An Executive Order that Targets Jews
The sanctions are being imposed on people who are neither settlers nor violent. The list of sanctioned entities includes Tsav 9, an organization that engages in nonviolent protest to prevent humanitarian aid from being captured by Hamas. You’d think that this administration, or any U.S. government, would have exactly the same goal: It can’t be a good idea to let Hamas capture humanitarian aid, because we know—as reported by Israeli TV again recently—that Hamas sells the aid, at exorbitant prices, to the Gazans to whom it’s directed, and then uses that money to fund Hamas terror operations.Seth Mandel: Hamas’s Fitting Embrace of a Nazi Symbol
The Israelis who are trying to right this obvious wrong are engaging in exactly the kind of protests we see all the time. When such tactics were used to protest judicial reforms, President Biden praised the riots as an “enduring protest movement that is demonstrating the vibrancy of Israel’s democracy.”
But the same tactics deployed by Israeli Jews against Hamas get a different response, and this administration is committed to stopping them even if they take place entirely in Israel, entirely among Israelis and are entirely nonviolent. What does this mean in practice? It means that the organization Tsav 9 and one of its organizers, a mother of eight living in a development town in Southern Israel, have been debanked.
As shocking as it is, this Executive Order didn’t come out of nowhere: Within weeks of President Obama’s first inauguration, IRS and State Department officials began considering whether they could deny or revoke tax-exempt status for organizations that provide material support to Jews living across the Green Line—the nonborder that delineates pre-1967 Israel from the territories Israel acquired in the Six-Day War. The theory was that a Jewish presence in those areas is inconsistent with U.S. policy. The IRS drew up lists of such organizations based on information from anti-Israel websites such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss. A case successfully challenged that policy, with a federal appellate court opinion holding that the IRS couldn’t discriminate on the basis of viewpoint when processing applications for charitable status.
One of the most troubling things about this Executive Order is how it’s targeting Jews. There are plenty of Islamist terrorists operating in Judea and Samaria, and in fact the Palestinian Authority itself officially pays monthly stipends to the families of terrorists who have been convicted of killing Jews. (Those payments are an explicit violation of the U.S. law known as the Taylor Force Act, but the Biden administration doesn’t care and allows such payments.) Not one Arab individual has been sanctioned under this Executive Order.
The only sanctions “imposed” on any non-Jewish person or entity was the Lion’s Den terrorist cell in Nablus. But the terrorist cell is just that—a cell. It has no bank accounts or credit cards in its own name, and nobody else was sanctioned along with it—no individual people or leaders, no banks that service those people. And aside from this “sanction,” the Biden administration has done nothing under this Executive Order to sanction any non-Jew for any action, including the actual or attempted murder of Jews, which you can read about every few days in the newspaper.
As a matter of Constitutional law, the president has the authority to treat allies and enemies largely as he wishes, and it’s not illegal for the President to discriminate among different groups of people when none of them is a U.S. citizen. But it’s disappointing that Israel, which for the Biden administration is formally categorized as an ally, has its citizens subject to financial sanction while the people who are trying to kill them not only get virtual immunity, but also get paid with money provided as U.S. aid.
Ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder. That seems to be the lesson of the quadrennial fight over political symbols in U.S. presidential elections. Four years ago, an inverted red triangle in some of the Trump campaign’s Facebook ads caused a scandal, and the ads were eventually taken down and replaced with triangle-free versions.Seth Frantzman: International donors are complicit in Hamas’ presence in Gaza – and key to its demise
The Nazis had used the inverted red triangle—and triangles of other colors—on prisoners’ uniforms to sort them into categories. Since the Trump ads took aim at the pretend anti-fascist rioters who called themselves Antifa, and the red triangle in German camps represented Communist political prisoners, we were told the symbol was proof of Trump’s Nazi role-playing games.
“If your reaction is, ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’” wrote a contributor to Psychology Today, “consider also that the first sentence of the ads contained 14 words, and a total of 88 ads were purchased by the campaign to be run on Facebook.” Fourteen is the number of words in an alt-right slogan, she pointed out, and 88 is shorthand for “Heil Hitler,” since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. (Remind me never to watch Sesame Street with this person.)
It was doubtful Trump or Facebook’s moderators understood the full implications of this—the campaign had seen the triangles in Antifa material and assumed the group had adopted it, which some actual anti-fascists did after World War II—but both were scolded for it and the ads were changed.
Contrast that with the chin-stroking over the inverted red triangle used by Hamas to indicate its battlefield targets.
Because its origins (in this context) lie in Hamas’s use of the triangle for one specific purpose, its meaning contains no ambiguity. But in the grand tradition of Western play-radicals who want to have their cake and eat it too, Hamas’s supporters have begun to reverse-engineer the symbol into vague respectability.
To understand the truly demented nature of this, you’d have to be in the unlucky position of having watched some of Hamas’s battlefield propaganda videos. At their tamest, they show the triangle hovering over an Israeli tank in the distance before the tank is shelled. Often these videos are a cross between a snuff video and a horror film, and glorify the execution of people.
The adoption of the red triangle by pro-Palestinian activists is a badge of derangement. This is not the watermelon, which is used as a stand-in for the Palestinian flag because of its similar color scheme. The triangle is a specific marker of vicarious violence.
It’s important to understand here how deeply Hamas has infiltrated all facets of life in Gaza. It infiltrates media and also healthcare workers. It exploits schools, universities, shelters and hospitals. For Hamas, all these NGOs and UN organisations are targets to be exploited, and each large civilian building is a potential hideout. Hamas conducts itself both as a terrorist group and a kind of mafia in this respect. The armed men that it sends to hijack aid convoys, for example, pretend to be there for “protection”. This is the kind of protection that the mafia also offers in other settings. It’s how cartels operate. Separating the civilians from the mafia-cartel aspect of Hamas is key to uprooting Hamas.
Gaza’s misfortune is to have an international community that has worked in Gaza for decades and been unwilling to confront Hamas. The NGOs and other groups that work there want to get their aid to local people. They see working with Hamas as a lesser evil than the aid not being delivered. They aren’t willing to condemn Hamas or monitor their aid convoys for the presence of gunmen, because it’s easier to look the other way and just let a system that is in place continue. As long as they can say aid came across the border, they can say it was delivered, even if it never reaches the people in Gaza and even if Hamas and armed gangs take the aid and sell it, fuelling the Hamas war machine. To separate Hamas from local people in Gaza, donor countries should mandate that any NGO or UN organisation working in Gaza must monitor and report on Hamas and other groups’ presence in institutions that receive funding. It’s not enough to call on “armed groups” not to enter schools. Monitoring Hamas, as the ruling power, is needed.
This can be done. Schools can set up CCTV cameras and they can provide transparent lists of who enters and exits the school. Convoys can track where aid goes and make sure it is not stolen. UN institutions are strong enough to have a special rapporteur tasked specifically with reporting on Hamas’s presence. Hospitals can monitor each floor and each room in their facility.
This can also be done by shifting the way organisations operate in Gaza. Rather than pretending Hamas doesn’t exist and calling it an “armed group” it should be named and monitored. NGOs and UN organisations know how to do this in other conflicts. They know how to keep armed men out of their facilities or report the presence of armed men in places such as eastern Congo. If the UN and NGOs can report armed men entering schools or hospitals or taking over aid in other places in the world, they can do it in Gaza.
Separating Hamas from civilians in Gaza and ending the exploitation and use of civilians as human shields is key to defeating Hamas. This starts at the level of donor countries who back the UN and NGO efforts in Gaza. They can mandate reporting on Hamas presence. After October 7 it is imperative that a paradigm shift takes place in how the international community relates to Gaza. The international community can also work toward a day without Hamas, and a day when Gazan children can attend school without Hamas men illegally occupying their classrooms.