What Happened Today: January 11, 2024

Hezbollah’s UN gambit; Whites flee the military; Israel’s Man in Black

---

---

The Big Story

With tensions continuing to flare on the Israeli-Lebanese border, heightened by the IDF’s assassination last week of a senior commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, Lebanon on Wednesday proposed a “road map” to the U.N. Security Security Council for a diplomatic solution to the conflict, calling for a “full implementation” of Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. 

Without getting into technical minutiae, the gist of the proposal is that in the name of Lebanon’s territorial integrity and “right to self-defense,” Israel must withdraw to “agreed international borders,” including withdrawal from the Shebaa Farms, part of the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights that has been claimed by Lebanon but is not recognized as Lebanese by the United States, Israel, the UN, or anybody. The Lebanese proposal also includes a sleight of hand regarding one of the key provisions of 1701, which was the disarmament of Hezbollah south of the Litani River, which the Israelis have demanded as a precondition for any new diplomatic solution. The Lebanese proposal (all emphasis ours) “requests support from the United Nations to help the Lebanese State extend its authority over the entirety of Lebanese territory by strengthening its armed forces.” Here’s Tablet News Editor Tony Badran:

The Lebanese Armed Forces are already deployed in the area. And the LAF, as per countless UN Secretary General reports on the implementation of 1701, is actively helping Hezbollah in the area and preventing UNIFIL from accessing certain areas, on behalf of Hezbollah. The notion that the LAF needs to be “helped” in order to deploy everywhere and “extend state authority” is ridiculous in every way imaginable. First, because they’re already deployed everywhere. And second, because what they do when deployed is assist Hezbollah. And third, because Hezbollah is part of the government.

The proposal goes on: “In particular, support should be provided for deployment of those forces south of the Litani River, and they should be provided with equipment in cooperation with UNIFIL (U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon), so that there will be no weapons without the consent of the Government of Lebanon [emphasis ours] and no authority other than that of the Government of Lebanon.” Here’s Tony again: “OK, but the government, of which Hezbollah is part, consents to Hezbollah’s weapons.”

One anonymous geopolitical analyst we spoke to via email summed up the proposal this way: 

In return for the United Nations continuing to back its own force, UNIFIL—which has displayed zero will or ability to fight and whose purpose is therefore to serve as human shields for Hezbollah, the “Lebanese State,” which is controlled by Hezbollah—will deign to accept an expansion of U.S. and international aid to its Hezbollah-controlled military, in addition to the $1 billion it has already received from the United States to build a “security apparatus” that protects Hezbollah. This package would include more powerful weapons that Hezbollah—oops, the LAF—can use to “defend its borders” against Israel, once Israel agrees to give up large chunks of “disputed” land on those borders to Hezbollah so it can declare victory with zero losses, in exchange for nothing.

It’s like watching adult thieves try to take candy from an actual baby.

What’s remarkable about it is not just the insultingly transparent con, but that this is in fact U.S. government policy, as part of Biden’s larger “unannounced” realignment deal with Iran. The reason the policy is “unannounced” is that there are no words that can explain its idiocy.

Instead, the Biden administration appears to be running its usual playbook of using juicy, anonymous leaks to seed a narrative that will make its idiocy look reasonable. Politico reported Wednesday, citing U.S. officials “granted anonymity to talk freely about sensitive intelligence,” that Hezbollah could kill Americans in the Middle East and even launch terrorist attacks inside the United States unless—guess what?—Israel stands down. Here’s Politico: 

​​While so far Israel-Hezbollah tensions have been mostly limited to cross-border skirmishes, one U.S. official said there are concerns that the group could respond more strongly if Israel does not do more to slow the death toll in Gaza.

Got that? Hezbollah is going to start killing Americans unless Biden does more to restrain Israel, even though it’s the United States that’s currently restraining Israel from attacking Hezbollah. As The New York Times reported in the article we featured in yesterday’s Big Story, “The United States has told Israel that if Hezbollah comes over the border, Washington will support Israel—but not the other way around.”

So, here’s our best attempt at translating that: We must continue protecting Hezbollah, including by shoveling it money and backing its territorial claims against Israel through the fiction of an independent country called “Lebanon” while warning Israel that there will be hell to pay if it escalates … or else Hezbollah will turn around kill you, the average American voter—and it will all be Israel’s fault. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Tablet’s Armin Rosen profiles Yoav Gallant

---

The Rest

→Seeking to dispel international fears created by Israeli politicians such as MK Danny Danon and ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who in recent weeks have spoken publicly about their desire to encourage voluntary emigration of the Arab civilian population from Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an English-language address on Wednesday evening. “I want to make a few points absolutely clear,” Netanyahu said. “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population. Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population, and we are doing so in full compliance with international law.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had said on Tuesday that civilians “must not be pressed to leave Gaza” and that Netanyahu had assured him that Israel’s government agreed. Danon apparently didn’t get the memo, telling The Times of Israel that Netanyahu had recently told him that voluntary emigration was a “good idea” but that it was “not easy to find countries that would accept Gazans.” 

Danon, of course, was the co-author of a Nov. 13 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal urging the United States and Europe to accept Gazan civilians who wanted to relocate. On the one hand, we agree that the international left’s blanket opposition to evacuating civilians from Gaza—on the grounds it would constitute “ethnic cleansing”—is morally obscene and yet another example of an international “norm” designed to apply to Israel and only Israel (an estimated 6.7 million refugees left Syria during its civil war, while at least 6 million Ukrainians have fled since Russia’s invasion). On the other hand, Danon’s suggestion that Americans take Gazans was particularly stupid, given that prominent Israelis and pro-Israel voices in the United States were at the same time stressing that a majority of Gazans supported Hamas and the Oct. 7 attacks. For all the conspiracy theories on the left about sophisticated Israeli hasbara, it turns out that “Gazans are terrorists, please take them off our hands” doesn’t play in Peoria.   

→Blinken traveled to Egypt on Thursday, where he announced that Israel accepting a “Palestinian state” was “the single best way to isolate [and] marginalize Iran.” That leads us to our Post of the Day, from Omri Ceren on X: 

→More good news on the foreign policy front: the Iranian Navy hijacked a Marshall Islands-flagged tanker carrying 1 million barrels of Iraqi oil in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, claiming that it would hold the ship and its crew until it is repaid it for $75 million worth of sanctioned oil confiscated by the United States in summer 2023. The seizure came one day after U.S. forces in the Red Sea shot down 18 drones, two cruise missiles, and an anti-ship missile launched the Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen.

→The U.S. military’s recruitment of white soldiers has collapsed since 2018, with the decline in white enlistments accounting for the majority of the “recruitment crisis.” Military.com reports, citing internal military data, that the number of white recruits dropped from 44,042 in 2018 to 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% decline between 2022 and 2023 alone. Numbers for Black and Hispanic recruits have remained flat over the same time period. That’s bad news for combat effectiveness, since whites tend to serve disproportionately in combat roles, accounting for 83% of those killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom despite making up only 64% of active-duty service members in 2004. Army officials blamed “partisan attacks” and a “degraded … level of prestige in conservative parts of America” for the recruiting shortfall, but a more likely culprit is the military’s embrace of DEI goals (including de facto racial and gender quotas for promotion into the officer corps), its purge of disproportionately white and conservative vaccine skeptics, and its yearslong witch hunt for non-existent far-right extremists in its ranks, which an independent report published in December concluded was leading conservative enlistees to believe they were being targeted for their political beliefs. 

→Quote of the Day: 

Those familiar with [Israeli Defense Minister Yoav] Gallant’s thinking do not believe he wants Netanyahu’s job, though in the unknowable chaos of post-Oct. 7 Israeli politics he might wind up with it anyway. In a post-Netanyahu scenario, Gallant would be one figure capable of holding together a simultaneously chastened and energized secular right.

That’s from Armin Rosen’s profile of Yoav Gallant at Tablet, which, in our humble opinion, is one of the best pieces of English-language journalism on Israel since the war started. We demand you read it.

Do so here: https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/yoav-gallant-profile-armin-rosen 

→On Wednesday, the International Ice Hockey Federation expelled Israel from all competitions due to concerns about “safety and security.” The Jerusalem Post reports that the IIHF “made the decision after its chairman, Luc Tardif, succumbed to external political pressures, including Russian voices.” The Israeli Ice Hockey Association has announced its intention to sue the IIHF over the decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. 

→Nick Saban, head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide since 2007, announced his retirement Wednesday. The most successful college coach of the modern era and perhaps the greatest in history, Saban won six national championships and 11 Southeastern Conference (SEC) championships in 17 seasons at University of Alabama, plus another national championship at Louisiana State University—compared to Alabama legend Bear Bryant’s six national titles in 25 seasons. He retires without ever having had a losing season in 28 years as a college head coach. Sources close to Saban told ESPN that the coach, 72, had become increasingly frustrated by recent changes to college football recruiting, which have enabled schools to pay for top players and made it easier for players to transfer between schools in search of a more lucrative deal. In his final season, Saban’s Crimson Tide won the SEC but suffered a narrow overtime defeat to the eventual champions, the Michigan Wolverines, in the Rose Bowl. 

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Remote Remembrance, by Dianne R. Layden

A project at a Santa Fe cemetery allows people to memorialize their loved ones, even when they are buried far away

---

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.

---

Substack’s email length limit prevents us from posting Armin’s profile in full, so today’s Back Pages is an excerpt. A link to the full article can be found above, below our Quote of the Day, or here.

Israel’s Man in Black

Yoav Gallant Does Not Want Benjamin Netanyahu’s Job. But he might wind up wih it anyway.

By Armin Rosen

The death of a soldier dissolves some of the informality of Israeli life. Gal Eisenkot, the 25-year-old son of Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff and an observer in the war cabinet, died on a Thursday afternoon. He had to be buried on Friday morning, as soon as possible and before the early start of a winter Shabbat. There had to be infrastructure in place for family, friends, the wartime leadership of the country, and multitudes who had never known Eisenkot in life. A tent-shaded gravesite with rows of chairs and bags of earth had materialized according to a strict halachic timeline in the old cemetery in Herzliya, where cigarette-smoking policemen with the seal of the State of Israel on their black yarmulkes stalked through a network of metal crowd barriers.

At the cemetery gates, volunteers representing no organization—Israelis who had acted on an impulse to help—handed out packets of tissues as thousands of mourners filed into the spaces between the graves surrounding the tent, which rose from the cemetery’s military section.

An announcement rang out: In the event of a red alert, God forbid, we were to stand in place with our hands on top of our heads for protection. Aren’t we supposed to lie down during a rocket attack? I mused to a nearby mourner, an American-born man with a wild gray beard, wearing an IDF uniform from a distant era. Where would you lie down? he replied, pointing to the grave in front of us, resting place of Moshe Halpern, a veteran of the pre-statehood Haganah. With him?

Gal Eisenkot had been alive less than 24 hours earlier, when an urban land mine planted under the asphalt—a “tunnel bomb”—detonated during an operation to rescue two hostages in Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip. These hostages did not leave Gaza alive. A photograph the IDF released later that week showed their flag-draped bodies departing a ruined street in the middle of the night on the back of a mud-green Humvee, in the company of fully kitted special forces whose faces were blurred out.

The beginning of the funeral commanded an awesome silence from a vast crowd, a national cross section made of sturdy aging men wearing caps with the insignia of a dozen IDF units and middle-aged parents with their teenage children, dressed in jeans and cargo shorts and black sunglasses. Between the bird cries and the whoosh of circling helicopters, under the glare of an unseasonably hot morning, the father, sister, and close friends of the dead man gasped to steady themselves as they struggled through brief and disbelieving eulogies, every voice a pain-stricken battle against the unimaginable fact of even being there.

The only exception was the heroically steady Benny Gantz, the former IDF chief of staff. “When we approved plans we knew their meaning,” Gantz said in his remarks. “We knew that the arrows on the maps could become arrows to the heart of good and dear families.” Sending the children of your friends and colleagues to their deaths was part of the holy and awful work of Israel’s survival: “Blessed is the land whose sons are like Gal.” After Gantz spoke, a bone-thin old man in a loose-fitting olive uniform put on an orange pair of gardening gloves and untied the bags of earth.

Within the anguished graveside blur of family and battle comrades and cabinet ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu became distinguishable only when he was called to lay a black memorial wreath. He looked ashen, defeated, long lines streaking his face, mouth in a half-scowl, eyes retreating into his head. The prime minister and a small security detail rapidly snaked its way to the back of the tent.

Towering amid the graveside crowd was Yoav Gallant, the defense minister. Since Oct. 7, the only outfit Gallant has worn is a Uniqlo-style double-breasted black shirt with black buttons, open enough at the top to reveal a black undershirt, as well as black pants held up with a military nylon black belt and black dress shoes as featureless as wooden clogs. The voidlike uniform communicates mournfulness, gravity, and perhaps a note of penance from the retired general and 30-year IDF veteran, who was Israel’s top civilian security official on the deadliest day in its history. That he continues wearing black means the goals of the war haven’t been achieved yet, which means there are still a quarter-million internally displaced, 350,000 soldiers mobilized, and 130 people in Hamas captivity. It means there are still Israelis dying in Gaza nearly every day.

When it was his turn to lay a wreath, Gallant, whose wife is a retired lieutenant colonel and whose children have served in special forces units, knelt at the grave, rose, spent an endless second staring down at the blank vessel that encased the son of a close colleague who had died on their watch, and then executed a sharp 90-degree military turn before merging back into the crowd.

Eisenkot, Gantz, Gallant and Netanyahu have been at the highest levels of their country’s leadership for much of the past 15 years. The funeral in Herzliya was only the latest and starkest confrontation with the reality they’d made. The sons of Israel’s founding generation had squandered a national patrimony that it might be too late to recover—a feeling and a reality of optimism, an ability to see the world clearly and to meet its challenges no matter what that required, ownership of a national destiny that Jews had no choice but to control themselves. Now they can only regain it all through months or even years of violence, and at the expense of their own children’s lives.

But these days, the war cabinet barely functions. Most everyone believes that the only three people who really matter are Netanyahu and Gallant, both of the Likud Party, and Gantz, who joined an emergency unity government the week after the Oct. 7 massacre (the final two members, observers Eisenkot and Ron Dermer, are backers of Gantz and Netanyahu, respectively). These people do not work well together and don’t seem to like each other. Netanyahu reportedly barred Gallant from attending a late December meeting with the country’s intelligence chiefs, and the two Likudniks have repeatedly declined to appear before the press together. When Israel’s plans for postwar Gaza, as well as a possible commission of inquiry into the army’s Oct. 7 failings, were raised before the full security cabinet in early January, the session plunged into a shouting match between IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and far-right cabinet ministers. Gantz and Gallant leapt to Halevi’s defense; Netanyahu stood by as his coalition partners assailed the wartime leader of Israel’s military.

The war cabinet holds regular, highly tense meetings with families of the over 130 hostages still in Gaza. Within this high-stakes emotional maelstrom, “Gantz is somebody who people like to identify with,” one insider who has been present at these meetings said—a sharp contrast with Netanyahu, who often comes across as distant, badgering, or self-concerned. “[Gantz] speaks and he looks like Rabin.” Israel’s always unreliable polls show him as an early favorite for postwar prime minister. But as a key theorist of the failed multi-billion-dollar defensive barrier that Hamas breached on Oct. 7, it is hard to see Gantz transcending his image as an unexciting centrist mainstay, especially at a moment when the establishment he represents has sunk to all-time lows in credibility.

Gallant “is perceived to be very trustworthy, if not as cuddly as Gantz,” the source said of the hostage families’ reactions to the defense minister. “The way he speaks, and as a persona—he’s less lovable. But when he speaks his messages are respected. People don’t start shouting at him. He’s not polarizing. He comes across as someone who’s very professional. It doesn’t go beyond this. People don’t say, ‘oh, we love you.’”

Those familiar with Gallant’s thinking do not believe he wants Netanyahu’s job, though in the unknowable chaos of post-Oct. 7 Israeli politics he might wind up with it anyway. In a post-Netanyahu scenario, Gallant would be one figure capable of holding together a simultaneously chastened and energized secular right. If the war ends with Yahia Sinwar dead and Hezbollah pushed beyond the Litani, more credit would go to Gallant than to Netanyahu or Gantz.

It is possible to see the glimmer of Gallant’s future appeal. If there is anyone in Israeli wartime leadership who evokes a lost era of national power and confidence, it is Gallant, who issues dire predictions to the enemy in the short, grave, punctuated sentences of someone who really means it. “If Hezbollah wants to go up one level, we will go up five,” Gallant declared during a visit to the Lebanese border on Dec. 17, two weeks before an Israeli airstrike killed Hamas political chief Saleh al-Arouri in the Hezbollah stronghold of South Beirut, an attack reportedly carried out without prior warning to the U.S. Hamas fighters who are counting the days until the IDF withdraws from Gaza, Gallant said on Jan. 4, “need to change the count until the end of their lives.”

In these moments, Gallant is a Jewish war chief beamed in from the late ’70s, or maybe from the mid-’50s, or maybe from the time of the Shoftim themselves. Whether that is what Gallant really is relates to the question of what Israel now is—whether Oct. 7 has reawakened an ancient knowledge of the national condition, or exposed everything the country has lost.

***

In peacetime, Gallant, who is 65, would wake up before dawn and go from his house in Amikam, a moshav near the coastal wine country hub of Zichron Yaakov, to the dock at Sdot Yam to kayak on the Mediterranean—on Saturdays he’d spend three hours on the sea. Surrounding his house is an agricultural plot smaller than a farm but much larger than a garden. “Everything in the area where he hosts his friends is something he did with his own hands, and he’s very proud,” said one occasional visitor. “He does everything himself, everything”—he builds his own furniture, grows and harvests his own fruit and vegetables, makes olive oil from olives he picks himself.

The monasticism of Gallant’s wartime uniform isn’t a pose. The defense minister can thrive without these distractions and comforts, and possibly without any comfort at all. “How do you know he’s a military person?” asked Nira Yadin, a former Knesset aide of Gallant’s. “Because he can live a whole day on two dates.” As an officer in Shayetet 13 in the runup to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Gallant and the men under his command swam distances to the enemy shoreline that a unit comrade of his wouldn’t disclose to me even 40 years later.

Today, Gallant is in charge of prosecuting a multidimensional conflict in which Israel must apply enough concentrated brutality to destroy Hamas, deter Iran, free its remaining hostages, and render the north and south of the country habitable again, all without alienating the United States, tanking Israel’s once-secure international standing, agreeing to temporary cease-fires long enough to rescue Hamas from destruction, or touching off any escalation spirals whose pace and severity Israel can’t dictate. The conflict is also an unprecedented domestic crisis: It is socially and economically crippling for a country of Israel’s size to remain on an indefinite war footing, or endure the ongoing mass displacement of its own citizens and the shrinking of its livable territory.

Gallant is different from his peers in politics and the military. He is more aggressive, more skeptical of the enemy, less in thrall to political fantasy, less oriented toward Western and specifically American obsessions, and less afraid of confrontation. His IDF career, which ended when the superior political maneuvering of opponents in the army sank Gallant’s appointment as chief of staff in 2011, reads like a long and often losing campaign against the national drift Hamas exposed on Oct. 7.

Still, reversing course requires an era-defining break with the failed assumptions that governed much of Israeli life for the past 30 years, which is something that might prove beyond the ability and imagination of any of the country’s current leaders, Gallant included.

“Gallant when it comes to military operations has always been a hawk. In every operation I saw, he was always the guy who wanted to extend it, or to be more decisive,” said Amir Avivi, a retired IDF general and Gallant’s former colleague who served under Gallant as deputy commander of the army’s Gaza division. “He is exactly the kind of guy you want in a war. He’s a gladiator. The only thing he thinks about morning, noon, and evening is how to destroy the enemy, that’s it.”

Gallant was—and, by all accounts, still is—the kind of good-natured hardass who inspires admiration in the people under him. During a press conference I attended at the Kirya, the Defense Ministry’s college campus-like Tel Aviv headquarters, it was impossible not to focus on his hands, which are massive, veiny, and very likely still dangerous. Gallant has a close-cut, white brow line and absolutely no facial hair. When facing the media he stands with the freakish stillness of a man accustomed to situations where survival depends on total bodily control, never pivoting weight or looking down at notes that he might not even have. He locks his head at an almost imperceptible downward tilt, such that TV viewers will see him in a subtle and unwavering upward stare that draws out an intense pair of unblinking eyes. They are beacons of mortal seriousness burning from the end of a muscular neck, simultaneously trained on the Israeli public, on Yahia Sinwar, and on whatever journalist is questioning him. His cheeks are twin cliff faces; he might not smile again in public, or maybe even in private, until the war’s been won.

Leading militaries train their career officers through a long-established system of service academies, war colleges, and domestic academic programs. But as Avi Bareli, a Ben-Gurion University historian who specializes in civil-military relations in Israel, explained, “professionalism in the Israeli army is problematic. It still has some traits of a militia.” Among them is an ad hoc system of recognizing and fostering leadership talent. In the IDF people of middling ability can advance through cliquishness; an enduring informality allows institutional conformity to fester, since there are no structures in place for ensuring that overly independent thought isn’t punished. “The best military education they’re expected to have is to study in the USA,” said Bareli.

In the decades after the Oslo Accords, the advanced intellectual and strategic training of Israel’s military elite has been effectively outsourced to the United States, through programs like the recently ended Wexner Fellowship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Netanyahu is calculatedly American in his style and outlook, and Gantz, military attache to the U.S. from 2005 to 2009, is the kind of pliable army establishment type whom Washington has always seen as a natural ally.

The young Gallant did not get a fancy foreign degree or eye a career in business or politics, working instead as a lumberjack in Alaska when his initial six-year period of active-duty service ended. Gallant did not prepare himself for anything but a life in the IDF, which he treated as his natural home and his entire professional future when he returned to Israel. He once opened a talk before an AIPAC group in Jerusalem by saying: “Sorry for my poor English. But Hezbollah and Hamas don’t understand English.”

In contrast to this gruff public persona, Gallant is “one of the most intellectual people I ever met in the army,” Avivi told me. He is said to be a voracious student of history, with an interest in the Middle East, World War II, Islam, Jewish history, and Zionist history. As with the sometimes-mercurial Ariel Sharon, who pulled off one of Israel’s most fateful reversals at a time when Gallant served as his military secretary, there is a significant side of Gallant’s personality that he shields from his battlefield enemies, his political opponents, and—crucially—members of the press. He gave no real on-record interviews during the first three monthsof the war, and did not talk to me. He seems to believe that amid a multifront conflict and simmering domestic political chaos, excessive outside mediation of his decisions is unnecessary, maybe even counterproductive. “Don’t be confused,” Yom-Tov Samia, a retired general who oversaw the IDF’s southern command between 2001 and 2003 and served with Gallant during three operations against Hamas in Gaza, told me. “The only ones who control what’s happening now are Gallant and the army headquarters.”