The Big Story
Donald Trump blamed President Joe Biden for the Hamas attacks and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Israeli intelligence failures leading up to the assaults as well as for “let[ting] us down” by backing out of the 2020 U.S. assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, in remarks delivered to supporters in Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday night. In a meandering address, the former president declared himself “the best friend Israel ever had in the White House,” derided the “grossly incompetent” Biden administration, and claimed that “Israel would be flourishing, they would have no problem” if he were still in office. Trump’s jibe at Netanyahu, combined with his remark that Hezbollah is “very smart,” drew widespread condemnation from Democrats as well as from Republicans rivals, such as Ron DeSantis.
Leaders of both major U.S. political parties have declared their solidarity with Israel over the past week. President Biden in a speech Tuesday night condemned the “sheer evil” of the Hamas attacks and reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to Israeli security. His administration has promised U.S. military aid, though it has also called for a “proportionate” Israeli response to the attacks while declining to specify any red lines for the Israeli military. On the left of the Democratic Party, lawmakers have sought to distance themselves from vanguard activists who praised the massacre of Israeli civilians over the weekend as part of the “necessary” work of decolonization. Congressman Shri Thanedar (D-MI) renounced his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America on Wednesday, following a DSA-affiliated pro-Palestine rally in New York on Sunday at which speakers joked about Hamas fighters killing Israeli “hipsters.” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) issued a statement condemning the rally, and Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) announced Wednesday that he had allowed his membership in the DSA to lapse.
Meanwhile, Republicans such as Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and J.D. Vance (R-OH), as well as presidential candidate Nikki Haley, have voiced their support for Israel doing whatever it takes to eliminate Hamas. They have also slammed the White House for its policies toward Hamas’ backer, Iran, including failing to enforce Trump-era sanctions on the country’s oil industry and unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets as part of a prisoner-swap agreement with Tehran. A sample:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): “This was paid for by Joe Biden and the Democrats.”
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC): “This administration has blood on their hands because they are complicit.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: “This administration wants to bend over backwards to not hold Iran accountable.”
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie: “This terrorism is funded by Biden’s idiotic release of $6 billion to the Iranians. The Hamas war against Israel is now the second war started under Biden’s failed presidency.”
Reports surfaced Thursday that the White House and Congress are working on a bill for $2 billion in supplementary aid to Israel. The White House, however, is attempting to tie the aid to continued funding for Ukraine, which could dampen support among some conservative lawmakers. One of the Senate’s leading “populists,” for instance, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), posted on X on Monday that “any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.”
Read more:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/politics/trump-criticizes-netanyahu-hamas-attack/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/11/gop-rhetoric-hamas-00121051
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/11/dsa-rally-aoc-israel-00121060
The Rest
NOTICE TO SCROLL READERS: A former Hamas leader called for global demonstrations on Friday. Anyone planning to attend public gatherings or Jewish institutions is advised to implement additional security measures (lock doors, contact your local police department to request a security escort, hire guards) and remain on high alert throughout the weekend.
→Early Thursday morning, the Israeli military admitted for the first time that the IDF had “signs” of an impending Hamas attack before Saturday, according to reports in Ynet and the Times of Israel. “There were some indications, but nothing that could have warned of an attack at that scope,” said IDF spokesman Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari at a press conference. A number of IDF generals spoke to each other on the phone about the situation in Gaza late Friday night “due to some warnings and irregularities,” according to the Times of Israel, but put off a decision until the following morning, by which time the Hamas operation had already begun. Hagari dismissed allegations, initially leveled by Egyptian officials and later repeated in the U.S. press and by U.S. politicians, that Israeli officials or military leaders received an urgent intelligence warning from their Egyptian counterparts about an impending attack from Gaza, stating directly that “there was no such warning.”
Read more: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bjpesxhwt#autoplay
→Egypt moved on Thursday to block refugees from Gaza from entering its territory on the Sinai Peninsula, Reuters reports. Egypt has closed the Rafah border crossing from Gaza and has deployed ground troops and military aircraft near the border to monitor—and prevent—any potential movement of refugees. The Egyptian government has called on Israel to provide “safe passage” for Gazan civilians rather than encouraging them to flee south, but it is reasonable to suspect that Cairo has its own reasons for wanting to keep the Palestinians out. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that is outlawed by Egypt’s military government, and the Sinai has been the center of a long-smoldering Islamist insurgency against Cairo, which Egyptian officials are no doubt loath to inflame.
→The confirmed Israeli death toll from Saturday’s terrorist attacks rose to 1,300 on Thursday, with another 3,000 wounded. Israel also said it had confirmed the identities of 97 hostages taken into Gaza. The number of American dead rose to 25, according to the U.S. State Department. Officials in Gaza say that 1,417 Palestinians have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded in retaliatory Israeli air strikes.
→Quote of the Day:
Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water pump will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home. Humanitarianism for humanitarianism. And no one can preach morality to us.
That’s Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz in a Thursday X post, following the announcement of the Israeli military’s “complete siege” of Gaza earlier in the week. The siege, which involves a blockade of electricity, food, and fuel to the Hamas-controlled territory, has drawn scattered condemnation in the West for its humanitarian implications. For instance, the European Union’s top diplomat, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, said on Tuesday that Israel’s blockade is “against international law,” while Amnesty International on Thursday announced that Israel “must lift the illegal and inhumane blockade on Gaza.”
As energy expert Elai Rettig explained on X, in peacetime about 50% of Gaza’s electricity is provided by Israel for free, with the rest provided by both a diesel-fueled power plant, which ran out fuel Wednesday, and a vast array of privately owned diesel generators and solar panels. Hamas, however, will have stockpiled months’ worth of fuel to sustain its combat operations—fuel that it diverts from the very same humanitarian shipments that Amnesty International and other organizations are calling on Israel to resume. But fuel isn’t the only “humanitarian” aid repurposed for terrorism: A Hamas-produced video circulated by social media users on Thursday showed members of the militant group digging up water pipes to convert them into makeshift rocket launchers to be fired at Israel.
Read more:
→Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on X Saturday that his nation “stands in solidarity with Israel.” It was the latest step in the transformation of the relationship between the Jewish state and the world’s largest democracy, which, in its former role as a leader of the “non-aligned movement,” refused diplomatic relations with Israel until 1992. As Manjari Chatterjee Miller explains on the Council on Foreign Relations’ blog:
Modi’s statement on Israel and how quickly he offered Israel support remain noteworthy. India has excellent relations with Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. Publicly, India still supports the Palestinian cause, hosting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in New Delhi in 2018. But India’s geopolitical situation and domestic politics have changed. Not only does it have a close relationship with Israel, but India is today a close strategic partner of the United States, a staunch Israeli ally. Stability in the Middle East is important to India because, in addition to its relations with Arab nations, large numbers of the Indian diaspora reside and work in the region and send remittances home to family. Furthermore, India, itself extremely vulnerable to attacks by jihadist terrorist groups, understands Israel’s security concerns. Modi’s statement suggests that India has come to see its relationship with Israel as not just friendly, but even vital for its long-term strategic interests.
Read more here: https://www.cfr.org/blog/modis-statement-israel-crisis-demonstrates-transformed-india-israel-bilateral-relationship
→Great idea for how to deal with that person whose Hamas apologia might otherwise drive you to punch a wall:
TODAY IN TABLET:
Was Biden’s Speech as Pro-Israel as You Think? by Tony Badran
No. Because it was missing the only word that matters.
Choosing Between My Two Identities, by David Christopher Kaufman
Because I’m both Black and Jewish, I know hatred when I see it. And in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, I’m seeing plenty.
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.
Was Biden’s Speech as Pro-Israel as You Think?
No. Because it was missing the only word that matters.
By Tony Badran
There is only one word that mattered in President Joe Biden’s remarks on the terrorist attack on Israel—and it was a word he didn’t say.
For those who care about actual U.S. policy rather than feel-good schmaltz, the point of Biden’s speech was not the oft-repeated dubious anecdote about meeting with Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War. Nor was it Biden’s rich declarations about how he was raised in synagogues—along with being raised in Puerto Rican communities and growing up in Black churches. Rather, the entire speech was centered around the absence of one word: Iran.
Biden’s glaring omission of Iran, the chief sponsor, funder, and weapons supplier of Hamas, and the intended beneficiary of its monstrous suicide attack, was an affirmation that his administration’s policies remain unchanged after a weekend of unprecedented horror in Israel. Namely, Biden still fully intends to continue providing cover for the Iranian regime, to whom he released $16 billion of held funds before the attack—in addition to the tens of billions more that the administration has gifted Iran by not enforcing sanctions on its oil sales.
Instead, the administration has rather bizarrely been expending all its diplomatic capital since the attack to avoid connecting Iran in any way to a massacre perpetrated by a terror group that Iran clearly funds, arms, trains and directs. The administration has expended particularly large amounts of energy responding to an inconvenient Wall Street Journal article that reported that the Iranians planned the attack in the joint operations room they have established in Lebanon (the existence of which Hezbollah media had announced in 2021 after the last Gaza war).
Responding to the Journal article, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the press that they have absolutely no “confirmation”—zero, none—to back up the claim of Iranian foreknowledge, planning, or help in directing this particular attack. Yet in nearly the same breath, Sullivan called Iran "complicit" in Hamas' attack. "They have provided the lion's share of the funding for the military wing of Hamas. They provide training, they have provided capabilities, they have provided support, and they have had engagement in contact with Hamas over the years and years.” Come again? NSC spokesman John Kirby then added that there was nothing that suggests 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.”
Biden’s address was actually the second statement the administration put out that deliberately avoided mentioning Iran. On Monday, the U.S. released a joint statement with the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, which not only avoided to mention Iran by name (never mind holding it responsible) but also made sure to include the administration’s term of art for its pro-Iran policy: “integration.” That is, the moral of the bloodiest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was that Iran and its regional assets like Hezbollah must continue to be “integrated” into the American regional architecture by forcing them down the throats of old allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia. They should not only “share the neighborhood” with those who seek their destruction, but they must prop up the polities these terrorists control.
What we heard in Biden’s speech, therefore, wasn’t the most moving articulation of the longstanding American alliance with Israel ever in human history, as a deluge of pro-administration propagandists rather stridently insisted. Rather, what we heard was the deliberate obfuscation of a reality that is plain, stark, and staring everyone in the face.
The reason the word “Iran” can’t be mentioned in public by the White House is that the Hamas massacre on Saturday is the direct product of a decade of U.S. regional policy directed at funding and reinforcing and strengthening a terrorist and terror-sponsoring regime in Tehran. It’s a vision built on a realignment of U.S. interests with this regime, to be cemented with gifting them a nuclear bomb. It’s a statement of ongoing commitment to this policy, which explains a comment made by a senior administration official in a briefing with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he spoke of “future initiatives” with Iran that the administration doesn’t want to see jeopardized. In other words, the administration’s priority is to ensure that none of the ugly business in Israel on Saturday is allowed to interfere with “future initiatives” with the mullahs.
Well, take a good look. What happened on Saturday is so ugly in part because that’s what the administration’s Iran policy looks like. Yes, the pictures, videos, and recorded voice calls are distastefully harrowing to some. But that’s the policy—which is often referred to as Barack Obama’s “legacy” or “signature initiative.” The policy is that Iran must be allowed a free hand to conduct its massacres through its regional Jew-hating proxies, while being given de facto immunity by the United States from Israeli retribution.
But wait, didn’t Biden say, as he again told American Jewish community leaders yesterday, that his administration was “enhancing” the U.S. posture by sending a U.S. carrier fleet to the eastern Mediterranean, which a senior defense official explained was sent to serve as “a deterrent signal” (whatever that means) to Iran and Hezbollah? Didn’t he say that sending the ship made it “very clear” to the Iranians to “be careful”?
So what do you suppose that aircraft carrier means? We already know, because Jake Sullivan said so explicitly, that the USS Gerald Ford is not in the region to strike Hamas. It’s there to ensure, as one administration official after another has said, that the war doesn’t expand to other fronts. But Hezbollah has spent days launching and orchestrating attacks from south Lebanon. Did they miss the “deterrent signal”? On the contrary. They understood exactly what it means, and to whom it’s intended: Israel is being deterred by the United States from striking them.
Senior administration officials told CNN that they “do not believe at this point that Hezbollah is likely to join Hamas’ war in force against Israel.” They also “think the warnings are having an impact even though there has been some escalation on the border.” So, Hezbollah will continue to use Lebanon as a launching pad against Israel, but not “in force.” Sure, there will be “some escalation,” but Israel will need to absorb those attacks, in order to “avoid igniting a larger regional war”—with Iran.
In other words, what the U.S. is signaling is Iran and Hezbollah’s preferred scenario: cost-free attacks from south Lebanon without fear of devastating Israeli retaliation. The U.S. carrier group, in other words, is there to ensure Israel does not attack Iran or Hezbollah, even if it wanted to. Integrate. Don’t escalate.
Israel just suffered the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It cannot afford to indulge in wishful thinking and fanciful readings of the U.S. strategic posture. Nor should it misread the vociferous statements of condemnations of Hamas as support for Israel, except insofar as it is willing to accept its new regional status as a punching bag for Iran.
After two days of radio silence, the architect of America’s Iran policy, Barack Obama, finally offered a single tweet.
All Americans should be horrified and outraged by the brazen terrorist attacks on Israel and the slaughter of innocent civilians. We grieve for those who died, pray for the safe return of those who’ve been held hostage, and stand squarely alongside our ally, Israel, as it dismantles Hamas. As we support Israel’s right to defend itself against terror, we must keep striving for a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Apparently, terrorists who kill 1,200 people in their homes and at a music festival is not the kind of thing you comment on at once. It takes a good 48 hours to think it through. That was the message.
Yet the text of Obama’s tweet is not entirely unimportant. It clarifies the point of American policy, which is to compel Israel to focus on Hamas in isolation, and not attempt to climb the escalation ladder against America’s preferred Middle Eastern partner. Yes, go ahead, “dismantle Hamas.” The trap is already set, as evidenced in Biden’s speech and in the “advice” of the deputy national security council adviser, Jon Finer, who reminded Benjamin Netanyahu of the need to act according to the rule of law. “We uphold the laws of war. It matters.”
Israeli retaliation was built into both the Iranian war plan and Obama’s info op. In other words, Israel is being encouraged to retaliate against Hamas—at which point it will be duly roasted for killing civilians. Release your anger, Luke. But whatever you do, don’t hit the Iranians.
This dichotomy is an important article of faith for Team Obama-Biden, and is in clear contrast to the policies of President Trump, who ended the fictional distinctions between Iran and its terror tentacles in the region. Trump’s regional policy was based on backing Israel and the Gulf states against Iran. By contrast, the current policy, disguised with florid promises about “having Israel’s back,” is designed precisely to protect Iran while it dismembers America’s allies—quite literally.