There was quite a bit of discussion of this Tablet article (author Justine El-Khazen) yesterday in the comments here. So I decided to take a look at it. It begins this way:
My mother died on Dec. 4 of last year. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. In life, she worked for the CIA, in the Near East Southern Asia Division, for six years as head of the Arab-Israeli Division. She was an expert on Syria and political Islam.
I found it to be an oddly disjointed article. It took me a little while to understand – and the author never made it 100% clear – who in the author’s family was Jewish and what religion the other parent was. It seems to have been her father and not her mother who was Jewish, but the author never says whether her mother was Christian, or atheist, or what (other than a CIA analyst).
Much of the latter part of the article is a discussion of the current Middle East situation, but it says nothing particularly unique. On the CIA, however, the author seems to have been strangely naive, and seems to still be naive about John Brennan, whom she seems to trust. But I see no reason that anyone would trust Brennan (do a search on this blog for “Brennan” and you’ll see why I say that).
Why would the author be surprised at the anti-Israel bent of anyone connected with our foreign policy or intelligence community these days? The State Department, the CIA, all of it? When this stance started I don’t know (I think it got worse during the Obama administration but I think the trend predated that). The only person I personally knew who went into the diplomatic corps was definitely a leftist, and I knew him in the 70s when he was in grad school shortly before he entered that profession.
She writes this about her father, who was Jewish (at least ethnically):
Never mind that my father hated visiting Israel. The story he told me was that he’d talked to a woman in a bar when he was there in his 20s, a “working girl.” When he found out she was Jewish, that was it. The dream of a Jewish homeland was done. He never wanted to go back …
This doesn’t make much sense to me, unless her father was extremely strange. In Israel there are Jewish plumbers, Jewish police, Jewish thieves, Jewish prostitutes, Jewish whatever. It’s a society. Did he, a Jew, think Jews had to be perfectly pure?
More from the article:
My mother and I had dinner one night in April 1996 at the CIA station chief’s house in Israel, north of Tel Aviv. There was some kind of minor war underway. Fighter jets kept skidding above us as we ate. The IDF and Hezbollah were trading fire again, which was not that remarkable in itself. This time, the IDF bombed a U.N. compound, killing 106 civilians.
This event might not have made news here, but it rocked the Arab world. Mohamed Atta committed his life to jihad that very day. Osama bin Laden was none too pleased, either. “You supported the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon,” he explained in his “letter to America,” which, since Oct. 7, has gone viral in the TikTok feeds of America’s youth. Anti-Westernism has always been closely entwined with antisemitism in the Arab world; these days it’s closely entwined here too.
But she’s talking about this event and leaves out some very important (and relevant) facts (emphasis mine):
Israeli artillery fire strikes a U.N. compound where at least 800 Lebanese civilians are sheltering in the village of Qana in southern Lebanon. At least 13 shells hit the compound, killing 106 civilians and wounding more than 100 other people, including four Fijian U.N. peacekeepers.
The artillery attack comes during Operation Grapes of Wrath, an Israeli response to the collapse of a cease-fire with Hezbollah that had lasted nearly three years. The Israel Defense Forces issued a warning April 11 for civilians to evacuate from towns and villages to avoid the fighting. As a result, the roads are crowded with refugees fleeing northward, and civilians crowd into the U.N. compound in Qana.
Hezbollah uses several positions within 700 yards of the U.N. base to launch mortar and rocket attacks on IDF positions and northern Israel on the afternoon of April 18. An IDF commando unit commanded by Naftali Bennett calls in an artillery strike on one Hezbollah mortar unit firing from a cemetery less than 200 yards from the U.N. base, but none of the 36 shells fired by a four-gun battery of 155mm howitzers hits the mortar site. Instead, carnage within the U.N. compound results.
Israel apologizes for what it says are the accidental civilian deaths and blames Hezbollah for violating international law by using the U.N. compound as civilian shielding for its forces. A U.N. investigation finds that the Israeli attack on the base likely was likely not an accident, and a separate Amnesty International investigation concludes that what comes to be called the “Qana Massacre” was intentional. Israel rejects those reports, which it says are biased.
Recognize the pattern? I certainly do. Hezbollah violates a ceasefire. Hezbollah places munitions near the UN base, purposely putting all the civilian inhabitants at risk. Israel mistakenly hits the base and causes civilian casualties (all the people there may not have been civilians, but I’m going to assume that a great many were). The extremely anti-Israel UN and the extremely anti-Israel Amnesty say Israel did it on purpose, and Israel says it did not.
If Israel wanted to kill civilians it had much better ways to do so than this – to warn civilians to leave, and then to hit some while trying to take out a mortar launch site placed very nearby by Hezbollah. Hezbollah counts on a certain number of such mistakes on which it can capitalize in the propaganda war, after it has purposely put its civilians in harm’s way.
I think the author means well, but I found the piece very confusing and very incomplete, as well as naive.