What Happened Today: November 02, 2022
Bibi back in as prime minister, again; U.S. troops on Ukraine soil; FCC commish calls for TikTok ban
The Big Story
With some 90% of the votes counted, Benjamin Netanyahu appears poised to reassume the role of Israel’s prime minister, solidifying his reputation for political comebacks, including five previous stints as prime minister over a stretch of 15 years. For what was essentially a referendum on Netanyahu, who remains the most galvanizing figure in Israeli politics, 71% of Israelis came out to vote—the highest turnout since 2015 for what is now the country’s fifth election in four years. As of Wednesday evening in Israel, exit polls indicated that Netanyahu’s Likud Party would pick up 32 of the 120 Knesset seats and lead a religiously strident right-wing 65-seat alliance shaped in no small part by ultranationalist lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir, who’s engineered a political comeback of his own since his conviction for racist incitement against Arabs in 2007. Ben-Gvir’s Religious Zionist Party was set to win 14 seats, a surge of influence in the Knesset that melted Netanyahu’s hesitancy to make a deal with the firebrand, who pushed on Wednesday to be named Israel’s minister of police.
“We need to wait for the final results. But one thing is already clear: Our path, the Likud’s path, has proven itself,” said Netanyahu at an event with supporters on Wednesday. Echoing his campaign promise to strengthen the country’s Jewish identity, Netanyahu told the crowd that the mandate from voters pointed to the popular sentiment to “restore national pride.” The Likud-led alliance could also delegate to lawmakers more control over judicial appointments as well as certain political finance laws that some of Netanyahu’s allies say will make him immune to the corruption charges he now faces at an upcoming trial, though he has said the new laws could not retroactively apply to his case.
The final vote tally could take until Friday to complete, though it appears already that current Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party was set to lead a bloc of around 53 seats.
In the Back Pages: Understanding Israel’s Election Results
The Rest
→ American troops are on the ground in Ukraine to oversee and conduct inspections of some of the tens of thousands of weapons provided by the United States to Ukraine in its war against Russia, top military personnel confirmed this week. Despite the confirmation that U.S. troops are on the ground in Ukraine, an anonymous Pentagon official told The Washington Post that they would not carry out their mission “close to the front lines.” The suggestion from the unnamed defense official is that—for now, at least—U.S. troops aren’t engaged in combat, though the stakes couldn’t be higher as Russian forces continue to attack a wide range of targets that could well include Ukrainian facilities holding arms that are being inspected by the U.S. military. The possibility of a direct conflict between U.S. and Russian forces would mark a new front in the war, though it would mirror the mission creep that has affected Western forces in conflict zones like Syria.
→ Idea of the Day:
In a response to Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine’s 40,000-word cover story on the history, meaning, and future of crypto, futurist and Tablet contributor Antonio García Martínez teases out Levine’s observation that cryptocurrencies aren’t necessarily at their best or most useful as a solution for the problems of the physical and familiar pre-internet world, but rather as the financial ledger and decentralized record-keeping apparatus “well-suited to a world lived in databases,” as Levine puts it.
Read More: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-the-crypto-story/
→ Quote of the Day:
Most mass murderers and mass shooters did not have severe mental illness.
From a new report by teams at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute after their study of 82 mass shootings on school campuses. “Our findings suggest that mass school shootings are different from other forms of mass murder, and that they should be looked at as a distinct phenomenon,” said report author Dr. Girgis. The study undercuts a popular narrative that school shooters are simply suffering from a mental health crisis and points toward another thesis that school shooters, all of whom were male, were often propelled by ideological, cultural, or social influences to carry out a violent goal of some kind. The study noted that nearly half of the school shooters committed suicide at the scene, which the team observed as possible evidence “that perpetrators may see themselves as engaging in some form of final act.”
→ Brendan Carr, a Federal Communications Commission commissioner, is calling for lawmakers to ban TikTok in the United States, citing a national security threat. “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban,” Carr told Axios, a reference to the recent discovery that TikTok is potentially tracking users’ location and sending sensitive data to Beijing. President Trump had unsuccessfully led an effort to kick the app out of the United States in 2020, at the time drawing ire from progressives who’ve recently shifted their stance on the app. “This is not something you would normally hear me say, but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago,” Sen. Mark Warner said in October. “If your kids are on TikTok … the ability for China to have undue influence is a much greater challenge and a much more immediate threat than any kind of actual, armed conflict.”
→ Video of the Day:
Yes, their brains are so small they incur no pain when hammering their heads against trees, but woodpeckers do not lack for charm—or at least not all of the 239 species, many of which are featured in this new documentary, Woodpeckers: The Hole Story, narrated by Paul Giamatti. Case in point: the acorn woodpecker, which fervently guards its stash of accumulated acorns by “tattooing” them into the holes made in the bark of a tree. Throughout the winter, these thoughtful, or single-thought, creatures then dine on the bounty.
→ South Korea President Yoon Suk-yeol described one of the 23 missiles that was launched on Wednesday into the sea by North Korea and landed just 40 miles off the South Korean coast as a “territorial encroachment.” In response, South Korean officials launched their own missiles into Northern waters while issuing rare air-raid warnings. Not since the peninsula’s division in 1945 had a ballistic missile splashed so close to Southern territory, a provocation that follows North Korea capital Pyongyang’s previous call for the United States to cease a planned stretch of large-scale military exercises. U.S. State Department representative Ned Price said these were simply defense drills, though he did note that North Korea would suffer “profound costs and profound consequences” should Pyongyang resume its nuclear testing.
→ Chart of the Day:
Just as the Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it would hike interest rates by .75 of a percentage point for the fourth consecutive time, this Bloomberg graphic underscores one of the difficulties facing the Fed as it tries to tame threats of an economic recession: While the rising rates have rapidly slowed down the U.S. housing market, the higher rates are having little to no impact on the industrial sector, the retail economy, or the labor market, which continues to expand at its fastest rate in seven months. That could become a big concern for Fed officials, particularly if they need the labor market to cool to temper inflation.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Overmatch by Michael Doran and Can Kasapoglu
Iran’s increasingly sophisticated drone and missile strike packages are driving America’s beleaguered allies to seek protection in Beijing.
Jewish Sports Nerds and Their Path to the Promised Land by Tablet Podcasts
Ep 4: How ‘Moneyball’ changed the game and opened the door to new careers in sports
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.
Understanding Israel’s Election Results
By Liel Liebovitz and Tony Badran
What to make of Bibi Netanyahu’s decisive electoral victory?
We’ll leave the squawking about the end of democracy and the brink of war to the same bien pensants who sang the exact same tune last time around, only to grow considerably quieter when Bibi, backed by President Donald Trump, managed to usher in a large-scale Israeli-Arab peace initiative that had, for decades, eluded our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters.
For now, it seems to us, two questions need addressing, one domestic and relatively trivial and the other regional and deeply significant.
The silly one first: What kind of coalition will Bibi build?
The votes are still being counted as we write, so it remains to be seen precisely how many building blocks Bibi has at his disposal. He may yet reveal himself to be an even more skilled operator than even his bitterest foes believe, seducing poor Benny Gantz into a center-right coalition and sidelining the Betzalel Smotrich-Itamar Ben-Gvir coalition he’d midwifed. This will put him with upwards of 70 seats in the Knesset, which he can make even stronger—numerically and symbolically—by welcoming in the conservative Muslim Ra’am party. Or he can opt for a narrower hard right coalition with Smotrich et al.
It hardly matters, mainly because his political opponents have proven themselves to be catastrophically inept, making basic tactical errors that everyone could see coming and no one was fit to avoid. Yair Lapid, hailed by many in Israel and stateside as a graceful politician, campaigned hard for his own party, which left him with 24 seats—his strongest showing ever—and absolutely no one left to play with, his own successful efforts having singlehandedly decimated his entire delicate political coalition. To his left, Meretz and Labor, awash with big egos and petty grievances, shunned a joint run earlier this year; now, one is likely out of the Knesset for the first time ever and the other will be fortunate if it retains five seats. Avigdor Lieberman, too, whose personal grievances launched this electoral tsunami five cycles and nearly four years ago, is on the verge of political extinction, proving that saying much and doing nothing makes for a very limited political shelf life.
Any way you spin it, the outcome is clear: Bibi remains the only adult in the room, and whatever political decision he makes right now is still likely to give him the breathing room he needs to form a relatively stable coalition. Mazal tov. Now, on to the important stuff.
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Outside of the airless world of punditry, elections are not about the mere manifestation of political power; they’re about real-world consequences, and, for Israel, no consequences could be more meaningful than the regional and geopolitical ones that determine its security and well-being. Upon his return to office, then, Bibi’s first task would be to look soberly at all that had happened since he left it last June.
He’s not likely to like what he sees.
Sharing his former boss’s commitment to regional realignment that rewards the Iranians, President Joseph Biden has aggressively championed policies furthering that disastrous end. Under the Biden administration, the Realignment agenda has been dubbed “regional integration” — namely, forcing US allies to prop up Iranian so-called “equities” on their borders.
“A more secure and integrated Middle East,” he wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post ahead of his trip to Saudi Arabia this summer, “benefits Americans in many ways… A region that’s coming together through diplomacy and cooperation—rather than coming apart through conflict—is less likely to give rise to violent extremism that threatens our homeland or new wars that could place new burdens on U.S. military forces and their families.”
What kind of diplomacy did the president have in mind? The answer, as Bibi knows full well, is two-fold: First, robustly revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran Deal, which remains the administration’s foreign policy crown jewel even as Iranian mullahs are murdering Iranian women for refusing to wear the hijab and as Iranian drones, deployed by Putin’s soldiers, are murdering civilians in Ukraine. Second, a laser focus on Lebanon—significant only because it is an Iranian holding—which has forced Israel to sign the disastrous maritime border deal with Lebanon, a deal that benefits no one but Hezbollah, Teheran’s terrorist proxy.
That last point is likely to be particularly hard for Bibi to swallow. Not even Naftali Bennett, his one-time aide turned successor, agreed to sign the deal. It took Lapid, a stunningly inept statesman, to be cajoled by the White House into giving away a lot for nothing. Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, knows that, too, which is why he took the bold step of sending his drones to attack an Israeli gas rig on July 1 this year. It was, not coincidentally, also the very day Lapid began his tenure as prime minister.
How might Bibi disentangle himself from this mess? The answer could be relatively simple: Sidle up to the Saudis.
Riyadh, too, understands very well that Biden’s policies, like Obama’s, are explicitly pro-Iranian, which is why its relationship with Washington had cooled to an unprecedented degree. This is why the Saudis supported, however implicitly, the Abraham Accords, which they understood, correctly, to be an anti-Iranian effort to align the interests of regional countries opposed to the murderous mullahs and their regime. It was no coincidence that the White House advertised its “regional integration” agenda on the eve of Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia. The message couldn’t have been clearer: the administration’s objective is not to further advance Israeli-Saudi alignment in the context of the anti-Iran framework of the Abraham Accords. Rather, it was to force Jerusalem and Riyadh to “integrate” Iranian holdings.
It makes perfect sense, then, for the Saudis and the Israelis to deepen their cooperation now that the Biden administration is cracking down on the former and about to do the same on the latter. And if they needed any further incentive to distance themselves from Biden and his explicitly harmful policies, the Saudis and the Israelis are likely counting on a Republican surge in next week’s midterms, as well as on Biden’s shockingly low poll numbers. It’s a great time for both to make this the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
That, however, would require some dancing, both from within and without. At home, Bibi will need to make sure that his coalition understands his priorities full well. This may prove challenging if Gantz chooses to become a partner; despite arguing the opposite for most of his career, he eventually lent his support to the disastrous deal with Lebanon, another in a line of long political miscalculations. If he now becomes Bibi’s minister of defense, he’ll have some ‘splaining to do, and a tough time disentangling himself from the assurances he’d given Washington.
More meaningfully, the Saudis themselves will need to adjust their attitude to their Arab Peace Initiative. The Saudi attachment to the API is understandable. It has been a signature initiative, which underscores the Saudi position of leadership in the Arab world. However, the world has changed dramatically since 2001. The API, for example, requires that Israel returns to so-called 1967 borders, which, among other things, would mean giving up the Golan Heights. This is not only out of the question for Israel, but also not at all in the Saudi interest, as the Iranian satrapy of Syria isn’t exactly a staunch ally of the House of Saud. Also, the API’s key promise—it’s raison d’etre, really—was promising to normalize Israeli-Arab relationship across the board and the region; the Abraham Accords already achieved that in large part, and only did so because of tacit Saudi approval. So while the API and the Abraham Accords aren’t exactly aligned policy frameworks, Israel and Saudi Arabia have enough threats, challenges, and opportunities in common to compel them to forge an alliance in defiance of Washington’s embrace of the Islamic Republic.
It’s an alliance that may not seem so promising to folks stateside. Americans like to talk about “peace in the middle east” as both a salvic rite and an achievable goal that gives people warm feelings that they variously connect to the Old and/or New Testament and/or to secular ideas of human progress. Residents of the Middle East, historically at the mercy of greater powers and of the sharp swords of their neighbors, think in terms of allies and enemies. For Americans, what matters about the Abraham Accords is the promise of the title: The uniting of the children of Abraham. What matters most in the Middle East is the promise of a hard security architecture to protect against Iranian militias, drones, and missiles. That’s why the Abraham Accords and the Lebanese maritime deal, as manifestations of the “regional integration” framework, while both ostensibly promising some kind of “peace,” are in fact radically opposing concepts that are at war with each other. The Abraham Accords means Israel, the Gulf, and Saudi Arabia uniting against Iran and its proxies under a US security umbrella; the purpose of the Lebanon maritime deal according to its American authors is to “integrate” Iran and its allies into the region under the same US security umbrella.
See the difference? In the Abraham Accords, Israel’s alliance with the Gulf States to counter Iran is backed by America. In Lebanon, the US is aligned with Iran through its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, to which Israel is required to gift a potentially valuable gas field that it formerly controlled. In the first case, Israel and the Gulf wins, backed by America. In the second case, Iran and Hezbollah win, with American backing, under the fig leaf of a fictional entity called Lebanon.
It’s this exact security-minded worldview that may yet give the API a new lease on life under Bibi’s new government. Like the Abraham Accords, the API has to be reinvented as having less to do with a vision of a region-wide peace in which mankind will beat its swords into plowshares than with regional alliances and hard security structures. In that context, the API remains critically important, as an Israeli — and American — acknowledgement of Saudi primacy within the Arab world. The API will therefore remain the starting point for Saudi-Israeli relations even if all the things it supposedly requires are shunted off to the sidelines. The details are all negotiable; the acknowledgement of Saudi primacy is not. In that sense, the transformation of the API into a bilateral Saudi-Israeli agreement is less of a reach than the words on paper make it seem — the main opponent of such an agreement being not Israelis or Saudis but the Biden administration, which sees Iran as primary.
It’s not likely an Israeli-Saudi alliance, inspired as it may be, would be able to curb all of the Biden Administration’s worst instincts. But it could certainly be a very strong and united message to the White House that its attempt to force Riyadh and Jerusalem into its pro-Iran “integration” scheme will fail, and that security interests--not media affirmations--will guide both Jerusalem and Riyadh moving forward. That is a complicated task requiring real vision and capabilities. Thankfully, the best man for the job is now back at the helm.
Your usual snarkiness and half truths.....deliverd with much brio......and so convincingly well-written....
It is odd to me that on the one hand Liel rants against things like traditional college educations but on the other praises Bibi because he is so slimy that he constantly succeeds politically. The fact that the man if void of ethics doesn't make me like him. I also don't like the fact that Bibi wants us to be little America. That was the result of his financial policy which has blessed us with the same inequalities in income, education, government services, etc means the 10% at the top of Israel get everything and the 90% fight over what remains.
I would also remind the authors that Bibi did not stop the original Iran deal and in the process alienated many Democratic senators and congresspeople which was unnecessary. Lapid had the same stance which he made clear without becoming so polarized in the US.
All that being said, I don't think Bibi is a bad PM and just hope he can keep some of the far-right political proposals at bay.