What Happened Today, Special Edition: Israel at War Day 30
November 6, 2023
The Big Story
As the Israeli military capitalizes on the momentum it has achieved so far by cutting off southern Gaza from the north and beginning its push into Gaza City, the Biden administration is stepping up its public and private criticism of the Israeli war effort. Late last week, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for Israel to consider “pauses” in its ground and air campaigns to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians. Israel had previously bowed to U.S. pressure to delay the start of its ground operation, restore communications to Gaza after blocking them during the initial phase of its invasion and, before that, undermine its siege by restoring water access and allowing for increased delivery aid into Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. The request for a pause in the fighting, however, coming just as Israeli forces were completing their encirclement of Gaza City, was apparently a bridge too far. Israel rejected it on Friday, announcing that it would only consider a pause if Hamas released all of its hostages.
Perhaps in retaliation, a story appeared in The Washington Post on Sunday quoting anonymous U.S. officials to the effect that a “frustrated” Biden administration felt it no longer had any influence over Israeli conduct of the war, which officials blamed for souring U.S. relations with Arab states and escalating tensions in the region. According to one anonymous “person familiar with the administration’s thinking,” the White House is “watching a train wreck, and they can’t do anything about it, and the trains are speeding up.” The person continued: “The train wreck is in Gaza, but the explosion is in the region. They know that even if they were to do something, which is to condition aid to Israel, it won’t actually stop the Israelis from what they’re doing.”
Putting aside the mixed metaphor (the trains are speeding up through a wreck while exploding?), the message from the White House leaker is clear: The Israelis have gone rogue, they won’t listen to us, they don’t care about protecting civilians, they don’t care about our interests, and they want to drag us into a regional war with them. It’s the same message the Biden administration has been pushing since before the ground operation in Gaza even started. And, wouldn’t you know it, it’s the same message that Iran and its proxies have been delivering since Oct. 7. As Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in his speech on Friday, “If America wants the war not to expand, its way is to stop the aggression in Gaza. Tell your servant Israel to stop, because this is your aggression.”
“Well,” the White House says, “we’re trying our best, but the Israelis just won’t listen.” The reason they won’t listen, however, may be that the Americans are treading on the life-and-death decisions being made by a country at war, while giving bad advice. According to recent reports in The New York Times and The Times of Israel, U.S. officials have been urging the Israelis to take steps to minimize civilian casualties, such as “using smaller bombs” and “deploying pinpoint commando squads” to flush out Hamas fighters and commanders, similar to how the United States waged counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq. The IDF has rejected these suggestions in part because, in the estimation of Israeli defense officials, they would result in more Israeli casualties. As The New York Times reported, IDF officials reject the analogy between U.S. operations in Iraq and the current campaign in Gaza—Hamas is stronger and better armed and has had nearly two decades to prepare elaborate defenses in a denser urban environment than any faced by the Americans—and believe that sending commandos into the Hamas tunnels would amount to a “suicide mission.”
But even if the U.S. advisers are right and the IDF officials are wrong, it is remarkable that these disagreements are being aired in public. Traditionally, in foreign policy, you decide who is your ally and who is your enemy and then you back your ally against your enemy. What you don’t do is attempt to micromanage your ally’s every move in what it regards as an existentially significant war and publicly undermine its operational decisions while echoing the rhetoric of your enemy.
Read more here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-to-push-back-on-us-advice-for-reducing-gaza-civilian-casualties/
IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub’s letter from Tel Aviv: “We Will Defend Ourselves”
The Rest
→For a sense of why the IDF might be hesitant to put its troops at even greater risk, consult today’s Quote of the Day:
With 26 fatalities in a week of operation, Israelis are dying at more than twice the rate as in 2014, when 67 lost their lives during a seven-week campaign.
That’s from a Saturday report in The Wall Street Journal on Hamas’ formidable arsenal of weapons, including suicide drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, long-range missiles, guided antitank weapons, and state-of-the-art Russian-made assault rifles—not to mention the tunnels. Many of the weapons have been supplied by Iran, but Hamas has also acquired American small arms that fell into the hands of the Taliban and are now being sold on the black market. The group has also improved its domestic arms manufacturing capacity in Gaza.
Read the rest here: https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-weapons-israel-invasion-gaza-aff4247d?mod=middle-east_more_article_pos1
→Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has been suspended from government meetings after suggesting in a radio interview over the weekend that Israel could drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza. The minister, a member of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit Party, said during an interview with the ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol BaRama that every option is on the table in the Gaza Strip. Pressed on whether that included nuclear weapons, Eliyahu said, “That’s one of the options.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly announced Eliyahu’s “suspension,” although, as Yossi Verter points out in Haaretz, this is a largely symbolic move. A prime minister does not have the legal authority to “suspend” a minister; Eliyahu is merely barred from attending meetings of the full government, which rarely take place and have little influence over wartime government policy.
→Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Arab-Israeli Ra’am Party, has shown himself to be considerably more tactful than much of the Western left. On Sunday, Abbas called on one of his party’s Knesset members to resign for “minimizing the severity” of Hamas’ atrocities. The MK, Iman Khatib-Yasin, said in an interview with Knesset TV on Sunday that Hamas “didn’t slaughter babies and they didn’t rape women, at least in the footage.” Reuters reported on Oct. 14 that Israeli forensics teams had discovered evidence of multiple instances of rape among the bodies of women killed during the Oct. 7 attacks, and the IDF has released footage of several Hamas detainees admitting that they intended to rape captured or killed Israeli women. Abbas, a talented political operator whose influence has risen in recent years as a result of Israel’s volatile parliamentary politics, announced Sunday that he was “shocked” by Khatib-Yasin’s comments and added that “there is and will be no space in our ranks for anyone who denies or minimizes the severity of the actions, which negate our values and also the religion of Islam.”
Read more here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/raam-party-chief-calls-on-mk-to-resign-for-claiming-hamas-didnt-slaughter-babies/
→Several employees of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which has received nearly $1 billion in U.S. funding since President Joe Biden took office, celebrated Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis, according to a new watchdog report. The report from IMPACT-se, which monitors U.N. schools in the West Bank and Gaza, found that at least 14 teachers employed by UNRWA praised the Oct. 7 attacks on their private social media accounts. In one particularly striking instance, an UNRWA elementary school posted a video of a school rally on its official Facebook page, featuring a young boy accompanied by an UNRWA administrator calling for victory for Hamas’ “jihad warriors” and invoking Muhammad’s defeat of the Jews at Khaybar. The report also identified at least 100 Hamas terrorists who are graduates of UNRWA schools.
Read more here: https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/11/06/un-agency-staff-celebrated-oct-7-massacre-part-terror-strategy-at-root-hamas-attack-watchdog-says/
→Bernie Sanders, the democratic-socialist Vermont senator and former presidential candidate, has drawn fire from left-wing critics for failing to support a cease-fire in Gaza. Sanders has echoed the Biden administration in calling for a “humanitarian pause” in the fighting and criticized what he has called Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza, but in a CNN interview on Sunday, Sanders acknowledged the obvious problem with progressive calls for a cease-fire. “I don’t know how you can have a permanent cease-fire with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the state of Israel,” he said. That led Sanders’ former national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, whose repeated denials of Hamas’ atrocities might have gotten her booted out of the Arab-Israeli Ra’am Party but doesn’t seem to have harmed her following among Western leftists, to announce on X that Sanders was the “biggest political disappointment of our generation.”
Gray and the legions of American socialists now denouncing Sanders as a “Zionist genocidal maniac” have a certain logic to their position. When State Department foreign service officers are publicly accusing their boss, President Biden, of being “complicit in genocide,” who needs Bernie Sanders anymore?
Read more here: https://freebeacon.com/national-security/state-department-employee-accuses-president-biden-of-being-complicit-in-israels-genocide/
→A French Jewish woman was stabbed at her home in Lyon on Saturday by a masked assailant who painted a swastika on her door. According to accounts of the attack in the French press, the attacker rang the woman’s doorbell “insistently,” then stabbed her twice when she opened the door. The 30-year-old woman survived the attack and is now listed in stable condition. The assailant, who fled the scene immediately after the stabbing, is still at large.
→In America, meanwhile, the crisis of competence is affecting even our would-be terrorists. A 34-year-old Indiana woman named Ruba Almaghtheh was arrested late Friday after ramming he car into the Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge in Indianapolis, telling police that she was upset about her “people back in Palestine.” What she thought was a Jewish school belonged, in fact, to the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black nationalist sect that believes that African Americans are the true descendants of the Biblical Israelites.
Read the rest here: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2010-02-05/zionism-anti-semitism-and-left
TODAY IN TABLET:
Should Jewish Communal Security Be Entrusted to Qatar? by Armin Rosen
After Oct. 7, the question seems completely insane. Apparently not.
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.
This essay first appeared in Tablet on November 5, 2023.
We Will Defend Ourselves
A letter from Tel Aviv
By Gadi Taub
We did not think we would ever see such sights in Israel. Helpless Jews—women, children, the elderly—tormented, raped, torched alive, beheaded, and mutilated. There is much that has not yet been made public, and may only reach few, because the gore is not just incomprehensible, but actually traumatizing. In some of the worst footage the victims are recognizable, and so they have to be kept away from the public eye lest the victims’ families witness their loved ones tortured and killed. We are faced with Nazi-scale atrocities—inhuman barbarism.
It goes without saying that any civilized person would be deeply shocked. But that does not even begin to describe how this horror played on the collective Israeli psyche, indeed the Jewish psyche in general.
For two millennia, Jews have been helpless. When antisemitism swelled and rose around them, they could only try to flee or beg for mercy. They rarely had the chance or the means to organize and resist. Jewish history since the fall of the Second Temple reads like a string of expulsions and pogroms culminating with the Holocaust. The promise of Zionism, the promise of Israel, was therefore "Never Again."
By Never Again, Zionism did not mean that Jews would be spared hate, or wars, or even violent death. Rather Zionism meant that we will defend ourselves or die trying. This is so deeply ingrained in the spirit of anyone who grew up under the influence of Zionism that it is an instinct, an existential orientation toward life and death, more than it is a thought or an ideology.
The late Hebrew University professor of history Zeev Sternhell was a child in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. From a hiding place, in a hole in the ground, he saw Jews hunted like animals in the streets, men and women fleeing and shot in the back, shot children falling from treetops where they tried to hide. He survived, migrated to Israel and later served in the Israel Defense Forces. In an interview he gave to journalist Ari Shavit in 2008 in Haaretz he said that when he saw friends and men under his command die in battle, he thought that:
at least they died like human beings. They didn’t die being hunted on the streets. For me the state of Israel is not a political affair. It is something far more fundamental. Far more basic. It is a return to being human. A return to living like a human being. Because there, in the ghetto, there was a loss … of your human identity. You ceased to be a person altogether.
Sternhell’s politics were on the far left, and as a scholar and pundit he tended to see veiled fascism in every expression of nationalism and patriotism. He believed that Zionism betrayed its leftist promise, because it clung to its nationalism at the expense of its original socialist promise. Still, he insisted he was a Zionist. “I’m not just a Zionist,” he said in that interview, “I’m a super-Zionist. For me Zionism was and still is the right of Jews to control their destiny and future.” Politically it is difficult to make sense of Sternhell’s anti-national yet Zionist stance, since Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews. Sternhell seemed to support the principle of self-determination for all peoples but reject its concrete realization in nation-states, or at least he often come close to rejecting it.
But emotionally, his position was easily understood by any Zionist, including those who, like me, sharply disagreed with his politics: Never Again.
At the heart of Israel’s Declaration of Independence there is a single-sentence paragraph, the shortest one in the parchment. This is the heart of the text, the line that separates the section that talks about the past from the section that discusses the future. It says: “It is the natural right of the Jewish people, to be like all peoples, master of their own fate, in their own sovereign state.”
You can—indeed you should—read this statement politically. But you can also read it emotionally. And we all do. It means for Israeli Jews, and for many Jews outside Israel, that henceforth Jews will not be hunted in the streets, slaughtered while trying to hide in basements, or shot off treetops. They will die, if they must, on their feet, a weapon in their hand. Or, to use Sternhell’s harsher terms, they will not die like hunted animals but like human beings.
The horrors of Oct. 7 reminded us that the existential condition of Zionism is not a given and cannot be taken for granted. It is something that we willed and carved out of history against all odds. It is something we must constantly protect and uphold, because it can be lost.
I think the Israeli public, emerging gradually from the initial shock, senses this already, though politics has not yet adjusted. It seems that our politicians have not yet realized that the ground has shifted under their feet and they still think in terms of yesterday, as if this is just another round in a continuing war. It is not. It is going to change Israel in fundamental ways, which we may not yet fully comprehend.
What Hamas has now done has not just buried the two-state solution and killed all hopes for peace in our lifetime, or in our children’s lifetime. It has also tripped the wire that triggers the deepest of Jewish fears, the fears that run so deep that they precede reflection or even verbalization. That is why you hear from most of the left what you would normally hear only from the right: calls to see this all the way through to the complete destruction of Hamas as a functioning organization.
Modern antisemitism has learned to hide in its moral opposite: the language of human rights. Old blood libels claimed Jews kill Christian children to use their blood for the baking of matzot, the Passover bread. Contemporary blood libels claim the IDF is uniquely murderous and deliberately kills Palestinian children to satisfy its bloodlust. The form is new, but the content is not.
The contemporary versions are peddled by organizations claiming to uphold human rights, while undermining the universality of that principle, which is its very essence. They do this by applying one standard to the Jewish state, and another to all others, especially those belonging to groups with a postmodern moral badge of official victimhood, which supposedly grants them a waiver from moral imperatives.
This corruption of morality relies on marginalizing the evidence of the actual behavior of such groups toward their own members (especially gays, women and nonbelievers), toward minorities in their midst (such as Jews and Christians) as well the outside world.
This application of double standards has caused Israel to voluntarily impose on its army a stricter code than any other army does, a task made all the more difficult by the increasing sophistication of its enemies in manipulating these very vulnerabilities. As Benjamin Netanyahu succinctly put it: We use rockets to protect our women and children. They use women and children to protect their rockets.
Israel should be done with this game. It is an immoral one, and it has enabled our murderous enemies to escape responsibility. It has led to the sacrifice of our own men to save the lives of those who would turn their own children into cannon fodder. Israel should insist that those who have tied together Jewish children with rope then burned them alive, will not manipulate us in the name of human rights. It should insist that only those who put their own children in harm’s way to protect the weapons they use against our innocent civilians, are responsible for their safety. It should insist that Hamas has committed crimes against humanity and we will not sustain its rule under the guise of “humanitarian aid.” International law prescribes that if the enemy does not separate civilians from combatants it alone bears responsibility for the lives of the innocent. Israel should insist on that rule and not flinch.
This is a chance to begin restoring moral clarity, and the gore from this attack, much of which was recorded by Hamas’ sadistic antisemitic terrorists, should serve to remind us of this.
Those who have not lost their conscience to the auto-immune disease of wokeism, to conformity and cowardice, would do well to leverage the horror that befell Israel to clean their own house, too. It is, perhaps, not yet too late to save the Judeo-Christian tradition from the self-inflicted destruction of postmodern pseudomorality.
Professor Taub hits the nail on the head-Israel should do whatever however and whether to destroy Hamas without allowing its war effort to be intimidated or mini managed by Biden & Co
Perhaps the reason that the Biden administration is parroting the line of Iran is that, in its view, Iran is NOT the enemy. Please, can we not continue to express surprise that Biden is pushing for a "pause" in the fighting. This Biden administration is really Obama's third term, and he has now come out of the shadows and explicitly blames Israel for the slaughter of its own citizens. No one could have imagined such a blatant expression of brotherhood with Hamas's terror from a U.S. official. My only hope is that Netanyahu remains steadfast in seeing this extinction of Hamas through to the end.