What Happened Today, Special Edition: Israel at War, Day 20

October 27, 2023

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The Big Story

After more than a dozen attacks by Iranian proxies against U.S. targets in Iraq and Syria in recent weeks, Washington finally retaliated early Friday morning. U.S. F-16s struck two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: a weapons storage facility and an ammunition storage facility. “The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel,” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a press conference, “and he directed today’s action to make clear that the United States will not tolerate such attacks and will defend itself, its personnel, and its interests.”

The news came shortly after the Pentagon announced that 19 U.S. military personnel had received traumatic brain injuries in the wave of Iran-backed rocket and drone attacks on American bases; by contrast, no Iranian casualties were reported in the airstrikes, and the Pentagon had no details to offer about the amount of damage done. Seemingly undeterred, Iranian forces responded by launching 10 rockets at a U.S. base in Syria on Friday; another U.S. base in Iraq came under fire shortly before The Scroll went to press. Perhaps these attacks was a sign Tehran knew it had nothing to worry about—an IRGC-affiliated news agency reported Friday that the Iranians had received a message from U.S. forces saying they “do not intend to engage in conflict and create a new front.” 

To help readers make sense of this display of U.S. “deterrence,” The Scroll asked Tablet’s Levant analyst, Tony Badran, for his perspective. What follows is Tony’s analysis:

The Iranian strike on U.S. targets in Syria tells you how the Iranians are receiving what the administration likes to call “deterrence signals” or “messages of deterrence.” (Biden warned Khamenei on Oct. 25—and Kirby then said they relayed a direct message—to stop the attacks on U.S. troops. There were reports of Iranian-controlled militia strikes on Oct. 26). If the U.S. retaliatory strike was meant to communicate something, what did it communicate? The answer to that is in Sec. Def. Austin’s tortured statement. Leaving aside the self-parodic description of the Iranian attacks as “ongoing and mostly unsuccessful,” the statement’s key points are in its final graph: 

These narrowly-tailored strikes in self-defense were intended solely to protect and defend U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria. They are separate and distinct from the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and do not constitute a shift in our approach to the Israel-Hamas conflict. We continue to urge all state and non-state entities not to take action that would escalate into a broader regional conflict.

The caveats ooze weakness and pleading. The “narrowly-tailored” strikes are “separate and distinct” from the Israel-Hamas conflict “and do not constitute a shift in our approach to the Israel-Hamas conflict.” Hold on. Wasn’t the point of sending not one but two carrier strike groups to the Mediterranean to deter Iran? While the administration thinks it’s come up with a super-clever distinction between supposedly having “deterred” Iran from opening more fronts against Israel on the one hand, and the Iranian attacks against the United States in Iraq and Syria on the other, the Iranians see it as a continuum. They are hitting U.S. targets as part of their campaign against Israel, threatening the troops we have sitting in their various satrapies unless we continue to constrain the Israelis.

This lends an assist to the Biden administration, which has been warning Israel against striking Hezbollah in Lebanon in order to prevent an escalation to a “broader regional conflict.” That is, implicitly, the old Team Obama talking point about how Israel is dragging us to war with Iran and endangering the lives of American boys. Hence, the so-called deterrence signal becomes, in Austin’s statement, a message to Iran to dissociate the United States from Israel: “We have nothing to do with Israel’s war, please stop hitting us!” Letting it be known that the strike was not coordinated with Israel was also meant to reinforce this point.

In the end, all these performative attempts at a tough posture against Iran belie the fact that the Biden administration’s policy is predicated on partnership with Tehran and the underwriting of its regional project from Iraq to Lebanon, where the administration has warned Israel against escalation, and Gaza, where it has been pulling all the stops to delay and discourage a ground operation.

—TB

IN THE BACK PAGES: A Q&A with independent journalist Julio Rojas on what he saw in southern Israel.

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→NSC spokesman John Kirby on Thursday blasted the Gaza Health Ministry as a “Hamas front” and said the White House would not cite unreliable casualty figures provided by a terrorist organization, a day after President Biden said he had “no confidence” in the death-toll figures coming out of Gaza. That, apparently, was enough to rouse the press corps from their usual attitude of deference toward both the administration and Hamas. A Friday article in Huffington Post cited State Department cables and “experts” to argue that Biden was lying and that the Gaza Health Ministry was generally “trustworthy.” An article in Time claimed that “this is the first time that the reliability of the enclave’s health ministry has been so prominently called into question,” before going on to cite “a Ramallah-based political analyst” who argued that skepticism toward the Hamas numbers “is no different to [sic] other historical denials of ethnic cleansing.” 

Biden and Kirby, however, are far from the first to question the reliability of Palestinian casualty figures. On Wednesday, former Reuters Israel/Palestine bureau chief John Baker told the Telegraph that the Health Ministry’s figures were “unreliable” and “misleading,” an assessment backed by European officials. During previous rounds of fighting, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets have run stories on the difficulty of accurately counting civilian casualties in Gaza, noting that even when overall death tolls are roughly accurate, Hamas and Palestinian NGOs routinely claim that 80-90% of those killed were civilians. Israeli sources, however, generally estimate, based on analysis of the names of the dead published by Hamas, that about 50% of those killed are militants or members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A New York Times investigation into Israel’s 2014 Gaza campaign could not independently confirm the Israeli estimates but did note that 34% of the dead were men aged 20-29, despite them making up only 9% of Gaza’s population. 

→On Tuesday the chancellor of the State University System of Florida called on public universities in the state to deactivate their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, claiming the group had violated Florida’s law against material support for terrorism. The letter, sent in consultation with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, cited a “toolkit” issued by SJP’s parent organization, National Students for Justice in Palestine, that referred to the Oct. 7 attacks as “the resistance” and said that “Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.” 

Although the letter notes that students are free to re-form similar groups as long as they disaffiliate from National SJP, it has sparked a national conversation about campus free speech, with GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy accusing DeSantis of “utter hypocrisy for someone who railed against left-wing cancel culture.” We at The Scroll are heartily in favor of free speech, though we are less enthusiastic about terror financing. We therefore think it worth noting that the founder of National SJP, Hatem Bazian, is also the chair of American Muslims for Palestine, which has in turn been called the “most important sponsor and organizer” for National SJP. AMP was founded in 2005 by leaders from several Islamic NGOs after their organizations were “canceled”—i.e., indicted by the U.S. federal government for financing Hamas. An ongoing federal lawsuit from the family of Daniel Boim, a 17-year-old killed in a 1996 Hamas attack, alleges that AMP is a legal “alter ego” of the now-defunct “propaganda arms” of the Holy Land Foundation, created to avoid paying out a $156 million judgment awarded to the Boim family in 2004. 

Read more here: https://www.jns.org/judge-finds-evidence-linking-amp-to-hamas-supporters-for-lawsuit-to-proceed/ 

→The Adalah Justice Project, a “grassroots” anti-Israel group whose executive director praised the Oct. 7 terror attacks as “the oppressed rising up,” is a subsidiary of the Democratic dark-money giant the Tides Network, The Washington Free Beacon reports. Adalah is one of Tides’ many “fiscal sponsorships,” a legal arrangement that allows the sponsor to direct money to an organization without that organization having to register as a nonprofit with the IRS, which would trigger disclosure requirements. In practice, this means there is no legal distinction between Adalah and Tides. The Free Beacon reports that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given Tides $710,000 in earmarked funds for Adalah since 2018. Tides has also received large sums from George Soros (including $225,000 for “pro-Palestine initiatives”), Pierre Omidyar, and other progressive billionaires, though it is unclear whether Adalah made use of these funds. Adalah executive director Sandra Tamari told Yes! magazine on Oct. 11 that “Hamas’s attack was resistance to an intolerable situation that has been taking place in the Gaza strip.”

Tides, Soros, and the Rockefellers are also major donors to Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, which sponsored the Oct. 18 anti-Israel rally at the U.S. Capitol.  

Read the rest here: https://freebeacon.com/democrats/this-grassroots-anti-israel-group-is-actually-part-of-a-left-wing-dark-money-behemoth 

→The Scroll has reported on a few cases of NYU students tearing down Israeli-hostage rescue posters. Here we present, for your entertainment, a lesson in what happens when you try that in Forest Hills:

→The Scroll is honored to present a bit of Torah commentary from our friend, the ‘Rav’ Liel Leibovitz. 

Here’s a very quick dvar Torah for this week’s parsha. Ready? Here we go. This week, we’re introduced to Abraham. Abraham was born 1,948 years after the creation of the world. Abraham was 75 when the parsha began. The parsha is about Abraham’s family being kidnapped by evil people and Abraham waging all-out war to rescue his loved ones. 1,948 plus 75 is 2023.

—LL

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Open Source News Is the Future of Journalism, by Steven Sinofsky

Despite claims that it spreads ‘misinformation,’ X has offered an invaluable check on The New York Times and other mainstream media publications that present Hamas propaganda as ‘news’

Preparing for an Emergency, by Hillel Kuttler

In northern Israel, Galilee Medical Center is already moving patients, canceling procedures, and training doctors in anticipation of a second front opening

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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.

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Julio Rojas is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and independent journalist whose work can be found on Substack. Julio recently returned from a two-week trip to Israel, spent mostly in the south near the Gaza Strip. The Scroll caught up with Julio on Wednesday, Oct. 25, to get his impressions on how the country is recovering from the attacks, and what comes next.

The Scroll: What did you see in Israel that Americans are not really getting right now?

Julio Rojas: Israel is still very much in the process of just cleaning up everything. It was close to 3,000 fighters from the Gaza Strip that entered into Israel on Oct. 7. And so, the crime scene, so to speak, is basically all of southern Israel. One day, toward the end, I was talking to a local journalist, and we noticed that a car that was heavily damaged was being put on one of those big trucks to take it away. And he saw the license plate. And I learned that in the kibbutz, since it’s a communal setting, you know, all the cars are communally owned—whoever wants to take it for the day, can.

So the license plate number starts off with a number that indicates that it’s from a kibbutz. And he told me, “Oh yeah, that’s, that’s from one of the towns that was attacked.” And that was more than two weeks later. Another time I was near the site of the music festival that was attacked, and there was still a van that was on the side of the highway that was shot up. There were shell casings all around, and both the passenger seat and the driver’s seat were stained with blood. And that was a week later. So the scope and the scale was very large for a relatively small country like Israel.

That leads into our next request, which is, tell us a bit about the scale of the devastation in southern Israel.

What struck me, like I was saying before, was just the vast area that was touched in some way. And not only that, but yesterday, we had the largest rocket barrage since the start of the war. Southern Israel, central Israel, all the way up to Tel Aviv. I have the rocket alert app on my phone, and it was going off like crazy. I was completely caught off guard by it because we’re so far into this conflict and the Palestinians unleashed the largest barrage that they’ve unleashed since the start.

I went to an apartment building in Ashkelon that took basically a direct hit. Everyone had been evacuated for obvious reasons, because it wasn’t livable anymore. It wasn’t safe. And the cars were still burnt out. They hadn’t been taken away yet. So the cities by the front lines, especially Ashdod, they’re bearing the brunt of this still. And on top of that, because they haven’t received orders to officially evacuate like some of the other towns closer, it’s kind of like a ghost town, but not really. I would say about maybe half of the population is still there. And so they’re trying to figure out how to continue on in that new environment. Basically all the businesses are closed. One of the restaurants that I did find that was open, they had two rockets that landed on them, one on their left side and one on their right side. How are you trying to make a living when the threat of getting blown up by these things is so prevalent?

What were you hearing from Israelis, and especially from anyone in the IDF, about their expectations from the ground assault in Gaza?

I talked to some IDF people, though not on the record, and I also got some idea from talking to the border police. They’re ready to go. They want to go in. Everyone was completely caught off guard with what happened. Obviously it’s shaken them to their core, but they’re ready to go in, and they understand that it’s gonna be a long fight because urban combat is just absolutely vicious. And that’s part of the reason why they’re trying so hard with the airstrikes and artillery to soften up the area, just clear the way for the ground assault. But, as we know, Hamas has a vast network of tunnels, and they’ve been preparing for this for a very long time.

So they want to go in, but they’re also nervous, to say the least. Anyone who says they’re not is a liar. But they want to start because they want to make sure that something like this isn’t happening again. And it’s just a matter of waiting. Because it looked like they were going to go on the first Saturday that I was there. Everyone was kind of expecting that, and then it didn’t happen. If you talk to any grunt, the waiting is the worst part, before the actual fighting starts.

What was the attitude you got from Israelis toward America’s role in the conflict?

Well, it was funny because anytime I’d say I was from America, usually the response was, “Oh, that’s so great!” Because, you know, they appreciate all the support that we give them militarily. They appreciate the support that America has provided and continues to provide. But they want to do this themselves. Just because it was so personal. And, you know, talking to people, they would always say that this is worse than the Yom Kippur War, because the bulk of the casualties and the hostages were civilians.

They also very much liked Joe Biden. There were a bunch of electronic billboards with a picture of Biden and an American flag on them that just said, “Thank you.” I also saw a few bumper stickers, actually, that looked new. It was an Israeli flag and American flag. And it was funny because they would ask me, “What do you think of Joe Biden?” And I was thinking, well, you know, in Israel, he’s fine, but you should look at our economy right now, look at our southern border. But overall, I would say that they like Joe Biden, they appreciate America’s support, but they want to deal with the Hamas problem themselves.

How well do you think the American press has been covering the conflict so far?

I am definitely of the thought of that, and I’m sure you’ve seen this joke on X: “However much you hate journalists, it’s not enough.” The mainstream media as a whole has really tried to lean into that with everything. The hospital explosion is just a prime example.

It’s frustrating because that had direct consequences, right? We had riots outside our embassies in the Middle East because people thought Israel killed 500 people. We’ve had a bunch of Americans injured in different attacks. I understand why people wouldn’t want to just trust Israel, but what I don’t get, and what I cannot comprehend, is why they would then trust in an actual terrorist organization, because the Gaza Ministry of Health, I mean, that’s just Hamas.

I’m not saying there haven’t been civilian casualties. There’s been evidence of that, but they just take these numbers, you know, like 3,000, and half of those are children. And it’s like, well, how do we know that? How do you know that? Do you have independent verification, or are you just running these numbers from a terrorist group? And that’s just been kind of standard throughout this current conflict. Of course, you have all the different posts on social media from different people, sometimes from the mainstream media, sometimes not. And I’ll admit that even being there on the ground, it was hard to figure out what was true and what wasn’t.

But my rule of thumb is to not take a terrorist group that just committed these horrific acts and take their claims at face value. And then of course the media’s trying to clean it up by saying, “Oh, it’s the fog of war.” No, you messed up because you just parroted Hamas’ claims. That, to me, that’s not fog of war. That’s very deliberate. I’ve long been a critic of the mainstream media. That’s why I’m independent, and that’s why I started out in conservative media. They’ve really shown their asses here, if I can swear.

You can.