The Big Story
U.S. President Joe Biden asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a Monday phone call for a three-day cease-fire in exchange for Hamas’ release of “some” hostages, Axios’ Barak Ravid reported Tuesday. How many? Twelve, according to Wednesday reports in the Israeli and U.S. media, which said that Qatar—the nation that has been hosting much of Hamas’ senior leadership in exile— was leading efforts to broker an agreement among Hamas, Israel, and the United States to release a dozen hostages, half of them American, in exchange for a multiday pause in the fighting. According to U.S. and Israeli officials cited in Axios, Netanyahu rejected Biden’s proposal on the grounds that he doesn’t trust Hamas and worries that international support for the Israeli operation could evaporate if fighting stopped for three days. On Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu announced, in what he described as an attempt to dispel “idle rumors,” that “there will be no cease-fire without the release of our hostages.”
Netanyahu’s reasons for rejecting the proposal, which would halt the momentum of so-far successful combat operations in Gaza and hand over diplomatic leverage to Hamas and its partner Qatar, are not difficult to understand. Whatever public promises Hamas makes, it will inevitably take advantage of any pause in the fighting, just as it has exploited previous humanitarian gestures by, for instance, confiscating fuel and aid from U.N. warehouses and attempting to smuggle wounded fighters disguised as civilians through the Rafah crossing to receive medical care in Egypt. But Netanyahu is up against a White House that, under pressure from the Democratic Party’s left flank and progressive staffers within the government, is aligning its public messaging with Hamas’ state sponsors while pressuring Israel for concessions and leaking withering criticism of the Israeli war effort to the American press. Qatar subsidizes Hamas’ rule in Gaza with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual transfer payments to Gaza; it also brokered a deal earlier this year in which the United States agreed to pay $6 billion to Hamas’ main military sponsor, Iran, in exchange for five American hostages.
Although it remains difficult to assess Hamas’ current operational strength, it’s clear that the group has lost the initiative on the battlefield in the face of an intense air campaign and fast-paced ground assault. The IDF, after a month of heavy bombardment, has now completely encircled the group’s enclave in Gaza City and is in the process of evacuating the remaining civilian population to the south so that it can isolate and destroy what remains of Hamas’ combat forces and tunnel network. Small wonder, then, that Hamas’ sponsors and allies are clamoring for Israel to halt its campaign in exchange for a handful of the more than 240 hostages still held by the terror group. As the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy’s Richard Goldberg stated Wednesday, “Hamas and Qatar are playing a game, trying to dangle the mere possibility of a partial hostage release for the survival of Hamas.” What is more troubling, from the Israeli perspective, is that Washington appears to be playing along.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Tablet editor Alana Newhouse explains why the American Jewish community needs to replace its leadership
The Rest
→Up to 50,000 Palestinians civilians left northern Gaza on Wednesday through a humanitarian corridor opened by the IDF, after as many as 15,000 evacuated on Tuesday. Since the start of the war, Israel has been urging civilians to flee to southern Gaza, but Hamas has blockaded evacuation routes and threatened to shoot civilians attempting to flee from the war zone; one video that circulated on social media late last week showed dozens of dead Palestinians lying on a road in Gaza, killed by small-arms fire in an area where no Israeli troops had been present. Now that the IDF has operational control of large sections of northern Gaza, it is attempting to ferry civilians to relative safety in the south, but even that decision is now coming in for criticism from elements of the “international community.” According to a Wall Street Journal article on the evacuations, “Senior U.N. officials called the exodus from northern Gaza an act of forced displacement, and have said that civilians should be allowed to remain where they live”—i.e., in an active war zone.
→Israel’s intelligence service Mossad partnered with Brazil’s federal police in a joint operation Wednesday to stop imminent terrorist attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets in Brazil. A rare public statement from Mossad said the attacks were planned by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed group that has spent the past month launching regular attacks into northern Israel from its base in Lebanon. A 2014 investigation by the Brazilian Federal Police discovered ties between Hezbollah and Brazil’s premier criminal cartel, Primeiro Comando da Capital.
→The New York Times published a long article Wednesday morning, based on interviews with Hamas leaders and Arab, Israeli, and Western officials, purporting to explain the intentions behind the group’s Oct. 7 attacks. The article is worth reading in full for the Hamas leaders’ candor about their desire to fight Israel rather than “improve the situation in Gaza,” but the following passage caught The Scroll’s attention as a window into how Hamas launders its talking points into the Western press:
In 2021, Hamas launched a war to protest Israeli efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem and Israeli police raids of the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.
That was a turning point, Osama Hamdan, a Hamas leader based in Beirut, Lebanon, told The Times. Instead of firing rockets over issues in Gaza, Hamas was fighting for concerns central to all Palestinians, including those outside the enclave. The events also convinced many in Hamas that Israel sought to push the conflict past a point of no return that would ensure the impossibility of Palestinian statehood.
Mythical threats to the Al-Aqsa Mosque have been a standard rationalization for Arab anti-Jewish violence since before Israel was a state. In 1929, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini used false rumors that Jews were planning to desecrate Al-Aqsa to whip up anti-Jewish rioting that left more than 60 dead. In 1996, a false claim that the Israelis were planning to dig a tunnel under Al-Aqsa led to the so-called Tunnel Riots, which killed 59 Palestinians and 16 Israelis. Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount was the pretext for the Second Intifada in 2000, also known as the “Aqsa Intifada.”
In this case, however, it seems rather unlikely that a 2021 Israeli police raid of the Aqsa compound represented a “turning point” in Hamas’ thinking. Why not? Well, because the Iranian regime-affiliated news agency Tasnim published a report in October explaining that Hamas had already begun drilling for the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation in December 2020, four months before the raid.
Read the rest here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/middleeast/hamas-israel-gaza-war.html
→Quote of the Day, Part I:
CAIR has been identified by the government as a participant in an ongoing and ultimately unlawful conspiracy to support a designated terrorist organization [Hamas]—a conspiracy from which CAIR never withdrew.
That’s former assistant U.S. attorney James Jacks, who was the lead prosecutor in the 2008 terrorism trial against the Holy Land Foundation, speaking about the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Jacks is quoted in a Tuesday investigative report from Real Clear Investigations that laying out the extensive evidence of connections between CAIR and Hamas. Readers of Tablet and The Scroll may remember that CAIR, which helped organize the massive Free Palestine march in Washington, D.C., this weekend, was tapped by the White House in May as one of the organizations supporting the Biden administration’s “whole-of-society call to action” to counter antisemitism.
Read more here: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/11/08/hamas_front_has_been_operating_with_impunity_inside_america_for_30_years_991289.html
→The U.S. House of Representatives voted 234-188 in favor of censuring Michigan Democratic Rep. and “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib over a string of anti-Israel comments. Among the remarks cited in the resolution were an Oct. 8 statement in which Tlaib called to dismantle “the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance,” her repetition of debunked Hamas claims about an Israeli massacre of civilians at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, and a recent video posted to Tlaib’s X account that included the phrase “from the river to the sea.” Twenty-two Democrats, including Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, joined 212 Republicans in voting for the resolution.
→Quote of the Day, Part II:
The [Americans] pleaded with us in their messages. There might have been two [threatening] sentences there, to save face, but the truth is that they know they are in a bind, and are asking for our help to find a way out.
That’s Iranian Defense Minister Mohammad Reza Gharaei Ashtiani in a weekend interview with an Iranian news agency. Iranian military officials have been known to bluster in the past, so take it with an appropriate grain of salt. But consider also that Iranian proxies have struck American targets in Iraq and Syria 40 times since Oct. 17, injuring at least 46 U.S. military personnel, and Washington’s only response has been to bomb a couple unoccupied shacks in Syria.
Read more here: https://www.memri.org/tv/iran-defense-minister-mohammad-reza-gharaei-ashtiani-advised-america-support-israel-ceasfire-help
→Rumor radar: A video circulated on social media Tuesday of a gun battle in what appeared to be the West Bank, described by users as the aftermath of an assassination attempt against Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas by a group linked to Hamas. The Scroll has not found any further confirmation of the rumor, but the State Department acknowledged in a Tuesday press briefing that it had seen public reports of the alleged assassination attempt, that Abbas was unharmed, and that the department would share any further information that came to the U.S. government’s attention.
The Scroll extends its apologies to Jeanine Wiegman Hadar, whom we neglected to credit as the author of the account in yesterday’s Back Pages on life on a southern Israeli kibbutz in the days after the Oct. 7 massacre. Hadar is an American Israeli living on Kibbutz Ruhama in, Israel with her husband, Gadi Hadar, and the families of her three daughters. She has six grandchildren.
TODAY IN TABLET:
How the Talmud Can Change Your Life, by Liel Leibovitz
It’s the greatest self-help book ever written. And isn’t that what we need right now?
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 comes from Tablet editor Alana Newhouse’s contribution to What Now? a special collection from Tablet writers and guest authors like Bari Weiss on how to feel, and what to do, one month after the massacres.
Replace American Jewish Communal Leadership
Years ago, I read a 1923 short story by Dovid Bergelson that has haunted me ever since. Titled “Among the Refugees,” it revolves around a tormented Jew originally from a region called Volhynia, who has moved to a squalid boarding house in Berlin. One day, into the room across the hall from him moves the notorious pogromist from his hometown, the person responsible for, among many other horrors, his grandfather’s death. The villain isn’t hiding or obscuring his identity; in fact, he’s brazenly using his own name.
The distressed young man realizes the opportunity that has come to him: He must kill this devil. But he does not have a weapon, and has no family or friends to turn to for help. One day, he bumps into a man he knows from Volhynia, a man named Beryl, who has connections to the respected leaders of the Jewish community in town: “He’s always involved with Jewish groups here. He associated with them, and they associate with him … Who should I turn to if not him?” he thinks. He asks Beryl to beseech the elders to get him a gun so that he can rid the world of this murderous enemy of the Jews.
The next day, he meets Beryl, who ushers him off to the planned secret rendezvous. There, he is taken into a room with the Jewish leaders, who have brought not a weapon to be used on the enemy but a psychiatrist—to be used on him. In their eyes, this young Jewish man’s instinct for personal and collective self-defense is not heroism; it’s hysteria.
That the story takes place—and was written—between the wars, before the horror of the Holocaust, adds to our terror as modern readers—turning it from a story ostensibly about a revenge killing into one about Jewish communal self-defense. How on earth could those so-called leaders be so blind, so dismissive of the concerns of someone so close to the ground, so outrageously entitled?
How indeed.
Now that pogromists are parading in the streets, smashing windows and noses, and cheering on Jewish genocide, it’s easy for Jewish leaders to wave the biggest blue-and-white flag they can find and vow to take “immediate and concrete action,” whatever that is. But look around at the disarray and the chaos and the betrayal of Jews by alleged friends and allies, and you’ll see a bitter truth: Our communal leadership has gone bad.
Bad leadership failed us on college campuses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into “advocacy” while sucking up to university administrations and leaders turning once-illustrious institutions into festering swamps of antisemitism.
Bad leadership failed us on the international scene, complicit in the single greatest blow America has ever dealt to Israeli security, the Obama administration’s Iran deal, while mumbling stupidly about bipartisanship. They swaggered about D.C. declaiming their political clout and influence, yet they were unwilling, when the hour of need arose, to withdraw their support for those intent on giving a genocidal, Holocaust-denying regime hundreds of billions of dollars, regional legitimacy, and the power and motivation to resume exporting death and destruction against its enemies, the Jews first and foremost.
Bad leadership failed us on the political front, rushing to embrace obvious Jew-haters. Like New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, for example, which was eager to engage Alexandria “the U.S. tested chemical weapons in Vieques as a dress rehearsal for Israeli war crimes in Gaza” Ocasio-Cortez in a fawning dialogue while simultaneously hosting seminars on “white supremacy” and cracking down on Orthodox communities that dared to defy the state’s draconian COVID restrictions.
Bad leadership failed us by failing to prioritize our own, very real needs, abandoning its core mission—to serve and protect Jews—in order to imagine itself instead as yet another tile in the mosaic of the Democratic Party’s contemporary coalition of grievances. Earlier this year, when a Tablet staffer asked a senior executive at a very large American Jewish organization what their group’s top priority was for the year, this person replied, without missing a beat: “Ukraine.” What?
In every precinct and every channel, these leaders not only failed to see what was coming down the pike; they also did their best to sideline and even demonize those who did—snidely dismissing our clear-eyed observers, like Bari and Liel, who’ve grown hoarse from sounding the alarm about intersectionality and antisemitism in left-wing spaces, or Lee, Tony, and Mike, righteous gentiles who’ve spent years warning about the insane and irreversible dangers—to the U.S., to Israel, and to American Jews—of playing footsie with Iran.
Some of these misguided communal leaders have been chastened by recent events.
Andres Spokoiny, of the Jewish Funders Network, spent years using social media platforms to argue that these concerns, particularly about antisemitism in liberal circles, were overwrought. Two weeks ago, in a public forum, Liel asked him point-blank about the large philanthropies he had engaged turning sharply against Israel when it mattered most, like the Ford Foundation—whose CEO, months after appearing as a featured speaker at JFN’s conference, issued a stunningly terrible statement in the wake of the Hamas attacks. Spokoiny answered briefly, clearly, and convincingly. He said he had been wrong, that he had learned his lesson, and that he would not be fooled again.
Others, though, are more sure of themselves than ever. Appearing on Eli Lake’s podcast, the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt was asked why the organization under his leadership dedicated itself to decrying right-wing antisemitism and running cover for a censorship and surveillance effort that undermines the First Amendment, not to mention the centurylong Jewish commitment to it?
What did Greenblatt—whose ADL published a guide to America’s leading antisemites that did not include Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar but only a handful of meaningless right-wing bloggers; who stood shoulder to shoulder with Al Sharpton, America’s most prominent living pogromist, to demand that social media outlets censor speech, including of a president elected by 60 million Americans; and who repeatedly championed the Black Lives Matter movement even when it was abundantly clear that it was both financially corrupt as well as deeply anti-Israel—have to say in response?
“We definitely do not play this left-right game,” Greenblatt replied, before going on to blame the media for making up lies.
Of course, it’s not hard to know why. Greenblatt can’t give up on this intersectional racket, since it’s responsible for nearly doubling the ADL’s coffers under his reign. But that’s business, not communal leadership—and we, the community, must finally accept that.
Two weeks ago, a friend was on multiple calls with other Jewish communal professionals where people were trying to square our new reality with the mixed-up ideas they had come to believe were our communal priorities. “We need to hold space in the Jewish community for Jews who are struggling in this moment because they don’t support Israel.” Do we? It seems to me this is an opportunity to bring clarity to what has been obscured, by answering charges like this one as directly as possible: “It is very important that we not misrepresent ourselves, because then these people will ultimately—rightly—feel gaslit. We are Zionists, and we believe that Zionism is central to our work. If this makes our spaces not right for certain people, we need—for their sakes and ours—for them to know it now.”
If we want more morally focused leaders, we need to start being more active followers. Stop reflexively writing checks to legacy organizations whose real work you don’t actually understand. Start demanding to see charters and mission statements, and demanding that they be changed immediately if somewhere along the way they lost the thread of concern for Jews, Israel, and America. And if the leaders at these organizations themselves seem unclear about or uncommitted to the priorities you believe should be paramount right now, fire them or jump ship. Empower new people and new organizations with the smarts and strength and vision to truly lead.
Now is not the time to forgive and forget, because we have no way of knowing if the worst is behind us or not. And I, for one, will not end up on some shrink’s couch, wishing for the gun that never came.
I want to express my deep gratitude for the writing and thinking Tablet supports. I found Tablet during the “pandemic” and have stayed. I’m not Jewish. I was raised by Evangelical Christian parents (deceased) with a profound respect for Judaism and Israel. My father studied with rabbis (learning some Hebrew) and worked with them politically as part of a small “interfaith” group in Toronto (where I continue to live). When her children were adults, my mother spent a year in Israel teaching dance. She subscribed to the Jerusalem Post and used a Jewish calendar. Since Oct. 7, my personal focus has been learning as much as I can (starting from a place of acknowledging my ignorance - wish more people would do that) and The Tablet and the Scroll have been enormously helpful. Thank you!
Ms. Newhouse spells out why the suits who run the American Jewish establishment failed its next generation in ignoring the anti Semitism and anti Zionism that was clearly part and parcel of the intersectional left