What Happened Today: July 31, 2023
Protests against Hamas; Woman executed in Singapore; Nuclear power makes a comeback?
The Big Story
Thousands of demonstrators rallying against Hamas leaders because of ongoing power outages and the rising cost of living in the Gaza Strip were quickly suppressed by security forces on Sunday, though protestors have said they will take to the streets again later this week. The protestors said they had issued an ultimatum to Hamas to heed their demands within two weeks and promised to expand “our peaceful revolution until all our demands are met.”
One political activist involved in the current protests told The Jerusalem Post that the demonstrators weren’t frustrated only by Hamas for the economic conditions in the Gaza Strip. “The entire people took to the streets because they are fed up with the situation. We are angry not only against Hamas, but the Palestinian Authority as well.”
Four years ago, a similar protest effort seeking improved economic conditions had been rapidly smothered by Hamas security forces, whose leaders accused Fatah, a rival faction led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, of fermenting the unrest. This current wave of protests comes amid new negotiations between Fatah and Hamas, with Abbas meeting in Turkey last week with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to discuss the possibility of a unified Palestinian government. Those discussions ended with no settled resolution as Haniyeh rejected the formation of a political coalition that would recognize Israel or any pacts previously reached between Palestinians and the Israel government over the past three decades.
Read More: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-753165
In The Back Pages: Israel, Right or Left
The Rest
→ A suicide bombing left 54 dead and at least 200 wounded at a pro-Taliban political rally in Pakistan on Sunday. The event was organized by Jamiat Ulema Islam Party as it prepares for elections later this year. The party’s leader, hard-line cleric and politician Maulana Fazlur Rehman, has survived multiple bomb attacks at political rallies in the past and was not at the event on Sunday. No one has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack, though several militant factions in northern Pakistan could have organized the bombing as a way to incite “confusion, instability, and unrest ahead of the elections,” Pakistani security analyst Mahmood Shah told the Associated Press.
→ Number of the Day: 37%
That’s the gap between Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the GOP nomination, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll of likely primary voters. While the 2024 primary is still months from beginning in earnest, Trump has continued to pull ahead of his rivals, as voters seem to be cooling on DeSantis the more time he spends on the campaign trail. The nearest third-place candidates were all hovering around 3% (Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott) about 51% behind the former President. At the moment, Trump faces three civil trials and two criminal trials, with the possibility of both criminal proceedings not wrapping up until after voters make their choice for the nomination.
→ Gathered during an emergency summit on Sunday, leaders from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) said they might need to organize a military response against the recent coup effort in Niger amid fears that the rebel group could become a critical security ally for Russia in the region. The ECOWAS called on the military junta in Niger to return power to Mohamed Bazoum within a week and announced several economic sanctions meant to undermine junta members’ access to their bank accounts. “In the event the authorities’ demands are not met within one week [ECOWAS will] take all measures necessary to restore constitutional order in the Republic of Niger,” said Omar Alieu Touray, president of the ECOWAS commission. “Such measures may include the use of force.”
→ Quote of the Day:
We are not impressed by Nasrallah’s bunker threats. On the day of the test, he will find us standing shoulder to shoulder. It is not worth it for him to test us.
That’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking on Sunday at a security summit with Israeli military leaders about the threats Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah made during a speech a day earlier. Noting the summit, Nasrallah said, “The Zionist entity is the source of evil and a cancerous growth in our region. Our region will not calm down until this cancerous growth and this germ of corruption is removed.” Ahead of any possible attacks by the Iran-backed Hezbollah, Israeli news media said the IDF was recently hardening its position in the north after it dismantled part of a new Hezbollah outpost on Israel’s side of the demarcation line. Nasrallah had threatened retaliation against the IDF if it made a move against the rest of the outpost.
→ For the first time in almost 20 years Singapore has executed a woman. She was hanged after receiving a mandatory death sentence for possession of heroin. With 15 total executions since the beginning of 2022, Singapore has come under increased international scrutiny for its frequent use of the death penalty against those sentenced for nonviolent drug offenses. The woman who was hanged last week, 45-year-old Saridewi Djamani, said she was coerced into a confession by police while enduring heroin withdrawal. “The death penalty is not a deterrent. It’s time for Singapore’s killing spree to stop before its reputation is permanently damaged,” wrote Richard Branson, the British billionaire founder of the Virgin empire, who had joined others in calling for Saridewi to be spared. Another man convicted of drug dealing is scheduled to be executed next week.
→ It cost billions of dollars more than it should and took seven more years than anticipated, but Plant Vogtle Unit 3 has become the first new nuclear facility constructed in the United States in more than 30 years, delivering commercial electricity to the Georgia power grid. The project, which includes another reactor set to come online sometime this year, will deliver electricity for 60 to 80 years, but the runaway budget and production timeline could become a cautionary tale of new atomic investment as state and federal officials seek zero-carbon energy sources for the future. The plant was meant to be one of dozens of new nuclear reactors amid a renewed appetite for atomic energy in the late 2000s. But the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and the rise of natural gas largely undermined the nuclear renaissance.
→ American regulators “recommended” that Coinbase shut down trading all cryptocurrencies on its platform save for Bitcoin before they sued the exchange, according to an interview with Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong in the Financial Times. The attempt to have Coinbase delist more than 200 crypto tokens signals the ongoing appetite by the Securities and Exchange Commission to exert wider authority over the crypto sector, though Armstrong says the SEC recommendation was based on a faulty reading of the regulator’s legal power. “Delisting every asset other than Bitcoin, which by the way is not what the law says, would have essentially meant the end of the crypto industry in the U.S,” Armstrong said. “It kind of made it an easy choice … let’s go to court and find out what the court says.” At the moment, the SEC doesn’t treat crypto tokens as securities the same way it does stocks, bonds, and other traditional financial instruments, though that could change if Congress expanded regulators’ authority over crypto assets.
→ Roughly 2 of every 3 of the iconic Parisian bookseller stalls along the Seine River are being forced to shut down because they pose a security risk during the 2024 Olympics, according to city officials. The open-air book market is the largest on the continent, with stalls that have been selling books there for 400 years; the bookseller association president, Jerome Callais, told Reuters that “people come to see us like they come to see the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, [but] they want to hide us during a ceremony that is supposed to represent Paris.” City leaders say they’ll cover any costs incurred from moving the stalls to a nearby location that’s outside of the security perimeter, but booksellers say the economic disruption of the relocation could leave some stalls shuttered for good as the COVID-19 pandemic left some of them on the brink of financial ruin.
TODAY IN TABLET:
LGBTQ+ at Yeshiva University: The Path Forward by Netanel Zellis-Paley and E.Y. Zipris
Learning from the past to engage with the future
Record Master Marshall Chess by David Hershkovits
The record industry dynast talks music, family, and doing drugs with the Rolling Stones
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 publication on July 16, 2023, of an article by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel opened a fresh debate over a topic dominated by outdated assumptions and emotional entreaties. To deepen the conversation, Tablet invited a group that includes a retired IDF general, U.S. Senators and members of Congress, former Middle East diplomats, and writers from various political persuasions to offer their thoughts on the issue. We will be publishing them in the Scroll today and next week.
Israel, Right or Left
Framing the question of U.S. aid to Israel as a right-left binary is a partisan evasion
Is U.S. military aid to Israel a right-wing or a left-wing issue? Nothing in Tablet’s article calling to “End U.S. Aid to Israel” suggested partisan argumentation, yet some of the online discussion it inspired immediately swerved in that direction. Nicholas Kristof’s column making a similar argument in The New York Times a few days later, suggested that ending aid to Israel is part of a liberal agenda, even as he gave a backwards nod to the Tablet piece, noting that “it’s not just the liberals” who argue that aid should be cut. Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter Ron Kampeas labeled Siegel and Leibovitz “two right wingers” in a tweet that declined to mention the Tablet authors by name while expressing surprise that Kristof was getting “pro-Israel flack.” Netanyahu, Kampeas tweeted, “has been thinking about this since the 1990s.”
Let’s set aside the question of whether the assumptions about the political affiliations of the Tablet authors are correct—in fact, their body of published writing suggests that they are not so easily grouped under an ideological label—the apparent need to politically pigeonhole a complex essay is frustrating and unhelpful. Siegel and Leibovitz argue that aid as currently structured does more harm than good to Israel because it stunts Israel’s domestic defense industry, curbs Israel’s autonomy, and transforms the country “into a scapegoat for every lunatic conspiracy theorist in America to indulge in Jew-baiting in the guise of pontificating about ‘U.S. foreign policy.’” They point to the damaging effect that the focus on aid to Israel has on America’s own strategic priorities, while also making the more provocative claim that “America’s manipulation of the Jewish state endangers Israel and American Jews.” Finally, they question the wisdom of channeling American Jews’ political energies into supporting a policy that is, at bottom, a subsidy for the U.S. defense industry. Their argument appears to be rooted in the belief that both the U.S. and Israel would be better off refocusing their commitments on their respective national interests—a claim that has both left and right wing versions but is far too specific and nuanced to be reduced to the crude lens of political bias.
There are profound unstated questions underlying this essay that simply get glossed over or ignored in the rush to assign it to a political team. Among them: How to ensure Israel’s success going forward? What strategic value does Israel provide to America and what can America offer in return? What is the best way for American Jews to express solidarity with Israel? What is the right path forward for Americans and Israelis together? These questions invite American Jews to look at the aid not as Democrats or Republicans but first and foremost, as members of the Jewish people.
In a sense, it is unsurprising, and perhaps even inevitable that these questions should immediately evoke partisan bias. Although Israeli and American Jewish analysts of all stripes have over the years raised the point about U.S. aid’s harmful aspects, in the current political climate in the U.S. the most vocal advocates for canceling or limiting aid have been Democratic politicians from the furthest reaches of the progressive end of the spectrum. Some of them are aggressively hostile to the Jewish state, others hardly bother to hide their contempt for it. They are wholeheartedly applauded by those who’d like to see Israel erased from history. The former head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, who has made a career out of demonizing Israel despite evincing the same level of historical understanding of the state found in an average freshman dorm, has tweeted Kristof’s column out three times.
Liberal American Jews—which is still the majority of American Jews—have failed to resist the Democratic Party’s recent pull to the left toward its radical progressive wing. That means that in addition to being influenced by its activist positioning on “defunding the police’' and other domestic political issues, they have also increasingly adopted its hostile stance toward Israel. Disconnected from the religious and historical heritage and from the Zionist perspective that is baked into Jewish holy books and liturgy, many American Jews replaced the traditional sources of Jewishness with a fervor for the politics of Israel that has both supported, and is now turning against, the state. The problem is that, like Kenneth Roth, their passion has often outpaced their understanding, making them reliant on slogans and susceptible to manipulation. Most American Jews, for instance, don’t speak Hebrew and are therefore unable to follow the Israeli national conversation. They learn about Israel either from Western media sources or from those Israeli journalists and activists whose speciality is serving as “American whisperers.” As a result, they entrust the job of interpreting the country for them to commentators who often do so through the familiar lens of American politics, leaving out nuance and complexity, while pandering to U.S. sensibilities. The truth is that when it comes to Israel, many American Jews don’t even know enough to ask the right questions.
One example of this failure is evident in the coverage and perceptions of Israel’s internal conflict over judicial reform. Mainstream American media as well as many Jewish publications have presented it as a Manichean standoff between the good, progressive Jews of Tel Aviv who are fighting for democracy and the evil, far-right West Bank settlers yearning for a dictatorship. Completely absent from this caricature is any sign of interest in the complex layers of Israeli history, politics, and culture, let alone the class and ethnic aspects of the conflict. Many American Jews would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that what drives many pro-reform Israelis is not a craving for more settlements, a wish to escape military service, or a desire to turn Israel into a theocracy. What drives them, rather, is a desire to correct the many injustices they feel they have suffered at the hands of the current system.
Most left-wing Israelis are aware of this point but reject it because it comes from the opposite side of the political spectrum. But as the Israeli journalist Avishai Ben Haim shows in his book Second Israel (which is not available in English), the sense of discrimination and oppression among millions of Israelis is too real to be dismissed on partisan grounds. That most liberal American Jews are blind to this story is ironic, given the degree to which liberal American Judaism is built around social justice and repairing the world.
In his talks, the former Soviet dissident and current Israeli politician Natan Sharansky often notes the absurdity of looking at antisemitism in a partisan way. What a victory for our enemies, he likes to say: Instead of standing united against their enemies, Jews fight each other over which antisemitism is worse—the right-wing or the left-wing kind.
It’s time to recognize that adopting hyperpartisan postures on issues critical to Jewish collective existence, including in Israel, is just as harmful. One can agree or disagree with Siegel’s and Leibovitz’s arguments about military aid to Israel. But conducting this debate while clinging to American political identities will help neither American Jews nor Israelis.
With Jews comprising just 2.4% of the U.S. population, it is a safe bet that America will survive no matter what political choices its Jewish citizens make. The same cannot be said about the future of the American Jewish community and Israel. When thinking about the future of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, American Jews would do well to learn to shed their left-wing and right-wing allegiances and look at the issues facing them from a radically different angle—the Jewish one.
Read the full collection, here.
I stand with the booksellers! ❤️
I write in response to the article by Messrs Netanel Zellis-Paley and E.Y. Zipris. I refer the readers here to this uperb column https://parshawithchana.substack.com/p/lgbtq-club-at-yeshiva-university and the stark reality posed as follows by its author:
"Let’s also look at #5 on the list of causes the students marched for. It reads: “YU Students should be allowed to have a Gay-Straight Alliance on campus. It must be clear it is a GSA.” GSA Network defines a GSA in the following way:
"GSA clubs, or GSAs for short, are student-run organizations that unite LGBTQ+ and allied youth to build community and organize around issues impacting them in their schools and communities. GSAs have evolved beyond their traditional role to serve as safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth in middle schools and high schools, and have emerged as vehicles for deep social change related to racial, gender, and educational justice [emph mine].
A growing body of research confirms that the presence of a GSA has a positive and lasting effect on student health, wellness, and academic performance. It can also protect students from harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and improve school climates for all students in the long-term."
The difficulty of having a GSA on a religious campus is that the club is no longer there merely to serve as a safe space and support group. The club comes with a focus on "social change related to racial, gender and educational justice." That social change declares that gender is a construct and therefore one can transition between genders, something which traditional Judaism and halakha does not support. It also advocates for acting upon one's sexuality (having a sexual or romantic relationship with a partner of the same gender), which once again, clashes with halakha.
The authors and their supportes have to choose whether they are part of the community whose lives are dictated by adherence to Halacha or by their adherence to the LGBT world. Both Randi Weingarten and Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel are both Cardozo graduates-the authors and their supporters should be intellectually honest to say whether their allegiance is to Halacha or the woke LGBTagenda