What Happened Today, Special Edition: Israel at War Day 33

November 9, 2023

Nov 09, 2023

The Big Story

On Wednesday, the pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting revealed that several Gaza-based photojournalists whose work appears in Reuters, the AP, CNN, and The New York Times accompanied Hamas fighters during their Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel. During the attacks, the local photographers accompanied the Hamas fighters and captured photos of in-progress kidnappings, beatings, and lynchings that were later uploaded to Western wire services. Social media users subsequently discovered a photo of one of those journalists, Hassan Eslaiah, who has worked with the AP and CNN, posing with Hamas leader and Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar:

Yes, that’s Sinwar kissing Eslaiah on the cheek—seems like they know each other, right? HonestReporting also noted, based on images from the photographers’ social media feeds, that the “journalists” did not identify themselves as press while documenting war crimes and taking the photos that they later sold to Western media outlets.

Both the AP and CNN announced Thursday that they were cutting ties with Eslaiah in the wake of these revelations. The New York Times was more defiant, attacking HonestReporting for what it called its “reckless” and “vague” allegations against the Gaza photojournalists. “The accusation that anyone at The New York Times had advance knowledge of the Hamas attacks or accompanied Hamas terrorists during the attacks is untrue and outrageous,” the paper wrote, adding that there is “There is no evidence for Honest Reporting’s insinuations.”

The Times’ statement is dishonest on its face. The allegations were neither reckless nor vague, and the evidence that the photojournalists accompanied Hamas on their raid is that they took pictures of it, which were then posted to the AP and Reuters photo wires. Nor did Honest Reporting accuse the New York Times of having advance knowledge of the Hamas attacks. What it did was raise an obvious point: how did those journalists find themselves at the scene of the attacks, including in kibbutzim inside Israel? Although it is unlikely that they were informed of Hamas’ larger plans, it seems equally implausible that they just happened to show up in the right place at the right time, especially given that the operation began early in the morning, involved breaching the Israeli border fence, and was so top-secret that it blindsided Israeli intelligence. A more plausible scenario is that Hamas considered these “journalists” an integral part of their propaganda operation (that would explain why Sinwar seemed so pleased to see Eslaiah) and had planned to have them accompany the raiding force with the understanding that they would help publicize Hamas’ exploits.

Now that Hamas and its Western sympathizers have shifted to minimizing the Oct. 7 attacks, it is easy to forget that in their immediate aftermath Hamas was eagerly disseminating visual evidence of the massacres throughout the Arab world in order to broadcast their strength. That’s certainly how Al Jazeera Arabic understood the message, telling viewers in its Oct. 7 report that Hamas had destroyed the Israeli military’s “iron image” and that footage of the attacks had caused the IDF’s “expensive propaganda” to “evaporate.” And what better way to herald your victory over the Zionist entity than with glossy professional photos in the leading international wire services?

Knowledgeable observers have long pointed out that there is effectively no such thing as an independent journalist in Gaza. Journalists operating in the area understand that unflattering coverage of Hamas will lead to loss of access at best and physical harm to themselves or their local translators, fixers, and freelancers at worst. As former AP correspondent Matti Friedman explained in Tablet in 2014, Western journalists and news agencies operating in Gaza “are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both.” Which is why it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock to learn that the locals providing the raw information that gets converted into “news” for Western audiences are praising Hitler on their Facebook pages (as did NYT freelancer Soliman Hijjy) or riding along with Hamas’ Einsatzgruppen. What is shocking, but perhaps shouldn’t be, is that these Western news agencies don’t tell their audiences anything about it.

And read Matti Friedman’s 2014 essay here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-insider-guide

IN THE BACK PAGES: On the road in southern Israel, Journalist Antonio García Martínez witnesses the return of capital-H History

The Rest

→American F-15 fighter jets bombed what U.S. officials said was an Iranian weapons facility in Syria late Wednesday, Washington’s second “retaliation” for the more than 40 attacks by Iranian proxies against U.S. bases in the Middle East. But hitting ammo dumps in the desert is unlikely to do much to unnerve Tehran. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted in a Tuesday report that Iran exported 1.4 billion barrels of oil per day in October, up from an average of 775,000 per day under then President Donald Trump—a difference largely attributable to the Biden administration’s nonenforcement of U.S. sanctions. Washington, in other words, has non-military means of going after Tehran. It just isn’t using them.

→More details have emerged about the death of Paul Kessler, the 69-year-old Jewish man who died Monday after being struck in the head with a megaphone by a pro-Palestinian protestor in Los Angeles. A fellow pro-Israel protestor who witnessed the altercation told Fox News that the suspect in the killing attempted to “bait” Kessler and then, after shouting in his face, punched him in the face with his bullhorn. The New York Post identified the suspect as Loay Alnaji, a professor of computer science at Moorpark College in California. Alnaji had posted several pro-Palestinian messages on social media after the Oct. 7 attacks, including a video comparing Hamas to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi and one in which Alnaji wrote, “Oh Allah, release the captivity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” Alnaji had not been arrested at the time of The Scroll’s publication Thursday, although several reports on social media, citing unnamed sources, claimed that the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department is planning to arrest and charge him shortly.

→Eighteen Palestinian militants were reportedly killed during an IDF counterterror operation in the West Bank city of Jenin on Thursday. Several videos circulating on social media showed IED explosions and intense gun battles between IDF troops and heavily armed Palestinian militants. Last week, U.S. officials publicly warned against U.S.-made assault rifles making their way into the hands of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Somewhat less publicized was an Oct. 25 report in The Wall Street Journal on the massive Iranian smuggling network bringing weapons to Palestinian jihadist groups in the West Bank. Videos of the fighting in Jenin showed Palestinians wearing military-style tactical vests and wielding what looked like American M-4 assault rifles, which could either be U.S. weapons captured by the Taliban or Iranian replicas.

→The IDF captured a Hamas “stronghold” in west Jabalia and advanced further toward Hamas’ headquarters under Shifa Hospital on Thursday morning. You may remember Jabalia as the “refugee camp” that Israel was roundly condemned for bombing on Oct. 31 (Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah: “They bombed a refugee camp. A. Refugee. Camp.”) It was apparently a well-defended one. The Times of Israel reported today that the IDF killed “dozens” of terrorists in the course of a 10-hour gun battle over a Hamas stronghold in Jabalia known as Outpost 17, where they discovered Hamas battle plans, weapons, and entrances to tunnel shafts. In the nearby Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, Israeli forces discovered a drone manufacturing facility and weapons depot in a residential building located next to a school.

→The president of the Rochester City School District’s Board of Education in upstate New York pointed to the alleged role of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade to defend the use of Black Lives Matter teacher training resources in district schools, the Washington Free Beacon reports. Asked by a parental rights groups whether the district would continue using BLM educational resources after the group issued statements in support of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, school board president Cynthia Elliott wrote in an Oct. 28 email, “I would ask that you study the history of the Jewish nation and their involvement in slavery — financing the slave ships to bring Africans into the Americas and the Caribbeans [sic].” The false claim that Jews were disproportionately involved in the slave trade was first advanced by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in a 1991 book published by the NOI, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, and is a staple of Black nationalist antisemitism.

While Elliott’s claim was particularly lurid, the problem in American public education is, as they say, “systemic.” In 2021, California passed a law requiring all high school students in the state to take an ethnic studies class. Although the standard curriculum is bad enough, the University of California Ethnic Studies Faculty Council (ESFC) has developed course criteria that the UC system is considering adopting as an admissions requirement, effectively making these, rather than the state’s official model curriculum, the governing criteria for the entire state. For a sense of the type of person who sits on this council, consider a public letter the ESFC sent on Oct. 16 in response to the UC president’s condemnation of Hamas. In it, the ESFC argued that descriptions of the Oct. 7 attacks as “terrorism” made Palestinian students “unsafe” and lent tacit support to “Zionist” “militarism,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “violence,” “destruction,” “dehumanization,” “terror,” and “colonial brutality.”

→More than two-thirds of Americans oppose a cease-fire with Hamas, according to a new poll from Rasmussen. Of the respondents, 49% strongly agreed and 19% somewhat agreed with the prompt “Benjamin Netanyahu is Prime Minister of Israel. In a speech this week, Netanyahu said: ‘Calls for a ceasefire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen.’” Twenty-one percent disagreed and 10% were not sure.

→Headline of the Day:

Fights erupt outside of Museum of Tolerance after screening of film on Hamas

No, that’s not from Dr. Strangelove. That’s from ABC7 Los Angeles, describing the violence that broke out between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protestors surrounding a Wednesday-evening screening of a documentary on Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities. Organized by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, the screening had been the subject of some controversy, with activist filmmaker Boots Riley describing it on X as “murderous propaganda” and urging others in the entertainment industry not to go.

TODAY IN TABLET:

Snowflakes for Hamas, by Oliver Traldi

It turns out that ‘white people’ often means Jews

Oct. 7 Happened Before, in Hebron, by Yardena Schwartz

A brutal massacre nearly a century ago in Judaism’s second-holiest city makes clear that murderous Palestinian rage against Jews has little to do with Israel or Zionism

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.

Today’s Back Pages is an excerpt from an essay by Antonio García Martínez that ran today in Tablet, which cannot be reproduced in full due to the length constraints of Substack. The full essay can be found here.

The Dogs of War

Traveling Route 232 in the days after the Hamas attacks

By Antonio García Martínez

Faced with an army roadblock on Route 232, the highway that runs roughly parallel to the Gaza border, our driver, Tomer, makes a sharp left onto a side road.

“Let’s see if we can get into the kibbutz,” he says, pointing the car at the gate of Mefalsim ahead of us, driving a bit too fast.

Drawing close to the gate, half a dozen M4s leveled themselves at us from behind shrink-wrapped pallets of concrete sacks being used as an improvised fortification. As with every kibbutz we’d visit that day, many of which had been attacked in what was now referred to as "Black Saturday" (literally, "Black Shabbat"), this one was heavily defended by an infantry platoon concealed behind a wall of building materials.

Tomer slams the brakes, and waves his upraised hands in front of his face and out the window to indicate we’re civilians. The rifles don’t move as Tomer starts announcing nervously who we are in Hebrew.

As I slowly get out on the passenger side, it occurs to me how comical it would be, after all these warnings from soldiers along the way about sniper and antitank missile fire from the Palestinians, to get waxed in a friendly fire incident with jumpy reservists.

“Cigarette?” I offer, gesturing with a packet of Marlboros I’d bought in Tel Aviv airport’s duty-free shop.

“We prefer weed,” one of the reservists joked from behind the piled concrete sacks, now much more relaxed.

“Didn’t manage to bring that,” I replied.

They shouted at us to clear the approach to the kibbutz (and their field of fire) by parking over to the right alongside other vehicles. As we’d see in most clearings used as improvised parking lots close to Gaza, this one contained a mix of reservists’ cars who’d driven the scant hour from Tel Aviv, cars shot to pieces by Hamas that had been dragged and abandoned there, and a pile of donations from civilians. On the ground and out of place, on the remains of a wooden crate, there was a 120 mm artillery shell with scrawled Hebrew: “For my wife Shirley, my kids Aimri, David and May, from Daddy.” That’s when I looked around and finally noticed that we were standing next to a number of tanks.

You’d think a 60-ton thing would be hard to hide, but you absolutely did not see them from the highway, tucked away behind trees as they were. The sharply sloping turret and engine exhaust up front indicated this was an Israeli-made Merkava Mk 4, the main battle tank of the IDF. The tanks’ crews were relaxing in a circle alongside their war chariots. You kind of imagine a tank as being the scale of a large truck or SUV, but up close and personal, these felt like the size of a yacht or RV: an imposing conveyance which an entire crew occupied as they rode off to combat.

We milled about the shot-out cars, tanks, and the infantry unit that now totally ignored us, wondering what to do next as we heard the rumble of either artillery or air strikes in the distance. We were just over a kilometer from the Gaza fence, in the northeast corner of the Gaza Strip, close to Beit Hanoun, where the IDF was softening up the battlefield (and from where they’d launch their initial assault a couple days later). Eventually, a commander showed up and told us to get the hell out of there: Journalists weren’t supposed to be hanging around army units, and we beat a hasty retreat back on the 232 to find a more circular route to Be’eri, the kibbutz that suffered tremendous losses in the Black Saturday attacks.

The last time I was in Israel, a few months ago, the Israeli drama du jour was not war, but a wonky constitutional crisis over whether the Supreme Court could override parliamentary laws. In a flipped version of the U.S. political system, the court is a bulwark of the political left, and the country’s largely secular elites were having a meltdown over losing power in the face of an increasingly right-wing and religious Israeli legislature.

This time, hundreds of thousands of reservists were mobilizing for war. In the literal span of an hour after the Black Saturday attacks, the civil society organizations that had sprouted as part of the judicial protest movement pivoted entirely to helping Israeli civilians impacted by the attacks and supporting the war effort. One of the largest such organizations, Brothers in Arms, went from organizing protests in front of the Knesset or ministers’ houses to organizing donations for soldiers, and delivering them under armed guard to the south where the war was brewing.

In the tense first hours of the Hamas attack, much of the defense came not from the IDF, which failed miserably to protect civilians, but from individuals who’d grabbed a car and whatever firearm they had and rushed down to save a family member. Israeli media abounded with stories of such individual heroism. Similarly, the same groups that until Black Saturday were relentlessly attacking the government and its reform plans, dove into the wartime breach created by an overwhelmed government.

The Expo Tel Aviv, a sprawling conference-center park on the north side of the city, was the hub of the civilian relief effort. A WeWork-like coworking space there called Mixer—the visual language of kombucha taps and exposed concrete beams is apparently universal—had been transformed into a war room organizing food, clothing, and lodging for impacted families, many of which now found themselves as internally displaced refugees. All was energy and commotion in the former coworking space as Keren Levy, one of the leaders of Hamal Ezrachi ("civil war room" in Hebrew) showed me around the various teams, composed mostly of volunteers from Israel’s large tech industry.

The Expo’s large subterranean parking garage had been transformed into an immense warehouse of donated goods, organized neatly into categories like baby strollers or women’s clothing. It reminded me of similar distribution centers I had seen in western Poland at the start of the Ukraine war when half of Europe showed up with donations, except this was in a country of 9 million the size of New Jersey.

Israelis are incredible at self-organization and getting things done quickly in a pinch, with minimal guidance and under conditions of uncertainty. I would see it again and again, from restaurant owners who became impromptu military cooks and managed to get their food to the front lines, to tech executives like Levy who suddenly ran civilian rescue operations instead of online payment companies. It’s no wonder the country excels at startups: Operating autonomously in the balagan is a national sport.

Israel had mobilized itself into total war, with every sector of society reorienting itself toward one goal: victory against a neighboring enemy. In Tel Aviv, normally a lively hedonistic city reminiscent of Miami, streets were empty and bars were closed, due to lack of both clientele and staff (Jews were called up for reserve duty, and the Arabs made themselves scarce). Those that stayed open were quiet places, often full of foreigners, with servers telling you where the mamad (safe room) was without you asking.

To someone who’s never experienced such a national mobilization, it is heady in its totalizing omnipresence: Gaza, the war, the hostages, the looming invasion everyone knew was coming, again the hostages, fucking Bibi, the atrocities, the friends and family every Israeli knew who’d been murdered or kidnapped, what unit everyone’s friends were serving in, whether you were able to find body armor, the war again … it was all anyone could think or talk about. It was the only thing that mattered.

Compared to the parade of nonstop bullshit that constitutes life in the stagnant West, life in Israel pulsed with an inarguably real vitality. Americans live in the Fukuyaman "end of history," bouncing hysterically between current things happening inside optional realities, atomized, pissing their lives away in manufactured status contests.

Israel still lived in the capital "H" History of ethnoreligious conflict, societywide mobilization, and a transcendent and overriding sense of purpose. It would be hard to imagine Google VPs taking over San Francisco’s Moscone Center and organizing thousands of Silicon Valley techies for a nationwide war effort if the U.S. ever suffered an attack of similar scale. It would be hard to imagine Americans in 2023 managing anything like what the Israelis were handling with such collective resolve.

***

Back in southern Israel, we backtracked to regional hub Sderot to find a way around the army roadblocks. Driving through what felt like a dusty frontier town, now even deader-seeming with the population evacuated, I recognized the first scene of the attacks: a bus stop piled with dead civilians. I got out and, almost like macabre silhouettes, the ground was smudged with the puddles of blood outlining where the dead had fallen. A couple of candles sat under the communal bookshelf hung on the side of the bus stop (the neighboring building is Sderot’s public library).

Wandering around, we found the city center where the Sderot police station once stood, which is now a field of rubble. In one of the dramatic scenes of the Oct. 7 attack, Hamas militants murdered all the police inside and then engaged in a ferocious firefight when the IDF appeared. After a pitched battle, the Israelis simply demolished the entire station with the terrorists still inside. The area around was strewn with shell casings and broken glass from the battle.

As we’d see in every town in southern Israel, streets and parking lots were often jammed with the bullet-riddled cars of civilians who’d been targeted; they either sat where their owners were murdered, or were dragged there by cleanup crews and abandoned. One car next to the station was absolutely Swiss-cheesed by gunfire. In the back, there was a baby seat, and all the seats and doors were caked in the streaked ochre of dried human blood. Even two weeks later, it was covered in flies and reeked of death.

On the way out, we saw a tragic play in two acts: A bullet-riddled Toyota lay crossways in the right lane, partly blocking a highway underpass. We got out to investigate and saw that none of the shots traversed the passenger compartment, and the usual blood stains were absent. Not more than 10 meters away, we see a migunit, one of the omnipresent concrete bunkers that dot the landscape and provide shelter if you’re caught outside during a rocket attack. They’re usually covered in murals painted by local artists, an attempt to make art out of an eyesore.

The muraled exterior of this one was pockmarked with bullet strikes, and inside it looked like someone took a jar of pasta sauce and threw it against the wall. In reality, we were probably looking at what happens when you fire a 7.62 mm round through a human head at close range. Some poor soul survived the initial fusillade aimed at their car, ran out, and took shelter in the only structure around, only to die inside this dark concrete box in a hail of rifle fire. Their car registration (presumably taken out by first responders to identify the body) still rustled in the breeze alongside other personal effects spilling out of their car.

Heading south and taking the long way around, we managed to avoid the army roadblocks preventing civilian cars from getting too close to Gaza. The risk was antitank missiles fired from Gaza, and indeed, an Israeli tank got hit that day right around Re’im, another kibbutz we passed along the way to Be’eri.

The IDF was jamming GPS (our phones said we were in Tel Aviv), which made navigation a somewhat approximate affair. Scanning the landscape for signage, I again recognized features of a place I’d never visited. The now-familiar signs of debris and mopped-up blood indicated this was another Hamas killing field. Farther out, I saw the remains of tents and awnings and realized this was the site of Nova, where hundreds of Israelis were murdered at a music festival. We pulled over, avoiding some of the personal effects still scattered about (Hamas booby-traps them). A bulldozer was busily burying something farther up the hill when suddenly …

BAAANG!

The loudest explosion I heard among many in Israel erupted from behind the treeline. We almost hit the deck, it was so damn loud. Clearly, one of the huge 155 mm self-propelled howitzers we’d seen dug-in here and there was nearby, and just fired off a shot at Gaza. I doubted Hamas was capable of counter-battery fire, but I didn’t want to find out, and we skedaddled back to the car and got out of there fast.

Finally pulling up to Be’eri, it was like every other kibbutz we encountered, but even more swarming with IDF defenders. Miraculously, my Israeli press pass actually got us past the gate, and we sat in gridlock with army vehicles streaming in. Like every kibbutz in southern Israel, it felt lush and well-manicured, the dusty desert landscape giving way to a verdant oasis.

We pull up to what looks like a generic office building in Silicon Valley, except that its glass facade is shattered here and there with gunfire. This is the famous Be’eri print house, where all of Israel’s driver’s licenses (and much besides) are printed. It’s a showpiece of the kibbutz movement’s industry and entrepreneurship in staying relevant in the modern age. The reception is abuzz with activity, but mostly of soldiers rushing in and out. While we waited for our local contact, a tired-looking soldier dragged in an M249 light machine gun (with trailing ammo belt) and hotfooted it inside.

Eventually, a man in his 60s, his face a grim mask, emerges. Alon Kislev, a sales manager for the printing house, agreed to talk about life in Be’eri after the Hamas attack.

“I was born here," he told me. "My parents were among the pioneers of Be’eri when this was nothing but desert in 1948. My mother, children, and grandchildren live here. Everything in my life is connected to this kibbutz.”

One-tenth of the kibbutz’s population was murdered by Hamas, dozens of homes burned to the ground, and an unclear number of residents kidnapped. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him if his family survived (he would later volunteer that they did).

“We were printing again one week after the attacks … many people who work in the printing press were killed or injured. We evacuated the entire kibbutz, only the army is here now … but we have contracts we must deliver against. If we continue to run the printing factory, we can show that life can come back. But the government must make people feel safe.”

Alon’s face remained absolutely expressionless and his gaze wandered off into the middle distance as he spoke. The term "shell shocked" came to mind.

“I was a soldier in the Yom Kippur War," he continued, "and saw a lot, and lost lots of friends. But this is like nothing I ever imagined.”

The kibbutzniks lean left politically, and what strikes you from the biographies of many of the dead is how many had worked to normalize relations with the Gazans. Some of the terrorists were found with the green ID cards granting them permission to come work in Israel in the adjoining communities. Given the exceptionally accurate intelligence Hamas seemed to have had on the area, it’s clear many of those terrorists worked alongside Israelis one day, and then conspired and acted to brutally murder them the next.

“Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt," intones Deuteronomy, about another such atrocity in roughly this corner of Israel. "How, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear.”

The Scroll

What Happened Today, Special Edition: Israel at War Day 33

November 9, 2023

The Big Story

The Rest

Discussion about this post