Author: News Polite

A new American intelligence assessment released on Monday raised doubts about whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel could stay in power, as the C.I.A. director said a hostage deal was the most practical way to halt, at least temporarily, the war in Gaza.

The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment expressed concerns about Israel’s vision for the end of the war and said that Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition “may be in jeopardy.”

“Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections,” the report said. “A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

The report predicted that Israel would struggle to achieve its goal of “destroying Hamas.”

“Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength and surprise Israeli forces,” the report said.

Tensions between President Biden and Mr. Netanyahu have flared in recent days over Israel’s planned military operations in Rafah in southern Gaza. But the intelligence report, prepared over months, was written before the most recent tensions.

The annual report is usually accompanied by two days of hearings before the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees. Intelligence officials were not asked about the assessment of Mr. Netanyahu’s government in testimony before the Senate panel on Monday. Instead, questions about Israel and Gaza focused on the hostage negotiations.

William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, returned on Saturday from his eighth overseas trip to negotiate the release of hostages. U.S. officials had hoped to secure an agreement by the beginning of Ramadan, but that deadline passed.

Mr. Burns said he was focused on pursuing a first phase of an agreement to pause the fighting in Gaza for six weeks to allow more humanitarian aid to flow into the territory and secure the release of 40 hostages. That group — remaining women, older men, and wounded or ill people — would be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Mr. Burns did not detail how many Palestinians would be released, but others briefed on the talks have said hundreds of low-level prisoners and 15 people convicted of serious crimes would be freed.

But Mr. Burns said the only way to help Gazans suffering in “desperate conditions” and provide relief to Israeli hostages and their families was to pursue a first step to something that might become a “more enduring arrangement over time.”

“I learned a long time ago in crises like this that you have to find a practical goal and pursue it relentlessly,” Mr. Burns said.

“I don’t think anybody can guarantee success,” he said. “What I think you can guarantee is that the alternatives are worse for innocent civilians in Gaza who are suffering under desperate conditions, for the hostages and their families who are suffering also under very desperate conditions, and for all of us.”

Protesters interrupted the hearing several times, calling for Israel to stop bombing Gaza and shouting that the war was “exterminating the Palestinian people.” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, asked Mr. Burns if he agreed with the protesters.

Mr. Burns said that he understood Israel’s need to respond to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, but that “we all also have to be mindful of the enormous toll that this has taken on innocent civilians in Gaza.”

“As the president has said, it’s very important for Israel to be extremely mindful of that and to avoid, you know, further loss of civilian life,” he said.

Mr. Burns testified alongside Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, and other intelligence leaders including Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director.

Mr. Wray said the United States was facing elevated terrorism threats from homegrown extremists, foreign organizations and others.

“Since Oct. 7, though, that threat has gone to a whole other level,” he said. “And so this is time for much greater vigilance.”

In the annual report, the intelligence agencies concluded that “Israel will face mounting international pressure because of the dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.”

The war in Gaza is “posing a challenge” to America’s Arab partners because of growing public sentiment against both Israel and the United States caused by “the death and destruction in Gaza.” Those nations see the United States as the power broker that can end the conflict before it spreads.

The report says what many U.S. officials have said in recent months: that Iran did not orchestrate or have foreknowledge of the Oct. 7 attacks.

Both Iran and Israel are trying to calibrate their actions against each other and avoid a direct conflict, the report said. But the intelligence agencies say they believe that Iran will continue to arm and aid proxy forces that threaten the United States even after the Gaza war is over.

On Thursday, Katie Britt, the junior senator from Alabama, delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union address. Her overwrought performance has been widely mocked; that’s OK for late-night TV, but I’m not going to join in that chorus.

What I want to do instead is focus on the centerpiece of Britt’s remarks, a deeply misleading story about sex trafficking that she used to attack President Biden. Her use of the story — which turns out to have involved events in Mexico way back when George W. Bush was president — wasn’t technically a lie, since she didn’t explicitly say that it happened in the United States on Biden’s watch. She did, however, say: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace.”

That’s a clear attempt to mislead — the moral equivalent of a lie — and the careful wording actually suggests that she knew she was being misleading, and wanted an escape hatch if someone called her bluff.

To really understand the significance of her de facto lie, however, we need to put it in political context.

Over the past few months, there’s been a palpable shift in Republican rhetoric away from attacks on the Biden economy and toward dire warnings about “migrant crime.”

This shift has in part been forced by the fact that the Biden economy is actually doing very well these days, with inflation receding while unemployment remains near a 50-year low. In political terms, the narrative of a bad economy seems to be fading.

If I were a Republican strategist, I’d be especially worried about the changing tone of news coverage. The San Francisco Fed maintains a daily index of “news sentiment.” In the summer of 2023, although the economy was arguably already performing pretty well, this index was roughly as low as it was in the depths of the Great Recession. Since then, however, it has shot up to levels roughly comparable to those that prevailed on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Republicans, then, need a new issue. And there really does seem to have been a surge in illegal attempts to cross our southern border. So there are strategic reasons for Donald Trump and his party to hype the dangers of migrant crime — and for Trump and his allies to maximize the fear factor by blocking bipartisan legislation that would have helped secure the border.

My guess, however, is that Trump’s rants about migrant crime aren’t purely strategic. He has a history of being obsessed with alleged crimes by dark-skinned people, going all the way back to his demand, after the arrests of the Central Park Five, who were eventually exonerated, to reinstate the death penalty. And his claims about the dangers posed by migrants are so extreme that they may well be self-defeating.

The other day, for example, he declared, “I will stop the killing, I will stop the bloodshed, I will end the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country.” Which towns and cities, exactly, have been sacked and plundered? Did Attila the Hun swing by for a visit while I wasn’t looking?

Yes, figuring out how best to secure our borders is a real issue, but the data just doesn’t show that there’s a crisis of migrant crime. Indeed, homicides in America surged in 2020 — a year in which Trump was still president and apprehensions at the southern border were way down. By contrast, in the past couple of years, the homicide rate has come down even as border activity has increased.

So what do you do when the numbers don’t support your dystopian fantasies? You zero in on the most horrific individual stories.

Without question, the killing of Laken Riley, for which an undocumented immigrant has been charged, is devastating. But in a country as big as ours, it’s almost always possible to find examples of unspeakable tragedies involving individual members of whatever group you name. There are probably more than 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Based on the available evidence, however, immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.

In any case, the migrant crime wave — the “plunder of our cities” Trump seems to endlessly decry — is a myth. But it may be a myth Trump believes in, and the possibility that in this instance he may actually be sincere is alarming.

Why? Because if Trump really believes migrants are an existential threat, if he wins in November, as president he might go through with his plan to engage in sweeping raids and mass deportations, very likely catching up many people who simply look as if they might be undocumented immigrants.

So don’t wave away Britt’s remarks as a mere example of bad acting. They may be the harbinger of a reign of terror that will wreak havoc in America.