What Happened Today, Special Edition: Israel at War Day 39

November 14, 2023

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A note on the date: The Scroll discovered today that we had been undercounting by one the number of days Israel has been at war. Yesterday’s edition, which was marked “Day 37,” should have been Day 38. Today is day 39. We regret the error.

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The Big Story

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported late Monday that Israel and Hamas are close to a deal that would free “most” of the Israeli women and children held hostage in Gaza in exchange for a five-day cease-fire and the release of an unnamed number of Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons. The deal, which is being mediated by Qatar and involves the Israeli and American intelligence services as well as Hamas, could be announced within “days” if the details are finalized, a high-ranking Israeli official told Ignatius. On Sunday, the White House expressed its support for a hostage deal in a statement following President Joe Biden’s call with the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. Hamas confirmed on Telegram Monday that it was prepared to release 70 hostages, out of a total of more than 240, if Israel would grant a cease-fire; Israeli government sources quoted in Haaretz Sunday said the government is insisting on a minimum of 100. 

The potential for a deal raises difficult questions for Israel. Thus far, the IDF’s ground invasion of northern Gaza has been a clear operational success, surpassing even optimistic Israeli and American expectations. Despite pockets of intense resistance, the IDF has been steadily advancing while suffering fewer casualties than many expected. Hamas, meanwhile, has proved incapable of slowing the IDF advance or preventing it from emptying northern Gaza of civilians. On Monday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Hamas has “lost control in Gaza,” and Israeli ground troops are reporting signs of “pressure and despair” among Hamas fighters, who seem to be losing their will, or perhaps simply their ability, to fight. Still, Hamas has not yet surrendered, and according to Haaretz’s Amos Harel, the IDF General Staff believes it will take several more weeks for Israel to achieve one of its stated war aims—destroying Hamas. Per Harel, the General Staff and Gallant want to keep up the military pressure, arguing that it will force Hamas’ leadership into even greater concessions. Part of that calculus is the belief that Israel has limited time before its Western allies, including the United States, begin pressuring it to halt military operations. 

Yet the military objective of destroying Hamas may be coming into conflict with the government’s other stated aim of returning the hostages. Historically, Israel has been extraordinarily willing to trade tactical advantages for the lives of Israelis; in 2011, it released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including Hamas’ current leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, in exchange for a single IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit. Inside Israel, there has been growing pressure from the families of the hostages to bring their loved ones home regardless of the military cost; on Monday, hundreds of families set out on a five-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem demanding an immediate deal. To that internal pressure will be added pressure from Washington should a workable deal materialize. The White House has already begun to publicly balk at the civilian casualty numbers, and Ignatius reported that U.S. officials “hope a hostage-release agreement and temporary truce could reduce the international uproar surrounding the war.”

In Harel’s estimation, Israel will be unable to refuse a serious offer it believes Hamas is capable of implementing—not necessarily a sure thing, given the apparent collapse of the group’s communications and command-and-control networks. But any deal will slow the momentum of Israel’s advance, and a sufficiently long cease-fire could halt it altogether, while creating international pressure to make the cease-fire permanent. This could mean that to save its citizens in Hamas captivity, Israel may have to downgrade, if not altogether abandon, its plans to eradicate Hamas. 

Read more here: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-14/ty-article/.premium/israels-military-is-making-headway-in-gaza-but-hamas-surrender-is-far-from-imminent/0000018b-ca6f-d8c7-a59b-df6f80560000 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/13/israel-hamas-hostage-deal-qatar-talks/ 

IN THE BACK PAGES: An interview with the NYC-based Israeli artists behind the “Kidnapped in Israel” poster campaign

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The Rest

→A U.S. official with “knowledge of American intelligence” confirmed that Hamas has a “command node” under the Al-Shifa hospital, CNN reported Monday. IDF forces have encircled the hospital complex, Gaza’s largest, for several days, and have been attempting to evacuate civilians while demonstrating to the world that Hamas is using Shifa for military purposes—a fact seemingly confirmed not only by CNN’s source but also by a long Sunday report in The New York Times, not to mention in a Washington Post article from back in 2014 that referred to Shifa as “de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders.” Despite the obligatory nods to the “competing claims” and the lack of “conclusive proof” for “Israeli allegations,” the Times assembled a vast array of evidence sourced to U.S. and Israeli intelligence, Amnesty International, and the paper’s own previous reporting showing that the Israeli claims are true, though it took care to bury this evidence beneath the story’s 22nd paragraph. Nonetheless, the siege of the hospital complex has turned into a delicate diplomatic dance. On Sunday, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that “The United States does not want to see firefights in hospitals,” which seems like a strong case for not funding groups like Hamas that use them as military installations. 

Read the Times report here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/12/world/middleeast/gaza-hospitals-shifa.html

→More on Gaza’s hospitals: IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari led CNN’s Nic Robertson into the basement of Rantisi Hospital for children in Gaza, where the Israelis found a weapons cache and a room they believe was used to hold hostages.

Watch the video here: https://x.com/kaitlancollins/status/1724271462079418382?s=20 

→Anger at Biden over his public support for Israel is growing among junior U.S. government staffers. On Tuesday, more than 400 political appointees and staffers from 40 agencies sent a letter to Biden protesting his handling of the war and calling for a cease-fire, according to The New York Times, which also cited officials who said that the dissent over Gaza “comes mostly from employees in their 20s and 30s.” News of that letter came one day after Axios reported on an internal dissent memo signed by 100 employees of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which attacked the Biden administration for spreading “misinformation” and supporting Israeli “war crimes.” That memo, which echoed the language of “progressive activists” outside government, was organized by Sylvia Yacoub, the foreign service officer who has publicly accused Biden of supporting “genocide” and who was described as “hysterical and unprofessional” by a congressional staffer who spoke to The Washington Free Beacon. Last week, Politico reported on a separate memo from State Department staffers calling on the United States to push for a cease-fire and publicly criticize Israel’s “violations of international norms.” In response to this wave of semipublic dissent, 116 former Obama and Biden officials signed a letter Tuesday in support of the administration. Unlike the dissenters, they publicly signed their names. 

→For another glimpse at our new ruling class, meet James “Fergie” Chambers, the millennial Communist who inherited “hundred of millions” from his family and is now bankrolling a bail fund for a radical pro-Palestine group dedicated to criminal harassment of Israeli-owned businesses. Chambers, whose billionaire father James Cox Chambers co-owns the Atlanta Hawks and whose mother-in-law is the daughter of the late billionaire Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, is donating to a legal defense fund for Palestine Action US, a radical group that has committed several acts of vandalism against Israeli defense contractors and other targets, and which looks from its social media posts to be a variant of antifa. Chambers also claims to have donated money to the Samidoun network, a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a “Marxist-Leninist” Palestinian group that has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union. On his social media accounts, Chambers has said Hamas did not do “*anything* wrong” on Oct. 7 and that “we need to start making people who support Israel actually afraid to go out in public.”

Read more here: https://freebeacon.com/israel/hes-a-communist-trust-fund-baby-who-inherited-millions-now-hes-using-daddys-money-to-harass-jews/ 

→New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced Monday that the state is surveilling social media as part of an effort to counter online “hate speech.” Speaking at a press conference after meeting with state Jewish leaders, law enforcement, and federal authorities, Hochul said: 

We’re very focused on the data we’re collecting from surveillance efforts—what’s being said on social media platforms. And we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms. Our social media analysis unit has ramped up its monitoring of sites to catch incitement to violence and direct threats to others. And all of this in response to our desire, our strong commitment, to ensure that not only do New Yorkers be safe, but they also feel safe. 

On Oct. 31, Hochul announced $75 million in new money to “mitigate hate” inside New York, which included $700,000 to expand the Social Media Analysis Unit at the New York State Intelligence Center. If that money merely goes to identifying actionable criminal threats and incitement, all well and good. But it is worth remembering that New York passed an online hate speech law last December requiring social media companies to provide mechanisms for reporting “hateful” conduct, defined as content used to “vilify” or “humiliate” a person based on a wide range of protected characteristics. The law was struck down by a federal judge for violating the First Amendment, but New York is appealing that ruling in the Second Circuit. While we at The Scroll have done our part in documenting some of the grotesque anti-Jewish propaganda that has emerged online since Oct. 7, it remains our belief that offensive speech is still speech, and that it is the role of the government to keep citizens physically safe, not to make them “feel” safe, whatever that means. We are therefore suspicious of any attempts to smuggle in speech restrictions that could not stand up in court by way of appeals to “security” and emotional safety. 

→Speaking of bad ideas related to social media, here’s what GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley had to say Tuesday in an interview on Fox:

When I get into office the first thing we have to do: social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms. Let us see why they’re pushing what they’re pushing. The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name. First of all, it’s a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say, and it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots. And then you’re going to get some civility.

→A Ukrainian colonel acting on the orders from the highest levels of the country’s military played a “central role” in the bombing of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines last September—an act of sabotage that U.S. and Ukrainian officials originally blamed on Russia—according to a joint investigation by The Washington Post and Der Spiegel. The colonel, Roman Chervinsky, is alleged to have acted as the “coordinator” for the operation, which was ordered by Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, without the knowledge of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The identification of Chervinsky follows an earlier report from June, which revealed that a European intelligence agency—now understood to be Dutch military intelligence—warned the CIA in June 2022 that the Ukrainians were planning to send six operatives to rent a sailboat in the Baltic and then use deep-sea diving equipment to place charges on the Russian-owned pipelines. A German law enforcement investigation has confirmed several details that match the plot described by the Dutch: in September, six individuals using fake passports rented a sailing yacht, embarked from Warnemünde, Germany, and planted the explosives. German authorities say they have matched the explosives residue on the pipeline to residue inside the cabin of the yacht. The June article also revealed that Western governments had uncovered communications from Ukrainians and Ukraine sympathizers discussing a plan to blow up the pipelines. 

The Ukrainian government has denied its involvement in the bombing, as has Chervinsky, who is being held in jail in Kyiv on charges of having “abused his power” as a military officer. Chervinsky denies the allegations and claims he is being punished for criticizing Zelensky. 

Read more here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/11/nordstream-bombing-ukraine-chervinsky/ 

→An estimated 200,000 people attended a rally in support of Israel on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Speakers at the March for Israel, organized by the National Jewish Federations of North America, included Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Majority Leader Mike Johnson (R-LA), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and New York Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), formerly a darling of the socialist left, was seen outside the Capitol waving an Israeli flag at pro-Palestinian protestors who were being arrested by Capitol police. The march also produced this charming video, of Japanese supporters of Israel singing Psalm 28, verse 9 in Hebrew. The words translate to “may God provide salvation to his people and bless his legacy, lift and carry them for eternity.”

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Jewish Hate Hits the Silver Screen, by Judith Miller

A fascinating new documentary offers context about today’s antisemitism

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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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The Art of the Teardown

An interview with the artists whose effort to highlight the fate of kidnapped Israeli children ended up underscoring the moral and social rot of our cities and universities

by Emily Benedek

Israeli street artist Nitzan Mintz, 32, and her partner, Dede Bandaid, 36, had just arrived in New York to study at an art residency, when Hamas terrorists crashed through the Gaza border fence and unleashed their barbaric rampage of murder, rape, arson, and torture on Jewish communities inside Israel. The shocked couple withdrew from their art program before it had even started, and tried to think of what they could do to help the desperate situation at home. Recalling the “Missing Children” pictures on milk cartons that Bandaid said had become “iconic” around the world via American films, they focused their attention on the hostages, whose number, at first thought to be around 130, has now risen to 239.

With the help of Tal Huber, an accomplished graphic designer in Israel who is the founder and creative director of the branding house Giraffe, they came up with the now-famous posters featuring a thick red border on top with “Kidnapped” in white capital letters, and below that, photos of the babies, toddlers, adults, and elderly men and women who were dragged from their homes in the early morning of Oct. 7 into Gaza’s labyrinth of tunnels and underground hideouts by an army of murderous terrorists. On the posters is a brief description of the attack and on the bottom, the message: “Please bring them home alive.”

The couple, both of whom are from Tel Aviv, have been together for a decade. Bandaid says they started to make “street art” in their teens, separately “painting walls or sketching random vandalist art” with spray cans after school. After they served in the army, they attended art schools, he at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, she at the Minshar School of Art in Tel Aviv, “all the while creating in the streets.” After they met, they shared studio space and worked together, traveling and creating, with their work being shown in galleries and museums around the world.

Bandaid is a painter, whose work often features images of Band-Aids. He has written: "I was seeking a way to express and heal my wounds. The band aid then became a symbol for all kinds of difficulties—personal and social—seeking fix." Nitzan is a poet. She paints her poems in public, sometimes as stand-alone graffiti, sometimes besides her partner’s representations of Band-Aids.

On Oct. 9, Bandaid and Nitzan put up their first posters in New York City. They began in Central Park and walked down to lower Manhattan. “At the beginning people didn’t want anything to do with us,” Bandaid told me. To increase their reach, they uploaded the posters to Dropbox and announced their availability through social media. They opened Facebook and Instagram accounts called “KidnappedfromIsrael.” They made a website with the same name. Anyone could download the posters, print them out, and put them up in public spaces.

When I first spoke with Bandaid on Oct. 12, people were printing out their posters and hanging them in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and sending back photos to the group’s Instagram and Facebook pages. Within days, the couple needed help to manage the internet traffic. By Nov. 2, “it is everywhere, around the world,” Bandaid told me, with the locations of the most downloads being Germany, London, Paris, New York, and Argentina. Interestingly, the posters were also being downloaded in unexpected places like Qatar, the Emirates, Morocco, and Egypt. “Maybe they have another idea for our files,” Bandaid said, “but it’s being downloaded there.” The posters have now been translated into 30 languages, and the system is “updating all the time” as Mintz and Bandaid collect more hostage names and information, in coordination with the families. In addition to the “thousands” of people hanging posters, others approached Bandaid and Nitzan with ideas like digital TV trucks, billboards in sports arenas and in Times Square, even what he calls “guerrilla projections,” including on the walls of the United Nations.

Bandaid and Mintz knew that their project could be controversial. They warned on their website: “Be safe—don’t provoke or instigate any conflicts with people or officials. Act quickly and stay alert.”

That advice would turn out to have been prescient in ways that the artists themselves didn’t imagine. Immediately, people began pulling down the pictures of hostages from walls, subways, bus stops, telephone poles, angrily, purposefully, often tearing the paper posters right across the faces of kidnapped children. They carried them away in self-righteous handfuls or stuffed them in trashcans. In addition to helping raise awareness of the fate of the hostages, Bandaid and Nitzan’s poster campaign was now also highlighting the startling prevalence of raw antisemitism within the flagships of Western enlightenment—in large cities and on university campuses.

“The first torn-down posters we saw I think was a video coming from London,” Bandaid recalls, “two Muslim women tearing down posters.” When observers criticized the women, they responded, “We are doing this for Palestine.”

It was not immediately clear, to most normal observers, why concern for the fate of hundreds of innocent people grabbed from their homes and held as hostages in inhumane circumstances in blatant violation of international law should elicit any reaction but grief. Yet the teardowns increased, and soon became the story. Some of the vandals filmed themselves tearing down posters and uploaded footage of their actions to social media, as proofs of their virtue and in the hopes of inspiring others. Others yelled at strangers filming them. The destruction went on in Boston, London, Miami, New York, Melbourne, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, and Paris. Hitler mustaches were drawn on the faces of two 3-year-old twin girls. Vandals scrawled “Actors” and “Lies” on others.

“There is no possible justification for such heartlessness,” wrote Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. “The whole purpose of the fliers is to heighten awareness of the Israeli (and other) civilians kidnapped by the Hamas terror squads—to put names and faces to the hostages, all with one goal: to bring them back home. How can a project so heartfelt and humane trigger such a poisonous response?”

The vandals had their own ideas. These ideas were often confused, illogical, sometimes wrong on the facts, but were all expressed with intense, shaking emotion. They seemed rooted in a deep identification with the hapless, helpless, and voiceless, which in their minds justified not just tearing down posters of real human beings in terrible circumstances but also the kidnappings themselves.

The hundreds of videos of people tearing down posters have become as widespread as the posters themselves. Some of the perpetrators are enraged and inarticulate; some are furtive and defensive; some are proud of their actions; some are creepily smug. All of them seem to be operating on a similar odd frequency, in which their actions signal their belonging to a group with impenetrable beliefs that are not open to discussion or questioning, like a cult. In the U.S., at least, nearly all were current or aspiring members of the professional classes.

A worker at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School, videotaped while tearing down posters on campus, was asked why he was destroying posters of innocent victims. He shouted, “Get the fuck out of my face,” and when informed the photos were of innocent victims, said “There were people killed in the hospital bombing,” referencing the deaths at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza that was later attributed to an Islamic Jihad rocket gone astray. When asked why she was tearing down the posters, a woman in New York said, “Because they are fake.” Francesca Martinez-Greenberg, who according to her LinkedIn profile is a graphic designer at the Center for National Security at Fordham Law School, said, “This is part of a concentrated propaganda effort to rile up support for the genocide of Palestinian people.” A man identified as Joe Friedman tore down posters at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, explaining, “what about the Palestinian children?” and then made fun of an observer’s Israeli accent, calling it “fake.” Friedman, who comes from tony Silver Spring, Maryland, was previously arrested while disrupting a pro-life event on campus at VCU.

The teardown artists elicited their own social media-driven response, which in some cases included real-world consequences. Observers hunted down the rippers on social media and outed them. NYU law student Ryna Workman, who was filmed destroying posters with a companion, who coyly said she was “very proud” of their actions, saw her job offer from a top law firm rescinded after video of her acts was posted online. Laurel Squadron, who works part time as a babysitter for ArtistBabysitting, a boutique child care agency serving families in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, was filmed tearing down posters of children and screaming, “you support genocide you asshole,” at observers. The agency later denounced her actions and pulled her profile off the job site. An endodontist tearing down posters in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, was outed by StopAntisemitism and fired from her job. New York County public defender Victoria Ruiz was filmed tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children, and she later resigned from her position.

In a viral incident reported by the New York Post, construction workers jumped out of their truck to stop a man in Queens from tearing down the posters. “This is a free country,” said one of the men, named Paulie. “You can wave your Palestine flag and say death to the Jews and America whenever you want, but we can put up f–king signs.” He pointed out the man was breaking the law by littering.

Although Bandaid had anticipated some trouble, he admitted the poster destruction “was not so nice to see.” He was also surprised to observe the vandalism on the Upper East and Upper West sides of Manhattan. “You would think there are so many Jews there, that maybe it will be more protected, but you can feel the hate.”

And hate it was—sometimes calm, cool, self-confident, and entitled, and sometimes hysterical. A 24-year-old Israeli student enrolled in general studies at Columbia University in New York City was putting up posters on campus when he was assaulted by a masked female Jewish student named Maxwell Friedman, who was later arrested and charged with assault after breaking her victim’s finger with a stick. A vandal tearing down posters while walking her dog in Miami admitted Hamas was a “terrorist organization” but, shaking with emotion, she said she was ripping down the pictures of hostages to “protect Palestinian civilians” who "over decades have been oppressed; they’re in apartheid because of what Israel is doing.”

One observer on Instagram understood right away what was happening. A young Israeli woman from South Africa explained the rippers were compelled to tear down the photos of innocents kidnapped because “it doesn't fit the propaganda they've been feeding the world,” which denies the humanity of Jews and Israelis while painting them as monsters who oppress innocent Palestinians. “Every video we post, every death and missing person we announce, it's all ‘fake’ and we're ‘making it up,’ never mind the fact that the most graphic videos we have of the crimes committed on our innocent Israeli angels are taken by their own leaders.”

The barbarity of the Hamas attack on innocents was thus impossible for those who hate Jews to process, so they didn’t. Rather, they attempted to deny the evidence by throwing away photos of the real-life Jewish victims, in a vain yet chilling attempt to resolve their own logical impasse. “Precisely because the massacre and abductions had been so unspeakably horrific,” Jeff Jacoby wrote, “it was necessary to reinforce the narrative of Jewish villainy.”

Mintz and Bandaid are hurt by the blood-curdling reactions, but they remain undeterred. “You know, we are only going to put the posters up again, and all the thousands of people who are with us, they just print more and put them back up,” says Bandaid. “We put innocent civilians on these posters because we know they can't speak for themselves right now. We have to keep their names up there and keep spreading awareness until they gain their freedom.”

Bandaid and Nitzan’s posters continue to be downloaded. (There are fewer reported teardowns in the Far East.) Posters have been displayed on 240 chairs surrounding an empty Shabbat table that has been constructed and displayed around the world: in New York, Geneva, Boston, Berlin, Rome, Frankfurt, Washington, D.C., Johannesburg, London, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Tbilisi, Chicago, Vienna, LA, and Lisbon, to name a few.

In the fourth week of the war, analytics show that kidnappedfromIsrael.com has been visited an average of 30,000 times per day.

Nevertheless, Bandaid has to admit the rage is terrifying. “They tear down photos of babies and elderly people!” the artist told me. “It's just pure evil. It's not human. It's really crazy. It's really upsetting. We see antisemitism rising everywhere. It's not a nice feeling to have when you're abroad, and we feel less and less safe. It's scary and it's depressing to see the world act like that. But we will just go out and put up more.”