English LCCC Newsbulletin For
Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For November 16/2024
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news
The Bulletin's Link on the
lccc Site
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/aaaanewsfor2024/english.November
16.24.htm
News Bulletin Achieves
Since 2006
Click Here to enter the LCCC Arabic/English news bulletins Achieves since 2006
Click On
The Below Link To Join Eliasbejjaninews whatsapp group
https://chat.whatsapp.com/FPF0N7lE5S484LNaSm0MjW
اضغط
على الرابط في
أعلى للإنضمام
لكروب
Eliasbejjaninews whatsapp group
Elias Bejjani/Click
on the below link to subscribe to my youtube channel
الياس
بجاني/اضغط
على الرابط في
أسفل للإشتراك في
موقعي ع اليوتيوب
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAOOSioLh1GE3C1hp63Camw
Bible Quotations For today
Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those
who are sick. Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For
I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew 09/09-13/:”As
Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth;
and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him. And as he sat
at dinner in the house, many tax-collectors and sinners came and were sitting
with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his
disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’But when
he heard this, he said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but
those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not
sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
Titles For The Latest English LCCC
Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published
on November 15-16/2024
The
Arab-Islamic Summit of Misrepresentations/Etienne Sakr (Abu Arz) / November 15,
2024
Israel Launches Largest Incursion into South Lebanon
Iran backs Lebanon in ceasefire talks, seeks end to ‘problems’
Israeli Strike Hits Edge of Beirut Suburbs
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Asks Iran to Help Secure a Ceasefire in
Israel-Hezbollah War
Berri to Asharq Al-Awsat: US Proposal Does Not Guarantee Israeli Freedom of
Movement in Lebanon
Lebanon: US Hands Berri a Draft Proposal for a Ceasefire
Beirut's Southern Suburbs Under Fire, Rising Casualties in the South
Ali Larajani's Security Team Resists Airport Check
Mikati to Larijani: Iran Must Avoid Positions That Create Tensions
Devastation Mounts Amid Escalating Tensions Between Hezbollah and Israel
Geagea Stresses to Magro the Need to Implement International Resolutions
The Shadow of War on the Holiday Season!/Christiane Tager/This is
Beirut/November 15/2024
Editorial/This is Beirut/Larijani… Go Home
French Prosecutors Request Carlos Ghosn, French Culture Minister Stand Trial in
Corruption Case
Italy protests to Israel over unexploded shell hitting Italian base in Lebanon
Living in Syria’s Qusayr Becomes Nearly Impossible Due to Israeli Strikes,
Hezbollah Presence
Lebanon rescuer picks up ‘pieces’ of father after Israel strike
Video Link interview with Toni Nissi/The Capitol/Maria Maaloof TV
Iran backs Lebanon in ceasefire talks, seeks end to 'problems'/Maya Gebeily and
Riham Alkousaa/Reuters/November 15, 2024
Israel strikes Beirut suburbs after resident evacuation warnings
Hizbullah-Linked Lebanese Drug Lord Moved Cannabis Operation To Syria Using
Illicit Smuggling Routes Operated By Regime's Fourth Division; Hizbullah Stored
Large Shipments In Al-Dumayr To Fund War Against Israel
Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published
on November 15-16/2024
IAEA
Chief Visits Two Nuclear Sites during Iran Trip
Israeli Strikes at Damascus Suburb, Syrian State News Agency Says
Hamas ready for ceasefire ‘immediately’ but Israel yet to offer ‘serious’
proposal
French, Saudi officials meet in Paris to advance AlUla development initiative
Saudi Foreign Minister Meets with His French Counterpart in Paris
Gaza Aid Access 'At a Low Point', UN Official Say
Ukraine’s Zelenskiy Says Scholz-Putin Phone Call Opens ‘Pandora’s Box’
Gaza aid access 'at a low point', UN official says
Israel Air Force kills terrorist from PIJ Gaza City Brigade during strike
Hamas ready for ceasefire ‘immediately’ but Israel yet to offer ‘serious’
proposal
Titles For The Latest English LCCC analysis & editorials from miscellaneous
sources
on November 15-16/2024
Trump II: Challenges Ahead/Amir Taheri/Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
From Riyadh... Obligations of Conditional Peace/Mustafa Fahs/Asharq Al Awsat/November
15/2024
The Intifada Was Globalized in Amsterdam/Alan M. Dershowitz and Andrew Stein/Gatestone
Institute/November 15, 2024
Iran, Hezbollah strongholds make Syria a 'hunting ground' for Israel/Jonathan
Spyer/Jerusalem Post/November 15/2024
Trump and Biden’s influence on Israel: Netanyahu’s trial and right-wing
appointments/Yaakov Katz/Jerusalem Post/November 15/2024
Before Maximum Pressure, Trump Needs an Iran Strategy/Richard Nephew/the
Washington Institute/November 15/2024
Is Trump's Israeli ambassador pick a sign of potential West Bank annexation?/Ron
Kampeas/JTA/Jerusalem Post/November 15/2024
Israel plays Kurdish card to undermine support for Palestine/Sinem Cengiz/Arab
News/November 15, 2024
FROM THE ARCHIVE/The RFK Jr. Tapes/David Samuels/THe Magazine/April 24, 2023
The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News &
Editorials published
on November 15-16/2024
The
Arab-Islamic Summit of Misrepresentations
Etienne Sakr (Abu Arz) / November
15, 2024
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/2024/11/136888/
The Arab-Islamic summit held in Riyadh last Monday placed full responsibility
for the ongoing wars in the Middle East on Israel. It condemned the "brutal acts
of genocide" allegedly committed by Israel in Lebanon and Gaza, called for
banning arms exports to it, and demanded an immediate ceasefire, among other
things. Not to defend anyone or take any side, but for the sake of objective
truth, we affirm that these wars were initiated by both Hamas and Hezbollah, the
terrorist armed jihadist organizations, against Israel, forcing the latter to
respond based on the principle of action and reaction, in line with the
legitimate right to self-defense. Thus, the term "Israeli aggression," widely
used by most media outlets to describe Israel’s military operations in Gaza,
Lebanon, and the so-called Axis of Resistance countries, is merely wrong and
invalid.
What is astonishing is that the summit attendees made no mention whatsoever of
the Iranian regime, nor did they issue a single word condemning its direct
responsibility for igniting these destructive ongoing wars, despite the fact
that all participants know that the Mullahs' regime is the leader of the
so-called Axis of Resistance, the primary instigator of all terrorist operations
and devastating conflicts raging in this region of the world. Instead, the
opposite happened: their final statement condemned the Israeli raid on Iran,
deeming it a violation of its sovereignty. Truly astounding!
The attendees also called for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon without
specifying its conditions or implementation mechanisms. It should be noted that
any ceasefire that does not guarantee the full disarmament of the Iranian
terrorist Hezbollah, in accordance with UN Resolution 1559, is against Lebanon's
interests and is categorically rejected by the Lebanese people.
The height of audacity was embodied in the attendance of the head of the Syrian
regime, the criminal Bashar al-Assad, at the conference and his speech
condemning the current massacres, describing his opponents as butchers! Such a
rhetoric coming from the very architect of massacres, the master butcher himself
is a mere hypocrisy!
Lastly, the ultimate absurdity was in the statement of the Lebanese Prime
Minister, Najib Mikati, who called for a ceasefire In Lebanon based on
Resolution 1701, which has long been rendered obsolete by unfolding events. He
then tied resolving Lebanon’s crisis to the Palestinian issue, describing it as
"central."Stupidity and ignorance in their best forms!
In conclusion, the more we witness Arab summits convening, the more convinced we
become of the necessity of withdrawing from the Arab League.
Long Live Lebanon
Etienne Sakr – Abu Arz
(Free translation from Arabic by Elias Bejjani, the LCCC Editor & Publisher)
Israel Launches Largest
Incursion into South Lebanon
Beirut: Nazir Rida/Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
The Israeli army launched its “largest incursion” into southern Lebanon on
Thursday, advancing along three main axes. On the western front, forces reached
the outskirts of Shamaa, a town located about 4 kilometers from the border,
where they engaged in clashes with Hezbollah. This marked the first day of a
ground operation whose scope and objectives remain undefined. The incursion was
accompanied by widespread aerial bombardment targeting villages located 7 to 15
kilometers deep within Lebanese territory. The Israeli army stated that forces
from the 91st Division were expanding the scope of the ground operation into the
outskirts of the second line of villages in South Lebanon, entering areas where
Israeli forces had not previously accessed. During the operation, commandos from
the division reportedly discovered a rocket-launch platform containing 32
launchers, along with weapons depots, various munitions, and underground
tunnels. Although the Israeli army did not specify the operation’s scale or
location, sources in South Lebanon told Asharq Al-Awsat that Israel was
conducting “its broadest incursion attempt across all sectors.”The incursion
reached the outskirts of the strategic town of Shama, which overlooks the city
of Tyre. A Lebanese security source informed Asharq Al-Awsat that infiltration
attempts began at dawn along the Dahira axis. This border town, heavily
destroyed in recent weeks, was part of a path leading toward Wadi Hamoul and
Shama. Sources confirmed that Israeli forces reached Shama’s outskirts, where
heavy clashes were ongoing.
On the western front, the Israeli army avoided crossing wooded areas and
valleys, opting instead for exposed paths to minimize the risk of direct rocket
attacks by Hezbollah fighters believed to be entrenched in those regions. This
approach followed a shorter route from Dhaira through the outskirts of Teir
Harfa toward Shama. Notably, Shama hosts one of the largest UNIFIL bases in
southern Lebanon. Local media reported fierce clashes involving machine guns,
followed by Israeli artillery shelling of Teir Harfa with phosphorus and heavy
artillery shells. Reports also emerged of an Israeli Merkava tank being
destroyed while advancing in Wadi Al-Batishiya en route to Teir Harfa. An
Israeli helicopter was spotted evacuating injured soldiers from the incursion
axis. By afternoon, Israeli forces had reportedly withdrawn from some incursion
points back toward the border, while Hezbollah continued targeting military
positions with rocket fire.The Israeli army appears focused on reaching the
highlands overlooking Wadi Al-Hujeir, believed to be a launching site for
rockets targeting Israel. This strategy mirrors its geographic positioning in
southern Lebanon before its withdrawal in 2000.
Local media reported attempts to penetrate along multiple axes, including Dahira–Alma
Al-Shaab–Hamoul on the western front, and Naqoura–Teir Harfa in the same sector.
In the central sector, incursions targeted Yaron–Bint Jbeil, Ayta Al-Shaab–Bint
Jbeil, and Ayta Al-Shaab–Ainata. In the eastern sector, Israeli forces attempted
to advance through Al-Abbad–Houla and Wadi Hounin–Marjayoun. Field sources told
Asharq Al-Awsat that airstrikes resumed on border villages, suggesting that
Hezbollah fighters had managed to re-enter areas previously seized by Israeli
forces.
The renewed aerial bombardment targeted villages along the third and fourth
defensive lines in a bid to disrupt the missile and artillery support aiding
Hezbollah fighters on the ground. The intense Israeli shelling and airstrikes
extended 7 to 12 kilometers deep into Lebanese territory, hitting the outskirts
of villages such as Zibqin, Majdal Zoun, Sheihin, Shaqra, Braachit, Tiri,
Qabrikha, Al-Mansouri, and others. Dozens of villages were reportedly struck
with heavy artillery and air raids. The objectives, scale, and timeline of the
Israeli military operation remain unclear. Israeli media reports indicate
uncertainty about whether the incursion is aimed at establishing permanent
military positions in South Lebanon, or simply destroying border villages in the
second defensive line, as had been done with villages in the first line.The lack
of clarity stems from the Israeli withdrawal from first-line villages, which
enabled Hezbollah to regain access to those areas. While Yedioth Ahronoth
reported that the military seeks to establish conditions for a post-war scenario
in southern Lebanon—preventing armed Hezbollah presence south of the Litani
River, particularly in the first and second defensive lines—other commentators
argue that significant amounts of Hezbollah’s rocket stockpiles, which continue
to target deep into Israel, are located in second-line villages. These areas are
considered close enough to the border for Hezbollah to launch effective strikes
on Israeli territory.
Iran backs Lebanon in ceasefire talks, seeks end to
‘problems’
Reuters/November 15, 2024
BEIRUT: Iran backs any decision taken by Lebanon in talks to secure a ceasefire
with Israel, a senior Iranian official said on Friday, signalling Tehran wants
to see an end to a conflict that has dealt heavy blows to its Lebanese ally
Hezbollah. Israel launched airstrikes in the Hezbollah-controlled southern
suburbs of Beirut, flattening buildings for a fourth consecutive day. Israel has
stepped up its bombardment of the area this week, an escalation that has
coincided with signs of movement in US-led diplomacy toward a ceasefire.Two
senior Lebanese political sources told Reuters that the US ambassador to Lebanon
had presented a draft ceasefire proposal to Lebanon’s parliament speaker Nabih
Berri the previous day. Berri is endorsed by Hezbollah to negotiate and met the
senior Iranian official Ali Larijani on Friday.Asked at a news conference
whether he had come to Beirut to undermine the US truce plan, Larijani said: “We
are not looking to sabotage anything. We are after a solution to the
problems.”“We support in all circumstances the Lebanese government. Those who
are disrupting are Netanyahu and his people,” Larijani added, referring to
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hezbollah was founded by Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards in 1982, and has been armed and financed by Tehran. A
senior diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, assessed that more time was
needed to get a ceasefire done but was hopeful it could be achieved. The
outgoing US administration appears keen to secure a ceasefire in Lebanon, even
as efforts to end Israel’s related war in the Gaza Strip appear totally adrift.
World powers say a Lebanon ceasefire must be based on UN Security Council
Resolution 1701 which ended a previous 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.
Its terms require Hezbollah to move weapons and fighters north of the Litani
river, which runs some 20 km (30 miles) north of the border. Israel demands the
freedom to act should Hezbollah violate any agreement, which Lebanon has
rejected.In a meeting with Larijani, Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib
Mikati urged support for Lebanon’s position on implementing 1701 and called this
a priority, along with halting the “Israeli aggression,” a statement from his
office said. Larijani stressed “that Iran supports any decision taken by the
government, especially resolution 1701,” the statement said. Israel launched its
ground and air offensive against Hezbollah in late September after almost a year
of cross-border hostilities in parallel with the Gaza war. It says it aims to
secure the return home of tens of thousands of Israelis, forced to evacuate from
northern Israel under Hezbollah fire.Israel’s campaign has forced more than 1
million Lebanese to flee their homes, igniting a humanitarian crisis.
FLATTENED BUILDINGS
It has dealt Hezbollah serious blows, killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
and other commanders. Hezbollah has kept up rocket attacks into Israel and its
fighters have been battling Israeli troops in the south.
On Friday, Israeli airstrikes flattened five more buildings in Beirut’s southern
suburbs known as Dahiyeh. One of them was located near one of Beirut’s busiest
traffic junctions, Tayouneh, in an area where Dahiyeh meets other parts of
Beirut.
The sound of an incoming missile could be heard in footage showing the airstrike
near Tayouneh. The targeted building turned into a cloud of rubble and debris
which billowed into the adjacent Horsh Beirut, the city’s main park.
The Israeli military said its fighter jets attacked munitions warehouses, a
headquarters and other Hezbollah infrastructure. Ahead of the latest airstrikes,
the Israeli military issued a warning on social media identifying buildings.
The European Union strongly condemned the killing of 12 paramedics in an Israeli
strike near Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley on Thursday, EU foreign policy chief
Josep Borrell said.
“Attacks on health care workers and facilities are a grave violation of
international humanitarian law,” he wrote on X.
On Thursday, Eli Cohen, Israel’s energy minister and a member of its security
cabinet, told Reuters prospects for a ceasefire were the most promising since
the conflict began.
The Washington Post reported that Netanyahu was rushing to advance a Lebanon
ceasefire with the aim of delivering an early foreign policy win to his ally US
President-elect Donald Trump.
According to Lebanon’s health ministry, Israeli attacks have killed at least
3,386 people through Wednesday since Oct. 7, 2023, the vast majority of them
since late September. It does not distinguish between civilian casualties and
fighters.
Hezbollah attacks have killed about 100 civilians and soldiers in northern
Israel, the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and southern Lebanon over the last
year, according to Israel.
Israeli Strike Hits Edge of
Beirut Suburbs
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
An Israeli strike on Friday morning hit a building on the edge of Beirut's
southern suburbs, near a central park in the city, witnesses told Reuters. The
strike followed about 50 minutes after an evacuation warning for the area, which
is a densely packed neighborhood that includes residential apartment buildings,
businesses and a police center. On Thursday, an Israeli airstrike killed
at least 12 Lebanese rescue workers inside a civil defense center in the eastern
city of Baalbek, according to health and rescue officials, hours after state
media in Syria said Israeli strikes in and around the capital killed at least 15
people.
Lebanese emergency workers were digging through the rubble Thursday evening to
search for more of their colleagues still trapped under the destroyed rescue
center, the group said in a statement. At least three civil defense members were
wounded, The Associated Press said.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. Lebanon’s civil
defense forces have no affiliation with the militant group Hezbollah, and they
provide crucial rescue and medical services in one of the world’s most war-torn
nations. The Health Ministry condemned what it called a “barbaric attack on a
Lebanese state-run health center,” adding that “it is the second Israeli attack
on a health emergency facility in less than two hours.”In southern Lebanon, an
Israeli strike on Arabsalim village targeted the Health Authority Association, a
civil defense and rescue group linked to Hezbollah, killing six people,
including four paramedics, the Health Ministry said. Earlier, Israel carried out
at least two airstrikes on the western Mazzeh neighborhood of Damascus and one
of the suburbs of Syria's capital, Qudsaya, killing at least 15 and wounding
another 16, Syria's state news agency said. An Associated Press journalist at
the scene in Mazzeh said a five-story building was damaged by a missile that hit
the basement. The Israeli military said it hit infrastructure sites and command
centers of the Islamic Jihad militant group. In Syria, an official with
Palestinian Islamic Jihad said the strike in Mazzeh targeted one of their
offices, and several members were killed. The official spoke on condition of
anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. The airstrikes
came shortly before Ali Larijani, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ali
Khamenei, was scheduled to meet in Syria's capital with representatives of
Palestinian factions at the Iranian Embassy in Mazzeh. Israel's military says
Islamic Jihad participated alongside the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the
Oct. 7, 2023 attacks from Gaza into Israel that killed some 1,200 people —
mostly civilians — and saw 250 others abducted. The ensuing Israel-Hamas war has
spilled into the wider region, affecting Lebanon, Syria and leading to strikes
between Israel and Iran. The war has left much of Gaza in ruins and has killed
over 43,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to local health
authorities who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israeli warplanes intensified airstrikes in Lebanon on Thursday, targeting
various areas in southern and eastern Lebanon, including the outskirts of the
port city of Tyre and the Nabatieh province, the National News Agency said.
Throughout the day, sporadic airstrikes targeted Beirut’s southern suburbs in a
clear uptick in attacks on the district over the past two days, with the Israeli
military issuing evacuation warnings for several locations and buildings in the
suburbs.
The Israeli military said it struck Hezbollah targets in the Dahiyeh area,
including weapons storage facilities and command centers. Military spokesman
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said that over the past week, Israel had “struck more
than 300 targets from the air across Lebanon, including about 40 targets in the
heart of the Dahiyeh in Beirut.”Lebanon’s state media said an earlier Israeli
airstrike hit a building in Baalbek, killing at least nine people and wounding
five others. The strike came without warning. The Israeli military did not
immediately comment and the target was unclear.
A report by the World Bank on Thursday estimated that Lebanon has suffered $8.5
billion in physical damages and economic losses from 13 months of war. Hezbollah
began firing into Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.
Since then, Israeli strikes and bombardment in Lebanon have killed at least
3,380 people while the number of wounded has surpassed 14,400, the Health
Ministry said Thursday. Among the dead were 658 women and 220 children. In
Israel, 76 people have been killed, including 31 soldiers. Before the war
intensified on Sept. 23, Hezbollah said that it had lost nearly 500 members but
the group has stopped releasing statements about their killed fighters since.
United Nations peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix, speaking during a visit
to Lebanon, said the UN remains committed to keeping its peacekeeping force,
known as UNIFIL, in place in all of its positions in southern Lebanon, despite
intense ongoing battles between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants. UNIFIL
has continued to monitor the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah
across the boundary known as the Blue Line despite Israeli calls for
peacekeepers to pull back 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the border. UNIFIL has
accused Israel of deliberately destroying observation equipment, and 13
peacekeepers have been injured in the fighting.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Asks Iran to Help Secure a Ceasefire in
Israel-Hezbollah War
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister on Friday asked Iran to help secure a
ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hezbollah and appeared to urge it to
convince the armed group to agree to a deal that could require it to pull back
from the Israel-Lebanon border. The prime minister made the comments in talks
with Ali Larijani, a top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Larijani’s visit to Lebanon comes as the United States continued pushing both
sides to agree to a deal to end 13 months of exchanges of fire between Israel
and Hezbollah. Iran is a main backer of Hezbollah and for decades has been
funding and arming the Lebanese group. Hezbollah began firing rockets into
northern Israel the day after Hamas’ surprise attack into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023
ignited the war in Gaza – prompting exchanges between the two sides ever since.
Since late September, Israel dramatically escalated its bombardment of Lebanon,
vowing to cripple Hezbollah and end its barrages in Israel. More than 3,300
people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli fire – 80% of them in the past
month -- Lebanon’s Health Ministry says. According to Lebanese media, US
Ambassador Lisa Johnson handed over a draft of a proposed ceasefire deal to
Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, who has been leading the talks
representing Hezbollah, his close ally. A Lebanese official confirmed that
Beirut has received a copy of a draft proposal based on UN Security Council
resolution 1701, which ended the last Israel-Hezbollah war, in the summer of
2006. That resolution, among other things, said that only the Lebanese army and
UN peacekeepers should operate in southern Lebanon, meaning Hezbollah would have
to end its presence there. That provision was never implemented. Lebanon accuses
Israel of also violating the resolution by maintaining hold of a small, disputed
border area and conducting frequent military overflights over Lebanon. The
Lebanese official did not give details other than to say Israel was insisting
that some guarantees be included. The official spoke on condition of anonymity,
because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media about the ongoing
talks.The US Embassy refused to either confirm or deny the reports. In talks
with Larijani, caretaker Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati urged Iran to help
implement resolution 1701. He said the Lebanese government wants the war to end
and the resolution to be implemented “in all its details,” according to a
statement on the talks issued by his office. Mikati, who in recent weeks has
become more critical of Iran’s role in Lebanon, also said the government wants
Iran to help Lebanon’s national unity and not take any stance backing one party
against another. Iran’s backing for Hezbollah has helped the group, which is the
most powerful faction among Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, dominate the country’s
politics the last decade.After meeting Mikati and Berri, Larijani said his
visit’s main aim was “to loudly say that we will stand by Lebanon’s government
and people.”Asked if he was trying to thwart US ceasefire mediation, Larijani
said: “We are not trying to blow up any effort, but we want to solve the problem
and we will stand by Lebanon, whatever the circumstances.” Larijani held similar
talks a day earlier in Syria with President Bashar al-Assad. Syria’s state news
agency said that Assad and Larijani discussed the “ongoing aggression on
Palestine and Lebanon and the necessity of stopping it.”
While Larijani was in Beirut, Israeli forces carried out a new strike on the
southeastern edge of the city. Images taken by an Associated Press photographer
showed a rocket about to strike an 11-story residential building in Beirut’s
Tayyouneh neighborhood – then a blast of flame erupts from the side of the
building. Much of a lower level of the building was smashed to rubble. There
were no immediate reports of casualties. The Israeli military had issued a
warning before the attack, saying it was a facility that belonged to Hezbollah.
Near the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek, rescue teams continued searching
through the rubble Friday at the site of an Israeli strike the night before that
hit a civil defense center in the town of Douris. So far, the bodies of 13
employees and volunteers with the Lebanese Civil Defense had a been recovered,
the agency said, as well as some other remains that will require DNA testing.
Israel expanded its operations in Lebanon even as it continues its campaign in
the Gaza Strip, vowing to destroy Hamas, which is also backed by Iran. Funerals
were held Friday for 11 Palestinians killed Thursday in a series of Israeli
airstrikes in and around the central Gaza Strip city of Deir al-Balah. Two
children were among the dead, seen with the other dead by an AP reporter. On
Thursday, the UN Security Council’s 10 elected members circulated a draft
resolution demanding “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” in
Gaza. The US, Israel’s closest ally, holds the key to whether the UN. Security
Council adopts the resolution. The four other permanent members — Russia, China,
Britain and France — are expected to support it or abstain. The Israel-Hamas war
began after Palestinian fighters stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing
about 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and abducting 250 others. Israel’s
bombardment and ground offensives since then have killed more than 43,000 people
in Gaza, Palestinian health officials say. The officials don’t distinguish
between civilians and combatants but say more than half of those killed have
been women and children.
Berri to Asharq Al-Awsat: US Proposal Does Not Guarantee
Israeli Freedom of Movement in Lebanon
Beirut: Thaer Abbas/Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
Efforts to resolve the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon have for
the first time entered the negotiations phase. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri
received a written US proposal that was followed by discussions with American
and Hezbollah officials. The Iran-backed party has tasked its ally Berri with
the negotiations. Lebanon is expected to reply to the US proposal “very soon”
with a written message of its own that includes its reservations. Berri denied
to Asharq Al-Awsat that the US proposal included any guarantee for the freedom
of movement of the Israeli military inside Lebanon.The Americans and others know
that this is unacceptable and not open for discussion. “There can be no
undermining of our sovereignty,” stressed Berri. He also denied that the
proposal had suggested the deployment of NATO or other forces in Lebanon.
Another “unacceptable” point for Lebanon, continued Berri, is the formation of a
committee that would oversee the implementation of United Nations Security
Council resolution 1701 that helped end the July 2006 war between Hezbollah and
Israel and that calls for southern Lebanon to be free of all weapons outside
state control. Berri asserted that a current mechanism to oversee the
implementation of the resolution is already available, a reference to the UN
Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) that has been monitoring the implementation
since 2006. Regardless of the reservations, the speaker emphasized that the
discussions are going ahead positively. Moreover, he remarked that US envoy Amos
Hochstein’s next visit to Lebanon “hinges on progress in the negotiations.”
Asked about Israel’s air strikes on his hometown of Tebnine and the regions of
al-Ghobeiry and Bourj al-Barajneh in Beirut where he enjoys popular support, he
replied: “It seems that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu resorts to
force when he wants a concession. But he doesn’t know who he is dealing with,
and such actions don’t work with us.”
Lebanon: US Hands Berri a Draft Proposal for a Ceasefire
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
US Ambassador to Lebanon Lisa Johnson has reportedly handed a document to
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, which included a proposal for a ceasefire in
Lebanon, Lebanese media outlets reported on Thursday. No further details were
available. For its part, Lebanon's Al-Jadeed TV quoted sources close to Berri,
stating that the Speaker had given the US Ambassador his response to the
proposal put forward by US envoy Amos Hochstein. Unnamed sources close to Berri
said the Speaker seems “optimistic about reaching a ceasefire within a few days
or a week, provided that no unforeseen developments occur”. Earlier Thursday,
the US news outlet Axios reported that an American official confirmed the United
States had reached agreements with Israel on a ceasefire deal and was now
working to secure similar arrangements with the Lebanese authorities. For his
part, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peace
Operations, affirmed on Thursday that the redeployment of the Lebanese Army in
southern Lebanon is "absolutely crucial" for any lasting solution to end the war
between Hezbollah and Israel. Lacroix stated during a meeting with journalists
near Beirut that "the redeployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces is a key element
for any permanent solution," amid the ongoing escalation in fighting between
Hezbollah and Israel since September 23, according to AFP. Lacroix conducted a
three-day visit to Lebanon, during which he met with several officials,
including Prime Minister Najib Mikati, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri -who is a
close ally of Hezbollah and is negotiating on its behalf to end the war- and
Army Commander General Joseph Aoun. He also visited sites operated by the United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the south. The United States is
working to mediate a ceasefire to end the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah,
but these efforts have yet to yield results. Israel launched an intensive air
and ground military campaign against Lebanon late in September following a
cross-border exchange of fire, coinciding with the ongoing Gaza conflict.
Beirut's Southern Suburbs
Under Fire, Rising Casualties in the South
This is Beirut/November 15/2024
Widespread destruction in Beirut's southern suburbs and South Lebanon amid a
rise in civilian casualties ©Al-Markazia. Violence went on unabated on Friday
with devastating Israeli airstrikes hitting Beirut’s southern suburbs for the
fourth consecutive day, while strikes and fighting between Israeli troops and
Hezbollah continued in South Lebanon, causing additional casualties among
civilians. Evacuation warnings were issued during the day and late afternoon by
Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee, followed by intense raids on Ghobeiri,
Haret Hreik and al-Hadath, inflicting significant material damages. Adraee
stated on his X account that the Israeli army completed a third wave of
airstrikes on Beirut's southern suburbs “targeting several Hezbollah command
centers.”“In the last 24 hours, warplanes attacked a missile storage facility as
well as 15 rocket launchers in southern Lebanon,” he added. The National News
Agency (NNA) reported on Thursday evening that a family of five, including three
children, were killed in an airstrike that targeted their house in the town of
Ain Qana in South Lebanon’s Iqlim al-Tuffah region. Israeli warplanes also
raided residential and commercial areas in Tyre and destroyed a major commercial
center in Nabatieh and adjacent areas, killing several civilians, including six
rescuers from the Islamic Health Society. Hezbollah, for its part, claimed
several attacks against Israeli forces inside the South Lebanese towns of Sa’sa
and Maroun al-Ras, inflicting casualties among the troops. According to al-Arabiya
TV channel, Israeli units are attempting to advance toward al-Bayyada
overlooking the Tyre coastline and Hezbollah positions in the western sector.
The United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs in Lebanon expressed concern
over the alarming rise in casualties due to Israeli bombardments on residential
areas. According to the Ministry of Public health, the death toll has risen to
3,445 with 14,599 injuries.
UNIFIL
In another development, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)
said that a French peacekeeper was killed in a road accident near Chamaa on
Friday, and three others sustained minor injuries as their convoy headed to the
force’s Headquarters in Naqoura. According to the statement, UNIFIL medical
staff and the Lebanese Red Cross provided on-site assistance. Also on Friday, a
shell landed inside the command center of the Western Sector and base of
UNIFIL’s Italian unit in the town of Chamaa during Israeli artillery shelling of
the area. This occurred after Israeli forces withdrew from the town, following
an attack by Hezbollah.
Ali Larajani's Security Team Resists Airport Check
This is Beirut/November 15/2024
Ali Larijani, an advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
arrives in Lebanon on a diplomatic mission. ©Al-Markazia. The security team
accompanying Ali Larijani, the advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, refused to undergo a mandatory security inspection at Beirut Rafic
Hariri International Airport on Friday, citing diplomatic immunity. Brigadier
General Fadi Kfouri, head of airport security, had ordered a thorough inspection
of the delegation upon their arrival. However, the refusal of the Iranian
embassy's security team to comply led Kfouri to take immediate action, closing
all gates to the VIP lounge and halting the team's movements. Following
negotiations, the delegation's luggage was eventually inspected, allowing the
situation to de-escalate, and airport operations returned to normal.
Mikati to Larijani: Iran Must Avoid Positions That Create
Tensions
This is Beirut/November 15/2024
Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati emphasized the importance of Iran
“avoiding positions that could create friction between different Lebanese
factions or favor one group over another.”During his meeting at the Governmental
Palace with Ali Larijani, the advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, Mikati urged Tehran to “support Lebanon’s stance on implementing UN
Security Council Resolution 1701, as well as on electing a president that all
Lebanese agree on, and to promote national unity.”Mikati stressed that “the
Lebanese government is focused on halting Israeli aggression, achieving a
ceasefire, and fully implementing Resolution 1701 without any amendments or
interpretations.”He added, “Negotiations are ongoing to reach an
agreement.”Larijani, who arrived in Beirut on Friday, held discussions with
Prime Minister Mikati, joined by Mohammed Reda Chibani, the special envoy of
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi for Middle Eastern and Western Asian
affairs. Larijani then visited Ain el-Tineh for a meeting with Speaker of
Parliament Nabih Berri. Following these meetings, Larijani stated, “We reaffirm
our support for the government, the army, and the Lebanese resistance in their
fight against Israeli aggression.”He continued, “We do not seek to obstruct any
process; rather, we want a solution for Lebanon.”Larijani added, “We are working
to resolve the issues, while Netanyahu is blocking any outcome.” He emphasized,
“It is important to distinguish between friends and enemies.”According to the
Iranian embassy in Beirut, Larijani discussed efforts with Berri to secure a
ceasefire. The Supreme Leader’s advisor is also expected to meet with Lebanese
lawmakers and party leaders, according to the embassy.
Devastation Mounts Amid Escalating Tensions Between
Hezbollah and Israel
This is Beirut/November 15/2024
The situation on the ground leaves little room for hope of an imminent ceasefire
as hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel escalate. Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly preparing for a potential ground operation deep
into Lebanese territory if Hezbollah does not agree to a ceasefire, according to
the Wall Street Journal.
Southern Suburb
Early Friday morning, Israeli airstrikes resumed on Beirut’s southern suburb,
including the Ghobeiry district, following evacuation warnings from the Israeli
Army’s Arabic-speaking spokesperson, Avichay Adraee. Adraee urged residents to
vacate areas near Hezbollah facilities, advising them to stay at least 500
meters away. The strikes on Dahyeh resulted in thick plumes of smoke rising over
the city. Maan Khalil, head of Ghobeiry’s municipality, told al-Mayadeen that 11
attacks in under 48 hours had severely damaged the region’s infrastructure,
including its main streets. About an hour later, another evacuation order was
issued and raids occured in Burj al-Barajneh, in an area near Beirut Airport’s
tarmac, as well as a violent strike in Tayyouneh.
Southern Lebanon
In southern Lebanon, Israeli aircraft launched extensive raids on towns such as
Kafra, Naqoura, Tayr Harfa, and Tyre. The village of Khiam was also subjected to
violent raids on Friday morning.
In Burj Rahal, a house was struck, though no casualties were reported.Rubble
clearance operations are underway to restore access to blocked roads. Meanwhile,
numerous homes in Tebnin were destroyed. The violence escalated in Nabatiyeh,
where residential areas and shopping centers were targeted. Strikes in the
Arabsalim region claimed the lives of six rescue workers from Hezbollah’s
Islamic Health Authority. Several villages, including Yohmor al-Chaqif, Taybe,
Zeita, and Khiam, also came under heavy fire.
The Beqaa
The Beqaa region has suffered devastating losses, with 20 fatalities reported in
Baalbeck since Thursday, including women and children.Airstrikes on the al-Chaab
district claimed eight lives and injured over 20 others. At the same time, an
attack on a Civil Defense center in Douris killed 12 people, including its
regional head, Bilal Raad. Adraee reported that forces from several divisions
were actively engaged in southern Lebanon, uncovering weapons, rockets, and
underground Hezbollah facilities. He stated that military structures, including
Hezbollah’s al-Radwan and Badr units, were also targeted in the attacks.
Hezbollah
In response, Hezbollah fired missiles at the Shraga base near Acre and struck
Israeli troops near Tayr Harfa. Rockets launched from Lebanon also targeted
Israeli forces in Kiryat Shmona and the Tel Haïm intelligence base. Air raid
sirens sounded in Yaroun, Kiryat Shmona, Acre, and Haifa as two missiles were
intercepted over Haifa Bay.
Geagea Stresses to Magro the Need to Implement International Resolutions
This is Beirut/November 15/2024
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea meets French Ambassador Hervé Magro to
discuss regional developments, including France’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire
and enforce international resolutions. ©Al-Markazia.Lebanese Forces Party Chief
Samir Geagea met with French Ambassador Hervé Magro on Thursday to review local
and regional developments, including France’s ongoing efforts to mediate a
ceasefire and ensure the implementation of international resolutions. Geagea
underscored the need to enforce international Resolutions 1559, 1680, and 1701.
He affirmed that these resolutions formed a mandatory roadmap for restoring
sovereignty, state institutions, and decision-making power. He called for firm
stances and a rejection of partial solutions, urging decisive action to resolve
Lebanon’s ongoing crisis. For his part, Magro briefed Geagea on France’s
humanitarian support for Lebanon, emphasizing commitments highlighted during the
October 24 international conference in Paris to bolster Lebanon’s sovereignty
and stability. Discussions also addressed Lebanon’s stalled presidential file
and the challenges facing the quintet’s diplomatic efforts during this turbulent
period.
The Shadow of War on the Holiday Season!
Christiane Tager/This is Beirut/November 15/2024
As the year-end holidays approach, Lebanese expatriates who usually rush home to
celebrate Christmas and New Year's with their families are now facing a grim
reality. The ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is profoundly
affecting Lebanon, turning it from a place of festivities and celebrations into
a war zone. This year, behind the sparkle of lights and the magic of Christmas
displays lies a holiday season that appears bleak. The war between Hezbollah and
Israel is not only causing a reduction in the number of travelers but is also
impacting the entire tourism sector.
Jean Abboud, President of the Union of Travel Agency Owners, tells This is
Beirut that reservation levels are far from ideal. He points out that only the
national airline, MEA, continues to serve Lebanon, compared to 55 airlines
operating flights to Beirut before the war. MEA currently operates 25 departures
and 25 arrivals daily. "Last year, 70 flights arrived each day during this same
period," he says. "Still, a small glimmer of hope: starting December 10, MEA
flights to Beirut are at 60% capacity, which is not bad given the
circumstances," says Abboud.
However, he notes that this remains minimal compared to previous years,
especially since the number of flights has been reduced by more than half. He
laments that tourism will not contribute to the economic cycle as it once did,
pointing out that last year, tourism generated $6 billion, whereas this year, it
will only bring in $2 billion. Pierre Achkar, President of the Federation of
Tourism Unions and the Hotel Union, describes the situation in the hotel sector
as "catastrophic." No reservations have been made so far, and hotel occupancy
rates are hovering around 0%. To cover its operating costs, a hotel needs an
occupancy rate between 30% and 50%. And how will the hotels survive? He responds
fatalistically, "We have vast experience managing such situations. We’re trying
to self-finance, but unfortunately, some establishments will be forced to
close."Most guesthouses have closed their doors, waiting for better days. Ramzi
Salman, President of the Union of Guesthouse Owners, says that some were
scheduled to reopen in December, but given the circumstances, they will likely
remain closed until the situation improves. As for the restaurateurs, the vice
president of their union, Khaled Naha, tells This is Beirut that compared to
2023, when establishments were fully booked throughout the holiday season and
generated significant revenue, the 2024 year-end celebrations “offer no
encouragement and above all, no visibility.” He hopes the conflict will end as
soon as possible, estimating that "at that point, many expatriates will return
to the country." It’s worth noting that the number of passengers at Beirut’s
Rafic Hariri International Airport (arrivals, departures, and transits) dropped
by 19.1% in the first ten months of 2024, falling from 6.3 million in 2023 to
5.1 million in 2024. The number of tourists also declined by 24% compared to
2023.
Editorial/This is Beirut/Larijani… Go Home
This is Beirut/November 15/2024
Alright, perhaps the title is a bit harsh for a nation known for its legendary
hospitality. But Ali Larijani’s visit — as the advisor to Supreme Leader
Khamenei — feels a bit like those uninvited guests who show up for dinner and
overstay their welcome long after you’re ready to call it a night.
That being said, if Larijani arrives bearing humanitarian aid and suitcases
brimming with cash — let’s say at least $5 billion to start rebuilding the tens
of thousands of homes destroyed due to his country's successive strategic
blunders — then perhaps the 1.5 million internally displaced people, who have
lost everything, might greet him with open arms. But let’s be honest, that’s a
big “if.” If Larijani, who’s also making a pit stop in Damascus — which, purely
coincidentally, was hit by intense Israeli airstrikes on Thursday night — has
come to encourage the Lebanese to keep serving as cannon fodder for the glory of
the mullah, then frankly, he can save his warmongering rhetoric for his
colleagues in Tehran. To be fair, Larijani isn’t one of the hardliners (though,
admittedly, the difference between hawks from doves in the Persian Empire isn’t
exactly glaring). His bid in the last presidential election was rejected due to
a lack of revolutionary zeal. And, ironically, that might actually work in his
favor here. However, the last thing the Lebanese people need right now is yet
another call to continue fighting valiantly bloody conflicts that have been
bleeding their country dry. The tactic is starting to feel a bit too
transparent. Iran will undeniably play a significant role in negotiating
Lebanon’s future, whether we like it or not. It’s imperative that Lebanese
leaders meeting with Larijani clearly convey that Lebanon does not wish to
remain an inflamed appendage of the Islamic Republic. Instead, we could happily
offer a generous dose of symbolic and moral support the day his country embarks
on a war. And here’s a little tidbit: Larijani has been a member of Iran’s…
Council of discernment since 2020. Yes, it’s a real thing. Let’s hope he brings
along some tips from this council on the fine art of discernment — a quality his
country seems to sorely lack.
French Prosecutors Request Carlos Ghosn, French Culture Minister Stand Trial in
Corruption Case
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
The French prosecutor's office for financial crimes has requested former
automobile executive Carlos Ghosn and French culture minister Rachida Dati stand
trial following its probe into corruption, a judicial source said on Friday.A
judge must make a decision on the request.
Investigators had been probing the consulting fees French culture minister
Rachida Dati once received from the Renault-Nissan auto alliance. The alliance
had hired Dati as a consultant after she stepped down as justice minister to
stand for the European Parliament. Dati has denied irregularities in the fees
she received during that time and Ghosn, who fled from Japan in a box aboard a
private jet to Lebanon, has denied allegations of misconduct against him. Ghosn,
who holds French, Lebanese and Brazilian citizenships, has not left Lebanon
since 2019 because of an Interpol Red Notice issued by Japan. Representatives
for the culture ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Representatives for Renault and Ghosn's lawyer declined to comment.
Italy protests to Israel
over unexploded shell hitting Italian base in Lebanon
Reuters/November 15, 2024
ROME: Italy on Friday said an unexploded artillery shell hit the base of the
Italian contingent in the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon and Israel promised
to investigate. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani spoke with Israeli
counterpart Gideon Saar and protested Israeli attacks against its personnel and
infrastructure in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, an Italian
statement said.Tajani said the safety of the soldiers in UNIFIL had to be
ensured and stressed “the unacceptability” of the attacks. The Italian statement
said Saar had “guaranteed an immediate investigation” into the shell incident.
Established by a UN Security Council resolution in 2006, the 10,000-strong UN
mission is stationed in southern Lebanon to monitor hostilities along the “blue
line” separating Lebanon from Israel. Since Israel launched a ground campaign in
Lebanon against Hezbollah fighters at the end of September, UNIFIL has accused
the Israel Defense Forces of deliberately attacking its bases, including by
shooting at peacekeepers and destroying watch towers.
Living in Syria’s Qusayr Becomes Nearly Impossible Due to Israeli Strikes,
Hezbollah Presence
Damascus/Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
Intense Israeli airstrikes on the Qusayr region in western Homs, Syria, along
with Israel’s escalating conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, are forcing
residents to flee. Many are choosing not to return, while some are selling their
homes at very low prices. “Living there is nearly impossible with Hezbollah’s
presence and Israeli airstrikes hitting the entire area,” said one resident. A
man in his fifties, originally from Qusayr and displaced since 2011, says he has
been given “security approval” to return to his home in the northern part of the
city.However, he fears doing so because of the frequent Israeli airstrikes and
Hezbollah's presence. From his current home in Homs, he told Asharq Al-Awsat:
“How can I take my family to certain death? Two young men from the area recently
died in Israeli strikes after returning from Lebanon.” He added: “They fled
death in Lebanon, but were killed in Qusayr.”He noted that only a few families
have returned, and they live in constant fear of the ongoing airstrikes. A
university student who visits the area occasionally said the situation is “very
bad” due to Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets. He told Asharq Al-Awsat: “The
situation for families there is heartbreaking. They’ve barely repaired their
homes, and displaced families from Qusayr are struggling with high rents and
rising costs.” “They want to return but are too scared,” he added. “If Israel's
reason is Hezbollah’s presence, why doesn’t this end? Civilians are dying in
airstrikes—what did they do wrong? And what about the families suffering from
displacement and high costs?,” the student wondered. Due to ongoing Israeli
airstrikes, many returning residents are leaving again, with some selling their
homes for very low prices. Brokers are offering to buy large homes for 200
million Syrian pounds, though their market value is over 700 million, according
to a local source. The source added: “When some families were allowed to return,
they were hopeful. But it seems Hezbollah’s control over the area won’t end
soon. Living under these conditions is very hard, and the situation has worsened
with the ongoing Israeli bombing.”
Lebanon rescuer picks up
‘pieces’ of father after Israel strike
AFP/November 15, 2024
DOURIS, Lebanon: Suzanne Karkaba and her father Ali were both civil defense
rescuers whose job was to save the injured and recover the dead in Lebanon’s
war. When an Israeli strike killed him on Thursday and it was his turn to be
rescued, there wasn’t much left. She had to identify him by his fingers.Karkaba
then rushed back to the bombed civil defense center to search for her fellow
first responders under the rubble. Israel struck the center, the main civil
defense facility in the eastern Baalbek area, while nearly 20 rescuers were
still inside, said Samir Chakia, a local official with the agency. At least 14
civil defense workers were killed, he said. “My dad was sleeping here with them.
He helped people and recovered bodies to return them to their families... But
now it’s my turn to pick up the pieces of my dad,” Karkaba told AFP with tears
in her eyes. Unlike many first-responder facilities previously targeted during
the war, this facility in Douris, on the edge of Baalbek city, was state-run and
had no political affiliation. Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a
request for comment. Friday morning, dozens of rescuers and residents were still
rummaging through the wreckage of the center. Two excavators pulled broken slabs
of concrete, twisted metal bars and red tiles. Wearing her civil defense uniform
at the scene, Karkaba said she had been working around-the-clock since Israel
ramped up its air raids on Lebanon’s east in late September. “I don’t know who
to grieve anymore, the (center’s) chief, my father, or my friends of 10 years,”
Karkaba said, her braided hair flowing in the wind. “I don’t have the heart to
leave the center, to leave the smell of my father... I’ve lost a part of my
soul.”Beginning on September 23, Israel escalated its air raids mainly on
Hezbollah strongholds in east and south Lebanon, as well as south Beirut after
nearly a year of cross-border exchanges of fire.A week later Israel sent in
ground troops to southern Lebanon. More than 150 rescuers, most of them
affiliated with Hezbollah and its allies, have been killed in more than a year
of clashes, according to health ministry figures from late October. Friday
morning, rescuers in Douris were still pulling body parts from the rubble,
strewn with dozens of paper documents, while Lebanese army troops stood guard
near the site. Civil defense worker Mahmoud Issa was among those searching for
friends in the rubble. “Does it get worse than this kind of strike against
rescue teams and medics? We are among the first to... save people. But now, we
are targets,” he said. On Thursday, Lebanon’s health ministry said more than 40
people had been killed in Israeli strikes on the country’s south and east. The
ministry reported two deadly Israeli raids on emergency facilities in less than
two hours that day: the one near Baalbek, and another on the south that killed
four Hezbollah-affiliated paramedics. The ministry urged the international
community to “put an end to these dangerous violations.”More than 3,400 people
have been killed in Lebanon since the clashes began last year, according to the
ministry, the majority of them since late September.
Video Link interview with Toni Nissi/The Capitol/Maria Maaloof TV ماريا معلوف
Lebanon’s neutrality is our shield, yet Hezbollah’s dominance has
distorted it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOhyFKYkJK8
1. On Lebanon’s Neutrality and Hezbollah’s Waning Control:
“Lebanon’s neutrality is our shield, yet Hezbollah’s dominance has distorted it.
But a day will come when its grip on Lebanon slips, and the vision of a
‘Switzerland of the Middle East’ is reclaimed.”
2. On Lebanon’s Founding Pact and Unity:
“Lebanon’s National Pact was built on the promise of unity and neutrality. To
honor this, we need to steer clear of conflicts with our neighbors and focus on
rebuilding trust within.”
3. On the 1949 Armistice as a Foundation for Peace:
“Lebanon was at peace with Israel under the 1949 armistice, supported by the
Arab League. It’s proof that Lebanon’s neutrality once thrived and can be
revived.”
4. On Outdated Anti-Normalization Laws:
“Lebanon’s anti-normalization laws hold us back. Today, Lebanese citizens in the
UAE are losing jobs because these outdated restrictions make working alongside
Israelis illegal.”
5. On Lebanon and the Abraham Accords:
“Lebanon joining the Abraham Accords could be revolutionary, but it requires
fresh leadership willing to prioritize peace over outdated ideologies.”
6. On Public Opinion Turning Against Hezbollah:
“Lebanese public opinion is clear: Hezbollah is no longer seen as a protector.
The people are ready for change, even if the leadership hesitates.”
7. On the Future of Lebanon’s Defense Strategy:
“Lebanon’s future lies with its army, not Hezbollah. Our military needs the
chance to secure our borders with international support until it’s strong enough
to stand alone.”
8. On the Timeline for Real Change in Lebanon:
“Hezbollah’s influence is waning, but without new leaders willing to push for
real reform, we’re stuck in the past. It’s time for fresh faces and bold
decisions.”
9. On Massad Boulos ’ Unique Role:
“Massad Boulos is a powerful voice who can bridge the gap between East and West.
He understands both mindsets and could play a key role in strengthening
U.S.-Lebanon relations.”
Iran backs Lebanon in ceasefire talks, seeks end to 'problems'
Maya Gebeily and Riham Alkousaa/Reuters/November 15, 2024
BEIRUT -Iran will back any decision taken by Lebanon in talks to secure a
ceasefire with Israel, a senior Iranian official said on Friday, signalling
Tehran wants to see an end to a conflict that has dealt heavy blows to its
Lebanese ally Hezbollah. Ali Larijani, an advisor to Iran's supreme leader,
spoke during a visit to Beirut as Israel kept up its intensified bombardment of
Hezbollah-controlled areas of the Lebanese capital. Israel has this week stepped
up airstrikes against the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs - an escalation
that has coincided with indications of movement in U.S.-led diplomatic contacts
towards ending the conflict. The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon submitted a draft
truce proposal on Thursday to Lebanon's parliament speaker Nabih Berri, who is
endorsed by Hezbollah to negotiate, two senior Lebanese political sources told
Reuters. The draft was Washington's first written proposal to halt fighting
between its ally Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah in at least several weeks,
the sources said. The sources did not provide details about the contents of the
proposal. Speaking to reporters after meeting Berri, Larijani said Berri had
provided him with "good clarifications". "We are not looking to sabotage
anything," Larijani said, responding to a reporter who asked whether he had come
to Beirut to wreck the American draft. "We are after a solution to the problems.
We support in all circumstances the Lebanese government. Those who are
disrupting are Netanyahu and his people," Larijani said, referring to Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hezbollah was founded by Iran's Revolutionary
Guards in 1982, and has been armed and financed by Tehran. A senior diplomat,
speaking on condition of anonymity, assessed that more time was needed to get a
ceasefire done and was hopeful it could be achieved. The diplomacy marks a
last-ditch attempt by the outgoing U.S. administration to secure a Lebanon
ceasefire, as efforts to end the war in Gaza appear totally adrift. One major
sticking point is Israel's demand to retain freedom to act should Hezbollah
violate any agreement - a demand Lebanon has rejected. Israel launched its
offensive against Hezbollah after almost a year of cross-border hostilities
ignited by the Gaza war, declaring it wanted to secure the return home of tens
of thousands of people forced to evacuate from northern Israel. Israel's
campaign has forced more than 1 million people to flee their homes in Lebanon,
igniting a humanitarian crisis. It has dealt Hezbollah serious blows, killing
its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and other commanders, using airstrikes to
pound areas of Lebanon where Hezbollah has political and military sway, and
sending troops into the south. Hezbollah has kept up rocket attacks into Israel
and its fighters have been battling Israeli troops in the south.
FLATTENED BUILDINGS
On Friday, an Israeli airstrike flattened a building near one of Beirut's
busiest traffic junctions, Tayouneh, shaking the Lebanese capital. The targeted
building was located in an area where the southern suburbs meet other parts of
the city, a more central target than most that Israel has hit. Ahead of the
latest airstrikes, the Israeli military issued a warning on social media
identifying buildings in the southern suburbs and telling residents to evacuate,
saying they were near Hezbollah facilities. The sound of an incoming missile
could be heard in footage showing the airstrike near Tayouneh. The targeted
building turned into a cloud of rubble and debris which billowed into the
adjacent Horsh Beirut, the city's main park. On Thursday, Eli Cohen, Israel's
energy minister and a member of its security cabinet, told Reuters that
prospects for a ceasefire were the most promising since the conflict began. The
Washington Post reported that Netanyahu was rushing to advance a Lebanon
ceasefire with the aim of delivering an early foreign policy win to U.S.
President-elect Donald Trump, who is expected to be strongly pro-Israel.
According to Lebanon's health ministry, Israeli attacks have killed at least
3,386 people through Wednesday since Oct. 7, 2023, the vast majority of them
since late September. It does not distinguish between civilian casualties and
fighters. Hezbollah attacks have killed about 100 civilians and soldiers in
northern Israel, the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and southern Lebanon over
the last year, according to Israel.
Israel strikes Beirut
suburbs after resident evacuation warnings
Jerusalem Post/November 15/2024
The report of the building hit came approximately one hour after residents of
Lebanon's southern suburbs were called to evacuate their homes. Israeli
airstrikes hit Beirut's southern suburb area on Friday morning and struck a
building, Reuters images showed, and witnesses said. The Hezbollah-affiliated
Lebanese news channel Al Mayadeen also reported on the strikes in the area.
According to Reuters witnesses, the Israeli strike hit a building near a central
park on the edge of Beirut's suburbs. The report of the building hit came
approximately one hour after residents of Lebanon's southern suburbs were called
to evacuate their homes by IDF Arabic Spokesperson Avichay Adraee in an
X/Twitter post during the morning. Warning civilians in advance . Specifically,
Adraee noted that residents in the areas of Burj El-Barajneh and Ghobeiry should
leave their homes and stay at a distance of 500 meters before planned Israel
strikes. "You are located near facilities and interests affiliated with
Hezbollah, which the IDF will be targeting in the near future," Adraee wrote.
The post showed an illustration of a map with the mentioned locations marked in
red. Adraee posted an additional message to X on Friday afternoon that again
warned residents in suburban areas to leave. This time, he called for those in
the areas of Haret Hreik and Hadath to evacuate.
Hizbullah-Linked Lebanese
Drug Lord Moved Cannabis Operation To Syria Using Illicit Smuggling Routes
Operated By Regime's Fourth Division; Hizbullah Stored Large Shipments In Al-Dumayr
To Fund War Against Israel
MEMRI/November 15, 2024
The following report is now a complimentary offering from MEMRI's Jihad and
Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM). For JTTM subscription information, click here.
On November 4, 2024, the Istanbul-based Syria.tv network, which supports the
Syrian opposition, reported that Lebanese drug lords linked to Hizbullah and
listed on U.S. Treasury's OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, have
moved to resume operations in Syria following the breakout of hostilities
between Israel and Lebanese Hizbullah in southern Lebanon.
U.S. Sanctioned Hizbullah-Linked Cannabis Baron Moved Operation From Beqaa To
Latakia In Syria.
Quoting exclusive sources, the Syrian-opposition outlet reported that drug
dealers working in the Beqaa region of Lebanon, had moved to Damascus and
Latakia in coordination with Wassim Al-Assad, a cousin of Syria's President
Bashar Al-Assad.
According to the opposition outlet, the Syrian Army's Fourth Division, a branch
commanded by Bashar Al-Assad's brother Maher known for orchestrating the
production and smuggling of narcotics, working with Lebanese drug dealer Noah
Zaitar and an affiliated group working in the cultivation of cannabis (hashish)
and engaged in the drug trade, entered Syria illegally through the Homs
crossings. The groups entered Syria "on a military line" used for smuggling and
transporting individuals and goods, under the protection and supervision of the
Fourth Division, Syria.tv reported.
The outlet stated that Zaitar's group was stationed in the village of Al-Shir in
the Latakia countryside; from there, it moved to other areas within Latakia,
where factories producing Captagon pills continue to operate. Captagon is the
brand name of a psychoactive medicine, mainly prescribed to treat attention
deficit disorder, narcolepsy, and as a central nervous system stimulant.
"These movements of drug dealers in Lebanon came after the start of war, and the
Israeli bombing of various areas of Lebanon, especially the southern suburbs of
Beirut and the Beqaa region, where Zaitar and his group used to operate," said
the report.
In March 2023, Wassim Al-Assad and Noah Zaitar were added to the Specially
Designated Nationals list maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of
Foreign Assets Control (OFAC): "Zaitar is being designated pursuant to E.O.
13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided
financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in
support of, Hizbullah."
In Dire Need Of Funds: Hizbullah Moved Large Quantities Of Drugs Into Syria,
Hiked Prices
In a related context, the Syrian opposition news portal, Eye of Euphrates,
published a report on October 30, 2024, saying that Lebanese Hizbullah exploited
the state of chaos between Syria and Lebanon, concurrently with the Israeli
military campaign against Hizbullah, to increase its smuggling operations into
Syria. Citing exclusive sources, Eye of Euphrates reported that Hizbullah's need
for money was reflected in a 100 percent increase in drug prices, noting that
the large shipments of drugs were smuggled via the Jroud Arsal in Lebanon
towards Western Al-Qalamoun in Syria. The drugs are then transported, under the
protection of the Fourth Division, to the city of Al-Dumayr in the Damascus
countryside, 30 miles northeast of Damascus. The sources further asserted that
large quantities of drugs were moved from Al-Dumayr to the Al-Hurrah area in the
Syrian desert and stored in underground warehouses that were set up in advance.
The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published
on November 15-16/2024
IAEA Chief Visits Two Nuclear Sites during Iran Trip
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
The head of the UN nuclear watchdog visited two Iranian nuclear sites on Friday
as part of a visit to Iran, ahead of an expected European diplomatic push over
Tehran's atomic activities before Donald Trump's return to the White House.
During the visit, Iran's foreign minister told International Atomic Energy
Agency chief Rafael Grossi that Tehran is willing to resolve outstanding
disputes over its nuclear program but won't succumb to pressure, Reuters
reported. Grossi visited the Natanz nuclear plant and the Fordow enrichment
site, which is dug into a mountain around 100 km (60 miles) south of the capital
Tehran, state media reported, without giving details. Relations between Tehran
and the IAEA have soured over several long-standing issues including Iran
barring the agency's uranium-enrichment experts from the country and its failure
to explain uranium traces found at undeclared sites. "The ball is in the EU/E3
court," Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi wrote on X following talks in Tehran with
Grossi on Thursday, referring to three European countries - France, Britain and
Germany - which represent the West alongside the United States at nuclear talks.
"Willing to negotiate based on our national interest and inalienable rights, but
not ready to negotiate under pressure and intimidation," Araqchi said. Trump's
return to office as US president in January upends nuclear diplomacy with Iran,
which had stalled under the outgoing administration of Joe Biden after months of
indirect talks. During Trump's previous tenure, Washington ditched a 2015
nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers that curbed Tehran's nuclear work
in exchange for relief from international sanctions. Trump has not fully spelled
out whether he will continue his "maximum pressure" policy on Iran when he takes
office. The US withdrawal from the nuclear pact in 2018 and the reimposition of
sanctions prompted Tehran to violate limitations on its uranium enrichment -
seen by the West as a disguised effort to develop nuclear weapons capability.
Tehran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% fissile purity, close to the
roughly 90% required for an atom bomb. Tehran says its nuclear work is purely
for peaceful purposes.
Israeli Strikes at Damascus Suburb, Syrian State News
Agency Says
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
Israel carried out attacks on the Mazzeh suburb of Damascus on Friday, Syrian
state news agency SANA said, a day after a wave of deadly strikes on what Israel
said were militant targets in the Syrian capital. Explosions were reported
earlier on Friday in the vicinity of Damascus.
"Israeli aggression targets Mazzeh area in Damascus," SANA said in a news flash.
It gave no other details. There was no immediate comment from Israel. Fifteen
people were killed on Thursday in Israeli strikes on residential buildings in
Mazzeh and Qudsaya suburbs, state media reported. Israel said the attacks
targeted military sites and the headquarters of Islamic Jihad. Israel has been
carrying out strikes against Iran-linked targets in Syria for years but has
ramped up such raids since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Palestinian militant
group Hamas on Israel that sparked the Gaza war, Reuters reported. Separately,
the Israeli military said it had attacked on Thursday transit routes on the
Syrian-Lebanese border that were used to transfer weapons to Hezbollah. Syrian
state media reported that an Israeli attack completely destroyed a bridge in the
area of Qusayr in southwest of Syria's Homs near the border with northern
Lebanon.
Hamas ready for ceasefire
‘immediately’ but Israel yet to offer ‘serious’ proposal
Arab News/November 15, 2024
LONDON: A Hamas official has claimed that Israel has not put forward any
“serious proposals” for a ceasefire since the assassination of its leader Ismail
Haniyeh, despite the group being ready for one “immediately.”Dr. Basem Naim told
the Sky News show “The World With Yalda Hakim” that the last “well-defined,
brokered deal” was put on the table between the two warring sides on July 2. “It
was discussed in all details and I think we were near to a ceasefire ... which
can end this war, offer a permanent ceasefire and total withdrawal and prisoner
exchange,” he said. “Unfortunately (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu
preferred to go the other way.” Naim urged the incoming Trump administration to
do whatever necessary to help end the war. He said Hamas does not regret its
attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which left 1,200 people dead and prompted
Israel’s invasion of Gaza that has killed in excess of 43,000 people and left
hundreds of thousands injured. Naim said Israel is guilty of “big massacres” in
the Palestinian enclave, and when asked if Hamas bore responsibility as a result
of the Oct. 7 attack, he called it “an act of self defense,” adding: “It’s
exactly as if you’re accusing the victims for the crimes of the aggressor.”He
continued: “I’m a member of Hamas, but at the same time I’m an innocent
Palestinian civilian because I have the right to live a free and dignified life
and I have the right to defend myself, to defend my family.” When asked if he
regrets the Oct. 7 attack, Naim replied: “Do you believe that a prisoner who is
knocking (on) the door or who is trying to get out of the prison, he has to
regret his will to be? This is part of our dignity ... to defend ourselves, to
defend our children.”
French, Saudi officials
meet in Paris to advance AlUla development initiative
Arab News/November 15, 2024
PARIS: French and Saudi officials gathered in Paris on Friday at the French
foreign ministry for discussions about advancing the AlUla development
initiative. The AlUla Committee, a joint initiative established under an
intergovernmental agreement signed in April 2018, is the coordinating body for a
range of ambitious projects being carried out by the Kingdom and France. The
projects focus on cultural preservation, tourism enhancement, economic growth,
and environmental sustainability in Saudi Arabia’s AlUla region. The committee’s
mandate includes overseeing the implementation and monitoring of the
comprehensive 2018 accord, aimed at fostering broad-based progress in the
area.The French delegation at the meeting included senior figures from the
ministries of European affairs and foreign relations, economy, and culture. On
the Saudi side, high-ranking officials from the culture, foreign, and investment
ministries participated, along with representatives such as the president of the
French Agency for AlUla Development (AFALULA) and the chairperson of the Royal
Commission for AlUla (RCU). French ministers Jean-Noel Barrot and Rachida Dati
met with Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan, Saudi Arabia’s culture minister,
Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Khaled Al-Faleh, investment
minister. Jean-Yves Le Drian, executive president of AFALULA, and Abeer Al-Akel,
acting CEO of the RCU, also took part in the meeting. The focus of the
discussions was on assessing the state of the Franco-Saudi partnership and
defining the future direction for AlUla’s development. Participants reviewed
collaborative projects that draw on French expertise, particularly in
archaeological research — highlighted by the involvement of 120 French
archaeologists and researchers in the region. Other focal points included
cultural initiatives such as the Villa Hegra project, as well as advances in
hospitality, transport and infrastructure. Additionally, the meeting addressed
the French Heritage Endowment Fund, which was established as part of the 2018
agreement, and reinforced its continued commitment to supporting heritage
conservation and cultural initiatives tied to AlUla’s unique historical
significance.
Saudi Foreign Minister
Meets with His French Counterpart in Paris
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah met on
Friday with French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot
during a working lunch. The foreign ministers discussed bilateral relations and
exchanged views on regional and international developments, especially the
developments in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, SPA reported. Attending the meeting
were Saudi Ambassador to France Fahad Ruwaily and Director General of the
Foreign Minister’s Office Abdulrahman Al-Dawood.
Gaza Aid Access 'At a Low Point', UN Official Says
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
Aid access in Gaza is at a low point with deliveries to parts of the besieged
north of the enclave all but impossible, a UN humanitarian official said on
Friday. The remarks run counter to a US assessment earlier this week that Israel
is not currently impeding humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip, avoiding
restrictions on US military aid. Israel has said it has worked hard to assist
the humanitarian needs in Gaza. "From our perspective, on all indicators you can
possibly think of in a humanitarian response, all of them are going in the wrong
direction," said Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in response to a question at a Geneva
press briefing about whether humanitarian access had improved, Reuters reported.
"Access is at a low point. Chaos, suffering, despair, death, destruction,
displacement are at a high point," he added. Laerke voiced concern about north
Gaza where residents have been ordered to head south as Israeli forces' more
than month-long incursion continues. Israel says its operations there are
designed to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping. "We have seen and been
particularly concerned about the situation in the north of Gaza, which is now
effectively under siege and it is near impossible to deliver aid in there. So
the operation is being stifled," Laerke said. "One of my colleagues described it
as, for humanitarian work... you want to jump. You want to jump up and do
something. But what he added was: but our legs are broken. So we are being asked
to jump while our legs are broken." US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in an Oct. 13 letter gave their Israeli
counterparts a list of specific steps that Israel needed to do within 30 days to
address the worsening situation in Gaza. Failure to do so may have possible
consequences on US military aid to Israel, they said in the letter. Other non-UN
aid groups say Israel has failed to meet the demands - an allegation Israel has
rejected.
Ukraine’s Zelenskiy Says Scholz-Putin Phone Call Opens ‘Pandora’s Box’
Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the German chancellor's phone call with
Russia's leader on Friday opened a "Pandora's box" that undermined efforts to
isolate Vladimir Putin and end the war in Ukraine with a "fair peace".A German
government spokesperson said Olaf Scholz urged Putin to begin talks with Kyiv
that would open the way for a "just and lasting peace" as the leaders held their
first phone call since December 2022 as the war in Ukraine rages on. "Olaf's
call, in my opinion, is a Pandora's box. Now there may be other conversations,
other calls " Zelenskiy said."... this is exactly what Putin has long wanted: it
is extremely important for him to weaken his isolation and to conduct ordinary
negotiations that will not end in anything." Kyiv says Russia is not prepared to
negotiate an end to the war in good faith and that Ukraine needs robust security
guarantees before there is any ceasefire in hostilities to prevent a future
Russian offensive. Zelenskiy said Moscow had repeatedly used negotiations to
advance its interests at Ukraine's expense, alluding to numerous rounds of talks
over the war with Russian-backed paramilitaries that erupted in Ukraine's east
in 2014 before the 2022 invasion. "This gave Russia the opportunity not to
change anything in its policy, not to do anything in essence, and this is
exactly what led to this war," he said in his evening address. Berlin is a major
Ukrainian financial backer and its largest provider of weapons after the United
States, whose future support for Kyiv appears uncertain following Donald Trump's
victory in the US presidential election. The victory of Trump, who has said he
will end the war in Ukraine swiftly without saying how, has spurred fears in
Europe that he will cut vital assistance to Kyiv and push for a peace that costs
Ukraine dearly.
INFORMED OF CALL
Though Germany has been a vital ally for Ukraine, its hesitance to provide
long-range Taurus cruise missiles has been a source of frustration in Kyiv as it
battles a foe armed with a powerful array of long-range weaponry. In the
one-hour phone conversation with Putin, Scholz demanded the withdrawal of
Russian troops from Ukraine and reaffirmed Berlin's continued support for
Ukraine, the German spokesman said. The Kremlin said Putin told Scholz during
the conversation that any agreement to end the war must take Russian security
interests into account and reflect "new territorial realities". The Kremlin
described the fact of the call happening as "extremely positive". Zelenskiy was
informed in advance of the call and cautioned Scholz against telephoning Putin,
according to a source in Zelenskiy's office. Putin has said Ukraine must drop
its ambitions to join the NATO military alliance and also retreat its forces
from four Ukrainian regions that his troops partially occupy. Kyiv says that is
tantamount to capitulation. With Kyiv preparing to mark 1,000 days since the
full-scale invasion, the Kremlin's forces are on the offensive on multiple
sections of the sprawling front line and Russian drones attack Ukraine's big
cities nightly.
Gaza aid access 'at a low
point', UN official says
Emma Farge/Reuters/November 15, 2024
Aid access in Gaza is at a low point with deliveries to parts of the besieged
north of the enclave all but impossible, a U.N. humanitarian official said on
Friday. The remarks run counter to a U.S. assessment earlier this week that
Israel is not currently impeding humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip, avoiding
restrictions on U.S. military aid. Israel has said it has worked hard to assist
the humanitarian needs in Gaza. "From our perspective, on all indicators you can
possibly think of in a humanitarian response, all of them are going in the wrong
direction," said Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in response to a question at a Geneva
press briefing about whether humanitarian access had improved. "Access is at a
low point. Chaos, suffering, despair, death, destruction, displacement are at a
high point," he added. Laerke voiced concern about north Gaza where residents
have been ordered to head south as Israeli forces' more than month-long
incursion continues. Israel says its operations there are designed to prevent
Hamas fighters from regrouping. "We have seen and been particularly concerned
about the situation in the north of Gaza, which is now effectively under siege
and it is near impossible to deliver aid in there. So the operation is being
stifled," Laerke said. "One of my colleagues described it as, for humanitarian
work... you want to jump. You want to jump up and do something. But what he
added was: but our legs are broken. So we are being asked to jump while our legs
are broken." U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd
Austin in an Oct. 13 letter gave their Israeli counterparts a list of specific
steps that Israel needed to do within 30 days to address the worsening situation
in Gaza. Failure to do so may have possible consequences on U.S. military aid to
Israel, they said in the letter. Other non-U.N. aid groups say Israel has failed
to meet the demands - an allegation Israel has rejected.
Israel Air Force kills
terrorist from PIJ Gaza City Brigade during strike
Jerusalem Post/November 15/2024
Anbar was eliminated alongside other Islamic Jihad terrorists who reportedly
fired rockets toward Israel and its military troops. Israel's military killed
terrorist Alkaman Abed Elslam Khalil Anbar, who held a significant role in the
Palestinian Islamic Jihad's Gaza City Brigade, the IDF announced on Friday
morning. According to the IDF, Anbar's position in the Islamic Jihad's Gaza City
Brigade placed him responsible for the terror group's fire array that directed
rockets toward Israeli territory. It also noted that Anbar was a significant
figure in the group's weapon manufacturing processes. Anbar's elimination
occurred through the intelligence direction of the Israeli Security Agency, the
IDF said. He was hit during an Israel Air Force strike. The IDF also added that
Anbar was eliminated alongside other Islamic Jihad terrorists who reportedly
fired rockets toward Israel and its military troops. IDF continues Gaza Strip
operations The IDF said that since Thursday, it has been continuing its
operational activity in several areas of the Gaza Strip, including Jabalya, Beit
Lahia, and Rafah.During these operations, it reportedly directed aerial strikes
and located large quantities of weaponry, including explosive devices, machine
guns, and additional terrorist equipment.
Hamas ready for ceasefire
‘immediately’ but Israel yet to offer ‘serious’ proposal
Arab News/November 15, 2024
LONDON: A Hamas official has claimed that Israel has not put forward any
“serious proposals” for a ceasefire since the assassination of its leader Ismail
Haniyeh, despite the group being ready for one “immediately.”Dr. Basem Naim told
the Sky News show “The World With Yalda Hakim” that the last “well-defined,
brokered deal” was put on the table between the two warring sides on July 2. “It
was discussed in all details and I think we were near to a ceasefire ... which
can end this war, offer a permanent ceasefire and total withdrawal and prisoner
exchange,” he said. “Unfortunately (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu
preferred to go the other way.”Naim urged the incoming Trump administration to
do whatever necessary to help end the war. He said Hamas does not regret its
attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which left 1,200 people dead and prompted
Israel’s invasion of Gaza that has killed in excess of 43,000 people and left
hundreds of thousands injured. Naim said Israel is guilty of “big massacres” in
the Palestinian enclave, and when asked if Hamas bore responsibility as a result
of the Oct. 7 attack, he called it “an act of self defense,” adding: “It’s
exactly as if you’re accusing the victims for the crimes of the aggressor.”He
continued: “I’m a member of Hamas, but at the same time I’m an innocent
Palestinian civilian because I have the right to live a free and dignified life
and I have the right to defend myself, to defend my family.” When asked if he
regrets the Oct. 7 attack, Naim replied: “Do you believe that a prisoner who is
knocking (on) the door or who is trying to get out of the prison, he has to
regret his will to be? This is part of our dignity ... to defend ourselves, to
defend our children.”
The Latest English LCCC analysis & editorials from miscellaneous
sources
on November 15-16/2024
Trump II: Challenges Ahead
Amir Taheri/Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
What will Trump’s foreign policy look like in his second term?
This is the question currently making the buzz in the commentariat around the
world. Western European pundits claim that Trump will abandon the Ukrainian lamb
to the Russian wolf or, at least, force the European shepherd to foot the bill
for keeping it half alive.
Indian oped-writers hope that Trump will cut China down to size, thus elevating
India as Asia’s new indispensable giant. Progressive Davos collectivists warn
that unless checked, Trump will go through the globalist ideology like a bull in
a china shop. In the past few days, I have run into even more interesting
speculations regarding Trump II foreign policy- from Iran and Israel. From Iran
comes a lengthy editorial in the daily Kayhan claiming that keen to maintain
friendly ties with Vladimir Putin, Trump will also refrain from attempts at
toppling the Islamic Republic in Tehran which Moscow has adopted as its
“faithful Ruslan. An even stranger reading of the tea-leaves came from an
Israeli strategy “expert” who wanted Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran and
destroy its infrastructures before Trump re-enters the White House. The
rationale for this is that Joe Biden’s lame duck administration won’t be able to
do anything to stop such an event while Trump would not have a sizzling potato
on his hands so soon in his second term.
So, what will Trump do?
The honest answer is nobody knows, perhaps not even he himself. In any case, the
United States has never been a one-man show and its president can’t be a modern
version of Kublai Khan or Tsar Vladimir of the 40 daughters.
The real question, therefore, is what could Trump II do to restore America’s
prestige across the globe and reassert itself as the indispensable power that it
still is? The answer is: plenty. In fact, Trump even if he doesn’t do anything
will repair some of the damage that the past three administrations shaped by
Barack Obama have done to US standing and credibility as a world power. In those
12 years, US leaders went around the world to apologize for imaginary injustice
done by Americans to various segments of mankind, mused about “leading from
behind” and presented the United States as a room service that doesn’t even ask
you to sign the bill let alone offer a tip. What Trump is seeking, however, is a
restoration of the classical meaning of alliance as a partnership in which pain
and profit are shared proportionally. Trump has also shown that the US should
not give its word only to get a few good headlines or help incumbents collect
votes in an election.
One example was Trump’s decision to implement the Senate resolution for
transferring the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Another was
the pledge to disengage from the Afghan imbroglio via an agreement with rival
factions in that forlorn land- a deal that turned into a fiasco because its
execution came under Biden’s presidency. Under the three Obama administrations
with Trump I as a brief interlude, the US saw Russia attack and occupy parts of
Georgia and annex Crimea and eventually invade Ukraine and did nothing. Obama
drew a red line against the use of chemical weapons to kill Syrian people but
when Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, did so, went into purdah. To divert
attention from the Middle East, Obama conjured the “pivot to Asia” slogan while
letting China grab a bigger chunk of the world, including US markets in the name
of free trade. However, for US to regain credibility it won’t be enough that
Trump not be Obama or Biden. Trump left many unfinished businesses when he had
to leave the White House in 2021. One such business is the Peace of Abraham
process that altered the established pattern of politics in the Middle East but
ended up as an unfinished symphony. Trying to finish it would be one of the
challenges Trump II will face albeit in a much less promising context. Trump
will also have to provide an alternative to the so-called Paris Accord on
climate change, a deeply flawed if not fraudulent deal he courageously rejected
almost eight years ago.
The pas-de-deux that Trump I performed with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un across
Asia led to a brief interlude in Pyongyang’s nuclear game but resumed with a
vengeance as Biden entered the White House. As for Iran, Trump’s “maximum
pressure” policy reined in the mullahs for almost four years during which they
didn’t attack US forces in Iraq and kept their proxies in Lebanon and Gaza on a
tight leash, thus allowing Israel a brief respite.
Trump II will have to decide whether the same result could be obtained with the
same means or something other than “maximum pressure” would be required.
Trump II machine won’t be in full gear before next spring. Donald Trump has to
complete his team, have its members approved by the Senate, and replace Senator
Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader. Then it has to organize goodbye and gold
watch retirement parties for at least 30 US ambassadors and reorganize the State
Department to free US diplomacy from deeply entrenched but misguided beliefs
marketed by lobbies, think-tanks and peddlers of progressivism within the
beltway. Doing meaningful business with European allies will also have to wait
until after Germany gets a new stable government, if it can, next spring and
France’s ramshackle coalition shows that it can go beyond grandstanding by just
standing. We must remember that Trump’s current unassailable position produced
by an unexpected landslide victory may not last beyond the next mid-term
elections in two years’ time. Nevertheless, he would have enough time to spell
out his policy options and set up his shop-window so to speak. Also remember
that regardless of what experts or even Trump himself say, the 47th president is
likely to be as unpredictable as the 45th one, a feature that helped him in
foreign policy last time and may do so again.
From Riyadh... Obligations of Conditional Peace
Mustafa Fahs/Asharq Al Awsat/November 15/2024
Between September 17 and November 11 of this year, Riyadh served as the stage
for three foundational events: a speech, a conference, and a summit. At the
heart of all three lay the Palestinian cause, with efforts centered on halting
the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
These events reaffirmed Saudi Arabia’s steadfast commitment to the two-state
solution, which has become a Saudi, Arab and Islamic prerequisite for any
comprehensive peace initiative in the region. These efforts are not aimed at
trading peace for peace; rather, they represent serious endeavors to achieve
long-term stability in the broader Middle East. Achieving this peace that
promotes stability and eases conflicts is increasingly tied to granting the
Palestinian people their rights—most notably, the establishment of an
independent state as defined by the two-state solution.
Saudi Arabia’s unwavering commitment to the two-state solution was reaffirmed by
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his address to the Shura Council on
September 18. This important speech preceded both the Arab-Islamic Summit held
on November 11 and the Global Alliance for a Two-State Solution Conference,
which convened in Riyadh on October 30. During his speech, the Crown Prince
declared: “The Kingdom will not cease its tireless efforts to establish an
independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. We affirm that
the Kingdom will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without this
condition being fulfilled.”In its pursuit of a two-state solution or the
establishment of a Palestinian state based on international
resolutions—including UN Security Council Resolution 242, issued on November 22,
1967, following the June War (known as the Naksa or setback)—Riyadh hosted the
Global Alliance for Implementing the Two-State Solution Conference on October
30. This initiative aligns with Saudi efforts to create an
Arab-Islamic-European-international framework aimed at cementing Palestinian
rights to statehood and recognition. Such efforts are particularly significant
as the two-state solution remains stalled, 57 years after the original UN
resolution. Saudi Arabia’s commitment to this cause persists despite the
unprecedented escalation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict following the Al-Aqsa
Flood operation and the subsequent war in Lebanon. For decades, Israel has
systematically worked to alter the geographic and demographic realities in
Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. These measures have included settlement
expansion, land confiscations, and fragmentation of Palestinian territories, as
well as political actions such as the enactment of a Knesset law rejecting the
establishment of a Palestinian state or the two-state solution. These
developments place the region at a crossroads, with clear choices: achieving
stability requires peace, and peace is contingent on land—namely, the
establishment of the long-overdue Palestinian state. Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic
efforts reached a peak during the extraordinary Arab-Islamic Summit held in
Riyadh on November 11. This summit underscored a unified and resolute
Arab-Islamic stance on the Palestinian cause, explicitly rejecting aggression
against Gaza, Lebanon, or any other nation. Its timing was particularly
noteworthy, coinciding with the results of the US presidential elections and the
preparations for a new administration in Washington. These Arab, Islamic, and
international commitments serve as clear priorities for the incoming occupant of
the White House. If there is to be a vision for a more stable world and genuine
attempts to resolve or reduce conflicts, the Palestinian issue remains the
essential entry point—a reality that cannot be ignored or bypassed, regardless
of the power or dominance of its detractors.
The Intifada Was Globalized in Amsterdam
Alan M. Dershowitz and Andrew Stein/Gatestone Institute/November 15, 2024
There is no moral or legal equivalence between non-violent mischief — such as
tearing down flags and shouting racial insults — and committing life-threatening
assaults upon people based on their religion and ethnicity. The anti-Israel
rioters were hunting down Jews...
Muslim extremists have a long history of hurling spears in response to
non-violent insults. Recall the numerous deadly attacks — shootings, stabbings,
bombings and lethal fatwas—against those who allegedly insulted the prophet by
picturing him or authoring books about him. There was also violence against
those who burned Korans or otherwise demeaned Islam. Even cartoons provoked
deadly responses. The law in no Western nation grants the victims of non-violent
insults the right to respond by violence. If a Jew were to physically assault
the many Muslims who have repeatedly demeaned Judaism or its nation-state during
recent protests, they would be appropriately punished, as some have been.
[W]e are likely to see more anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish pogroms in other parts
of the world as antisemitism moves from the fringes to the mainstream.
Protestors – both pro- and anti-Israel – have the right to express their views
verbally and even symbolically, but they have no right to attack individuals or
groups based on religion, ethnicity or national origin. Those who engaged in
physical assaults – and many were caught on video – must be prosecuted and, if
convicted, imprisoned or deported. A clear line must be drawn between lawful,
even if immoral, protests, and criminal violence.... It is a bright-line
distinction that many in the media are deliberately trying to blur.
The U.S. has a stake in stopping this violence: the call to "globalize the
intifada" is not limited to Europe. Those who advocate globalization are
inciting violence against Americans of Jewish heritage. The incitement may be
too general to be denied First Amendment protection against criminal punishment,
but the single standard demands that universities apply the same standard to
calls for intifada than they would to calls for lynching of blacks or assaulting
of gays. The real difference is that no university student or faculty member
would ever call for the latter, and if they did, they would be disciplined or
expelled. Yet today it is entirely acceptable, indeed expected, that radical
students will call for the lynching and assaulting of Jews and Israelis. That,
after all, is what an intifada entails.
We are likely to see more anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish pogroms in other parts of
the world as antisemitism moves from the fringes to the mainstream. Unless
something proactive is done, it's coming to a theater – or stadium – near you.
On university campuses throughout the world, there have been chants demanding
that the violent intifada – which killed thousands of Israeli children, women
and other civilians – be "globalized." Last week, we witnessed the first
significant manifestation of that demand in Amsterdam, where large groups of
predominantly Arab and Muslim rioters physically attacked Israelis and Jews who
had been cheering for an Israeli soccer team.
Although some of the media tried to blame the attacks on Israelis, the evidence
strongly suggests that this pogrom was planned well in advance and would have
taken place even if there had been no provocation by Israeli fans.
What some Israeli fans are accused of doing is all too typical of European
soccer "hooligans": tearing down the opposing team's flags – in this instance
Palestinian flags – and shouting racist epithets, but there is no evidence of
any violence directed against pro-Palestinian individuals by Israelis or Jews.
The violence was ALL perpetrated by anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rioters against
Israeli and Jewish victims.
There is no moral or legal equivalence between non-violent mischief — such as
tearing down flags and shouting racial insults — and committing life-threatening
assaults upon people based on their religion and ethnicity. The anti-Israel
rioters were hunting down Jews, compelling victims to beg for their lives by
denying they were Jewish.
Without justifying the shouting of racial slurs by some Israelis, it is
important to remember Sigmund Freud's brilliant insight that "civilization began
on the day the first human hurled an insult rather than a spear at his
opponent."
Muslim extremists have a long history of hurling spears in response to
non-violent insults. Recall the numerous deadly attacks — shootings, stabbings,
bombings and lethal fatwas—against those who allegedly insulted the prophet by
picturing him or authoring books about him. There was also violence against
those who burned Korans or otherwise demeaned Islam. Even cartoons provoked
deadly responses.
The law in no Western nation grants the victims of non-violent insults the right
to respond by violence. If a Jew were to physically assault the many Muslims who
have repeatedly demeaned Judaism or its nation-state during recent protests,
they would be appropriately punished, as some have been.
This attempt to justify the violence committed is yet another manifestation of
the rancid double standard imposed by the media and others against all things
Jewish. It also reflects widespread acceptance of the racist excuse that
"Muslims will be Muslims" when it comes to violently responding to insults.
Evidence strongly suggests that the violence in Amsterdam was planned and
coordinated well in advance of any non-violent provocations, and would have
occurred even if no flags had been taken down and no insults shouted. Also, many
non-Arab and non-Muslim Dutch antisemites cheered on the attackers, reflecting
the long-standing and deep Jew-hatred that has been part of Dutch culture since
before the Holocaust. The Netherlands was among the most pro-Nazi nations in
Europe during World War II, and after the war took little action against Dutch
people who collaborated with the German occupiers.
Not surprisingly, the Amsterdam police did not do enough to stem last week's
violence, and law enforcement authorities quickly freed most of the rioters,
including those who committed assaults.
Leaders of the Dutch government eventually apologized and took measures to
prevent recurrences. But we are likely to see more anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish
pogroms in other parts of the world as antisemitism moves from the fringes to
the mainstream. Unless something proactive is done, it's coming to a theater –
or stadium – near you.
Protestors – both pro- and anti-Israel – have the right to express their views
verbally and even symbolically, but they have no right to attack individuals or
groups based on religion, ethnicity or national origin. Those who engaged in
physical assaults – and many were caught on video – must be prosecuted and, if
convicted, imprisoned or deported. A clear line must be drawn between lawful,
even if immoral, protests, and criminal violence. There is no continuum. It is a
bright-line distinction that many in the media are deliberately trying to blur.
The U.S. has a stake in stopping this violence: the call to "globalize the
intifada" is not limited to Europe. Those who advocate globalization are
inciting violence against Americans of Jewish heritage. The incitement may be
too general to be denied First Amendment protection against criminal punishment,
but the single standard demands that universities apply the same standard to
calls for intifada than they would to calls for lynching of blacks or assaulting
of gays. The real difference is that no university student or faculty member
would ever call for the latter, and if they did, they would be disciplined or
expelled. Yet today it is entirely acceptable, indeed expected, that radical
students will call for the lynching and assaulting of Jews and Israelis. That,
after all, is what an intifada entails.
Some may argue that the literal meaning of intifada includes non-violent
actions, but many of those who hear the call to globalize the intifada
understand it to justify violence of the type seen in Amsterdam – and worse.
*Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at
Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of War Against the Jews: How to
End Hamas Barbarism, and Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process,
and Our Constitutional Rule of Law. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation
Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and is also the host of "The Dershow" podcast.
*Andrew Stein is an American Democratic politician who served on the New York
City Council and was its last president, and as Manhattan Borough President.
© 2024 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do
not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No
part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied
or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
Iran, Hezbollah strongholds make Syria a 'hunting ground'
for Israel - analysis
Jonathan Spyer/Jerusalem Post/November 15/2024
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/2024/11/136885/
Syria is likely also to continue to be a hunting ground for Israeli air power
working its way down the long list of Hezbollah and Iranian targets in the
country. With Israeli forces in daily action in Gaza and south Lebanon, and
intermittent drone and missile attacks continuing from Iraq and Yemen, one front
in the regional conflict currently underway has tended to be ignored: Syria. Yet
the available evidence shows that Israeli strikes against Lebanese Hezbollah and
Iranian targets in Syria have increased significantly over the last two months.
The individuals targeted in Syria have included veteran and prominent leaders
and operatives of the Iran-led regional axis. At the same time, reports in
regional media have appeared in recent weeks portraying Syrian President Bashar
Assad as a weak link in the Iranian-led war effort. These reports suggest that
the Syrian leader is trying to distance himself from his Iranian ally and move
closer to moderate Arab states. Some Israeli Syria-watchers concur with this
assessment. So what is going on in Israel’s most significant northern neighbor,
and where may things be headed? It is important to remember that the civil war
that began in Syria in 2012 has not concluded. Rather, the fighting lines have
become frozen, leading to a de facto partition of the country. After a
sorting-out period, Syria has since 2019 been divided into three de facto
entities: the regime-controlled area, encompassing around 60% of the country’s
territory including Damascus and the entire coastal area; the area controlled by
the Kurdish-dominated Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria (AANES),
which comprises around 30% of Syria; and a Turkish-guaranteed Sunni Islamist
enclave in the northwest, holding 10% of the country’s territory.
The continuation of this arrangement depends on the willingness of international
players to underwrite these areas of control: regime Syria is today a
protectorate of Iran and Russia, the US guarantees the survival of the
Kurdish-dominated area, and Turkey is the sponsor and controller of the Sunni
Islamist area.
Assad does not enjoy undisputed territorial control even over the area nominally
under his rule. His army is weak and impoverished. He depends on Iranian and
Russian support for his survival. As a result, the patrons are today the senior
partners. In practice, this means that the Iranians and their militia proxies
are today in control of the southeastern border crossing between Iraq and Syria
at Albukamal, and the roads leading westward. Assad’s army enters this area only
with Iranian permission. Southern Syria is thus a link in the chain of
contiguous Iranian control stretching from Iran across Iraq and Syria to Lebanon
and the Mediterranean. Israel professes no particular interest in Assad either
way, except insofar as his forces seek to facilitate, assist, or defend the
Iranian weapons trail from Iraq to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.
Israel's interest
Israel has, however, an intense interest in Iran’s activities on Syrian soil,
and in disrupting the Iranian effort.
IN RECENT weeks, this interest has been reflected in some very major “Resistance
Axis” scalps apparently claimed by Israeli air power on Syrian soil. The names
on this list may not quite have the prominence of Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah or Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh. But they are significant players, whose
sudden absence will contribute significantly to the disarray currently apparent
in this regional camp. The list includes Ali Musa Daqduq, a veteran Lebanese
Hezbollah operator whose name is well-known to Americans who served in Iraq. In
the years of Shi’ite insurgency against US and allied forces in that country,
Daqduq was a key facilitator and point man for the Iranians. He is believed by
the US to have taken part in deadly attacks on US troops. According to Syrian
media reports, Daqduq was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Sayida Zeinab
neighborhood of Damascus on November 12. An Israeli airstrike in the Qusayr area
this week took out a second very senior Lebanese Hezbollah operator. Qusayr, in
the Syria-Lebanon border area, is a strategically important area for Iran’s arms
trail into Lebanon. It was the site of a fierce battle in the Syrian civil war
in which Hezbollah prevailed over the Syrian rebels. This week, an Israeli air
strike on a location in that area killed Salim Ayyash, the Hezbollah man
convicted in absentia for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister
Rafiq al Hariri in 2005.
Several additional notable movement figures have also been eliminated in Syria
in recent weeks: Mahmoud Shahin, who headed Hezbollah’s intelligence network in
Syria and was involved in its air defense efforts, was assassinated on November
4. Abu Saleh, who headed Hezbollah’s Unit 4400, responsible for overseeing the
financing of Hezbollah from Iranian oil sales, was killed in a precision strike
on October 22 in Damascus. Adham Jahut, a Hezbollah official based in the
Quneitra area and responsible for the organization’s intelligence activities in
this important location, was killed by an Israeli air strike on October 10.
Hassan Jaafar Qassir, brother-in-law of deceased Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, was
killed in Damascus on October 3.
The disarray of Hezbollah
This list reflects both the extent of Israeli intelligence penetration of Syria
and Hezbollah, and the extent to which Israel has, since the outbreak of war a
year ago, brushed aside former tacit rules of engagement, treating Syria as an
inseparable component of an alliance with which Jerusalem is now at war.
THE RECENT assassinations also show the relative disarray of Hezbollah and its
allies in the face of Israel’s relentless attentions. This jibes with reports
from other sources, according to which Hezbollah officials and their families
have arrived in Iraq in considerable numbers in recent weeks.
There, they are being housed, with the assistance of their comrades in the Iraqi
Shi’ite militias, in the Shi’ite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Only there,
it appears, do they feel safe from Israel. Some observers have suggested that
the current relative disarray of the “Resistance Axis” is leading to efforts by
the Syrian leader to extricate himself from it. An article in the Al-Araby Al-Jadeed
newspaper this week assembled the evidence. It noted a recent reduction in
Captagon smuggling into Jordan, in line with Jordanian and Emirati requests.
Also, Saudi Arabia’s decision to reopen its Damascus embassy reflects an
undoubted desire among pro-Western Gulf states to draw a line under the civil
war and use economic inducements to tempt Assad away from his allies.
Behind-the-scenes efforts, led by the Italians, are underway to restore
relations between the regime and Europe.
But any hopes that Assad might make a decisive break with Iran should probably
be resisted.
The Syrian dictator remains in debt to Tehran for his surviving the civil war.
He must surely be acutely aware that had he met the Arab Spring while aligned
with the West, he would almost certainly have shared the fate of fellow
authoritarian leaders Zine el Abidine Bin-Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of
Egypt. Also, the current Syrian regime has survived for half a century because
it exploited conflict with Israel and the West (while leaving the door slightly
open for some future rapprochement). Gulf and Western overtures enable Syria to
continue to act according to this pattern. A wholesale abandonment of the
Iranians would represent a severe break with a model that has served the Assad
family rather well. So any such break remains unlikely. Syria’s current status
as a geographical description rather than a country looks set to remain for the
foreseeable future. This means that it is likely also to continue to be a
hunting ground for Israeli air power working its way down the long list of
Hezbollah and Iranian targets in the country.
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-829193
Trump and Biden’s influence on Israel: Netanyahu’s trial
and right-wing appointments - opinion
Yaakov Katz/Jerusalem Post/November 15/2024
Amid Netanyahu’s trial, US-Israel relations shift with Trump’s right-wing
appointees, raising questions about American influence the impact on regional
strategy and hostages.
It is like the dream team of the Israeli Right. A group of people who are not
just pro-Israel in the basic sense but are vocal supporters of the more
controversial aspects of the right-wing’s agenda.
Consider Mike Huckabee, the nominee for US ambassador to Israel. Huckabee
doesn’t just support Israel in a vague sense; he’s on record saying he believes
Israel has the right to annex significant parts of the West Bank. Back in 2019,
he boldly stated that there was no such thing as a “settlement” or even a
“Palestinian” people, a view that starkly contrasts with traditional American
policy. Such a stance indicates that, as ambassador, he won’t just advocate for
Israel in the diplomatic sense; he’ll press for a strategic shift. Then there’s
Pete Hegseth, the nominee for secretary of defense.
Hegseth has visited Israel multiple times over the years, but these weren’t
typical diplomatic visits. On one occasion, he was guided by settler leaders to
Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, an area of the West Bank off limits to the United
States government.
In a 2016 interview with The Jewish Press, Hegseth recounted his experience
visiting the Muslim Quarter and a home there, that had been renovated by Jews.
“There were about 15 young boys, aged around 10-16, singing and dancing. They
were hopeful, optimistic, unafraid, despite the challenges they faced in a
difficult place. To me, this was a powerful thing to see,” he recalled.
Michael Waltz, the Florida congressman nominated for national security adviser,
is another choice that signals a shift. Waltz has a hardline stance on Iran.
Just last month, following Iran’s latest attack on Israel, he called for the
Israeli Air Force to target Iran’s oil and nuclear sites. Waltz’s views on
military intervention reveal a willingness to support Israel in a way not seen
before on an issue that could redefine the Middle East. The list goes on: Sen.
Marco Rubio, the nominee for secretary of state, has publicly advocated for the
“complete eradication” of Hamas, while Elise Stefanik is slated to represent the
US at the United Nations. These are not the kind of ambassadors and leaders who
will issue statements of concern over Israeli actions. Instead, they are likely
to be cheering from the sidelines, allowing Israel greater flexibility on the
ground. And perhaps most importantly for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, many
of these appointees align ideologically with his cabinet’s policies. They
support not just giving Israel the weapons it needs to defend itself, but some
advocate for Israel’s continued presence in Judea and Samaria. Under this
administration, Israel will face almost zero criticism over settlement expansion
and is more likely to receive support for military action against Iranian
targets.
BUT THIS doesn’t mean Israel will have complete freedom of action. While the
atmosphere in Washington may be more accommodating, Israel will still need to
tread carefully.
The administration’s support does not guarantee a carte blanche, nor does it
mean Israel can do as it pleases. If, for instance, the administration
introduces a peace plan that recognizes Palestinian statehood without requiring
settlement evacuation, the Israeli Right might find it more difficult to
criticize this as being anti-Israel than it could have done under the Democrats.
In essence, while the environment may shift in Israel’s favor, this is not a
free pass.
While the atmosphere will be more positive and the relationship closer, it does
not mean that Israel will automatically get whatever it wants. Will it have an
easier time reaching understandings? Yes.
But will the pushback be less if Israel does not adhere to the administration’s
requests? Not necessarily.
US to blame?
On Tuesday, former IDF general Giora Eiland made a controversial statement,
accusing US President Joe Biden of effectively condemning the hostages in Gaza
to death. “The person who has prevented the return of the hostages is President
Biden and his administration. He forced Israel, after the first hostage deal, to
allow 200 trucks a day [into Gaza] and sentenced the hostages to death. You
can’t define it any other way, and you should say it to the Americans,” Eiland
asserted. The blunt accusation illustrates a narrative that has gained traction
on the Israeli right – namely, that American pressure has hampered Israel’s
ability to act against Hamas and has compromised its efforts to secure the
release of the hostages. When Israel paused its incursion into Rafah earlier
this year, critics argued that it was due to American pressure. Likewise, when
talk of a ceasefire came up at the beginning of the war, many people contended
that it was Biden who would decide how long the war could last.
But this narrative distorts the reality of the US-Israel relationship.
WHILE WASHINGTON certainly influences Israeli decision-making, it doesn’t
dictate it.
Does the US make its views known? Yes. Does it sometimes pressure Israel by
hinting at consequences if those views aren’t taken seriously? Also yes.
Nevertheless, the ultimate decision is up to Israel. Biden can urge Israel to
permit humanitarian aid into Gaza and even say that failure to comply could
affect arms supplies. But the final call is Israel’s, based on its priorities.
What’s surprising is how figures like Eiland, seasoned veterans of the IDF and
the government, seem to treat the US-Israel alliance as a one-sided relationship
where Israel merely takes and makes demands. What relationship is like that in
life? None that I can think of.
Criticizing American policy is fair, but Israel is an independent nation. What
Eiland said makes it seem as if Israel is not and if it wants to be, it needs to
act like one which means making decisions and standing behind them. The reason
Israel doesn’t do this is because it is convenient to have someone else to
blame. When Eiland blames Biden, he is essentially giving the government a pass.
This is a mistake and Israelis should stop falling for it.
Bad decision
On Wednesday, the Jerusalem District Court dismissed Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s request to delay his testimony in his ongoing criminal trial,
rejecting his plea for a 10-week extension. Netanyahu’s lawyers argued that the
demands of the war hindered his ability to prepare for court. Nevertheless, the
court maintained that he had ample time, having already set the December date
back in July. There’s no doubt that Netanyahu needs to stand trial.
Indeed, there’s even room to question whether his decisions might be influenced
by the charges he is facing. However, insisting on a rigid adherence to the
trial schedule, given the war, is irresponsible. Israel is not just in the midst
of a conflict; it’s fighting one of the most consequential wars in its history.
Daily casualties mount, critical post-conflict plans for Gaza and Lebanon must
be finalized, and the new US administration requires strategic alignment.
Netanyahu was indicted back in November 2019, nearly five years ago. His trial
has proceeded for four-and-a-half years, and suddenly, there’s an urgency to
conclude it? The insistence on keeping his testimony now, while Israel’s
military and political landscape is in a state of flux, seems oblivious to what
is happening on the ground. The court’s decision fails to recognize the
extraordinary circumstances Israel currently faces. The judges should correct
their stance. It is a matter not only of practicality but also of respect for
the country at a time when Israel’s future is very much on the line.
*The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a
former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.
Before Maximum Pressure, Trump Needs an Iran Strategy
Richard Nephew/the Washington Institute/November 15/2024
The administration should first consider how enhanced sanctions would fit into
its broader regional policy before talking about how to get them going again.
Maximum pressure is back according to Brian Hook, who served as Iran policy lead
during the first Trump administration and is now heading the State Department
transition team for the next term. But to what end?
Biden's Record
Maximum pressure never actually went away as a legal matter—the Biden
administration maintained existing sanctions on Iran and then built them up in
some ways, such as issuing new individual sanctions and expanding the scope of
President Trump’s Executive Order 13902 to target a broader array of oil-related
trade. From that perspective, U.S. sanctions on Iran have never been more
comprehensive than they are today. At the same time, however, a combination of
Iranian evasion and lackluster U.S. enforcement have enabled the regime to
increase its oil exports and currency reserves over the past few years. The
Biden administration has not offered an explanation as to why. Moreover,
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen noted in March 2023 that the administration’s
approach to sanctions had not changed Tehran’s destabilizing behavior.
Two main factors help explain the Biden approach and may influence Trump’s
approach as well:
Tightening oil sanctions against Iran would have conflicted with the U.S. drive
to strengthen sanctions against Russia (implemented in response to the invasion
of Ukraine, among other violations) and enforce existing sanctions against
Venezuela (for human rights violations). The Biden administration made no secret
of its concerns that further constraining international oil supply by taking
Iranian crude off the market would pose risks to the global economy.
Expanding Iran sanctions risked provoking the regime to intensify its nuclear
activities. During indirect talks via Oman over the past year or so, U.S. and
Iranian officials reportedly discussed an understanding on potential steps to
avoid escalation, one of which included holding back on oil sanctions.
In short, Biden’s team saw much risk and no benefit from intensifying
macro-level sanctions against Iran. The administration was willing to announce
new individual designations and sanctions targets, but it did not embrace
sanctions as a major policy tool.
The Trump Plan
Regardless of how one judges Biden’s Iran policy, Trump’s nascent plan merits
scrutiny. Hook has made clear that maximum pressure will be the new
administration’s tool of choice, but he did not enunciate the objective of this
pressure. He did disavow regime change as a goal, though the transition process
has just begun and other members of Trump’s national security team may have
different views. Other than regime change, maximum pressure could plausibly
contribute to two goals: some kind of new deal with Iran, or containment. U.S.
pressure could be a useful tool for achieving either outcome, but its actual
efficacy will depend on how it is wielded and with what level of international
support—especially if a more assertive enforcement posture creates an oil market
crunch. The Trump team also needs to consider how it will respond to potential
Iranian retaliation, which has recently included attacks on U.S. targets in the
Middle East and partner oil export capacity.
A New Deal?
During the first Trump term, U.S. officials stated their intention to pursue an
Iran deal that drastically improved on the 2015 nuclear deal (i.e., the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). This could be the next administration’s
objective as well, but it will be difficult to achieve. Iranian concerns over
Trump’s potential return to office were a core reason why the Biden
administration failed to conclude a mutual return to JCPOA compliance in
2021-22. Tehran’s reticence extended to other arrangements as well—the regime
refused to consider various deals with a U.S. government that it did not trust
to fulfill agreed terms over the long run. Of course, Trump will arguably be
less inclined to tear up any new deals his administration negotiates, which
could help convince Tehran to try. Moreover, Iran’s present strategic position
could be more favorable for negotiations. For one, the regime’s nuclear program
has achieved very significant technical milestones since Trump withdrew from the
JCPOA in 2018. These advances would be difficult to reverse through
negotiations, making Tehran more confident about holding its ground during
future talks. Even points that would notionally argue against a deal—such as
Iran being in a weaker position regionally after Israel’s evisceration of
Hezbollah and Hamas—could actually facilitate wide-ranging talks. Although
accepting U.S. restrictions on support for these groups would be costly to
Tehran politically, the regime might privately welcome a financial reprieve from
funding them for the time being, since it would essentially have to start from
scratch again.
Getting to a deal would still be very difficult, however, for several reasons:
Since as early as 2013, Tehran has maintained that it will not negotiate on
non-nuclear matters, and it has insisted that the JCPOA is as far as it would
go. It maintained that stance even during the first Trump administration’s
maximum pressure policy.
Any deal that extends to Iran’s regional activities would be contentious and
difficult to verify. A max pressure campaign is unlikely to generate substantial
leverage before Iran is technically able to cross the nuclear weapons threshold.
Although estimates vary as to how far the regime is from that threshold, it
could enrich enough weapons-grade material for one or more bombs in as little as
one to two weeks, either at an existing declared facility or after a sudden
diversion to an undeclared facility. (Much of the variation in estimates stems
from uncertainty over how close the regime is to designing and manufacturing a
viable weapon, not its production of sufficient fissile material.) Choosing the
geopolitically risky weapons path would not be easy for Tehran, despite its
recent brash rhetoric on the matter. But this scenario is far more plausible
today than when max pressure began in 2018.
If the next administration views max pressure as a longer-term option for
pulling Iran back to the negotiating table gradually rather than immediately, it
will have to account for the fact that this policy could take nearly a million
barrels of oil per day off the market—a scenario that would drive up global
prices unless additional supply is added. OPEC countries may be disinclined to
provide more oil, as markets are presently bearish and prices down. In theory,
Trump could demand sanctions relief for Russia to replace lost Iranian supplies,
but the structure of U.S. sanctions laws toward Moscow would make that
difficult. Moreover, sanctions relief for Venezuela seems unlikely absent a
change in its regime.
Containment
Ultimately, these obstacles may redirect the Trump team to a de facto approach
of containment via sanctions pressure, perhaps accompanied by continued U.S.
support for Israeli military operations against Iran and/or its proxies. Such a
sanctions campaign could focus on reducing Tehran’s capacity and willingness to
support a reboot of Hezbollah and Hamas. It might also strain the regime’s
ability to provide military support to Russia, rebuild its domestic air defenses
reportedly destroyed by recent Israeli counterstrikes, and manage the
still-restive Iranian population. Moreover, this campaign would use many of the
same sanctions measures envisioned under a deal-seeking scenario, but the goal
would be simpler: to impose costs that make it hard for Iran to destabilize the
region.
Of course, even a more limited containment strategy would raise dilemmas:
It would not constrain Iran’s ability to stage a nuclear breakout—as noted
above, the regime could execute this move at the very start of a new max
pressure campaign, or even before Trump takes office if it believes such a
campaign is inevitable.
It would lack a key incentive supporting the previous incarnation of max
pressure: the stated objective of reaching a new deal with Iran. Sanctions in
service of diplomacy has been a central U.S. message since 2005, both to Tehran
and as justification to other governments—something that would be essential if
sanctions worsen Iranian economic data and portend a humanitarian crisis. In the
past, U.S. partners understood that if a deal was reached, sanctions would be
removed, giving them more incentive to complement U.S. sanctions with their own
measures. An open-ended commitment to containment could prove more difficult to
sustain—such was the case with Iraq in the 1990s as humanitarian concerns grew,
and Iran has stronger relationships with Russia and China than Saddam Hussein
did, giving it more leverage to undermine sanctions.
To make containment more palatable, the Trump administration could focus its
pressure campaign on efforts that limit Tehran’s ability to cause regional harm
without encouraging escalation. Yet such a campaign would be closer to Biden’s
approach, with all the same drawbacks.
One way to address this dilemma and secure greater international buy-in would be
to clarify the benefits of Washington’s policy. For example, under
sanctions-based containment, Iran would have fewer resources available for
supporting the reconstruction of Gaza and Lebanon—and, by extension, advancing
its political interests there. Displacing Iranian influence through a
combination of U.S., Arab, Israeli, and European reconstruction support would
represent a significant geopolitical coup, especially if accompanied by
political changes that improve governance in Lebanon and the Palestinian
Authority.
Conclusion
With regime change ostensibly off the table for now, there is a yawning need for
the incoming administration to describe what end state it seeks with Iran and
build international support for this policy. Sanctions-based strategies only
work when they support policy rather than displace it. The Trump administration
should first consider how sanctions fit into U.S. strategy in the Middle East
before talking about how to get them going again.
*Richard Nephew, an adjunct fellow with The Washington Institute, formerly
served as the State Department’s coordinator on global anti-corruption and
deputy special envoy for Iran.
Is Trump's Israeli ambassador pick a sign of potential
West Bank annexation?
Ron Kampeas/JTA/Jerusalem Post/November 15/2024
Mike Huckabee’s support of Israel settlements stirs up US-Israel policy debate.
When Donald Trump appointed David Friedman as his ambassador to Israel eight
years ago, American Jews sensed – correctly – that it would presage big changes
in the US-Israel relationship.
Unlike any of his predecessors, Friedman was an Orthodox Jew and a public
supporter of West Bank settlements. His ascension led to the United States
recognizing disputed Israeli territorial claims — and it signaled that, in the
first Trump White House, right-wing and Orthodox voices had the president’s ear
when it came to Israel.Now there will be a new ambassador – and a new set of
signals, especially when it comes to whether Israel is about to annex the West
Bank. Ambassador-designate Mike Huckabee, like Friedman, is a supporter of the
settlements and of Israel annexation. Unlike Friedman, he is an evangelical
Christian – and is set to take office alongside far-right Israeli officials who
are itching to annex the settlements to Israel. Israel’s incoming ambassador in
Washington also supports the settlements. So does this mean that Trump may
greenlight Israeli annexation of the West Bank? And when he makes that decision,
will he be listening to Jewish pro-Israel groups, or evangelical ones?
'A thumb on the scale'
When it comes to the first question, both supporters and opponents of annexation
are saying that all signs point to yes.
“This will be a voice in the debate in the State Department and then the
national security team, a strong voice, a respected voice with real power and
access for annexation,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Israel
lobby J Street. “It’s a thumb on the scale.” Friedman, who doesn’t agree with
Ben-Ami on much of anything, appeared to agree with him here. In September,
Friedman write a book advocating annexation – and he noted to the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency that Huckabee blurbed it, calling the book “the solution the
world has been missing.”No one doubts Huckabee’s commitment to perpetual Israeli
control of the West Bank. He’s traveled to Israel repeatedly over the past
half-century, and stirred controversy more than once for suggesting Palestinian
identity was invented. In 2017 he said Israel had “title deed” to the West Bank,
which he refers to exclusively as Judea and Samaria, the preferred term of
Israel’s government and the settlement movement. When asked this week, following
his selection, whether there was a chance of Israeli annexation, Huckabee
responded, “Of course.” He told an Israeli reporter, Yanir Cozin, “I won’t make
the policy. I will carry out the policy of the president, but he has already
demonstrated in his first term that there’s never been an American president
that has been more helpful in securing an understanding of the sovereignty of
Israel.”
A range of Israeli cabinet ministers – including Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu – have pledged over the years to pursue West Bank annexation. But that
doesn’t mean American support for annexation is a sure thing. A peace plan Trump
unveiled in 2020 appeared to open the door to annexation – only for Trump to
later nix the move because he believed it could sabotage the Abraham Accords,
the normalization agreements he brokered between Israel and four Arab countries.
Now, Trump’s ambitions for an Israel-Saudi Arabia normalization deal could
similarly halt annexation plans, says Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer
of the Israel Policy Forum. “There are a bunch of factors that could weigh
against a very quick push toward annexation,” Koplow said in an interview. “And
while I think that the signals coming from the Israeli side are a lot clearer in
this regard, particularly appointing [former settler leader] Yechiel Leiter as
ambassador to D.C., I think that on the US side of things, the picture from
Trump land is not nearly so clear.”Wherever those conversations go, the people
in the room this time will be different from those who served under Trump from
2017 to 2021. In addition to Friedman, two of Trump’s chief advisers on the
Middle East were his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his chief negotiator (and
former lawyer) Jason Greenblatt, both observant Jews.
Trump has nominated Steve Witkoff, a friend and longtime business associate who
is Jewish, to take the role filled by Greenblatt. But Kushner doesn’t appear to
be joining the administration, and Huckabee is replacing Friedman – and is set
to become the first non-Jewish ambassador to Israel since 2011. Friedman’s
fellow evangelical Christians are celebrating the decision. Pastor John Hagee,
the founder of Christians United for Israel and perhaps the leading Christian
Zionist voice in the country, called Huckabee an “inspiring choice.” Sandra
Parker, who chairs CUFI’s campaign finance arm, said Huckabee “believes in
Israel’s right to self-determination and defense, not because it is politically
convenient to do so but because these are immutable tenets of his core
beliefs.”Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, posted a photo with Huckabee on X
and wrote that the Huckabee family “will be a great blessing to the people of
that country and represent America well.”Jewish proponents of annexation, for
what it’s worth, aren’t bothered by his faith, citing his longstanding support
for the settlements.
“Judea and Samaria is all Jewish and we of course are happy with the appointment
of Mike Huckabee,” said Ross Glick, the director of the right-wing Betar USA.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far right national security minister who favors
annexation, greeted Huckabee’s naming on social media with the American and
Israeli flags with a heart emoji between them. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich
said he had begun laying the groundwork for annexation.
The Zionist Organization of America, the major US Jewish group most closely
aligned with the settlement movement, also applauded the pick. “Governor
Huckabee has also correctly explained: ‘There is no such thing as a West Bank.
It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re
communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an
occupation’,” ZOA’s president, Mort Klein, said in a statement. Palestinians and
other opponents of annexation, including the Israeli and pro-Israel left, say it
would be illegal under international law; would eliminate the possibility for a
two-state solution, and, if Palestinians living there were not granted equal
rights, would create a de facto apartheid state. But critics of Trump worry that
the appointment is a sign that he will favor evangelical perspectives on Israel.
In 2021, Trump mused in a speech that “the evangelical Christians love Israel
more than the Jews in this country.”Huckabee “is very strong with the
evangelical crowd, and a whole lot of the support for Israel in the Congress is
because of the evangelical crowd,” Rep. Steve Cohen, a Jewish Democrat from
Tennessee, said in an interview.
A staffer for a top Democrat in Congress, speaking anonymously to be frank,
called Huckabee a ”Christian Nationalist and fake-sleeping-pill salesman” and
said it was “no surprise” that Trump named him. “Over the last several years
we’ve watched Republicans dehumanize the Palestinian people and do everything in
their power to move away from a two-state solution,” the staffer said. “Huckabee
is the perfect person to help Bibi Netanyahu cling to power and help Israel’s
right-wing coalition turn Israel into a true apartheid state, something it is
falsely accused of today.”
Ben-Ami said the coupling of Israeli far-right annexationists with evangelicals
who hinge their politics on biblical prophecy is laden with risk. “It’s a signal
that the alliance between the Messianic settler movement and the evangelical
Christian Zionist movement is what’s going to be driving American policy,” he
said. “And that is very scary for those of us who really care about Israel being
Jewish and democratic.”But ultimately, Koplow said, Trump remains unknowable.
“Whatever laws of politics apply to everybody else,” he said, “they don’t really
apply to Trump.”
Israel plays Kurdish card to undermine support for
Palestine
Sinem Cengiz/Arab News/November 15, 2024
In international relations, alliances have different forms and motivations.
However, no alliance can be considered permanent, as evolving policies and
changing national interests can lead to their collapse or the establishment of
new ones. Turkiye was once considered an ally of Israel, but now Tel Aviv views
the Kurds — whom Ankara views as a national security threat — as its “natural
allies.”In his first speech on taking office, new Israeli Foreign Minister
Gideon Sa’ar this week said Israel should reach out to the Kurds and that this
approach has both political and security aspects. His statement came as Tel
Aviv’s relations with Turkiye have reached rock bottom due to Israel’s bloody
war in Gaza. He went on to say that Turkiye used to be an ally, while some Arab
states were adversaries, and that it is impossible to know how things will shake
out in the future. This is true because, for Israel, interests are the priority,
not principles, and this can be clearly seen in its policy toward the Kurds. In
the 1990s, the Turkish-Israeli alliance was viewed as a critical buffer to
states that were backing the Kurdish PKK, which is considered a terrorist
organization by Turkiye and many Western nations. Due to support for the PKK
from Syria and, to a lesser extent, from Iran and Iraq, Turkiye and Israel
signed a memorandum of understanding on military cooperation in 1996. This
military cooperation involved stronger intelligence cooperation, logistical
support and training for the Turkish military.
While the Arab states perceived this military cooperation as directed against
them, Turkiye and Israel insisted that their alliance was not aimed against any
party in the region. However, it was obviously a deterrent against Syria, Iraq
and Iran, which despite supporting the PKK against Turkiye also had issues with
the Kurds within their own territories.
For Israel, interests are the priority, not principles, and this can be clearly
seen in its policy toward the Kurds
Ankara’s converging interests with Israel on the PKK issue was highlighted by
the-then Turkish defense minister, who said that Turkiye and Israel saw eye to
eye regarding Syria’s support to the PKK. Benjamin Netanyahu, who was the
Israeli prime minister at the time, stated that the PKK was a terrorist
organization and added that Israel opposed the establishment of a Kurdish state.
In this way, Tel Aviv secretly agreed to support Ankara’s policy toward the
Syrian-backed PKK, as Damascus’ support to the Kurds and other groups was seen
as a security threat by Turkiye and Israel. Today’s Israel, under the same prime
minister, calls for closer ties with the Kurds, who it was once against. This is
not surprising, since Israel was also the only country in the region to openly
support the independence referendum held by the Kurdistan Regional Government in
Iraq in 2017. Concerned that it may fuel Kurdish independence aspirations in
Turkiye and Iran, Ankara and Tehran both strongly opposed and criticized the
referendum. Israel’s changing attitude proves that its policy toward the Kurds
is not ideologically driven, but rather dependent on the course of its relations
with Turkiye. According to reports, within the context of the 1996 military
agreement, Turkiye has used Heron drones it bought from Israel in the struggle
against the PKK. The PKK and its supporters have also long accused Israeli
intelligence of involvement in the imprisonment of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan,
after he was captured by Turkish intelligence in Nairobi in 1999. And when
Israel supported the 2017 referendum, Kurds stated that Israel “only speaks out
when it benefits its own national interests and does not really care about the
Kurdish cause,” according to reports.
The interests and identities of states are not static. As interests evolve,
approaches may also change because of developments in the domestic and
international environments. These changes may dominate a state’s foreign policy
discourse.
Israel perceives the establishment of an independent Kurdish state as a chance
to strengthen its position
It is very clear that the new Israeli foreign policy approach toward the Kurds
is a response to Turkiye’s support for the Palestinian people facing Israeli
aggression. Israel’s call to the Kurds came just three days before Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced the severing of all ties with Israel.
Erdogan stated on Wednesday: “The government of the Republic of Turkiye, under
the leadership of Tayyip Erdogan, will not continue or develop relations with
Israel … and we will maintain this stance in the future as well.” Erdogan also
called on all regional countries to cooperate to end the Israeli aggression
against the Palestinian people. Within this context, it is easier to understand
the motives behind the Israeli approach to the Kurds. However, there is a
striking difference here. While an independent Palestinian state is supported by
all regional states, an independent Kurdish state is not supported by anyone but
Israel, which perceives the establishment of such a country as a chance to
strengthen its position in the Middle East. Israeli policy toward the Kurds
remains closely linked to its vision for a broader Middle East. This approach is
particularly seen as a threat by regional states, not only now but even decades
ago. For instance, back in 1966, Iraqi Defense Minister Abd Al-Aziz Al-Uqayli
blamed the Kurds of Iraq for seeking to establish “a second Israel” in the
Middle East. When the Kurds of Iraq held their referendum decades later, in
2017, the governments in Iraq, Turkiye and Iran all rejected it.
Israel’s approach to the Kurds, which seeks their autonomy, reveals its
desperation, as Tel Aviv seeks to use them to undermine the regional states that
support Palestinian rights.
• Sinem Cengiz is a Turkish political analyst who specializes in Turkiye’s
relations with the Middle East. X: @SinemCngz
FROM THE ARCHIVE/The RFK Jr. Tapes
David Samuels/THe Magazine/April 24, 2023
The Democratic presidential candidate and America’s most prominent ‘conspiracy
theorist’ talks about his family, the military-pharmaceutical complex, and our
new system of social control
Ifirst met Bobby Kennedy Jr. when he showed up one summer afternoon in 1976 at
the door of my ordinary suburban home in the company of a friend from Harvard
named Peter Shapiro, who was running for a seat in the New Jersey State
Assembly. I was 9 years old, and not particularly thrilled about our family’s
recent move from Brooklyn to a street of empty suburban lawns whose nearest
point of interest was a candy store a mile or so down a steep hill. The two
polite, handsome young men in navy blazers, both in their 20s and well over 6
feet tall, promised a whiff of something different.
I don’t recall if I had any idea that the young Bobby Kennedy’s uncle had been
president, or that his father had run for president; as a first-generation
American, I knew that important people went to Harvard, and being a Kennedy was
like being a movie star. The two young men on my doorstep, politely asking if my
parents were home, immediately appealed to my i”magination as connections to a
world that I hadn’t seen before, but which might be fun. So I gladly took them
to Tory Corners, the Irish working-class district nearby, and spent the rest of
the afternoon handing out buttons and leaflets for the Shapiro for Assembly
campaign.
Peter won that race, and a year later, at the age of 26, he ran for the newly
created job of Essex County Executive, and he won that race too, becoming
something of a rising figure in national Democratic politics—a future Jewish
president, even. In 1984, he won the Democratic nomination for governor before
losing in a landslide to the popular Republican incumbent Tom Kean, effectively
ending his political career. In between, though, I became something of an
in-house mascot—the joke being that I was the only person involved in Peter’s
campaigns who was younger than the candidate.
For his part, Peter graciously embraced his role as my patron, offering me
summer jobs in the County Executive’s office, writing me a letter of
recommendation to his alma mater, and hooking me up with a job in Sen. Edward M.
Kennedy’s office in Washington. The highlight of my employment there was the
week I spent with my friend RJ, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts,
scrubbing the senator’s house in McLean, Virginia, from top to bottom—in
preparation for what turned out to be a party celebrating the 20th anniversary
of the John F. Kennedy Library. The guest list for the event consisted of the
extended Kennedy family, including the late president’s widow, who was
remarkably friendly and kind; a few of the senator’s drinking buddies, including
Sens. John Tunney and Chris Dodd; House Speaker Tip O’Neill; President Ronald
Reagan and his wife, Nancy; and me and RJ. Having acquainted ourselves with the
lay of the land, RJ and I then returned to the senator’s house late one night
with two fellow interns and some bottles of Andre sparkling wine and got drunk
in his hot tub, an act that the senator would have no doubt got a kick out of.
When I call myself a Kennedy Democrat, those are among my reasons.
Robert Kennedy Jr. demonstrates during the ‘Fire Drill Friday’ climate change
protest in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 15, 2019
Robert Kennedy Jr. demonstrates during the ‘Fire Drill Friday’ climate change
protest in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 15, 2019 John Lamparski/Getty Images
Family patronage and largesse are not what people generally celebrate as the
strengths of American democracy these days, though I would venture that the
current emphasis on tribal warfare and jailing one’s political foes is in fact
an inferior model. I would also suggest that it is an empirical fact that far
more significant legislation of far more benefit to poor and working people
passed the U.S. Congress in the 1970s and even the 1980s than is ever proposed,
let alone passed into law, by the tribunes of TikTok and Fox News. Before it was
transformed into an instrument of billionaire oligarchs and their nonprofit
bureaucracies and the American security state, the Democratic Party proved
itself capable of delivering tangible benefits to tens of millions of ordinary
Americans in the places where they lived—whether that meant urban church
parishes or the Ozarks. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party aimed to make the
lives of ordinary people better, by working through the institutions that they
built and valued, rather than subjecting them to tedious lectures about
right-think and using the government as an instrument to punish anyone who said
the wrong words the wrong way. The party’s message was that everyone could find
a welcoming place under its roof, and have their foundational beliefs honored
and respected—the job of the Kennedy family being to sprinkle some handfuls of
fairy dust over the whole affair. It was a job that the family took seriously
for decades, sending their children to spend summers in Africa or Appalachia, or
helping out with the Special Olympics, and other good works, while helping eager
outsiders get a foot up on the ladder.
Everyone knows how the story ended, of course. First JFK and RFK were
assassinated. Then, Teddy drove off a bridge in Martha’s Vineyard, killing a
young staffer. His failed presidential run against Jimmy Carter in 1980 felt
like an obligatory coda to the end of Camelot, before he continued on to a
distinguished career in the Senate. Various third-generation Kennedys came and
went from Congress and various statehouses. In the 1990s, John Kennedy, the
former president’s olive-skinned, extraordinarily handsome, and personable son,
briefly captured the country’s imagination, before dying with his very blond,
very thin wife in a tragic plane crash.
Today, there are dozens of Kennedys with Ivy League degrees, quite a few of whom
have had perfectly acceptable and even laudable careers at the middle rungs of
the American governmental and corporate and nonprofit bureaucracies. As the
family legacy faded, the torch was picked up by others. Bill Clinton presented
himself as a wonky hillbilly successor to the Kennedys, inspired by his youthful
encounter with JFK to pursue a life of public service, while selling out the
American working class to the globalist gods. Barack Obama bought an enormous
mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, but otherwise displayed little interest in the
Kennedys and their mythos. Obama’s political chi came from his cool mastery of
the politics of race and empire and his disdain for the American working poor,
whom he redefined as white bitter-enders who clung to religion and guns. So much
for the Kennedy family and the 20th-century Democratic Party.
With one exception. Anyone who hung around Kennedy political circles knew that
in the collective opinion of the various longtime family friends, and
speechwriters, and political consultants, and other hangers-on, who in one way
or another saw themselves as custodians of the family brand, there was one
member of the third generation of Kennedys who was said to have “it”—the
family’s electric brand of political magic. Not Joe, the eldest of RFK’s
children, who was dull and plodding; not Kathleen, a dedicated public servant
who lacked personal charisma; not Caroline, who took after her mother; not
John-John, who was a playboy; not Teddy Jr., who battled cancer and lost a leg;
or Patrick, who was honest and sweet-natured but inherited his father’s problems
with substance abuse and spoken language.
The heir to the family’s political mantle in the third generation of Kennedys
was always Bobby. It was Bobby who became the leader of his tribe of orphaned
brothers and sisters after their father’s death, trying and failing to make up
for the absence of a charismatic father and the near-total absence of adult
supervision. A friend who was close to the family in those years recalls visits
to their home in Hickory Hill, Virginia, as like visiting a zoo—quite literally,
with live sea mammals in the swimming pool, and animals of all shapes and sizes,
frequently untamed, roaming freely throughout the house. Bobby’s hawks nested in
the eaves and children climbed in and out of windows. Eventually, the friend’s
mother forbade further visits, on account of it being too physically dangerous.
If the Kennedys were a kind of American royalty, then Bobby was their Prince
Hal—charismatic and beloved, yet also dangerous and frequently out of control, a
fatherless child who was trying to emulate the adult father figures who had been
taken from him before he could truly understand who they were or what their
brand of world-shaping masculinity meant. In 1983, Bobby was found nodding off
in an airplane bathroom, and then pleaded guilty to heroin possession. The death
of his brother David, who worshipped Bobby, a year later from a heroin overdose,
made an uphill climb back to respectability seem even more unlikely, even after
he got clean, and his decades of hard work as an environmental lawyer for
Riverkeeper and the NRDC established him as one of the most effective
environmental activists in the country.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Bobby kept his name alive in political circles
through a familiar striptease dance with the New York press, which was no doubt
orchestrated in part by his best friend from college, Peter Kaplan, the
sharp-eyed editor of The New York Observer: A dutiful accounting of his
environmental good works ridding New York’s waterways of deadly toxins, a dash
of Kennedy fairy dust, a tour of his falcons—falconry being a lifelong hobby,
pursued with characteristic dedication—and a tantalizing hint of a possible
future race for some political office that would re-up his star power and help
promote his advocacy. Of course, he never ran—which prevented the publication of
the inevitable attack articles ripping him to pieces. Running would have been
messy. His sister Kerry was married to the governor of New York, Andrew
Cuomo—heir to another political dynasty whose name meant more in New York state
than the name Kennedy did.
Then it all came apart. In 2005, Kerry and Andrew Cuomo divorced. In 2010, Bobby
separated from his wife, Mary Richardson, who had been Kerry’s college roommate
at Brown and appeared to be suffering from substance abuse issues; a judge
awarded temporary full custody of their four children to Bobby. In 2012, Mary
Richardson hung herself. In 2013, Peter Kaplan died of cancer.
Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy Jr. found success as an environmentally friendly
venture capitalist along with a new cause: vaccines. In 2005, Kennedy wrote a
blockbuster Rolling Stone magazine article titled “Deadly Immunity,” which
presented compelling evidence of an ongoing vaccine safety cover-up led by U.S.
national health bureaucrats, including transcripts of a 2000 CDC conference in
Norcross, Georgia, where researchers presented information linking the mercury
compound thimerosol with neurological problems in children. At its root, the
case Kennedy made in his article was no more or less plausible and empirically
grounded than the cases that he and dozens of other environmental advocates had
been making for decades against large chemical companies for spewing toxins into
America’s air, water, and soil, and then lying about it.
Yet the resulting journalistic-bureaucratic firestorm proved that vaccines were
different. It also offered a preview of the COVID wars, with pressure campaigns
by vaccine believers attacking five fact-checking errors in the article—a number
that was hardly unusual for a long and complex reported article in a venue like
Rolling Stone. The campaigns led to various emendations of the article by its
online publisher, Salon, which eventually retracted the article in 2011. In that
year, Kennedy founded the World Mercury Project, which would be renamed the
Children’s Health Defense, to keep pressing his assertions about empirical links
between vaccinations and the explosion of neurological issues in children. For
anyone who knew Kennedy, his family, and his own record as an environmental
advocate, the fact that he would sink his teeth in rather than let go was pretty
much a foregone conclusion.
And so began the strangest and in many ways also the most promising chapter of
Bobby Kennedy’s life. Stripped of the protection that the Kennedy name had once
offered him, he was no longer the future secretary of something in some future
Democratic presidential administration; he was a leper, banned from social media
platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, repeatedly attacked by network
television personalities and by members of his own family as an “embarrassment”
and a “moron.” Meanwhile, his book attacking Anthony Fauci, the high priest of
the COVID order, became an Amazon bestseller.
It is therefore easy to welcome the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an heir to
the political dynasty that sprinkled fairy dust on the 20th-century Democratic
Party, is running for president. The collision he’s about to cause between the
world of official group-think and the world of normal-speak—where most Americans
weigh what might be best for themselves and their children—can only be good for
American democracy, and for the American language.
It doesn’t take an alarmist to recognize how fast and far the term “conspiracy
theory” has morphed from the way it was generally used even a decade ago. Once a
description of a particular kind of recognizably insulated and cyclical
counterlogic, “conspiracy theory” has become a flashing red light that is used
to identify and suppress truths that powerful people find inconvenient. Whereas
yesterday’s conspiracy theories involved feverish ruminations on secret cells of
Freemasons, Catholics or Jews who communicated with their elders in Rome or
Jerusalem through secret tunnel networks or codes, today’s conspiracy theories
include whatever evidence-based realities threaten America’s flourishing
networks of administrative state bureaucrats, credentialed propagandists,
oligarchs, and spies.
Whenever a hole appears in the ozone layer of received opinion, it is sure to be
quickly labeled a “conspiracy theory” by a large technology platform. The lab
leak in Wuhan was a conspiracy theory, as was the idea that the U.S. government
was funding gain-of-function research; the idea that the development of mRNA
vaccines was part of a Pentagon biowarfare effort from which Bill Gates boasted
of making billions of dollars; the idea that masking schoolchildren had zero
effect on the transmission of COVID; the idea that the FBI and the White House
were directly censoring Twitter, Google, and Facebook; the idea that the
information on Hunter Biden’s laptop showing that he received
multi-million-dollar payoffs from agents of foreign powers including China and
Russia was real. The most offensive thing about these falsehoods is not the fact
that they later turned out to be supported by evidence, which can happen to even
the most unlikely seeming hypothesis. Rather, it is that the people who labeled
them “false” often knew full well from the beginning that they were true, and
were seeking to avoid the consequences; that is how a truth becomes a
“conspiracy theory.”
At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country’s leading
“conspiracy theorist” alone qualifies him to be president. He is privileged, or
cursed, to understand the landscape of American conspiracy theories, real and
imagined, from the inside, in the way that even our greatest novelists have
failed to do.
America’s last great generation of fiction writers were divided on the subject
of conspiracy theories into three well-defined camps. The first camp, consisting
of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo and
their fellows, accepted an American reality defined by pop psychology,
celebrity, and the power of individual narcissism—i.e., a somewhat more
sophisticated version of the official American narratives presented on the
nightly news and in Time magazine—with writers like Alice Walker and Toni
Morrison doing their part by filling in the endlessly fascinating subject of
race. It was no accident that both Mailer and DeLillo were driven to write
endlessly long, fictionalized biographies of Lee Harvey Oswald that concluded
that Oswald acted alone, while neither Morrison nor Walker displayed the
slightest interest in who shot Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. For his
part, Roth wrote two overtly political American novels, which concluded
respectively that Richard Nixon was bad and that Charles Lindbergh was an
antisemite. For all of these writers, the official version of American history
was the necessary overarching framework for social, familial, and individual
microhistories—though in his more overtly Jewish books, like The Counterlife,
The Ghost Writer and Operation Shylock, Roth managed to escape the official
version of Jewish history and became a much more interesting writer.
The second camp of American novelists were those who saw strange shapes moving
beneath the murk. These included Thomas Pynchon, of course, but also William
Gaddis; realists like Robert Stone and James Ellroy; and Ralph Ellison, the
author of the single greatest 20th-century American novel, Invisible Man, a book
which absorbed the literary energy of his great predecessor, William Faulkner,
who as a Southerner necessarily dissented from the official version of
everything. On one level or another, for all of these writers, the conspiracies
were real, and the official version was a lie for squares. The third camp, the
absurdists, who included Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Barry
Hannah, and others, tried and in most cases failed to break the deadlock through
deadpan comedy.
RFK Jr. has been, by degrees, a James Ellroy character, a Robert Stone
character, a William Gaddis character, a Thomas Pynchon character, and perhaps
now, a Ralph Ellison character, in that it may be fundamentally impossible for
any American to see him straight. But it is very clear to which fictional camp
his character belongs. He believes that conspiracy theories are not only real
but define American reality. He grew up believing that the CIA most likely
assassinated his uncle Jack, and lately, he has come to believe that it also
assassinated his father. To walk through American life for the past 50 years
believing that the government killed the Kennedys was to be fundamentally at
odds with the gestalt; to believe in these conspiracy theories while also being
a Kennedy must have been even stranger, to the point of making it impossible to
be entirely authentic in public. Now that conspiracy theories have gone
mainstream, who better than RFK Jr. to authentically understand and communicate
with a public that is rightly suspicious of the poisons in its water and air,
the dishonesty of the public health bureaucracy, and the toxic nature of
official discourse.
At the age of 69, the latest Kennedy to run for president is a vigorous
outdoorsman who looks at least 15 years younger than his calendar age. Reporters
at his announcement last week were quick to notice the preponderance of swooning
MILFs in the audience; projecting the kind of masculine charisma that is
impossible to find on either side of the political aisle these days, Kennedy
exudes the rude physical health of an older male supplement model. The contrast
with the geriatric president and his denatured courtiers, or the paunchy,
cheeseburger-addicted ex-president, could not be greater.
The idea of a Kennedy leading a Jacquerie against the new authoritarianism of
the best and the brightest may seem odd, or it may seem like a fitting last
hurrah for the 20th-century Democratic Party, whose postwar incarnation become
more or less synonymous with the Kennedys. It is too early to say whether his
challenge to the unpopular Biden will turn out to be a mirage, or whether
Kennedy—who after all these years has never held elective office at any level of
government—is truly interested in becoming president. Still, this is a very much
an era of black swans, and much stranger things, and worse things, have happened
in America recently, by contrast with which the news of a Kennedy running for
president seems quite normal.
I met up with Bobby Kennedy Jr. in the backyard of his house in Santa Monica
recently for a talk that lasted for the better part of five hours. What follows
are some edited excerpts from that conversation.
St. Francis and the Lepers
David Samuels (interviewer): I was an intern for your uncle Teddy in the 1980s,
and in that period he had some pretty obvious drug and alcohol issues. And when
he’d speak often there’d be this kind of Kennedyesque word salad that had no
syntax to it that would come out of his mouth, particularly if he’d been
drinking heavily. And you’d look at him and you’re like, what’s the mythos of
this busted-up family all about?
So this was in 1985, at the height of the AIDS crisis, and one day they brought
in a group of AIDS patients who were being left in locked hospital wards to die
because even doctors and nurses didn’t want to touch them—that’s how bad the
public ignorance and hysteria was about that disease at the time. And I remember
that in the office, we were all freaked out that they were coming in and we were
reviewing our playbook: What happens if one of them touches the furniture? What
happens if one of them sips from a cup?
Then these people come in. Many of them looked like hell, weak, frail, with
lesions on their faces. They looked like cancer patients. So we’re all kind of
standing there, five or six of us, and we don’t want to get too close to them.
And there was just this weird moment of silence, in which no one even thought to
invite them to sit down.
And then Teddy comes out of his office. They start saying, “We’re being left in
these hospital wards to die, and we’re here to talk to you,” because he was the
head of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which was in charge
of hospitals. He takes one look at them and you could see the response in his
eyes. He walks over and puts his arms around the two patients who looked the
worst, and suddenly he is hugging them. He starts reciting this mantra of “My
brother Jack, and my brother Bobby,” and talking about how everyone is equal,
and deserves to be treated with decency and respect.
In that moment I realized that for him, it was entirely real. He understood that
his mission in life, however flawed he was as a person, was to extend this
mantle of protection. I remember walking out of there feeling stunned.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: I did a little book, a children’s book about St. Francis
of Assisi, and one of the turning points of his life was leprosy. People didn’t
know how it spread. They knew it was contagious in some way. So lepers were
pariahs. They were excluded from society and they came to the wilderness and
they were required by law to carry bells with them and to ring them as they
walked to warn people away from their path. Immediately after his conversion,
St. Francis passed a group of lepers on the street, on a road, and he got off
his horse and he hugged and kissed one of them. He faced the thing that was his
greatest fear because that love and compassion overcame that biological impulse
of revulsion for risk of infection, which is hardwired into us from evolution.
Was St. Francis important to your dad?
Yes. At home in Virginia, there was literally a shrine on the second-floor
landing. Then there was a shrine on the third-floor landing. Then there was one
in the garden.
My father’s middle name is Francis. My middle name is Francis. He’s the most
popular saint, so it’s not unusual. But, for me, he had a special meaning
because of his involvement with animals.
Do you remember your dad with animals at all?
My dad would not let us have live feeders at home. I like snakes and I like
poison snakes, and I like constrictors. I would bring them home, and he would
not let me feed them mice because he thought it was cruel. He couldn’t stand it.
Did you explain to him, “Dad, that’s what they eat”?
Yes. And he was like, “No.”
He did let me have the hawks, though. But unless you go out hunting, you’re
feeding just meat to the hawks. I wasn’t feeding them live animals.
I remember one time he found an evening grosbeak on the tennis court. He was
sitting next to the tennis court. He had tweezers, and he was trying to
straighten out its beak, which is not supposed to be straight. It looks crooked.
I told him, that’s how it’s supposed to be.
He just had a natural compassion, and he couldn’t stand cruelty to animals or to
human beings. He couldn’t bear it. It was unbearable to him.
Do you remember ever seeing him cry?
My dad? No.
Your father was a very gifted man, obviously, and a complex man, who didn’t fit
neatly into any boxes. He was attached to the Catholic Church, in an age when
normal members of the elite had disdain for religion. And he was not a big
believer in big government. He was a champion of communities solving their own
problems locally. Thinking back to your early memories of him—of what he wanted
from you, what he taught you—what do you remember?
I think the most joyful thing is the amount of time that we spent outdoors, not
only just every day playing sports and competition, but also taking us on
wilderness explorations a lot. We went on all the big Western rivers, on the
Snake, the Colorado, the Little Colorado, and the Green, the Salmon, upper
Hudson, and many others, at a time when people weren’t doing that. Our lives
were very, very rich, and we were very, very lucky.
But I’ll tell you another memory about my dad. It happened just before he left
for the campaign, so a few months before he died. He called me into his office
and he gave me a copy of Camus’ book The Plague. He asked me to read it, which
he’d often do. He would give me poems or books or whatever, and asked me to read
them. But this one he gave me with a particular intensity. I didn’t read it till
after he died. When I did read it, I read it with an interest where I was trying
to figure out why he gave it to me. What was the lock that this was the key for?
The book is about a doctor in a quarantine city in North Africa, and there’s a
plague attack in the city, and nobody can go in or out. They never tell you what
the plague is, but they know it’s contagious. They’ve never seen it before, and
they have no idea how to treat it. A lot of the book is the doctor’s
conversations with himself, because he knows that if he leaves and goes out and
starts ministering to the sick, he’s almost certain to die. In any case, there’s
very little he will be able to do, because there’s no treatment known. He’s
convincing himself to stay locked up where it’s safe. Ultimately, he makes a
decision to leave and go do whatever help that he can, because that is his duty.
That is the duty of all humanity, but particularly doctors. That’s the subject
of the book.
Camus was an existentialist, and one of my father’s favorite writers. The
existentialists were the legatees of the Greek and Roman tradition of stoicism.
The Stoics had that same philosophy, which is that you find meaning in your
life. You bring order to a chaotic universe by doing your duty and not
complaining about it. The iconic hero of Stoicism is Sisyphus, and Camus also
wrote a book about Sisyphus.
Do you know where Camus wrote that book?
I assumed it was in France. In Algeria?
When he wrote that book, Camus was in hiding in a mountain village in France,
because he was a member of the French resistance. In that same village, about a
thousand Jews were being hidden. A friend of mine was a child who was hidden in
that village, which was actually a group of three Huguenot Protestant villages,
where they saved about 4,000 Jews by hiding them in their homes.
So Camus would wake up every day in hiding, but he was also aware of this whole
other population that was in hiding in that village. It’s all abstracted in The
Plague, but when he wrote it, he was living through something very concrete,
which was Nazi fascism, and the very real fear of what would happen to him, and
to the other hidden people in that village, if they went outside.
That’s a great story.
Anyway, the message of Sisyphus is that Sisyphus, of course, is cursed to push a
boulder up a hill and to never get it all the way over the ledge. It always
tumbles back on him at the top, and he’s supposed to do that for eternity, which
you would consider something that would be a rather miserable existence. But in
the minds of Camus and the Stoics, Sisyphus is a happy man because he undertakes
his duty. He’s always pushing to get uphill, to make it, to improve the
situation. He puts his shoulder to the stone, and he does what he’s supposed to
do.
That, I think, really describes my father’s own decisions that he made in his
life—particularly at the end of his life, his lethal decision to run for
president. It gave me, I think, some important insight and direction that taught
me how to live my own life.
Homing Pigeons
When did you first become interested in environmental law?
I was interested in the outdoors my entire life. I was obsessed with wildlife. I
was in the woods every day of my life. At school, I was really ADHD. So I was
always behind at school and I would sit in the back of the class and just think
about getting back into the woods to check my traps and lines. I started
seriously raising and breeding homing pigeons when I was 7.
How do you acquire your first pigeon?
It was a guy who lived next door to us, a farmer who was interested in animals,
but he ran cock fights, rooster fights, and other stuff. And he was walking
distance from my house, a couple across some cornfields, and he sort of took me
under his wing. My mother ended up suing him, or he sued her. She stole some
horses from him that he was mistreating and it was a big publicity case when my
father was attorney general.
But before that, I had this relationship with the guy where he turned me onto
reading and raising homers. We would put them on the train down to Delaware
along with all the other pigeon fanciers and the homers would come back and when
they came back into my coop, I would rush down to the post office and get them
time-stamped. That’s how the system worked.
What made you connect your love of the outdoors to practicing law?
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist or a vet. Then when my dad died, my
priorities reoriented and I felt kind of an obligation to pick up the torch. So
I went on a different path, which ended up in law school. And then when I was
getting sober, after I went to law school, I kind of had to reorient myself
around in ways that were sort of more true to myself. So that’s when I said,
“OK, I’m going to do environmental stuff.”
Did you have a mentor in the process of understanding environmental law and how
to use it?
I had a couple of mentors. One was John Adams, who was the head of NRDC [Natural
Resources Defense Council]. And then Robert Boyle, he was a Sports Illustrated
outdoor writer and editor for 60 years. And he founded the Hudson River
Fishermen Association, and it was just a bunch of commercial fishermen and
recreational fishermen—they were almost all former Marines.
In March of 1966, the Penn Central Railroad was vomiting oil from a
four-and-a-half-foot pipe in the Croton-Harmon railroad. And the oil went up the
river and made the tides black and the beaches and made the shad taste of
diesel. So the fishermen couldn’t sell them at the Fulton Fish Market in the
city. And all the fishermen came together.
There’s a fishing village on the Hudson called Groutville. It’s 30 miles north
of the city on the east bank of the river. And there the only public building
was the American Legion Hall. Groutville had the highest enlistment rate per
capita of any community in America and most of them are Marines. And they got
together in this American Legion Hall in March of 1966 to talk about blowing up
the Penn Central pipes, and also about floating a raft of dynamite into the
Indian Point Power Plant, which at that time was killing a million fish a day on
its intake screens. Somebody suggested they put a match to the oil slick coming
out of the Penn Central Pipe and burn up the pipe. And somebody else said they
should roll a mattress up and jam it up the pipe and flood the railyard with its
own waste.
And then Boyle stood up. He had written an article about these fishing clubs
made up of these weirdos and oddballs, these very colorful characters, for
Sports Illustrated. But in researching the article, he had come across an
ancient navigational statute called the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act that said it
was illegal to pollute any waterway in the United States, and you had to pay a
big penalty if you got caught. Also, there was a bounty provision that said that
anybody who turned in the polluter got to keep half the fine.
And he had gone to the libel lawyers at Time Inc., which owned Sports
Illustrated, and he said, “Is this still good?” And they looked and they said:
“In 80 years it’s never been enforced, but it’s still on the books. So
technically it’s good.”
So when all these men and women, 300 people were crowded in the American Legion
Hall talking about violence because their livelihoods and property values were
being destroyed, he stood up with a copy of that law and said, “We shouldn’t be
talking about breaking the law, we should be talking about enforcing it.” And
they resolved that evening, they were going to start a group that was then
called the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association. They were going to go out,
track down, and prosecute every polluter on the Hudson.
Eighteen months later, they collected the first penalty in United States history
and the first bounty in United States history against a corporate polluter. They
got to keep $2,500 from Anaconda Wiring and Cable, who were dumping toxins in
Hastings, New York. Then they sued American Filter in 1973. They got $200,000
and they used that money to construct a boat. And they then began patrolling the
river and they hired me using bounty money in 1984. They were still called the
Hudson River Fishermen’s Association and it was not that well organized. I mean,
they had a charter that required them to have a mixer, a dance for fishermen
once a year.
Then we started methodically suing every polluter on the Hudson. We brought a
couple hundred lawsuits, and we collected I think over $3 billion in remediation
and penalties. Hudson today is the richest waterway in the North Atlantic,
produces more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon than any other
waterway in the Atlantic Ocean, north of the equator. It’s the last major river
system left that still has strong spawning stocks of all of its historical
species of migratory fish.
Regulatory Capture, Pollution, and Vaccines
What did you learn about corporate America from your decades leading that
group—which eventually became Riverkeeper, right?
The way that Riverkeeper began was when Art and Ritchie Garrett, both former
Marines, went to the Corps of Engineers and they went to the State Conservation
Department to beg them to stop Penn Central Railroad from vomiting oil into the
Hudson. And the colonel who ran the Corps of Engineers, whom they visited 11
times in Manhattan, he finally told them, these are important people—meaning the
Penn Central Board of Directors, we can’t stop them. [The Garretts] realize,
“Oh, OK, government is in cahoots with the polluters.” If you’re a big shot, you
can destroy people’s livelihoods. You can privatize the commons, you can poison
the fish, and nobody’s going to stop you because you own the regulatory
agencies.
What does owning regulatory agencies mean?
There have been hundreds of articles, and I’ve written books on regulatory
captures. There are a lot of mechanisms by which powerful economic entities in a
society are able to capture the regulators that are supposed to be protecting
the public. It happens in every country. I mean, you see less of it in Canada
than you do in New York, for example, or Louisiana. But it’s happening
everywhere.
There are huge economic incentives to pollute. So the polluters are able to
figure out ways to turn those agencies into sock puppets for the industry that
they are supposed to regulate.
And when you go to Monsanto or Exxon or any of these companies that you sue and
say, “Hey, you guys, you’re dumping this shit into the water and it contains
mercury or whatever that could be harmful to kids, so why don’t you stop it?”,
what kinds of responses would you get?
The official response from those entities is sophisticated. And you’re usually
dealing with lawyers, who are very guarded.
The interesting question that I think most Americans have is: Why would a
corporation like Monsanto or General Electric poison all the fish in the Hudson
if it’s their fish too? And that question was answered by Sinclair Lewis, who
said that it’s impossible to persuade a man of a fact when the existence of that
fact diminishes his salary. There’s an economic law called “tragedy of the
commons,” which basically says an individual following their own economic
interests will capture and kill the last fish in the ocean no matter what it
does to the rest of society.
So those people are able to put blinders on to persuade themselves that they’re
creating jobs, that they’re doing good things, and they judge themselves by
their intentions rather than their actions. And ultimately their ultimate
redoubt is, I can live in Aspen, or I can live in Hawaii, or I can live in a
gated community, and the mayhem that I’m creating for other communities will not
reach my door.
So the idea that large pharmaceutical companies might be using additives or
using processes that could cause damage to children didn’t come as a shock to
you.
What was a shock to me was the economic entanglements between the pharmaceutical
industry and the regulatory agencies—which were, to me, unprecedented in my
previous experience. The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] is a captive
agency, but it’s captured by the coal industry, the oil industry, and by the
chemical industry. When we tried the Monsanto case, we got papers where the head
of EPA’s pesticide regulatory division had a secret communication with Monsanto
where he was telling them, “I’m going to kill this study and you need to give me
a medal when I’ve done it.” He was not working for the public. He was working
privately and secretly for Monsanto. And that’s pretty common. That’s basically
typical regulatory capture.
But with pharma, you have the entire agency that is dependent on pharmaceutical
revenue.
We need this study, and we need it done in a year, and here’s your million
bucks.
Right. We need this drug approved in a year, so we’re going to pay you extra to
fast-track it. And that money, the regulatory agencies become dependent on it.
At NIH [National Institutes of Health], as it turns out, they’re doing very
little in the way of basic scientific research. What NIH should be doing is
saying, OK, what’s the answer to this interesting question: Why is it that in my
generation, I’m 69, the rate of autism is 1 in 10,000, while in my kids’
generation it’s 1 in 34?
Now, I would argue that a lot of that is from the vaccine schedule, which
changed in 1989. But what nobody can argue about is that it has to be an
environmental exposure of some kind.
I saw a number the other day, it said that 45% of American children now suffer
from a chronic disease.
It’s more than that. The 2006 study is 65%. I think 45% suffer from obesity, at
least in some states. It’s 40, 47%, I saw, in Oklahoma, Mississippi, and West
Virginia.
And you know it has to be an environmental exposure because genes do not cause
epidemics. 1989 was the year that a lot of these changes happened. The food
allergy stuff suddenly became epidemic. Rheumatoid arthritis became epidemic.
Juvenile diabetes, a whole host of allergic-type disease like anaphylaxis,
eczema, food allergies, peanut allergies, etc., asthma, went to 1 in every 4
African American kids in cities. You had this explosion of neurodevelopmental
disorders, ADHD, speech-related, language-related, tics, Tourette syndrome.
In fact, Congress said to the EPA, tell us what year the autism epidemic began.
The EPA is a captured agency, as I said, but it’s not captured by pharma. They
came back and said, “1989, it’s a red line.” What happened in 1989 was some kind
of ubiquitous exposure that affected every demographic from Cubans in Florida to
Inuit in upper Alaska, affecting boys at four times the rate of girls. What
happened?
Phil Landrigan, who’s probably the premier toxicologist alive, and who has been
the expert in a number of cases for me, and who does not agree with me on
vaccines—he did a peer review article that said these are the 11 things that fit
that timeline. And it was like glyphosate, neonicotinoid pesticides, ultrasound
(which was interesting), cellphones, plastics, bottled water plastics, and a few
others.
Now, if you’re the head of NIH and you’re trying to protect American health, you
say, “OK, this is helpful. It’s got to be one of these 11 things. Let’s design
some studies to figure out which one it is, and we’ll make some policy
recommendations.”
Did that ever happen? No. The opposite happened, which is: The NIH will ruin
your career and bankrupt your university if you try to do that study.
If you were saying, “My name is Bobby Kennedy, and I’m representing an
organization called Riverkeeper, and we are taking on Monsanto, which is a big
company that is dumping chemicals associated with birth defects into your
water,” people look at you and say, “Good for you, Bobby.” So why do you think
emotionally, psychologically, that once you took on this other set of big
companies, pharmaceutical companies, which work with a different set of
chemicals, and started accusing them of some similar practices, suddenly that
made you into a dangerous weirdo?
Well, it’s actually even a narrower question than that, because if you ask any
Democrat or liberal, are the pharmaceutical companies greedy, evil, and
homicidal, and are they committing mass murder with a lot of products like Vioxx,
which killed 120,000 people, every Democrat and every liberal will tell you,
“Yeah, those companies are pure distilled evil.”
The opioid crisis kills 56,000 young Americans every year, and they knew it.
Right. Everybody knows big pharma is crooked. So if you’re a Democrat and a
liberal, you have to say yes, they are crooked in every aspect of their
business—except for vaccines.
I think the three big pharma companies have paid $35 billion in criminal
penalties and civil damages over the last decade or so. So they’re chronic
felons. Why do you think that just with this one product they found Jesus and
they are going to behave?
So, Are You an Anti-Vaxxer?
An “anti-vaxxer” is a very bad thing to be, in any kind of polite society. Of
course, the alternative is to accept that it’s absolutely normal for there to
suddenly be 27 mandatory vaccines in the state of New York, half of which no one
ever contemplated 10 years ago. Also, you must believe that every one of those
vaccines is immaculate and perfect, because the companies making them would
never, ever lie to us—and if you don’t believe that then you are also against
vaccinations for polio. Which is absurd.
It strikes me as a religious type of belief. Ultimately, they require you to
suspend critical thinking and to believe a trusted authority. I think that’s a
biological impulse that people have that comes to us from the 20,000 generations
we spent wandering the African savannah. Little groups, where there’s a boss,
and you had to obey them or you would perish. The people who are imposing these
orthodoxies are pressing all of those buttons.
Pro-vaccine means you are part of the group. If you are not, then you are no
longer part of the group.
And then you find the person who’s not in that group who you can say is evil and
a threat to everything we believe in. So you point to Donald Trump and you say,
either you believe him or you believe us.
Although of course Trump is the one that brought us the COVID vaccines, right?
He brought us Fauci. He brought us the vaccines. He allowed Fauci to kill
ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and he brought us the lockdowns and all that.
But they ignore that. And they say, OK, Fauci is good, Trump is bad. And anybody
who tries to depart from that orthodoxy is dangerous. And you have to discredit
them. You cannot debate them. The heretics must be burned. They must not be
allowed to speak.
Do masks work to stop COVID?
The Cochrane collaboration, Cochrane Library, which is the premier authority for
scientific clinical reviews, came out this week and said that masks, both the
masks, the N95 and the regular surgical masks, are useless. And we looked at the
studies, the existing literature, at the very beginning, and we collected it all
in one place and saw the same thing. What Tony Fauci said originally was true:
Masks don’t work against respiratory viruses during a pandemic.
The weird thing, which surprised me, is that my assumption was that the cloth
masks, of course they don’t work, because the holes in them are 200 times the
size of the virus. But then I started actually reading the literature and
there’s this huge 1982 study, it’s either University College or Royal College of
London, they said, we’ve been using masks in the surgical theater and elsewhere
for 80 years, but there’s no study of how effective they are. Let’s do one. For
six months, nobody’s going to wear a mask. As it turns out, the infection rate
went down, even in the surgical theater.
I mean, my assumption is, I want my doctor wearing a mask in the surgical
theater, because I do not want him sneezing into my open chest cavity. But as it
turns out, the science doesn’t even support that! It was an exercise not in
public health, but in control.
Or in public reassurance that then became control.
Right.
Don’t worry. You’re not helpless. Recite these words three times and sprinkle
some rose water, and you’re going to be OK.
They became these instruments of moral signaling or sanctimony, that I’m wearing
a mask, meaning I’m compliant. I’m showing my willingness to obey. It struck me
from the beginning, that convincing populations to put on masks, there was
something creepy about that.
Because, if you look at the ambition or the intention of every totalitarian
system, it’s ultimately to end the capacity for group action, for communication,
to control all communications and every aspect of human behavior, from monetary
exchanges to political organizing to sex. This is the ambition, the intention,
of totalitarianism. And what is more repressive than forcing somebody to cover
their mouth and their face. “No,” it says, “you cannot communicate.” God or
evolution has equipped the human face with 42 different muscles for expressing
all kinds of subtle skepticism.
My entire life as a reporter, I never interviewed anybody over the phone for
exactly this reason.
You want to look in their face.
Ninety percent of the information that you’re going to get about somebody’s
going to come from their face, from the way they move their body. That’s how
humans communicate.
I also think that the very skilled use of fear has the capacity to disable
critical thinking and make people run for the safety of authority. If you read
the last chapter of my Fauci book, I go through all these tabletop simulations,
which I uncovered, and there’s plenty of them that were organized by the CIA
beginning in 1999, almost every year since, involving that model, which is the
use of a pandemic to clamp down totalitarian controls and to obliterate the Bill
of Rights. And they do it again and again and again, and it’s astonishing.
None of them talk about, how do you boost immune systems? How do you stockpile
vitamin D? How do you link frontline physicians to figure out what therapies and
repurposed medications are working and efficacious against the disease? It’s all
about, how do you immediately impose censorship? How do you get people locked
down in their homes, when all of the manuals on pandemic management say you do
not do mass lockdowns. How do you do social isolation and impose all these
social controls?
It was training frontline physicians in every country in Europe and Canada and
the United States, Mexico, and Australia, that when the pandemic comes, the
response to it is to impose totalitarian control and some censorship.
It’s like a Rorschach test, right? This is who these people are, deep down. And
this is what some part of them, at least, is looking to do.
This is exactly what they did in COVID, in all of these liberal Western
democracies. Trudeau was a huge protector of civil rights and human rights. All
of a sudden they all pivot in lockstep and do the same thing: Masks, lockdowns,
mandatory vaccines.
I agreed that it was a really weird thing to watch, especially after the first
two, three months. You’re like, why is this happening this way? Why does it keep
going?
And the marginalization, the vilification, and delicensing of physicians and
scientists, and people, regular people, said, hey, I just got injured by the
vaccine. My daughter died. My son died. I’m paralyzed.
He was an athlete in high school, and now he just suffered a heart attack.
On the field. And those people are punished and they’re vilified rather than
treating them with compassion.
The Military-Pharmaceutical Complex
I want to keep going for a little while about the pharmaceutical complex itself
and the responses to COVID. It’s clear that there was a large-scale Pentagon
bio-weapons program. Bill Gates was brought in as a partner for the investment
in that program. Research for that program was offshored to labs in China. It
seems obvious now that the virus likely escaped from one of those Chinese labs.
And that there was funding for exactly this kind of research from the U.S.
government at that specific Chinese lab that the virus escaped from. So why
isn’t there an effort to create some kind of chain of legal responsibility for
the enormous amount of damage that was done, the same way you would do if
Monsanto was dumping toxins in the water?
First of all, it wasn’t just the military that ran the funding for the Wuhan
lab. It was the military and the intelligence agencies. The EcoHealth Alliance
was a CIA front. USAID, which was the biggest funder of the Wuhan lab, has a
long, long connection to the CIA, and they had a much bigger investment in it
than NIH did. So you have all of these U.S. military and intelligence agencies
who are running the lab, and then killing the investigation. So there was a
State Department investigation immediately, and Vanity Fair documented how
people with intelligence agency credentials from the nonproliferation branch of
the State Department ordered the investigation to stop specifically because it
would implicate the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
But I’m asking you, as someone who participated in 300 environmental lawsuits,
why isn’t this a lawsuit?
Because if you look at how it was done, they gave themselves complete immunity
from liability. You can’t sue them. If you look at actually who produced this
vaccine, it was not Pfizer and it was not Moderna. It was military contractors,
and it was the Pentagon. They did it under a series of provisions that were
created after 2002, between 2002 and 2019, that allowed the Pentagon to evade
any regulatory authority.
I’m not talking about the vaccine, though. I’m talking about the damage done by
the virus itself, which is a man-made creation.
Oh, I misunderstood your question. I think there will be litigation on that,
eventually. I feel we have enough evidence now that if I were allowed in front
of a jury, that I could convince virtually any jury in our country that we made
the virus, that this was a U.S. government and Chinese government collaboration.
Church Was Something That Was Miserable for Me
Would your father wake you up to go to church? Was that a thing you did with
him?
My father? We went to church almost every day.
Really?
Yeah, particularly in the summer. We went every day in the summer. Sometimes
twice.
And he’d go with you, once or twice a day?
Yeah.
What do you recall that being like? Because that’s pretty intense.
Church was something that was miserable for me.
Because you had to sit still indoors? You wanted to be outside?
Yeah. I would just count it down, in minutes.
What was your dad’s attitude?
I think my mother was the one who was the secret police when it came to church.
You’re going.
You’re going. And my grandmother, too.
My father, when we were in church, they had this odd mixture of piety and
irreverence and skepticism towards clerics. Their faith was a paradox. It was
not simple, because they came from the Irish tradition, which has a lot of
piety, but also a lot of rebellion. It creates cognitive dissonance in your
brain if you try to reconcile it, because it makes no sense.
That’s why you have to laugh, right?
Yeah. My father would read the church papers when he was in church. He would
look at what the church was saying.
I think they really loved Pope John XXIII. The Catholic Church is a public
organism. Its atomistic origins, at their best, are Christ’s Gospels and what I
think we now call Gnostic Christianity, when it was people meeting in basements
and sharing Christ’s gospels and the message of love and tolerance and
compassion. I think the way that they saw Pope John is that he was trying to
restore that aspect of the church.
What kind of lessons or stories do you remember your father telling you or
asking you as kids, to give you a sense of history?
My father came home from the Justice Department and had dinner with us almost
every night. He was a very good war historian, and he would talk about the
battles that changed history, particularly the battles of the American Civil War
and the American Revolution. We grew up knowing all the battles of the Civil War
and the Revolution, including obscure characters, because my father was really
interested in all of those things, the War of 1812, etc., but also the Greek
wars. We also heard a lot about what they were doing in the White House, the
Civil Rights movement, and—
Did he talk to you about World War II?
Yeah, lots. All the time.
Because he lost a brother in the war. Right? He lost a sister.
Yes. But also, it was the big event of their entire milieu. He lost his
brother-in-law. Kick’s husband got killed on the Maginot Line. Billy Hartington,
my uncle Billy. My uncle Joe was killed. A lot of their friends were killed.
We also talked a lot about the Germans and about what had happened during the
Holocaust. I remember him talking about Anne Frank and asking us, if you were in
that situation, would you hide Anne Frank if she came to your door? And we said,
yeah, of course we would hide her.
It was kind of like a moral character test. What side do you think you’d be on
in that situation? And that made an impression with me, and it stayed with me
the rest of my life.
As little Jewish kids, you grow up asking a different question, which is you
look at your neighbors and you say—
Will they hide you or kill you?
Exactly. And only as you get older do you start to realize it’s pretty fucked
up, because other little kids are not really asking that question about their
neighbors.
I think it’s an important question. I like to ask it every day.
Your dad went to Palestine in ’47?
Yeah, in ’47. For the Boston Herald.
His dispatches are very interesting because he obviously identified with those
Palestinian Jews, as they were then known, the Israelis, very strongly. I don’t
know if it was in part because they were fighting the British, but whatever it
was, the fact that they were fighting for their own independence seemed to make
an impression on him. Did he talk about that?
I remember in the ’67 war, I was at the pool next to him, when I think Johnson
called him and told him the war had just begun. It was either Johnson or
somebody from the White House. It may have been McNamara.
And I was the first person my father turned to because I was sitting next to him
on the chaise lounge. And he got up and I remember he put on his glasses and he
was going to go up to the house. And I said, “What’s happened?” And he said that
a bunch of the Arab countries had attacked Israel, including Egypt. And it was
Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait.
I knew how tiny Israel was because at that time, everybody took geography.
The great, lost fucking discipline.
In Catholic school, we had to fill in every African country. We were given a map
of Africa, Asia, and we had to fill in all the countries that we knew.
And I just thought how this little, tiny sliver of a country was going to fight
against these huge countries with tens of millions of people in them.
And I was like, “Is Israel going to get destroyed?”
And he said to me, he said, “No, the Israelis are tough.”
For my father to use that, that was his supreme accolade. The word “tough” was
the highest thing that he could say about anybody. So I knew who he was rooting
for.
You’d hear about the Freedom Riders or Martin Luther King?
Yes, all of that. We had the Freedom Riders at our house. There were always
Cubans in our house, from the Bay of Pigs. We went horseback riding every
morning before breakfast, at 6:00 a.m., when we were in Virginia. We would ride
through the CIA, and we would ride around a development there where my father
had found homes for a lot of the brigade members. He would go by and we would
talk to them. My mom and him would help them get health insurance, help them get
kids in school, and find them homes.
These were the Bay of Pigs and then the Operation Mongoose people?
Operation Mongoose, yeah. My father did not like the CIA guys who were running
Mongoose. He had a very antagonistic relationship with them. He liked Harry
Ruiz, who was the engineer who had been a part of the Bay of Pigs, who was one
of his closest friends. He had followed Castro, so he had been against Batista.
There were many different components of the Bay of Pigs group. Some of them were
old Batista murderers and torturers and soldiers. My father believed that we
should be supporting a revolution in Cuba, but he did not believe that we should
be assassinating Castro.
Who Killed JFK?
You never heard your father speculate or imagine any kind of connection between
Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, and Jack’s death?
Well, no.
My father’s first reaction to the day, I do remember.
I got picked up at my school, at Sidwell Friends, and then brought home when
Jack was shot. He had not died yet or been pronounced dead. We were brought
home. So I was at home with my father when [J. Edgar] Hoover called my father
and told him that my uncle was dead.
When I got home, my father was walking in our yard, which was a six-acre farm.
He was walking with [CIA Director] John McCone, who I knew because the CIA was
less than a mile from my house, and McCone would come over every day. After the
office closed every day, he would come and swim in our pool and do laps before
he went home. He would say hi to my mom and dad. Sometimes, they’d have
cocktails.
My father was walking with him, and my father asked McCone, “Did our people do
this?”
My father made three calls. One, he called the CIA, and he asked a desk officer,
“Did you guys do this?” He got McCone on the phone. McCone came over, and he
asked McCone directly, “Did the CIA do this?” Then he asked Enrique Ruiz
Williams.
Harry Ruiz Williams was very, very close to my family. He came on ski trips with
us. He was eating dinner at our house all the time. He was the liaison between
my dad and a lot of the other community who had a very complex relationship with
my family. Early on, we were heroes. Later on, a lot—
You left them to die.
Right.
But he called him at his hotel. He was there with a journalist, I forget that
guy’s name, who wrote the official chronicle of the Bay of Pigs, which is called
The Bay of Pigs, and he was a friend of my dad’s, and I grew up knowing him. He
and Harry Ruiz Williams were both staying at a hotel in Washington, D.C., at
that time. He called them and he said, “Did your guys do this?”
So my father’s first instinct was the CIA had done it.
But what happened with my dad is, first of all, he was shattered and just did
not pursue it. He was in darkness and, at that point, he didn’t care who killed
my uncle. He was just—
Gone.
He was gone, and there was nothing bringing him back. My dad was just trying to
survive.
At that point, immediately after Jack’s death, my father also lost 100% of the
investigative capacity of the Justice Department, because Hoover no longer was
reporting to the attorney general. He was reporting to Johnson. So my father
didn’t have an investigative arm anymore. So even if he wanted to quietly look
into my uncle’s death, he didn’t feel he had a way to do it.
Then as he came out of that darkness and depression, he began turning to the war
and to politics, and he went into the Senate in ’64.
A couple of years later, like I guess ’66 or ’67, he was walking through the
National Airport with Frank Mankiewicz and Walter Sheridan. And he said there
was a magazine stand there that had a lot of magazines with James Garrison on
the cover. And he pointed to Garrison, who was then investigating my uncle’s
death and thinking that the CIA was involved.
And he said to them, “What do you think about him? Does he have anything?”
And they said, “We think he does.”
And Daddy said to them, “Will you look into it quietly?”
So they went down, or Sheridan went down there. And what he came back with is
that he got a look at Jack Ruby’s telephone records right before the
assassination. And he was struck that virtually everybody that my dad had
subpoenaed and convicted who was in the Mafia had been in touch with Ruby a
month before.
And at that time, you have to remember that nobody knew at that time, the link
between the Mafia and the CIA, that there was really just one organization, when
it came to certain types of operations.
So my father, I think, at that point, was thinking, “Well, maybe it wasn’t the
CIA. Maybe it was the mob. And maybe they did it because I was prosecuting him,”
which was really, I think, hurtful to him.
But then a week before he was killed, about a week before he was killed, he was
campaigning here in California and he spoke at a community college in Los
Angeles.
And up to that time, when anybody asked him about the Warren Commission, he
would kind of mumble.
He wasn’t going to say it was right and he wasn’t going to go against it.
Right. Because if he started questioning it, he would marginalize himself and he
would lose his capacity to talk about the war and about what was happening in
the cities, which are the two things he wanted to be effective on. And he
would’ve looked nutty.
So whenever anybody asked him about it, he would mumble something that was
noncommittal. And he said privately to his aides that it was a shoddy piece of
work. And my father knew more about investigations than anybody. He had already
investigated the mob. A devastating investigation. He had been attorney general.
He knew how the CIA operated. He knew how the FBI operated.
And you did pick up from him, when you were a kid, a hostility towards the CIA?
Yes, absolutely.
So he was at a community college here in Los Angeles. And a student said to him,
and this is a week before the primary, he knew he was going to win California.
And if he won California, he was going to win the convention, in his head.
Because the two guys who stood between him and the White House, he had already
beat both of them. He beat Humphrey in ’60, and he had beat Nixon at ’60. He
knew how to beat them, and he was not scared of it.
And one thing, the night of a primary, something happened he knew was going to
happen, which was Richard Daley called him and said, “I’m going to grease the
skids for you in Chicago.”
So at that point, I think my father knew that he was going to be president. He
believed, anyway, that he would be president.
So a week before, he already sees California’s going his way.
And a student said to him, “If you become president, will you reopen the Warren
Commission?”
And if you listen to the tape, there’s a long silence. And then he says, “Yes.”
And that’s it.
I think that would’ve scared a lot of people because he knew how to do an
investigation and he would not have been steamrollered.
He showed that card.
Who Killed RFK?
Do you remember your father telling you that he was going to run for president?
I remember that whole time, yeah. I remember him staying up all night, writing
the speech.
And then I went to the announcement with him, in the Senate caucus room.
And there was a lot of excitement. There were people in the house, all of his
aides, and Adam Walinsky and Dick Goodwin, were all there typing the speech all
night. Arthur Schlesinger. So yeah, we knew that he was going to run.
Were you guys scared? As his kids?
No.
You didn’t think someone could kill him the way they killed your uncle?
You know what? I don’t think that’s the way any of us thought. We all thought,
they’re involved in a war. And it’s like war, where you take your risks.
There was no one among the kids who said—
There’s a lot worse things than dying, by the way.
Well, that’s a thing that either your parents teach you, or they don’t.
Yeah. So I think that was the way that everybody looked at it.
The person who ostensibly shot your father here in Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan,
was ostensibly motivated by the fact that your father was pro-Israel, wanted to
sell U.S. fighter planes to Israel. He shot your father on what for him was the
first anniversary of the Six-Day War, the ’67 war. Or do you understand that
event differently?
Well, at this point, I think Sirhan was part of that ambush of my father. I do
not believe that Sirhan actually killed my father.
But for many years, my understanding of it was the conventional understanding,
which was that Sirhan had killed my father because my father had committed to
defending Israel in the presidential debates.
My understanding of what happened, of the assassination, is more complex now. I
do not believe Sirhan actually fired the bullets that killed my father.
Were you persuaded by the evidence of the tape, where you can hear many more
shots than Sirhan Sirhan fired from his gun?
No, the thing that persuaded me, that first persuaded me was Paul Schrade, who
was standing beside my father—he was the vice president of the UAW and a very
close friend who had discovered Cesar Chavez and introduced him to my father.
But he was also shot that night. Five or six years ago, he basically forced me
to come over to his house and sit at his kitchen table and read Thomas Noguchi’s
autopsy report. And once you read that, it’s impossible to believe that Sirhan
had killed my father.
Because Sirhan fired two shots at my father. He had a revolver with eight shots
in the chamber. And he fired two shots. One of them hit the door jamb behind my
father and was later removed by the police. The other one hit Paul Schrade. And
then his gun was turned. He was pounced on by ultimately six people. A big dog
pile, who pinned him on a steam table, and forced the gun away from my father.
Rafer Johnson [who helped subdue Sirhan] talks about how this little man, he had
superhuman strength. And they could not wrest the gun from his hand. And he
fired off six more shots. All of those shots hit people. We know who they hit.
One person got hit twice, through his clothing once, but the shots were going
away from my father.
According to Noguchi’s autopsy, my father was killed by four shots fired from
behind him.
Sirhan never got behind him. Sirhan was in front of him. And those shots were
all contact shots. So they left carbon tattoos on his body, which means the
barrel of the gun could never not have been more than an inch from his body, and
in some cases were clearly touching his body. And they were fired upward, at
upward angle, suggesting the person who fired them was holding the gun close to
his body and concealing it while firing it upward.
The fatal shot was the one from behind his ear.
Sirhan never got that near. There were 77 eyewitnesses, and everybody placed
Sirhan five feet in front of my father.
So who do you think did fire the shots that killed your father?
I think the person who did it was [Thane] Eugene Cesar, who was the security
guard who had just got the job two nights before. And who was holding my
father’s elbow. He hated my father, and he—
Why?
He was very racist. And he thought my father was handing the country over to
Blacks.
And he was also a CIA asset. He had top security clearance at the Lockheed
plant. And he had just gotten the job as security. And he’s the one who steered
my father into the ambush. He grabbed my father’s elbow.
My father was not supposed to go into the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.
Don’t they usually say that was Fred Dutton who brought your dad into the
kitchen?
But Cesar picked him up at the doorway and guided them into Sirhan’s ambush.
And then he pulled his gun.
There were 12 people who saw him pull his gun. My father clearly knew he was
being shot from behind because he rotated and pulled off Cesar’s tie, his
clip-on tie. And as he fell, he had the tie in his hand.
He fell on Cesar and Cesar then pushed my father off of him and stood up with
his gun drawn.
When he was asked later, “Why did you have your gun drawn?” He said, “I was
firing at Sirhan,” but that didn’t happen.
And then he lied about what he did with the gun.
His gun was ultimately recovered. There’s people here in Los Angeles who are
testing it right now, but it made a long, bizarre sojourn, where it was stolen
by teenagers, it was thrown into a lake, and it was sold to another guy. A month
after my father’s death, Cesar sold it to another guy from the Lockheed plant
who was retiring and went to Arkansas.
And he told the police he had sold that gun and he told the guy, “This was used
in a crime. Don’t ever show it to anybody.”
He told the police he had sold that gun in May before my father’s death, but the
guy from Arkansas said, “No, he sold it to me in July of ’68.”
Then a bunch of things happened with that gun, that ended up now with a
collector here in Los Angeles.
And then the ballistics do not match. And there were more shots fired than
Sirhan had. There are too many conundrums to explain that it was Sirhan Sirhan.
It doesn’t make any sense, when you start looking, at even a cursory examination
of what happened that night.
The LAPD brought in a special team to do the investigation. It was called the
Special Units Center. And that team were all LAPD officers who had been trained
at the farm in Virginia at CIA’s headquarters, and then dispatched to duty in
Los Angeles, in Latin America for the CIA. And then were brought back to this
investigation. Prior to Sirhan’s trial, there were 2,800 photographs destroyed
by the police and incinerators. And a lot of the material evidence was also
destroyed. It was a very bizarre case.
Any lawyer could have gotten Sirhan off anyway, because the ballistics didn’t
match. But unfortunately, Sirhan was given a lawyer who was also the lawyer for
[famous American gangsters] Mickey Cohen and Johnny Roselli, who had their own
involvement in the JFK assassination. And they provided him with the lawyer who
told him to plead guilty.
What do you remember about the months after your father being killed?
Well, I mean, it was just a wasteland. It was a twilight zone in our house. The
older kids were all sent away for the summer. My brother David was sent away.
Because my mother had all these kids at a home, and she was trying to figure out
how to manage this family.
The horrible story about David was that he had actually seen the murder live on
TV, right?
Yeah. He was in Los Angeles and watched it on TV. And then nobody remembered him
for several hours. So he was sitting in a room, alone, watching reruns of my dad
being shot. And he kind of never recovered from that.
My brother David went that summer to Delano, to work for Cesar Chavez.
My sister went up to Alaska to work for the Inuit.
My brother Joe was sent to Seattle to work as a guide on Mount Rainier for Jim
Whitaker.
I got sent to Africa, with Lem Billings. I spent a lot of the summer with Tom
Mboya, who was a Kenyan labor leader who loved my father. He was in line to be
the successor to Jomo Kenyatta. And he was then assassinated.
I remember one of your cousins once told me about going to your house, I guess
it would’ve been in the early ’70s. And they remembered it as being quite
literally a zoo. I remember them saying, “Bobby had animals everywhere. And then
kids were climbing out onto the roof from the windows. And my mom was like, ‘No
more visits because it’s fucking out of control.’” Was that the way it was?
I think my mom liked that chaos and she endorsed risk-taking, and there were a
lot of emergency room visits. And then she liked the animals, too. I mean, we
had a seal living in our pool for a long time. We had a lot of other animals. We
had a full farm yard of cows and coats and geese and ducks and pigeons. We had
nine horses. I had a basement filled with possums and raccoons and coatimundis.
Then I had all my hawks.
So what did you need heroin for?
Listen, I was 16 years old. I would say I was out of control. At that point,
drugs did not have the same kind of stigma that they have today. We’re talking
about—
I had 15 years where I was high every day, so I am not judging you or your
27-year-old self.
I was what I’d call an addict for 14 years. I was using drugs for 14 years
before I got sober.
I became an addict the same reason most people do, which is they have a big
empty hole inside, and that was the one thing that would fill it.
How did you get clean?
I went to 12 steps.
You just went to meetings or did you go to the—
No, I went to a rehab, but I didn’t go to a 12-step rehab. I went to something
called Fair Oaks.
I lived with heroin addicts. I don’t know how anybody quits heroin. It becomes
part of you. Being able to quit that as a young man and stay off it is—
Those other people who do it probably start off a little bit more reckless than
your average alcoholic.
You built an integrated life.
How the Kennedys Gave Us Barack Obama
Tell me more about Tom Mboya
Tom Mboya was a Luo. I had first met him in 1960, when he came to our house on
the Cape, to try to airlift kids to America, to attend college. It’s an
interesting story because he was then the only Kenyan who had attended college.
He’d been to Oxford for two years. He was a labor leader and he had been part of
the Mau Mau with Kenyatta. But he came from a little tiny tribe called the Luo.
And they’re a fish-eating tribe up in Lake Victoria. And they’re known as super
smart, but also peacemakers.
In 1960, he came to my house because he had realized the British had said, OK,
we’re going to give you independence. You got five years to get your act
together. He had looked around and he said, “There’s not a single kid in this
country who has a college education. How are we going to govern ourselves?”
So he wrote letters to 200 American colleges and he said, “Will you give a free
ride, a full scholarship to a Kenyan kid? I’m going to choose the 200 smartest
kids in Kenya.”
He got 200 colleges to agree, including Harvard. And he got all these kids. And
then in the middle of the summer, he realized he didn’t have any money to get
them over.
So he flew over, went to the State Department, said, “Will you give us money to
bring these kids over?” And Nixon was VP, running for president, and thought if
he airlifted Blacks from Africa, they would kill him in the South. And Blacks in
the South were a key vote because they could go either way. At that point, they
had been traditional Republicans, but Roosevelt had gotten a lot of them to
switch over. But you didn’t want to screw around with the whites in the South,
who were also up for grabs.
And so then Tom Mboya went to see Martin Luther King. And Martin Luther King
said, “Maybe you should go to John Kennedy because he’s on the African
subcommittee and he’s a big African nationalist.”
And he introduced Mboya to Harry Belafonte. And Harry Belafonte, who was friends
with my parents and Jack, he brought him to our house and we all got to meet
him.
Now I had been obsessed with Africa since I was 7. My father had brought home a
film called Africa Speaks, and put it on our screen in our basement, a
16-millimeter screen. And I had read every book about Africa. I had read all the
Tarzan books. I read The Blue Nile, The White Nile, everything. So to meet a
real African was a huge thrill.
Then I went over in ’64 with Sargent Shriver, and we spent a lot of time with
Tom Mboya and his son, Bobby. We went and I spent the summer over there.
And then when my father died, I spent the summer there and we spent most of the
summer with Tom Mboya. And in August of ’69, Tom Mboya was assassinated, by
Daniel arap Moi.
Who then became president for Life.
Right. So then in 2004, I gave one of the keynote speeches at the Democratic
Convention in Boston. I was living with Larry David, at that time, in Martha’s
Vineyard. And they asked me to give this speech on the environment, which is now
a big Democratic issue.
Right. Along with Barack Obama.
Yeah. So Larry and I flew up. And Larry gave me a ride up in his plane. And then
we spent the day on the floor of the convention.
And in the green room, before I spoke, we met Barack. And I spoke, and then he
spoke. And we saw him speak, and he just blew the roof off the thing. Nobody
ever heard of him. He’d only been one year in the Senate. But then we talked to
him afterwards and we were having a lot of fun. And we said, “Where are you
headed?”
And he said, “I’m going to Martha’s Vineyard to raise money in Oaks Bluff,”
which is a Black community, full of millionaires, on Martha’s Vineyard.
And we said, “We’ll give you a ride down there.”
And we went and had dinner with him. And while he was at dinner, I sat next to
him and I was asking him about his background. He said his father was Kenyan.
And I said, “Do you know which tribe he is from?”
And he said, “Yeah, he was Luo.”
And I said, “Oh, have you ever heard of Tom Mboya?”
And he said, “Tom Mboya is the reason I’m in this country.”
Wow. Right.
Because Obama’s father Barack was the first guy that Tom Mboya brought over on
what they call now the Kennedy airlift.
Jack was so impressed with him. He gave him $200,000. But he told him, “You
can’t tell anybody.” Then Nixon found out about it and Nixon then branded it the
Kennedy airlift.
The New American System
Are we still living in the same country that you grew up in, in which your
family saga was one of the structuring myths, is this that same country still,
now?
I think democracy’s taken a lot of hits.
I think that a new system is being put in place. I can feel it and I see it.
Where do you think it comes from?
Eisenhower made this famous speech on my seventh birthday, in 1961 on January
17th, where he warned against the subversion of America’s values and democracy
because of the military-industrial complex, which includes the intelligence
apparatus. Also, he specifically mentioned the federal science agencies, which
he included in that definition.
I would say that my uncle came into office three days later and spent the next
three years fighting a battle against his own military and intelligence
apparatus to make sure that Eisenhower’s predictions didn’t come true and that
my uncle died in that process.
Then my father campaigned five years later for president against the Vietnam
War, against the domination of American democracy by the military-industrial
complex, and he died in that endeavor.
Since then, we’ve seen the steady subversion of our democracy and the
transformation of America into an imperial state abroad and a surveillance state
and security state at home. I think the biggest tectonic changes happened
because of the Vietnam War.
Then on 9/11, when the Cold War was over at that point, and we were all supposed
to now finally get the peace dividend, instead that peace dividend was diverted
to a new battle against an invisible enemy called terrorism. That was also the
beginning of the biosecurity state, which is a more potent enemy to justify this
huge diversion of a big slice of our GDP to the same people, the intelligence
agencies, the military agencies, and the associated industries, including the
pharmaceutical industry, which is now the biggest industry in the world.
They’re all tied together. They now control the media as well through a lot of
different mechanisms, including just pharmaceutical advertising, which dominates
the news reporting shows of our country. If you look at Anderson Cooper, he is
not working for CNN; he’s working for Pfizer.
There’s one actor that’s left out of your story, which is the actor that I got
to see destroy the landscape of what was once American journalism: large
technology companies.
I should have included those. When I talk about the intelligence apparatus,
that’s part of it. Because those companies were, generally speaking, many of
them were funded and seeded by In-Q-Tel. The entire grid is a creation of DARPA
and of the Pentagon. Most of those CEOs have client contracts with the CIA and
with DARPA and the Pentagon.
In return for which they were granted monopolies.
Yeah. Exactly.
Which is a lucrative thing to have, if someone’s going to grant you one of
those.
So was it a plan? Personally, I think the technology developed on its own, and
you had a remarkable amount of stupidity among the class of people that had
owned things like newspapers before.
It’s hard to know, because so much of it is obscure, how much of it was
purposeful. I have no way of saying whether it was purposeful or not, so I stay
away from those kind of predictions, because a lot of it does look purposeful.
The way I understand it from my own reporting and life experience, it’s like if
you cut a channel where there’s water, it’s going to flow through the channel.
That doesn’t mean that anyone necessarily cut the channel with the forethought
that that particular water was going to come on that day and go in there. By the
same token, once you cut the channel, you know that water is going to go there
and not go somewhere else. Does that qualify as a conspiracy or not? The answer
is, “it depends how tight you try to draw those connections.”
I think that’s a good way, a workable way, of looking at it. I don’t have any
other way. CJ Hopkins did a great article this week on sort of breaking down the
psyops of COVID-19. Without slipping into speculation and conspiracy theories,
but repeating what Noam Chomsky said many years ago that during an interview
when a newscaster said to him, well, I don’t share your beliefs about how things
work. Chomsky said to him, and if you did share my beliefs, you wouldn’t be
sitting where you are sitting. Because the system has a way of weeding out
people who aren’t going to question the permissible assumptions.
You used a phrase in a recent essay you wrote, which I liked, which was lockdown
liberalism. I’m a liberal. At least, I used to call myself a liberal, back when
I knew the tenets of my creed. They were free speech, personal freedoms …
My body, my choice.
Right. So how do you understand it now? I mean, it’s weird how fast it all
flipped.
Again, I think it was this kind of response that is ultimately rooted in the
same neuronal pathways that evolved during the tribal era of human evolution,
which were then exploited.
You think this is all one big stress reaction being exploited? By whom?
If you read these tabletop exercises, there was clearly an agenda to push to use
a pandemic, either real or imagined, to expand the power of the military and
intelligence and medical cartel apparatus. We did things that just made no
sense. None of the medical interventions worked. We were killing people by
denying early treatments that were very, very functional. I mean, we had the
highest body count of any country in the world. Our death rate was 3,000 COVID
deaths per million population. Nigeria was 14. Nigeria had a 1.3% vaccination
rate.
You’re imagining there’s a group of people that are sitting there itching to
have control over information anyway, and this is the excuse?
I think it’s what you said before, which is that the natural ambition of power
is to increase its reach. That you don’t need somebody sitting in a back room
saying, let’s have a pandemic and then let’s use it. There are companies, and
there are institutions that will just automatically know to use that to increase
their power and wealth.
But how did liberals become the people who—
Were most subsumed in the orthodoxy?
Yeah.
Again, I think that there were a lot of tribal buttons pushed, so that this
became, you had to choose between us and Trump.
It’s easy to forget how critical the independent institutional press was to
20th-century American democracy, and how different that press was from the
state-run bullshit farms we have now. An independent press with its own sources
of revenue based in a specific city, embedded in the structures of that city,
whether that’s unions, politics, religion, everything else, is an organic thing,
with a life of its own. You can’t tell the people of your own city, who pay for
your newspaper, that their kids aren’t getting sick, or that vaccines work when
they don’t, or else they won’t buy your newspaper anymore. Now we’ve replaced
that landscape, which was founded on trust, with a new AstroTurf-ed landscape of
monopoly information platforms which are all being censored and marionetted in
real time by the U.S. government. Where the White House is literally making
phone calls saying shut down this guy’s Twitter account. That’s a weird
transformation that happened pretty fast.
I watched the gradual capture of liberals in a way that is probably less
comprehensive than what you just said. Just briefly on the vaccine issue, it
used to be, even in 2018, Republicans and Democrats were evenly divided on that
issue. You could go to Democrats here in Sacramento and talk to them about it.
And what happened was, Obama needed the pharmaceutical companies on board for
Obamacare. And so he made the deal that, OK, we’re not going to negotiate over
drug prices and Medicare if you support Obamacare. Because he didn’t do that,
that was selling his soul to the devil. But if they didn’t do it, they couldn’t
have passed it. And pharma signed on to Obamacare, and suddenly it became
permissible for pharmaceutical companies to donate to Democrats. And before
that, Democrats can only get money, big money, from unions and from trial
lawyers. But there were no companies that they could get it from.
Suddenly the Democrats were all getting money from pharma, in fact, most of the
money. And it’s now the biggest industry in the world.
And then Trump runs, and says three times during that campaign, “I think
vaccines are causing autism.” So then it became a Trump issue. And they put it
in the same dumpster that you put his climate change pronouncements.
Anne Frank and the 24/7 Automated Smear Machine
Does it hurt you when you are painted as a nut? Or do you not give a shit?
I wouldn’t put it in either of those ways. I would say that the way that I do
decision-making is to just say that what other people think of me is not my
business. It doesn’t mean that I don’t care, but I’m just not going to pay
attention to it. I’m going to make decisions based on science and reason. If you
can show me the evidence, you can change my mind, and I’ll admit that I was
wrong, happily.
But don’t try to do it through bullying or through intimidation, because I’m
just going to say, “No, show me the evidence.” I try to live my life in a way
where I only got an audience of one—which is my conscience, my higher power, and
my wife—and I try to live a life of integrity.
Now, when you made your semi-infamous Anne Frank comment, in which you suggested
that modern-day totalitarians have tools at their disposal that even the Nazis
didn’t have, your wife publicly repudiated that.
Yeah.
That had a little bit of a Soviet feel to me. I was like, “it would hurt if my
wife said something like that in public.”
I encouraged her to do that. In fact, I had given her language that was even
stronger than what she said.
I made two statements. One is, I think it was 2016, a reporter in Sacramento
asked me something and I said I had used the word “a holocaust,” not “the
Holocaust,” but “a holocaust.” I love language, and I use language with
particularity. And to me, I was not comparing it to the Nazi Holocaust, but to
the biblical use of the word holocaust, which means a sacrifice, like Abraham
and Isaac. That’s the sense that I was using holocaust, a burnt offering, that
our children are being sacrificed to some idea of a greater good. That’s how I
intended it.
But, people came after me and said, “Oh, he compared it to the Holocaust.” And
then you get involved with, OK, you’re hurting people who are sensitive about
this so what do you do?
You’re not actually hurting people who are sensitive about it. You activated an
automated outrage machine that was looking for a gotcha.
I’m living in a world, David, where nobody prints my replies or explanations.
The only thing that they print is that I say I’m sorry. And that’s the only way
to end the controversy, because I can sit there all day and make rational
arguments, and nobody’s ever going to hear them. It’s like talking into a
fucking tin can. That is the environment, the ecosystem in which I live—one
where my words are never used unless there is some way to twist them to use
against me. So I ended up having to apologize for a mischaracterization of what
I said.
And then the same thing happened in Washington. They say, people said I compared
Anthony Fauci’s countermeasures to the Holocaust. But if you listen to what I
said, I was talking about totalitarianism in general, about the communist regime
in Eastern Germany, and the Nazis, and how the ambition of every totalitarian
regime is complete control, and how they’ve never been able to do it but now
there’s technology out there that allows for that.
Which is a factually correct statement.
It’s factually correct. They can look through buildings now. They know your GPS
even when your phone is turned off. So I was making this point about turnkey
totalitarianism that they’ve got now in place, and if they want to clamp down
there is no way to fight them. And it’s a really important point, but—
But instead of responding to that point, it became “oh, now this vile anti-vaxxer
has desecrated the sacred memory of Anne Frank.”
Right. So then I come home, and my wife is losing jobs. My wife was raised in a
trailer in Frostburg, Florida, and came up with nothing and drove out here in
her Toyota Tercel with literally no money and built a career in which she is now
flourishing. And my job as her husband is to protect her. And all of a sudden I
say something that is then mischaracterized on CNN, and people are now pulling
jobs away from her, including a job that she really loved, that she lost.
So, my response to that was, whatever I have to say, I will say. I don’t care
how it hurts me. I don’t care if it damages my credibility. I don’t care what it
sounds like, I’m going to say it. And I gave her a script that was much tougher
than what she actually ended up saying.
What do you understand about an information ecosystem that’s demanding that
people denounce their spouses in order to continue working? It’s sick.
Well, it’s not journalism. It’s a propaganda system. It’s a social control
system. It’s an information control system. And that’s what we’re dealing with.
At this point, I try to maintain a spiritual center that makes me impervious to
most of that. I never make predictions, because I don’t have expectations. And
as long as I don’t have expectations, I never have disappointments. And because
I don’t get disappointed, I never get crushed.
I was in the environmental movement for many years, and I had many friends who
were soul-crushed. If you’re an environmentalist, every victory you have is
temporary, and every loss is permanent. You lose a species, it’s not coming
back. You lose a piece of landscape, it’s gone forever. And people would get
just destroyed by the losses, and burn out. And I learned at that time that the
only thing I control is this little piece of real estate inside my own shoes.
And that’s literally the only thing I control.
So I have to let go of the outcomes and not get invested in them, and I just
have to keep fighting. The outcomes are in God’s hands. They’re not in my hands.
Was that a lesson that came out of recovery?
A lot of my lessons come out of recovery. I go to a lot of meetings, I go to
nine meetings a week, and that keeps me spiritually centered. I do an hour of
meditation every day, and I do it while hiking in the wilderness with my dogs.
And I do other stuff. I know all my strength comes from that spiritual center,
and that is the one thing that I really need to put effort into.
So how are you feeling these days?
I’m in a good place right now. I have kids who are all doing well at this
moment, knock on wood. And I can’t imagine having a better partner in my life
than my wife. I feel like she’s really almost just a gift to me from the divine.
She’s the most honest human being I’ve ever met. I’ve never seen her do anything
even a little bit dishonest, or self-promoting, or pretentious, or guileful. She
makes me really happy. And so, I feel like I do have to pay attention to her.
I know that feeling.
Right? And so, I would be pretty badly off if she were pissed at me for
something. That’s my Achilles’ heel.
That’s good. That means you care.
Yeah. Oh, well. I’m dealing with an audience of one. If the world hates me and
she loves me, I’m OK with that.
Now, you mentioned that you were close to Larry David. Did he introduce you?
Yes. He brought her on a couple of ski vacations. For a celebrity ski event, a
big fundraiser for NRDC. He would come to it every year. And I was living with
him on the Cape in the summers, and then we would vacation together.
How did you guys become friends?
I became friends through his wife, through Laurie. I met her because she was on
NRDC’s board. And then we became very close, and we raised our daughters kind of
together. They’re almost like sisters. And so.
I spent an afternoon with him once on the set of Seinfeld, and he was just
really serious. He wanted to talk a lot about Lewis Lapham and Harper’s
Magazine. He obviously has a serious side.
Yeah. He’s not like Robin Williams, which is to say that he has a hard time
turning it off. He’s the guy that you see on TV except that he’s actually a
really good human being. He’s very generous, and he hates to see anybody in
pain. He kind of believes the best of people.
So did he bring her to these ski vacations as a set-up kind of deal—
No, he did not bring her to turn her over to me. Not at all. In fact, the first
time I met her, she was married, I was married, and there was a friendship, but
there was no spark. And then she came back at a time when she had just gotten
separated, and I was separated. And then we sat together at dinner, and there
was an immediate spark. I actually then flew to New York and to ask Larry’s
opinion, or … to ask Larry’s permission to date her.
Because it’s his TV wife?
It was his TV wife. But also, Larry has a lot of rules that everybody ought to
know. It’s just like what you see in Seinfeld, there’s like rules where I felt
it was important that I ask his permission first. And I went up to the Carlyle
Hotel, around, I don’t know, 10 o’clock at night and we sat down, and I felt
like I was asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
But surprisingly, he was really enthusiastic and encouraging. And he said,
“She’s the best person that I know. She’s the only person I know in this
industry who has no enemies. And she’s totally beloved.” And he gave me a sort
of permission.
Then Cheryl talked to him about it, and he said, “It’ll never work.” So, he
didn’t say the same thing to her.
And then when he kind of replayed it on the show, he has Ted Danson asking
permission, going through the thing that I did. And he tells Ted Danson, “No
fucking way. You can’t date her.”
But that didn’t actually happen in real life.
That’s what he may have been thinking at the time. But luckily that’s not what
he said.
You are the source of another Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, right, which is very
famous among Orthodox Jews, which is the one with the girl who’s stuck in the
ski lift for Shabbat, the Sabbath, and then has to jump down.
Yeah. My first lawsuit when I was a summer associate at a law firm in New York,
my first client was somebody who had been injured at a ski area. And the states
that have ski areas normally pass shield laws, because the ski areas are huge
economic drivers for the state, and they know a lot of people are going to get
injured. They pass shield laws to make sure the ski areas are not just barraged
in a deluge of lawsuits all the time.
So I was looking through the law books to try to find some precedent where
anybody had successfully sued a ski area in New York, and I found this case, the
only case I could find, which was two Hasidic Jews who got on a chair lift at
the Bellayre area in the middle of the summer, and they were going to ride the
ski lift up, and then they were going to hike down, which is a common thing that
people do in the summer. You get a nice walk, but it’s all downhill. And the guy
at the bottom had told the guy at the top, there’s a couple who just got on, and
it was at the end of the day. So the guy at the top let a couple off, and shut
off the lift. And he hiked down and he left these two people, the Hasidic
couple, up on the lift. And it was at the highest point in the lift.
And in the Hasidic tradition, an unmarried male and female can’t be with each
other after sundown. But the stigma’s on the woman. So there was an argument
between them where she was trying to convince him to—
Jump.
And he refused to do it. And I told that to Larry and he thought that was the
funniest thing he ever heard.
It is quite funny.
And then she did jump. And then she was grievously injured, and she successfully
sued the ski area. But he didn’t believe it. And about a month later, somebody
from his office called me and said, “Can you find that case?” Because he was
checking.
You don’t keep any falcons here?
I don’t have birds here. We had an emu, but a lion ate it.
How did your wife feel about that?
My wife was very happy. She hated that emu. I would come home after work, and
she’d be at the computer, looking for what the life expectancy was of emus.
Did it ever bite her?
It did. It loved me. And when I came in, the emu would roll over and make me
scratch its belly and it would swim in the pool with me. And it was very … it
was in love with me. It had imprinted on me. But it hated her. And it would
chase her. They’re very big. It was about seven feet.
This is going to make my wife feel better. When my youngest son was young, we
went to the Bronx Zoo, and were showing him all the nice animals. And he falls
for this alpaca that’s there, and the alpaca puts its head down and is nuzzling
him. And of course, my wife looks over, and sees what she imagines is her child
being endangered by an alpaca, and she lunges towards him. Whereupon the alpaca
perceives a crazy woman that’s going to attack a child. It naturally acts
protectively, reaching over the gate and biting her thigh, hard.
So I go get our son, who is fine. Meanwhile, my wife, who is in pain and wants
the animal to be put to death, was outraged. “You’re not mad at the alpaca?” And
I’m like, “No. You lunged at a child, and the alpaca was acting protectively,
and he was perfectly nice to me and our son.” And this was a fight that went on
for about three days after that. So she’s going to be glad to hear that she’s
not the only woman who was persecuted by a large animal, and that the animal
died.
Cheryl hated that emu.
Thank you for telling me this story.