The Big Story
Shortly before Shabbat on Friday, Israeli units began limited ground operations in Gaza against Hamas targets—a signal that a full-scale ground offensive may be imminent as the country approaches the one-week anniversary of the massacre that triggered its latest war against Hamas. Among the operations in Gaza carried out on Friday were raids intended to gather valuable intelligence that can be used to locate hostages, high-level Hamas officials, and other targets in the areas. “IDF soldiers searched and collected evidence that would assist in the effort to locate hostages. In addition, IDF soldiers thwarted terrorist cells and infrastructure located in the area, including a Hamas cell that fired antitank missiles toward Israeli territory,” a military spokesman told Israeli publication Ynet. After repeated calls for civilians to leave northern Gaza, Israel on Friday issued what appeared to be a final evacuation order for people to leave before 8 p.m. local time that day. Despite orders from Hamas instructing Gazans to stay in their homes, thousands of civilians reportedly were moving south before the anticipated Israeli assault. Hamas messages broadcast from mosques in northern Gaza called Israel’s warnings “propaganda” and implored the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza statelet to “hold on to your homes and land.”
Additional skirmishes Friday between IDF and Hezbollah forces demonstrated the ongoing need for Israel to maintain security on its northern border, while the bulk of its units are now actively deployed in the south. Throughout the day, rocket attacks from Gaza struck southern and central Israel, culminating in a barrage Friday that hit Tel Aviv at roughly 10 p.m. local time.
—JS
The Rest
→Questions continued to circulate on Friday about the precise nature of Iran’s involvement in planning Hamas’ deadly terrorist attacks on Israel. A Monday story in The Wall Street Journal claimed that representatives from Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah jointly agreed on the operation at a meeting in Beirut earlier in October, citing unnamed officials from Iran and the two terror groups as well as an unnamed European official—a story that both Hamas and Iran have denied. The U.S. government, for its part, has echoed Tehran’s denial. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told the press earlier this week that Washington has no “confirmation” that the Iranians were “witting, involved in the planning, or involved in the resourcing and the training that went into this very complex set of attacks over the weekend,” in Kirby’s words, though Kirby acknowledged Tehran was “complicit.” Several American officials told The New York Times again Friday that the United States has “collected multiple pieces of intelligence that show that key Iranian leaders were surprised by [the attack], including people who would normally be aware of [such] operations.”
It’s no surprise that the Biden administration would be reluctant to concede that Iran helped to plan the deadliest attack in history on Washington’s closest Middle East ally. After all, the Biden White House has continued Barack Obama’s policy of courting the Iranian regime through sanctions relief, direct transfers of cash, and diplomatic support. Only a few weeks ago, it was revealed to have promoted an Iranian analyst with connections to the Iranian foreign ministry into key roles in the State Department and Pentagon, and before that the administration saw its chief interlocutor with Iran, Robert Malley, placed on leave after his security credentials were revoked by the State Department over his mishandling of classified information. But whether or not the account published in the Journal is accurate, and Iranian officials really did sit down with their Hamas and Hezbollah counterparts in Beirut a few weeks ago is somewhat beside the point.
As the Times goes on to report:
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, held an hourslong online meeting in March with an elite group of strategists from all the Iran-backed militias and told them to get ready for a war with Israel with a scope and reach—including a ground invasion—that would mark a new era, according to two participants from Iran and Syria.
The bottom line, beneath all the noise and obfuscation, is that an attack of this magnitude and complexity by an Iranian proxy on Israel—one that not only will spark the largest war by Israel against an Iranian asset since its 2006 invasion of Lebanon but also threatens to turn over the geopolitical chessboard of the entire region—could not have happened without the knowledge and approval of Iran.
Read more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/world/middleeast/hamas-iran-israel-attack.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
→Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem announced that the Iran-allied Lebanese terror group was “fully prepared” to intervene on behalf of Hamas, amid growing fears in Israel about the potential opening of a second front in the north. “We are fully prepared, and when the time comes for action, we will take it,” Qassem told supporters at a Friday rally in Beirut, adding that warnings from Arab and Western governments, which have urged Hezbollah not to involve itself in the conflict, “will not affect us.” Qassem’s remarks coincided with the arrival in Beirut of Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who warned that violence could spread to other parts of the Middle East if Israel’s “organized war crimes … don’t stop immediately.” Senior Hamas official Ali Barakeh also claimed that Hezbollah will “join the battle if Gaza is subjected to a war of annihilation.”
Rockets launched from Gaza and southern Lebanon rained down on northern and central Israel on Friday, including a long-range Hamas rocket targeting the northern city of Haifa, which was intercepted by Israel’s missile defense system David’s Sling. The rocket, believed to be an Ayyash 250 with a claimed range of 250 kilometers, represented “the longest-ever rocket attack from Gaza,” according to the Alma Research and Education Center, an Israeli think tank, and demonstrated Hamas’ ability to strike anywhere within Israeli territory, not merely its usual targets in the south.
The IDF announced on Friday that it was carrying out drone strikes against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon after the group opened fire on a number of Israeli army positions in the north.
Read more here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-shells-hezbollah-post-on-border-as-terror-group-iran-threaten-to-join-war/
→New York Gov. Kathy Hochul reassured New York City’s Jewish residents in response to a former Hamas leader’s call for a global “Day of Rage” on Friday, while saying that it was a “personal choice” to keep children home from religious school or synagogue on Friday. “I understand the very human desire to protect your family and your kids,” Hochul said at a press conference at which she and New York City Mayor Eric Adams detailed the NYPD’s heightened security measures and stressed that there were no “credible or specific threats” against the city’s Jewish community. “With that information going on, it’s something everybody individually will have to decide.” Some Jewish schools and synagogues closed or held virtual services as a precaution. In Beijing, an Israeli embassy staffer was stabbed by an unidentified assailant Friday, while a schoolteacher in France was murdered in a knife attack by an assailant shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
Read more: https://abc7ny.com/israel-hamas-war-nyc-unrest-hate-crime-palestinian-rally/13901666/
→Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that an Israeli ground offensive in Gaza would lead to “absolutely unacceptable” levels of civilian casualties and likened it to the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II, in which more than 1 million Soviet civilians died. Putin, who oversaw the 2000 Russian siege of Grozny, in which as many as 8,000 civilians were killed in a campaign to subdue Muslim Chechen separatists, nonetheless acknowledged that Israel had a right to defend itself from an attack “unprecedented in its cruelty.”
Russian state television, which takes its ideological line directly from the Kremlin, has been openly supportive of the Hamas offensive while blaming Israel and the United States for destabilizing the region. The Russian media campaign against the Israelis has been backed by public pronouncements in support of the Palestinian cause from Putin himself. This media campaign is particularly striking when viewed against the background of Putin’s historic closeness to Israel and the Russian Jewish community, and even more striking when viewed against Putin’s deep aversion to Islamic terrorism in the aftermath of the Chechen wars. It was Chechen Muslim terror attacks on Russian civilians that first brought the Russian leader to power.
What explains this seeming about-face? First, 20% of the Russian population is Muslim, a segment of Russia’s population that includes Putin’s cadre of Chechen fighters, who are crucial to Russia’s campaign in Ukraine. After surviving a recent coup attempt, Putin is more reliant on the Chechens than ever and can ill afford Muslim unrest.
Second, Israel supports Ukraine. Under strong U.S. pressure, Israel has become evermore involved militarily on the Ukrainian side of a bloody war that Putin is struggling to win. Even though the Israelis have continued to observe red lines related to the supply of strategically significant weapons, Putin can’t be happy to see Israel as an extension of a U.S.-backed and -funded war campaign designed to block his ambition to annex Ukraine, humiliate him on the world stage, kill Russian soldiers, and even remove him from power—all of which offers strong proof, in the Kremlin’s mind, of the U.S. desire to subjugate Russia.
Third, and probably most important, there is Russia’s ever-closer relationship with Iran, which is being shaped by Putin’s battlefield needs in Ukraine. Russia needs drones. In recent months, Iran not only has continued shipping massive numbers of drones to Russia—complete with Iranian operators, based in Crimea—but also has sent at least one complete drone assembly line to boost Russia’s drone-manufacturing capacity. Iran’s supply of drones is greatly significant in a war in which drones have been repeatedly used to strategic effect on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Russia contracted for, but failed to deliver, advanced fighter planes to Iran this summer. Somewhere, there has to be a quid pro quo.
Read more here: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-768119
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Nihilism of Antisemitism, by Thomas Balazs and Yonatan Hambourger
Hamas targets the Jews because of what Judaism represents: the moral system underpinning Western culture
How Hamas Fooled the Experts, by Armin Rosen
Why so many misread the Palestinian terror group’s openly state intentions and motives
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.
Stop Being Shocked—Once and for All
The ideas, institutions, and people that caused the collapse
By The Tablet Editors
None of the horrors you are witnessing this week—not the massacre of Jews, not the betrayal by public figures and popular activist movements, not the moral insanity of our universities and cultural spaces—happened by accident.
For the past decade, an elite consensus began to emerge. It was marketed as a worldview of optimism, of progress and justice brought about by the dawning of correct morality. It favored using the power of digital monopolies and elite institutions to reeducate Americans in new and better ways of thinking, writing, speaking, and being.
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID-19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
As journalists, the increasingly strident calls for uniformity of opinion and perception struck us, from the very beginning, as dangerous and wrong. We believe in empirical investigation and analysis and in subjective personal observation and experience, not in party-line obedience to an instant consensus being formed and managed God knows how or where. As Jews, we had concerns, too. For as long as we’ve been in this country, Jews have relied on and sung the praises of stalwart American institutions like the federal government, universities, media organizations, corporations, labor unions, and more. We watched in horror as each of these institutions not only fell prey to the new mania, but also seemed increasingly unable to do the jobs they had historically been tasked with doing.
We were also alarmed that … no one else was alarmed, especially among communal leaders. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union, once the protectors of the vulnerable, became handmaidens of power. Think tanks and politicians and journalists gave cover for policies that seemed obviously destined to set the world on fire. Internet monopolies merged with the federal government to produce a censorship and surveillance apparatus that would ensure that only the voices of some could be heard.
Tablet didn’t wade into the culture wars for its own sake. We did it because we feared we saw an emerging world in which the broad-minded American civic ideals and institutions that had kept us safe for so long were falling apart, which was bad for the country—and also meant that Jews would once again be seen as enemies to be eliminated.
As a result, our archive now looks like the answer to the question faced by so many people this week—namely: What the hell is going on?
Below is a selection from the past five years.
The Collapse: Is this the end of American Jewry’s golden age? by Adam Garfinkle (April 2019)
Get Out: American universities have become whirlpools of downward mobility that target the people and the ideas that they once cherished and protected. It’s time for Jews to stop paying for them. by Liel Leibovitz (May 2019)
The Prophet: Tragedy transformed Devorah Halberstam into New York City’s most outspoken expert on anti-Semitic crime. Are we listening? by Jacob Siegel (January 2020)
Bending the Jews: Deep-pocketed funders—including the Rockefellers and the Buffetts—are creating a constellation of activist groups like Stosh Cotler’s Bend the Arc that aim to rewire American Jewish life, by Sean Cooper (May 2020)
The New Truth: When the moral imperative trumps the rational evidence, there’s no arguing, by Jacob Siegel (June 2020)
Stop Being Shocked: American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology—one with dangerous implications for Jews, by Bari Weiss (October 2020)
Is Warren Buffett the Wallet Behind Black Lives Matter?: The Tides Network is a powerful instrument leveraged by billionaires working to change America, while shielding their philanthropic dollars from public scrutiny. Here’s how it works. by Sean Cooper (October 2020)
Everything Is Broken: And How to Fix It, by Alana Newhouse (January 2021)
The Thirty Tyrants: The deal that the Americans elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta, by Lee Smith (February 2021)
Us and Them: Your only two choices are Zionism and anti-Zionism. Pick wisely, by Liel Leibovitz (May 2021)
The Realignment: In the Middle East, Biden is finishing what Obama started. And his top advisers are all on board, by Michael Doran and Tony Badran (May 2021)
The Turn: When I saw the left give up everything I believe in, I changed politically. You can, too, by Liel Leibovitz (December 2021)
No More ADL: When it comes to Jews, the organization now does more harm than good, by Liel Leibovitz (November 2022)
Brokenism: The real debate today isn’t between the left and right. It’s between those invested in our current institutions, and those who want to build anew, by Alana Newhouse (November 2022)
The Vanishing: The Erasure of Jews from American Life, by Jacob Savage (February 2023)
A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation, by Jacob Siegel (March 2023)
End U.S. Aid to Israel: America’s manipulation of the Jewish state is endangering Israel and American Jews, by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz (July 2023)
The Obama Factor: A Q&A with historian David Garrow, by David Samuels (August 2023)
For a printable, special edition of The Tab featuring these articles, click here.
Much kudos is due to Tablet and the Scroll for alerting us to the dangers posed by the creation of a latter day Tower of Babel that seeks lock step conformity to the woke world view