What Happened Today: January 6, 2023
U.N. and U.S. and Israel oh my!...What to do with the Taliban?...New tech reveals micro-earthquakes in Hawaii
The Big Story
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new national security minister, paid a visit to the Temple Mount on Tuesday, which the Jordanian government histrionically decried as “the storming by the minister of national security of the Al Aqsa Mosque.” Soon after, the U.N. Security Council gathered for an emergency meeting to discuss the visit. “This meeting creates a sense of emergency over a non-event,” Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan told the council, which came together after the UAE, which is Israel’s new “ally,” and China, both on the council, heeded a request made by Jordanian and Palestinian officials, who are not council members. Erdan, who visited the mount as a minister in 2017, said that the ongoing Palestinian campaign to remove Jewish historical ties to the mount was “poisonous,” noting that Ben-Gvir’s 13-minute visit was “the right of every Jew” in Israel and part of the ongoing status quo that allows Palestinians to pray at the holy site but prohibits Jews from on-site prayer and limits their visits.
“Our people are running out of patience, and the moderation and sense of responsibility we display should never be construed as weakness,” said Palestine’s envoy Riyad Mansour, who also essentially threatened violence, adding that actions like Ben-Gvir’s could lead to “uprising.” “Israel has no claim and no right to sovereignty over occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and therefore no right over Haram al-Sharif.”
Biden administration envoy Robert A. Wood weighed in with the more revealing reaction to the episode, saying that the United States “opposes any and all unilateral actions that depart from the historical status quo, which are unacceptable,” and that it would hold the Netanyahu government to its commitment to preserve it. The American response comes as part of the administration’s effort to prevent any détente between Israel and the Saudis, Tony Badran, Tablet’s Levant analyst, told The Scroll:
Since Benjamin Netanyahu's electoral victory, the Biden administration has made abundantly clear its intention to wage political warfare against him and his government on several fronts. The go-to play is to use the Palestinians but also the so-called ‘values feint’—highlighting how Israeli policies under Netanyahu supposedly clash with U.S. values. [This will] keep Israel on its heels, mak[ing] it harder for it to achieve its goals in other areas.
Badran added that the Biden administration’s response will only serve to “maintain pressure on Israel.”
In the Back Pages: The Abraham Accords & Biden
The Rest
→ A new project aims to catalog a unique type of worldwide human output, with a team from Switzerland leading the creation of an international feces bank to preserve the wondrousness of the human microbiome. Something like the Svalbard Global Seed vault, where all of Earth’s seed species are kept in case of catastrophe, the Microbiota Vault will seek to capture the trillions of bacteria we need that modern Western lifestyles continue to eradicate from the human gut. Sabine Hazan, MD, one of the world’s leading experts on the microbiome, told The Scroll:
The key to the microbiome is diversity; however there is more to the microbiome than diversity, to have health. Definitely this is a step in the right direction, to increase the awareness that the microbiome is disappearing, because this is what we are seeing as well at Progenabiome [her research company], the disappearance of the microbiome. It’s important to stop the killing of microbes, and to understand how to establish a balanced microbiome.
Stress and diet are major factors dwindling our own microbe compositions, but while we struggle to get our heads and bodies right, the Microbiota Vault team will tap into the design and practices already used by dozens of stool banks around the world before it begins constructing its own global headquarters.
→ Quote of the Week:
To make things harder, the Taliban’s top leaders are deeply conservative Islamists who appear personally immune to most U.S. economic sanctions and travel bans; they are unlikely to have many financial assets outside Afghanistan and don’t travel much.
This—from a Politico report on the Biden’s administration’s hand-wringing over the completely unsurprising return to harsh restrictions on women under the Islamist regime—is one of the most ignorant things we have read lately. The Taliban recently banned women from universities and working for NGOs, and months ago it revoked the right of women to attend secondary school and to enter certain public spaces or take certain jobs. It’s a predictable, outrageous outcome from the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from the country that left billions of dollars in American military equipment in the hands of the warlords and saw 13 U.S. soldiers murdered in a suicide bombing. The smirking leaders of the Taliban know we need them more than they need us now, as al-Qaeda and now ISIS are proliferating in the country, and they want us to know that they sympathize with recently arrested misogynist provocateur Andrew Tate, saying that we need him “because we are oppressed by feminists.” But not everyone in D.C. is delusional. One former U.S. official told Politico, “We need to own up to the fact that our policy of shrilly criticizing them every five minutes isn’t working.”
→ Continuing the ongoing wave of unionization efforts across several sectors of the economy, a group of 300 workers at a Microsoft subsidiary voted on Tuesday to form a union. Primarily composed of quality-assurance staffers responsible for making popular video games such as Doom, the group has found a seemingly sympathetic ally in management after Microsoft said it was willing to engage in collective bargaining. Whether that willingness holds through negotiations remains to be seen, but such open arms this early stands in stark contrast to Microsoft’s Big Tech rival, Amazon, which has spent millions of dollars to aggressively attack union efforts at several of its warehouses, even as reports of degraded employee conditions continue to drip out in the press. The labor love from the Seattle software giant also won’t hurt Microsoft’s chances to finally acquire Activision Blizzard, the video-game whale whose employees have expressed interest in forming a union.
→ The United States handed over a looted artifact to the Palestinian Authority on Thursday, and not just any artifact. The 2,700-year-old ivory “cosmetic spoon” comes from the collection of Michael Steinhardt, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of Birthright who came under fire in 2021 for his acquisition of 180 stolen objects worth more than $70 million. It’s somewhat ironic that the item comes from Steinhardt, given that it’s now symbolic of some sort of recognition of Palestinian indigenousness to the Hebron area. The return is even more significant because the New York prosecutors who initially confiscated the items from Steinhardt ruled that the 40 Israel- and Palestinian Authority-related items should be returned to Israel. Chief of the U.S. office of Palestinian Affairs, George Noll, remarked at the handoff, “The U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs is proud to facilitate the return of this rare antiquity, an example of Palestinian cultural patrimony.”
→ Video of the Day:
The Les Soul Flyers trio: Fred Fugen, Vincent Cotte, and Aurélien Chatard set a new distance record for wingsuit flying this past November when they soared 4.6 miles over Mont Blanc and the Glacier des Bossons. There are no words.
→ The Spanish government is putting Big Tobacco on notice: You spoil it, you clean it up. Starting today, cigarette manufacturers are going to have to pay the government for the cost of cleaning up the millions of butts strewn in the streets annually. The cost may near $1 billion. The producers will also be responsible for attempting to educate smokers not to litter in public spaces. The whole initiative is part of a series of laws that includes “a ban on single-use plastic cutlery and plates, cotton buds, expanded polystyrene cups, and plastic straws.” Given that the measure will likely drive up the price of cigarettes, it just got that much harder to live out your dreams of being a Spanish war correspondent with a pack rolled in your sleeve and the poetry of violence on your tongue. ¡Que lastima!
→ After the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, some red states have taken on surprisingly moderate and even pro-choice-leaning stances on abortion access.
While 12 states have totally outlawed the procedure, including Idaho, whose Supreme Court ruled that the state laws prohibiting abortion are constitutional, in South Carolina, the conservative state supreme court voted to uphold choice by saying that a ban would violate women’s right to privacy.
That follows Kansas, where last summer residents voted against a constitutional amendment that would eliminate a woman’s right to choose. Kansas currently allows abortions before 21 weeks.
In Kentucky, where abortions are currently banned, 52.5% of November voters came out against enshrining the policy in the state constitution, potentially paving the way for some future legalization.
→ One of the biggest promises of the incoming Netanyahu coalition was judicial reform, and now it looks like it’s happening, in a big way. On Wednesday, the new Justice minister, Likud Member of Knesset Yariv Levin, announced long-awaited legislation that would give the Knesset veto power over the Supreme Court with a simple majority. This is a big win for right-wing activists who’ve criticized the court’s activist left-wing bent for years; but it may not be so good for the system of checks and balances in the State of Israel, which does not have a formal constitution but only a series of “Basic Laws” that substitute for the same. Israel’s former chief justice Aharon Barak says the proposal will “strangle Israel democracy”; and former prime minister Yair Lapid said, “They threaten to destroy the entire constitutional structure of the State of Israel.” But members of the coalition don’t agree. They see the move as enhancing democracy, allowing the will of the people to be more directly represented. Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the Otzma Yehudit party, and a minister in the government celebrated the move, saying this would end the “politicization of the judicial system” and that “it’s an important step for democracy and the rule of the people.” Hovering in the background, of course, are the legal troubles facing Prime Minister Netanyahu and his incoming interior and health minister, Aryeh Deri, who’s legal ability to serve in the cabinet is under scrutiny due to a recent conviction for tax fraud.
→ Picture of the Day:
Artificial intelligence has allowed scientists in Hawaii to map the channels of magma below the islands in the greatest detail ever achieved. By using machine learning to identify nearly 400,000 mini earthquakes, shown in the image above as individual dots, scientists now have an intricate map of the network of “sills” that magma may travel through on its way to the surface. It even appears that these channels may funnel the molten rock into the active Kilauea and Mauna Loa volcanoes, some of the most active on Earth. Volcanologist Diana Roman told National Geographic her “mind was blown” by the detail of the new data and that she wants more. Roman says the findings corroborate some of her research about the connection of earthquake swarms and eruptions and that this new way of seeing underneath Hawaii may help unravel how the volcanoes blow their tops. Geophysicist Matt Burgess says, “This is probably going to be the future for volcano science.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Picturing a Lost World by Carol Ungar
As the documentary ‘Three Minutes’ brings a Polish town’s Jewish pre-Holocaust history into focus, a Yizkor book helped me imagine life in my parents’ Romanian hometown
Enemies of the State by Clayton Fox
Two years after rioters stormed the Capitol, hundreds of defendants remain tied up in legal limbo and the government’s investigation is still growing
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.
The Abraham Accords & Biden
Bibi wants peace with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis probably want it, too. But the White House has other ideas.
By Tony Badran
In an interview a week before his victory in Israel’s general election, Benjamin Netanyahu stated his intention to achieve peace with Saudi Arabia if he returned to the prime minister’s office. “I think there’s a chance I will achieve it, because I think Saudi Arabia … know[s] that I’m absolutely committed to preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu added.
The administration’s response to Netanyahu’s declared priority of seeking a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia took a page out of a familiar playbook: use the Palestinians to throw Israel on the defensive, this time in the form of an impending FBI investigation into the accidental death of reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. The fact that the U.S. had participated in Israel’s own investigation of the incident, and approved its conclusions, meant nothing—as did the absence of any clear grounding for such an investigation in U.S. law. The investigation was a “values feint”—highlighting how Israeli policies under Netanyahu supposedly clash with U.S. values, in order to make it harder for Israel to achieve its goals in other areas.
The Biden administration’s policy is not driven by personal dislike for Netanyahu, as reporters and columnists never tire of asserting, or by any demonstrable interest in the welfare of Palestinians, but by the fact that its regional priorities are starkly at odds with Israel’s. A couple of days after Netanyahu’s interview, U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein pranced into Beirut to receive the Lebanese signature on his maritime border deal, in which the White House forced Israel to concede to all of Hezbollah’s demands. Standing next to Hochstein at a press briefing was Elias Bou Saab, one of the Hezbollah cutouts in the “Lebanese government” who serve as interlocutors with the U.S. “I have heard about the Abraham Accord,” Bou Saab opined. “Today there is a new era. It could be the Amos Hochstein accord.”
Even in his clownishness, the Lebanese functionary correctly telegraphed the Biden administration’s desire to replace the Abraham Accords with a different framework, representing a new set of priorities. Netanyahu’s vision, expressed in terms of a regional alignment facing the Iranian threat, is one the administration is actively working to bury.
The Biden administration’s discomfort with the Abraham Accords has been nothing short of comical, including a near-pathological aversion to using the term “Abraham Accords”—substituting instead the phrase “normalization agreements.” The peak expression of that attitude came last year in a bizarre exchange between a State Department reporter and spokesman Ned Price, in which Price repeatedly refused to utter the words “Abraham Accords,” replying each time to the reporter’s use of the term with the phrase “normalization agreements,” like a zombified cult member or one half of a diplomatic version of Laurel and Hardy.
The reason for the administration’s hostility to the Abraham Accords goes beyond jealousy or the desire to deny credit to a hated predecessor. There are significant matters of substance and strategy at stake. The Abraham Accords framework is fundamentally opposed to the Obama-Biden vision for the region. Whereas the Abraham Accords framework draws a bright line separating the U.S.-allied camp from Iran and its camp, the Obama-Biden vision turns the very concept of friend and foe on its head, elevating Iran and downgrading allies under the pretext of creating “equilibrium” or “balance.” The problem the White House faces is that the accords are popular: The biblical name alone resonates with the American public.
In the wake of Ned Price’s unintentionally comic attempt to disappear the term “Abraham Accords,” the Biden administration made a tactical adjustment to its presentation, if not to its policy. Drawing on the practice perfected during its incarnation as the Obama administration, team Biden has manipulated language associated with or adjacent to the Abraham Accords to torque it toward its own alternative policy framework, thereby emptying the accords of their meaning—while keeping the popular name.
The administration continued this shift by reemphasizing the importance of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a change in policy emphasis that it accompanied with a shift in language. “While we support normalization between Israel and countries in the Arab world,” Price explained, “it’s also not a substitute for Israeli-Palestinian peace, and that’s very important.”
See how the shell game works? “Peace” is reserved for agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. The Abraham Accords are therefore not “real” peace agreements, but “normalization” agreements—which are meaningful only insofar as they lead back to the Palestinians, thereby reaffirming Obama’s UNSCR 2334 parameters as the only meaningful avenue for U.S. regional policy.
Behind this lexical shift, of course, is something more than the desire to put Palestinians at the center of the region once more. An Israeli-Gulf agreement that might also include Saudi Arabia isn’t a “peace agreement” because, whatever the economic and cultural benefits of closer relations might be, it is also an alliance of regional states against Iran. The administration’s linguistic reshuffling is therefore needed to introduce its Iran-centric worldview into the vocabulary used for the Abraham Accords, imbuing it with new meaning that fits the administration’s alternative vision for the region, which is centered around an American alliance with Iran.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement on the second anniversary of the Abraham Accords provides an example of how the Abraham Accords are being rewritten and reframed to fit a new regional agenda driven by the United States and not by any of the parties to the accords. Blinken’s statement made sure to append the term “normalization agreements,” thereby changing “the Abraham Accords” into “the Abraham Accords and normalization agreements.”
More importantly, Blinken inserted the term “regional integration” in explaining the policy approach that the administration is promoting through the accords. A casual listener is thereby encouraged to imagine that “regional integration” means strengthening Israeli-Arab relations within the Abraham Accords framework, while the administration is in fact rewriting that framework to fit team Obama-Biden’s focus on strengthening U.S. relations with Iran.
That disguising this policy switcheroo is indeed the function of “regional integration” is evident from an op-ed under President Biden’s name that was published in The Washington Post a couple of months before Blinken’s statement. The occasion for the op-ed was Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia in July, following a visit to Israel. The piece used that association as camouflage to promote the “regional integration” alternative framework, which was unmistakably about pressing U.S. allies to prop up—“integrate”—Iran and its regional holdings. Hence, when offering an example of such “integration,” the op-ed did not discuss advancing a Saudi-Israeli agreement. Rather, it pointed to the role one of Tehran’s regional equities—Iraq—played in furthering Saudi dialogue ... with Iran.
A month after Blinken’s statement, the administration announced it had successfully brokered the maritime agreement between Israel and Lebanon. When making the announcement, a senior White House official explained to reporters how the deal should be understood as a manifestation of the Biden administration’s vision of “a more stable, prosperous, integrated region.” The examples the official offered involved other Iranian puppet states: Yemen and Iraq. Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia was notably absent from the “regional integration” agenda.
The Lebanon maritime deal, which the Biden team puffed up as “historic,” consisted of a package of Israeli concessions to Iran’s foremost regional equity, Hezbollah. The administration’s messaging infrastructure, in both D.C. and Israel, promptly classified the deal as more meaningful than the Abraham Accords—since it was an agreement with an Iranian asset, which is what the Obama-Biden framework defines as “peace.” The Obama-Biden echo chamber amplified the “depressurizing/deescalating” message to magnify the importance of the maritime deal as one that actually “prevents conflict,” as opposed to the Abraham Accords, which were “out of conflict zone” agreements—a riff on their initial derision of the Abraham Accords as not being “real” peace agreements, since those Arab states were never at war with Israel.
Taken together with the Biden administration’s sustained information campaign against the Saudis over “values” as well as energy policy, the offer America is making its two leading regional allies is clear: Forget the anti-Iran Abraham Accords framework. The path to team Obama-Biden’s approval is through “regional integration” with Iran.