Back to the UCLA Overnight Attack

Remember a week ago I was trying to find out more information or really just any information about who the assailants were when a group of “pro-Israel” rioters raided the pro-Palestine encampment at UCLA on April 30th. I’ve mentioned a few times hearing pervasive rumors (“common knowledge,” the origin of which is unclear) which I wasn’t publishing because I couldn’t verify them. But on Friday The Guardian published a story confirming that a far-right Armenian-American man named Narek Palyan had been photographed both at one of the daytime counterprotests and then on the evening of April 30th, but still hours before the overnight assault.

Tragedy and Folly

It gets lost in the myriad headlines at the moment about Rafah, weapons cut offs, Biden, horrific civilian loss of life, etc. But there’s a short piece in the Times of Israel this afternoon that captures a dimension of what’s happening right now in Israel that is mostly off the radar in the U.S. The piece is about a reported blow up between Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. Specifically, it has the latter telling Netanyahu that because he refuses to make diplomatic arrangements for the post-war government of Gaza, the IDF is having to go back to fight again in areas it already took over. In some cases they’re having to go back and fight for the same ground a third time!

(Here’s another article in Haaretz on how the IDF is now going back into northern Gaza, which they conquered back in the fall. Privately the IDF says Hamas has reestablished control there because there’s no day-after plan, which is a diplomatic to-do item. If you blow it up and leave why wouldn’t they just go back?)

Netanyahu refuses to do that because there’s really no way to plan for the future without blowing up his governing coalition. But without some plan, the Israeli army is reduced to doing something like pushing water up a hill with its hands. The article is replete with examples of heads of the army or intelligence services trying to get someone to give them a strategy, or actually more than a strategy, just a goal. And it has Netanyahu getting mad because they’re going to the defense minister, himself a former high-level IDF general. It’s not even a question of disagreeing on strategy really — that’s for the political leadership to decide. It’s refusing to come up with any strategy at all.

Cutting the Spigot

What was first communicated by reports of a slowdown in weapons transfers and then confirmed in leaks has now been brought into the open: Joe Biden is saying he will cut off the supply of heavy munitions (big bombs from the sky) if Israel goes ahead with a major ground incursion into Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, which is both the last refuge of Hamas’ intact battalions and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have fled other parts of the strip over the last six months. This is in addition to the city’s normal civilian population.

I have seen some commentators who have absolutely no love for Netanyahu saying this undercuts whatever leverage Israel has in the hostage negotiations by depriving them of the threat to go into Rafah in force. There’s likely something to that. But it is basically a certainty that this move was absolutely the final straw for the U.S. It had been insisting and insisting and insisting not to do this without a plan to evacuate the city, and the Israeli government is saying too bad. We’re doing it. Biden had the choice to make his words meaningless or put down his foot. When you’re supplying the weapons, your foot comes down very hard.