span of one century, freed the Jews from their respective houses of bondage, returned them to their indigenous homeland, taught them the spells of sovereignty, and powered their miniscule nation’s growth from embattled weakling to global powerhouse. And as a result, this is strictly an inter-Jewish affair, one pitting millennia of Jewish particularity against the promise of universalism once embodied in the Catholic Church, then in the Enlightenment, and now in the technocratic politics that unite the civilized right and the progressive left in the club of advanced countries that has, with increasing misgivings, included Israel among their number.

It’s a fight that isn’t going to end quickly, or with anything remotely resembling a compromise, because it’s about a question so central even the brave and prescient founders of the country avoided answering it. Israelis must now decide if they want a state for Jews, or a Jewish state.

Writing in 1888, the critic and essayist Asher Zvi Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha’am, or One of the People, argued that merely ushering scores of Jews to Eretz Yisrael would achieve little. Unless the Jews created a robust Jewish culture, he thundered, their experiment at self-government would produce just another Diaspora, this one more tragic for taking root in the sacred soil of the Promised Land. Israel, he concluded, needed to become a spiritual center, a state unlike any other on earth.

To today’s protestors, even the decidedly secular Ahad Ha’am’s answer sounds like more of a threat than a promise. Late at night at a Tel Aviv sidewalk café, I asked one of the leaders of the massive demonstrations now entering their 15th week to share with me her vision for Israel’s future. She declined to be identified by name—the movement’s leaders are reluctant to talk about who is organizing what, or paid for by whom—but she was happy to answer my question. “We’re here because we want this to be a normal state, you understand?” she said, “just like the United States or France or Germany. We don’t want this country to be taken over by those fanatics with their beards and their religion.”

This insistence on normalcy, on being a state like any other, is at the heart of the Second Israel theory, popularized by the academic and journalist Avishai Ben Haim. Israel’s defining political struggle, Ben Haim argued in 2022, wasn’t between left or right, or even the religious and the secular, but between representatives of the First and the Second Israel. In Ben Haim’s analysis, the First Israel was comprised of the country’s traditional elites, the largely socialist and largely Ashkenazi milieu that presided over Israel’s coming into being, while the Second Israel included Israel’s Mizrachi Jews and its growing Orthodox population. While the two Israels might co-exist uneasily for however long within the same body politic, they were in fact fundamentally different and opposing entities.

The First Israel measured success by how closely it resembled the west, which meant celebrating everything from big IPOs to Netflix deals. The Second Israel realized it was very much a product of the east, which meant doubling down on family, tradition, and nation. For the First Israel, Jewish values were tolerable only as long as they didn’t interfere with the dictates of cosmopolitanism; for the Second Israel, democracy was just another name for the sort of compromises that Judaism, in its most moderate and open-minded iteration, generates naturally and with ease. For the First Israel, the long tail of Judaism is just a historically contingent addendum to the values and practices of other Western countries, such as modern techno-capitalism and 21st century iterations of democratic elitism. For the Second Israel, the reverse is true.

These are not merely intellectual distinctions for professors and pundits to parse. They are, increasingly, concrete questions for policy makers, administrators, and judges to address. Take, for example, the case of Messiah in the Square, a large prayer event planned by several Orthodox organizers in the heart of Tel Aviv in 2018. Because most of the rally’s participants weren’t comfortable sitting next to members of the opposite sex, its organizers devised a solution: they informed the municipality that they’d like to create two distinct seating areas, one where men and women would be separated by a divider and another where anyone who wished to could sit together in an all-gender environment. The municipality refused; separate, it argued, was never equal, even if that was what event participants themselves requested, and even if alternatives were available to whoever wished to participate otherwise.

The court intervened, and the event was allowed to go on as planned, but similar lawsuits raising ever more vexing questions kept popping up: Could a private institution receiving no state funding offer classes open only to men or only to women? Did the government have the right to prohibit public transportation on Shabbat? Are immigration policies that favor Jews inherently discriminatory, or an essential part of both the raison d’etre and practice of a self-proclaimed Jewish State?

Lacking a constitution, Israelis of both camps are left with second-order quibbles over who gets the final say, with elected officials and the courts each offering arguments—sometimes valid, often imperfect—about why they ought to be the ultimate adjudicators. Nor is attempting to finally write out a national constitution, as some hopeful proceduralist types recommend, likely to end the question of what the State of Israel ought to be to its citizens: the task flummoxed generations of Israeli leaders, from David Ben Gurion onwards, all of whom eventually opted for deliberate ambiguity instead. The reason for their reluctance is simple: They were all dreading precisely the sort of showdown Israel is living through right now, one that calls for a decision between two fundamentally different sets of values and worldviews, neither one of which is willing or able to compromise with the other because they are, in fact, incompatible.

The fight that Israelis are engaged in now is about where they wish to live – not geographically, but within two radically different historical contexts, offering two radically different visions of Israel’s future. Israelis are choosing between, on the one hand, a state that offers Jews the freedom to live according to the dictates of their tradition, and on the other one that insists on strict adherence to universalist values as the price for the acceptance of Jews as a people like any other.

Which is why invoking the word “democratic” here, as many of the street protesters and their supporters in the US and in Western European governments have done, badly misunderstands the actual terms of the debate. A Jewish state could easily be fully democratic. But a state of Jews has no real reason to make special accommodations for any faith-based particularities, including those of practicing Jews—even if a majority of Israelis so desire, and even if no one’s rights are jeopardized as a result. The protesters who insist on “our democracy,” like their counterparts in the United States, are not defending the actual outcome of an election, which they lost. Rather, they are insisting that elections merely deliver a hollow form of democracy, and that to make a government for, of, and by the people valid, you have to make sure that the people who run it have the right ideas, or else.

What I saw in the streets of Tel Aviv this past month was that the shaky modus vivendi that let the First Israel coexist with the Second Israel has come to an end, in large part because the First Israel is—perhaps rightly, from its point of view—unwilling to allow a temporary electoral result to serve as cover for the Second Israel taking power. We don’t want to live in a theocracy like Iran, the protesters, some of whom I have known since childhood, told me; instead, they want to live in a “normal country,” like Sweden. And if that means emulating Sweden’s ban on kosher ritual slaughter, say, so be it—it was high time, my friends said, to rid ourselves of primitive practices that no longer have any place in the modern world.

Like any person who lives and works in a secular Western society, I understand this point of view completely. The truth is, that unless you believe in Israeli exceptionalism, in the biblical covenant of divine election, and in the sacred bond between the Jewish people, its creator, and its promised land, there’s no reason, under any condition, to tolerate much deviance from the broadest and most inclusionary contours of every other liberal western democracy. Why should Israel be an exception?

The question of Jewish exceptionalism is not admissible before the bar of universal justice. That is why no resolution to the protests that are tearing the country apart is likely forthcoming: the people marching in the streets of Tel Aviv want to make sure theirs is a country like any other, one that mandates mixed-gender seating for everyone, where malls are open on Yom Kippur, and that the benighted bigots who insist otherwise are kept safely away from the levers of power. You can focus, like Ben Haim, on the inherently racialized undertone of so much of these protests—Mizrachi Israelis, who overwhelmingly support Netanyahu, are routinely characterized as uncultured rubes too simple to understand intricate ideas like global finance and blockchain, let alone international relations. But you hardly need that added layer to understand the depth of the drama.

When Theodor Herzl, eager to show the British government that he was a serious statesman worthy of their trust, agreed to send an exploratory delegation to Africa to investigate the possibility of an alternative location for a Jewish state, he was applauded by his peers, educated and affluent Jews from western Europe. It was the eastern bloc, relatively young and comparatively poor but also more likely than the enlightened westerners to be just a generation or so removed from Yiddishkeit, that refused to entertain any option that didn’t lead the Jewish people back to Jerusalem. These tensions could be put on ice while Zionism was achieving its key task, that of securing a Jewish homeland. But now that it has, it’s back to the foundational dispute. At its heart is a cutting question: What is Zionism?

If you believe Zionism to be merely a movement for Jewish sovereignty in Israel, then it accomplished its historic mission 75 years ago, and ought to be retired. But if you believe that it is a Jewish liberation movement whose work begins, not ends, with the establishment of a Jewish state and whose energies come from the redemptive vision of the prophets of Israel, then Zionism ought to be re-charged and tasked with nothing less than the re-founding of the state of Israel—this time as a Jewish state, rather than simply a state for Jews. Two- thirds of Israelis, more or less, want just that.

The third that doesn’t shouldn’t be expected to bow down. Their pain is palpable, and their frustrations are real. They are right when they say that the country their opponents imagine has nothing to do with the one they and their ancestors built. They were hoping they could be Israelis, a new breed of person, and here come their neighbors to remind them that they are Jews. This is why so many of the country’s cultural elite cringed a few years back when a popular magazine asked Omer Adam, the mega-popular singer who is among the greatest icons of the Second Israel, what he considered to be quintessentially Israeli. Easy, Adam replied: putting on tefillin. His answer indicated that—to him, and to his fans—Israel had no meaning and no reason to exist other than in the context of the ancient and eternal Jewish story, a story which the majority of the First Israel feels is at best a genial abstraction and at worst an invitation to theocracy, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of prejudice and oppression.

How this struggle will end is too soon to tell. But what’s obvious is that soft appeals to brotherhood and shared destiny aren’t likely to resolve it. The debate we’re having right now is a century in the making, and the only way out is to go through it. It’s time for Israel to choose.

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