What Happened Today: December 13, 2023
Hamas still fighting; Trump’s trial and Biden’s impeachment; An interview with Erik Prince
The Big Story
Nine soldiers from the IDF’s elite Golani Brigade, including a colonel and a lieutenant colonel, were killed in an ambush in the Hamas stronghold of Shejaiya in northern Gaza on Tuesday evening. Another soldier was killed in a separate incident in northern Gaza, for a total of 10 IDF combat deaths Tuesday and 115 in the six weeks since the start of the ground operation. For comparison’s sake, 95 Americans were killed in six weeks during the Second Battle of Fallujah, the bloodiest U.S. engagement of the Iraq War.
The incident, one of the deadliest for the IDF in the current war, comes amid other signs that Hamas’ much-vaunted collapse may be less complete than press reports have indicated. Also on Tuesday, the IDF released headcam footage of a reservist killing a Hamas gunman in a close-range shootout in an apartment in Shejaiya, before being wounded by a grenade and then storming the apartment and killing a second gunman:
Incidentally, as Tablet’s Armin Rosen pointed out on X, the footage, combined with news of the ambush, puts the lie to allegations that the IDF is blindly or indiscriminately bombing Gaza. A military insensitive to civilian casualties “doesn’t send its best soldiers into close-quarters combat in dark, rubble-strewn apartment complexes,” Rosen wrote—it simply flattens the building.
But the intensity of the resistance from Hamas battalions in Shejaiya, which Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday were “on the verge of being dismantled,” illustrates some of the problems faced by the IDF in its attempt to destroy the terror group before the new year. Hamas’ command and control may well be severely damaged, but the group clearly retains the ability to fight, even in those areas where it is supposedly closest to disintegration. And recent reports indicate that the group’s leadership is nowhere close to panicking. “Top Hamas officials have said in recent days that more abductees will only be released as part of an overall deal, in which all the Palestinian prisoners imprisoned in Israel are released,” Haaretz reported Wednesday. “There are no signs right now that Hamas feels that its bargaining power in future negotiations has diminished.”
“There is a lot of expectation in the Israeli public, but this will be a long and exhausting war,” Michael Milshtein of the Moshe Dayan Center told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday. “We will not see a mass surrender of Hamas, and there will not be a specific point in time in which Israel will be able to say it has reached its goal.”
IN THE BACK PAGES: Scroll alumnus David Sugarman on David Lambroso’s new Holocaust documentary, ‘Nina & Irena’
The Rest
→Special Counsel Jack Smith, the lead prosecutor in the federal election interference case against Donald Trump, filed a motion on Monday asking the Supreme Court to bypass the normal appeals process so that the former president can be tried before the 2024 election. Trump’s legal team has argued that Trump has “absolute immunity” from prosecution for acts committed “within the ambit of his office” while he was serving as president. Those claims, which raise thorny constitutional issues about the separation of powers, were rejected by a federal judge earlier this month, but Trump’s team has since filed an appeal. Now, Smith is making what he acknowledges is an “extraordinary request” for the Supreme Court to skip the appeals process in order “to permit the trial to occur on an appropriate timetable.” The Washington Post’s Jason Willick breaks down the political considerations behind Smith’s motion:
This argument is circular: The case must be accelerated, because if it’s not accelerated, it will be delayed. But trials are delayed all the time, sometimes for years. Smith doesn’t say what he means: If the justices don’t take the case now, the chances of completing a trial before the 2024 election will go down. If Trump is not tried and convicted by the election, the chances of a Biden victory will take a hit.
Trump, of course, wants to delay the trial out of self-preservation. If he wins the election, his Justice Department could halt his federal prosecutions. But if Smith’s decisions were independent of the political calendar, that would be of no concern to him. His job is supposedly to work for the Justice Department—not to try to influence which party controls the Justice Department at a given time.
Of course, we’re sure that Smith’s urgency has absolutely nothing to do with current polling on the 2024 election. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal released a poll showing Trump leading Biden 47% to 43% in a potential rematch.
Read the rest here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/12/special-counsel-jack-smith-politicized-prosecution/
→Speaking of embattled presidents, the House of Representatives plans to vote this afternoon on formalizing the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. The inquiry, which is expected to pass the House, will focus on the president’s connection to his son Hunter’s financial crimes and influence peddling. Earlier this morning, Hunter blew off a subpoena to testify in a closed-door deposition in front of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, which have led the Congressional GOP’s investigation into his finances. Hunter claimed in a press conference he is only willing to testify in an open proceeding, but as National Review’s Andy McCarthy explains, he and his legal team likely bet that he could ignore the subpoena for two reasons. One is that the House hadn’t managed to formalize the inquiry before the date of the deposition, which Hunter’s lawyers will argue shows the House doesn’t take its own investigation seriously. The second is that even if the House committees hold him in contempt, he’s unlikely to be prosecuted, since, well, his father is the president of the United States.
→Yesterday The Scroll briefly mentioned Biden’s criticism of what he called the IDF’s “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza and his demand that Israel “change” its governing coalition. The president’s remarks have since been published in full. While condemning Hamas as “animals” and “brutal, ugly, inhumane people,” Biden also said that Netanyahu “has to change” his government and singled out Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as an official who doesn’t “want a two-state solution.” Biden further stated that “Bibi understands … he’s got to make some moves to strengthen the PLA [sic]”—apparently combining the acronym for the Palestinian Authority with the acronym for the party that controls it, the Palestine Liberation Organization. For our take on the administration’s strategy of declaring its absolute commitment to Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas while simultaneously kneecapping its ability to do so, see our first Quote of the Day below.
Read the president’s remarks here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-biden-remarks-on-bibi-ben-gvir-and-bringing-israel-together/
→The New York Times published a damning story on Sunday detailing how the Israeli government and defense establishment, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, helped prop up Hamas’ rule in Gaza over the past decade by encouraging Qatari financial support for the terror group. Among the allegations in the article are that Netanyahu personally sent defense officials to convince congressional Republicans not to impose sanctions on Qatar over its funding of Hamas in 2017, telling the Americans that the Qataris “played a positive role in the Gaza Strip.” The paper also quotes a former Mossad official, Uzi Shaya, who claims that his superiors initially permitted him to testify in a U.S. court case on Hamas money laundering through the Bank of China, but then revoked that permission after Netanyahu was offered a state visit in China. And then there’s this gem, detailing a 2021 attempt by then prime minister Naftali Bennett to disguise the monthly Qatari cash payments to Hamas, which he regarded as an “embarrassment” to the Israeli government:
All sides reached a compromise: United Nations agencies would distribute the Qatari money rather than [Qatari diplomat Mohammed al-] Emadi. Some of the money went directly to buy fuel for the power plant in Gaza.
Mr. Hulata, the national security adviser to Mr. Bennett, recalls the tension: Israel was blessing these Qatari payments, even as Mossad intelligence assessments concluded that Qatar was using other channels to secretly finance Hamas’s military arm.
It was hard to stop these military payments, he said, when Israel had become so reliant on Qatar.
Indeed, which is why it’s better not to become reliant on outside powers hostile to your interests in the first place.
→Map of the Day:
That’s from a Dec. 6 Washington Institute report on how Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea are affecting maritime trade routes. The report identifies three Israeli-linked ships that have chosen to travel around the Cape of Good Hope to reach Europe, rather than risk a passage through the Red Sea. A Norwegian tanker was struck by a Houthi missile on Tuesday, while on Wednesday the Houthis fired two missiles at a Marshall Islands-flagged tanker and sent a drone toward a U.S. warship, which shot it down. Another tanker reported an “exchange of fire” with a Houthi speedboat on Wednesday off the coast of Hodeidah.
→Israel has begun pumping seawater into Hamas’ tunnels in Gaza, according to U.S. officials quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Hamas’ vast tunnel network is critical to the group’s continued ability to fight and preserve its forces in Gaza. The IDF is reluctant to send troops underground and has instead been attacking the tunnel network with explosives, robots, and dogs, but analysts believe that most of Hamas’ underground infrastructure remains operational. While flooding the tunnels would likely be effective, there is also the question of hostages: Israel believes that some of its hostages are being held underground, and a number of freed hostages have described being held for weeks in Gaza’s tunnels. According to reports in the U.S. and Israeli press, hostage families told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting last week that they feared flooding the tunnels could kill their loved ones.
→Quote of the Day I:
The American habit of not winning a war, not managing conflict, and not trying to get to some kind of diplomatic resolution, that is being imposed on Israel now. Israel has an opponent that says, “Yeah, we’ll do October 7th again and again until there’s no Jews left.” That’s what the Hamas leadership is saying. That’s a war of tribal extinction. And the Biden administration is doing all it can to pressure Israel into making accommodations for people who want to kill them.
That’s Erik Prince, CEO of private military company Blackwater, in a wide-ranging interview with IM-1776. The U.K. newspaper The Times reported earlier this month that it was Prince who convinced Israeli leaders to flood Hamas’ tunnels in Gaza, using equipment purchased from Blackwater.
Read the rest of the interview here: https://im1776.com/erik-prince-interview/
→Quote of the Day II:
A list of examples of grants quickly gets rococo. American taxpayers sent $19,808 to an NGO called Queer Montenegro to introduce Gay Straight Alliance clubs in Montenegrin schools; $24,000 to stage a gay film festival in South Korea; $32,000 to produce a comic “featuring an LGBTQ+ hero” in Peru; $42,000 for the gay classical group the Well-Strung Quartet to perform in Kazakhstan. An NGO in Ecuador received $20,600 to “host 3 workshops, 12 drag theater performances, and produce a 2 minute documentary.” When Fox News ran a story about it, a State Department spokesperson replied that the purpose of the grant was to “promote tolerance” and “provide new opportunities for LGBTQI+ Ecuadorians to express themselves.”
That’s Helen Andrews, writing in The American Conservative on the United States’ increasing use of LGBT rights as an instrument of foreign policy.
Read it here: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/our-lgbt-empire/
TODAY IN TABLET:
A Plant-Based Quandary, by Maggie Phillips
Muslims, Jews, and Catholics wrestle with the religious implications of fake meat
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.
Once I’m Gone
A new film, Daniel Lombroso's 'Nina & Irena,' captures the challenges of talking about the Holocaust with family members who survived it
By David Sugarman
The story goes that Chaim, on a freezing night in Auschwitz in 1944, stole a few things from the kitchen—a potato, some salt—and led a Pesach Seder by memory. Discovered by the camp guards, he was whipped and left bleeding in the snow.
Another story: Helena, a young and blond child in Warsaw, hid munitions in a suitcase to help supply the ghetto’s small cache before its uprising.
Chaim and Helena were my grandparents, but I heard neither of these stories from them. I was too afraid to ask and they, busy in the fullness of their American lives—the grandkids and great-grandkids being bar mitzvahed, the picnics at their tiny upstate bungalow, so many births it became hard to remember the names of all the far-flung cousins—might not have wanted to answer. Now they can’t.
Daniel Lombroso’s new documentary, Nina & Irena, an understated and elegant short film released by The New Yorker, is premised upon this intergenerational quiet—the silence that can settle between survivors and their children and grandchildren. “I didn’t talk about that time of my life,” Daniel’s grandmother Nina says of her wartime childhood. “First of all no one was interested. Two, I felt that if I start telling my story the way it really happened, it was too depressing or too horrifying for the kids when they were small. So I felt, OK, sometime later. And later never came.” The film, for Daniel and Nina, is finally an occasion to talk. He sits in her Long Island home and asks her to tell him about her life.
This conversation is layered over archival footage from World War II and the family’s home movies, these various histories held together by Nina’s narration and Gil Talmi’s elegiac score. Presented by Errol Morris, Lombroso's film relies on one of that auteur’s central techniques: He sits across from his subject—his grandmother—and presses her, gently but persistently, to delve more deeply into her memory and into the past. Lombroso’s eye for detail, meanwhile, gives the film its still and pensive power: his grandmother’s sandaled foot against the background of her bright living room carpet; a vased bouquet of sunflowers set beside the kitchen window; a piano packed with so many family photos that the frames now spill across the bench; these images collect force and meaning, coalescing into a moving portrayal of Nina and her life.
For Nina, holding forth from her living room chair—“Oh hello, ladies and gentlemen,” she says to the camera, her white hair cut short, a chunky necklace dangling over her red blouse—the war was a series of miraculous evasions, largely the result of getting the right papers at the right time. But she lost a sister, Irena—a girl a few years her senior who went to check in on some family in a nearby town and never returned. “We got a note from my sister saying I’m going towards Lviv to see if there is anybody left,” Nina tells Daniel. “That’s the end. We never heard about her. We never heard from her.”
This disappearance—and the near-century that has passed without discussing it—is one of the central subjects of the film. “Many times after the war,” Nina says, “if I would see somebody that looked like her, I would follow them thinking maybe it’s her. But after a while, you know, you stop. And that’s it.”
Nina narrates much of her life in this way, describing traumas and griefs that slowly calcified into bearable facts. “Would I want her to be alive?” she says of Irena. “Definitely. Would I want her to be in my life? Yes. But what can I do about it? There’s nothing I can do. What’s gone is gone.”
Irena’s haunting absence is contrasted with Nina’s bright presence, a life that Lombroso captures in rich detail: bridge games with friends, yoga classes, visits with family, the careful attendance of home. It is this contrast between the firmly repressed past and the fullness of the present that animates the film, as Lombroso braids Nina’s narration of the war with loving and lovely shots of her late life: Nina filling a bird feeder, or talking to friends, or reading the newspaper. Such scenes return Nina’s testimony to the habitus of her home, and frame her recollections as a single aspect of a larger world—one that is vibrant but also shaded by grief.
Lombroso’s success at presenting his grandmother this way—as more than an object of history—is one of the major accomplishments of the film. “Schindler’s List and Shoah educated a generation,” Lombroso told me over the phone. “And I grew up being educated by those stories. And it was sort of a cliche that at school, you know, they would wheel in a TV and play a video of a survivor. And it was powerful, but when something starts to feel trite it starts to lose its power.” Lombroso sought a new way of approaching the Holocaust and its legacy in America, and one that might capture the power of what remains unspoken, even after decades and even between loved ones.
Such considerations come at a moment when the last bearers of firsthand accounts of the Jewish genocide in Europe are disappearing. “If there are questions you want to ask me, ask me now,” Nina told Daniel, the statement now serving as the film’s epigraph. “Once I’m gone it’s hard to get me.” When the last survivors pass away, their memories will be replaced by the historical records they’ve left behind. Archives like the Shoah Foundation are enormously important—are labors of incredible skill and care that stand as bulwarks against forgetting. But they also anchor a genre that lacks the power it once had. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which Lombroso cited as the apex of this genre of Holocaust testimony, is almost 40 years old, and even when Schindler’s List first debuted it was possible for Jerry and his girlfriend to neck the whole way through. For filmmakers reckoning with the legacies and afterlives of the Holocaust, this will remain a challenge.
One can imagine a world in which Lombroso missed his chance to ask his grandmother about her childhood and sister—a world in which all that remained, at the end of Nina’s days, is the barest of historical facts: Nina had a sister and that sister disappeared. The film attends to the urgency of having those conversations, as well as the difficulty of doing so. In one exchange, Nina tells him: “I feel the way I feel, but that’s nobody's business how I feel, but I don’t analyze it. That is what it is.” In another exchange she says: “I didn’t dwell on it while it was happening. That’s what was happening. I’m a very straightforward person. That’s what was happening and you have to accept it. You don’t like it that’s too bad.”
It is hard to get history to speak, and harder still if you wait too long. Lombroso created, poignantly and powerfully, the conditions for that conversation with his grandmother. “We have time together still,” he writes in an essay published alongside the film, “and I had better not waste it by sitting in silence.” The film is a testament to time spent well.
For those, like me, who failed to ask their grandparents about their childhoods while they could, this is the thing that aches—that I now encounter my grandparents’ experiences of the war as objects of history, unmoored from the world they built together. I can ask my parents about these stories, or access the testimonial footage my grandparents dutifully recorded in their old age, but I can no longer find them seated on the screened porch of their sagging bungalow, or in the Brooklyn living room amid shelves bending from seforim and family photos. I cannot ask my grandfather about that Seder in Auschwitz—if they drank water as if it was wine, or if they reclined like kings in the cold of their cabin. I cannot ask my grandmother if the guns were heavy in that suitcase, or what she covered them with. I cannot ask if they felt more proud and holy than afraid, or if the only thing they knew in those days was fear.
Yesterday you quoted Ha'aretz. I wish you wouldn't do that. It has no readership and no circulation (check the numbers vs Israel HaYom or Yedioth Ahronot). Ha'aretz hates Bibi and all those right of center. As with the NY Times every article is framed by progressiveness. Not helpful.
Mr Prince’s assessment of the sorry state of the American military establishment and the view that the promotion of the LGBT agenda is an important part of foreign policy illustrate what is wrong with the national security and foreign policy establishment in no uncertain terms