The plot against Iran: 7 things to know for May 23

1. Philip Roth, the doyen of American-Jewish literature, is dead at 85.

• Perhaps reflecting a gap in his importance between Diaspora Jewry and Israel, by 7:07 a.m. i.e. over an hour after his death was first reported, not a single Hebrew-language news site had even put up a bulletin on his death.
• The New Yorker, which first reported on his death and with whom Roth had a long and fruitful relationship, notes a 2000 essay by editor David Remnick in which his legendary falling out with the Jewish community early on in his career is recounted. “His sin was simple: he’d had the audacity to write about a Jewish kid as being flawed.”
• The New York Times sums up Roth as someone who “took on many guises — mainly versions of himself — in the exploration of what it means to be an American, a Jew, a writer, a man.”
• The paper also places him in the great white male pantheon alongside Saul Bellow and John Updike, unlike Israel’s Army Radio, which (finally reporting on it) places him alongside the decidedly less iconic Leon Uris and Herman Wouk.

https://twitter.com/MitchGins/status/999149265535545344

• Among the many remembering Roth are some who recall him as not only an icon but also an iconoclast.

https://twitter.com/jelani9/status/999141155999797248

2. What the Israeli press was sure to report on in  real-time were attacks by Israeli planes in Gaza overnight, first via Palestinian reports and later an official statement from the army saying it had hit a tunnel and seaport.

• On Twitter, Ynet correspondent Elior Levy notes that the strike didn’t merit that big of a news break, though: “It attests to the serial successes of the security establishment to take apart Hamas’s strategic weapon. Or in a word: We’ve gotten used to it.”

פעם חשיפה/פיצוץ מנהרה התקפית היתה עילה מוצדקת לפתיחת משדר מיוחד. נראה לי שאנחנו על המסלול שזו תהיה ידיעה לא פותחת פלוס מבזק.

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וזה מעולה כי זה מעיד על ההצלחה הסדרתית של מערכת הביטחון לפרק את הנשק האסטרטגי של חמאס

או במילה אחת: התרגלנו pic.twitter.com/RVfly3LTAz

— Elior Levy • אליאור לוי (@eliorlevy) May 23, 2018

• The army said the attacks were in response to a group of Gazans sneaking across the fence and burning a tent — but not actually hurting anybody — and then sneaking back across, for which it already shelled a Hamas position earlier Tuesday.
• The heavy overnight strikes may have been designed to return a deterrent edge to Israel and show it will not be monkeying around, given the potentially embarrassing nature of the incident, especially after a video taken by one of the Gazans was published by al-Jazeera.
• Haaretz notes that “The army says it was watching the Palestinians the whole time, but it’s not clear why the army would allow the infiltration, the arson and them to go back into the Strip without being arrested.”

3. This would not be the first time Israel sends a message via fighter jet. Its revelation that it used F-35 fighters on two occasions is read by tabloid Israel Hayom as a “message to Assad” and columnist Yoav Limor claims the news will also “echo in Tehran.”

• IAF commander Amiram Norkin “didn’t just make clear that Israel has a weapon no enemy can deal with, since they can’t see it, but also that it has ‘game-changing’ capabilities that will allow it to deal successfully with any attack on it,” he writes.
• Yedioth Ahronoth reports, though, that the IDF might not be that enamored with the F-35 because it can’t carry heavy bombs as well, and is considering instead ordering used F-15s “the workhorse of the air force. Old but reliable.”

4. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Iran ultimatum list is also still being dissected.

• On Tuesday evening, Pompeo told reporters at a State Department briefing that his list was anything but extraordinary: “The benchmark I set forward yesterday is a very low standard. It’s the standard behavior we expect from countries all around the world,” he said.
• Haaretz’s Steven Klein writes that the Trump administration’s long-term goal appears to be regime change, though they seem to be going about it all wrong.
• “While sanctions have had modest success in bringing adversaries to the negotiations table – most notably the Iran nuclear deal, democracies have tried and failed using sanctions to topple authoritarian regimes nearly 60 times between World War I and 2000, according to a long-term study. Examples range from Cuba and Panama to North Korea, Libya and Iran. If anything, the regime under siege doubles down and uses the sanctions as a rallying cry for national unity and anti-Western sentiment,” he writes.
• Yedioth’s Aviad Kleinberg is similarly pessimistic: “The US of Trump has no patience for nuance. It threw down the gauntlet. This replaces the furtive dance of threats and promises with a gun. The problem with ultimatums, of course, is that it’s not always clear what to do if the other side refuses to be moved by them and digs in its heels.”

5. Pompeo’s claim that Iran’s Quds Forces are carrying out assassinations in Europe, a comment that raised some eyebrows.

• “But there have been no widely reported Quds assassination plots in Europe in recent years,” Slate reports, noting that experts the news site approached could not recall any either.
• “US diplomats specialising in Iran were taken by surprise by Pompeo’s allegations,” The Guardian reports.
• “There is no evidence to back the claim that currently they are carrying out such operations in Europe,” Iraj Mesdaghi, a Sweden-based Iranian political activist who tracks IRGC activities tells the British website.

6. US Ambassador David Friedman is in hot water for a picture of him next to a picture showing Jerusalem with the al-Aqsa Mosque replaced with a Third Temple, imagery common in certain Jewish religious circles, but absolutely verboten for a US ambassador who is supposed to be an honest broker.

• The embassy responded by saying that the picture was shoved in front of Friedman and that he was “deeply disappointed” by the move, but some note that his clear smile and past positions leave the door wide open to him actually being fine with the picture.
• And of course, as a religious Jew, he probably prays several times a day for the return of the Temple and the sacrifices, unless he is disappointed in that too. Context is always important.

7. Except when it’s not. Thus PA president Mahmoud Abbas’s attempt to send a message that he’s feeling fine ended up going off the rails — at least in Israel — when some noticed the newspaper he was reading had a virulent anti-Israel cartoon on the front showing a soldier taking a baby’s milk and shoving poison down its throat instead.

כולם פרסמו את התמונות של אבו מאזן מתאושש בבית החולים עם בניו טארק ויאסר. התמקדו בחלוק היפה ובחיוכים שפיזר לכל עבר במטרה להרגיע את השטח. המנהיג המתון עדיין כאן. עכשיו תעשו זום על הקריקטורה בעיתון שהוא מחזיק. חייל ישראלי מחליף את בקבוק החלב ברעל לתינוקת הפלסטינית שמתה בעזה. pic.twitter.com/IQF1qM6DFK

— assaf gibor (@assafgibor) May 22, 2018

• Yedioth, which accuses Abbas of being “sick with incitement,” reports that its not clear if the placement of the cartoon was intentional or an “own goal,” but either way “it says it all.”
• Israel Hayom seems to believe it’s the former, running a headline accusing Abbas of having “no shame.”
• Haaretz doesn’t mention the cartoon at all, noting only that a timestamp and the use of the current newspaper seems simply designed to prove to the Palestinians that the video is not a fake.