I can no longer forgive the Israeli Left
What’s more, the Israeli Left (a minority after all) has spent decades trying to convince the world, and the rest of Israel, that peace comes from surrender, that empathy will melt away hatred. That if we just humanize our enemy, they will stop trying to dehumanize us.Seth Mandel: Columbia Is a Basket Case Because of Its Faculty
It was a beautiful dream. But October 7th killed that dream. And the Israeli Left’s unwillingness to face that truth — their insistence on mourning the collapse of their ideology more than the collapse of our safety — is a betrayal I cannot overlook.
On October 14, 2023 — exactly one week following October 7th — I said to my Israeli cousin: “Just watch, in a few weeks or months the Israeli Left will take to the streets, wailing and screaming about how the real crime isn’t what Hamas did to us, but how our own government responded. They’ll say the hostages are being forgotten, that the war is immoral, that Bibi is the devil, and that somehow, somehow, Israel is to blame for all of this.”
And sure enough — they did. Like clockwork. As if the bodies weren’t still being identified, as if the screams of that day had faded into background noise, they reemerged not with unity, but with slogans. Not with a vision for victory, but with recycled protests and righteous outrage aimed not at Gaza, but at Jerusalem.
The Israeli Left, in its current form, has not only failed to process the lessons of October 7th; it has exploited this war to reassert its own failed ideology. Every development in this war, every tragedy, every difficult decision has been twisted into another excuse to demonize the Israeli right.
The hostages — those we all pray for, cry for, march for — have become, for many on the left, not a symbol of our shared pain, but a political weapon. Instead of focusing solely on the inhumanity of those who hold them captive, they direct their fury inward, using the hostages as a bludgeon against the government, as if Israel is the jailer, not the victim.
They cheered the resignation of the Shin Bet chief not because it offered clarity or accountability, but because it gave them one more scalp in their campaign against a government they loathe — a loathing that runs deeper than policy differences. It’s not really about Netanyahu anymore. It hasn’t been for a while. It’s about the Israeli left’s total inability to reconcile with a nation that has, time and again, rejected its utopian vision in favor of realism and resilience.
In their worldview, the true enemy isn’t Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis — it’s the right. It’s the settlers. It’s the religious. It’s the Zionist who believes in Jewish power and defense and sovereignty. And that hatred has blinded them. It has made them incapable of unity, incapable of reflection, incapable of change.
This has nothing to do with holding leaders accountable and everything to do with salvaging a broken ideology. They do not oppose the war because they think it’s unjust. They oppose the war because it confirms what they most fear: that their decades-long program of appeasement, withdrawal, and moral relativism has utterly failed.
Ultimately, we gain nothing by blaming each other — nothing, that is, except offering our enemies a victory they could never achieve on the battlefield.
But blame is not the same as accountability. And if the Israeli Left wants to regain the moral high ground they so desperately cling to, they must start by acknowledging who attacked us, who raped, murdered, and kidnapped us — and who didn’t.
Forgiveness starts with truth. Until then, I can’t forgive you.
Most of the demands that the Trump administration submitted to Columbia University consist of actions the school needs to take in order to stop its slide into irrelevance. This is a Jerry Maguire “Help me help you” situation, where common-sense reforms to restore order to campus and regain a measure of academic discipline are obligations the school should want to meet.What Columbia University President Katrina Armstrong Really Told Faculty Members About Changes the School Is Making
The university administration’s fear of its students has turned the school into an asylum run by the inmates. But what if putting the asylum back in charge of the inmates won’t make much of a difference? The students are acting like feral maniacs, it’s true; but it turns out their professors want them that way.
The Free Press obtained the transcript of a faculty Zoom meeting with interim President Katrina Armstrong in which Armstrong “promised that there would be ‘no change to masking,’ and ‘no change to our admissions procedures,’ both of which the administration has demanded.” Armstrong said the same about other key administration demands, even though the university has signaled to the White House that it will comply.
The Washington Free Beacon goes into some more detail on the meeting:
“Throughout the discussion, Armstrong—who assumed the presidency on an interim basis in August after former Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned just over a year into the job—fielded questions from furious faculty members. One described the Trump administration’s actions as ‘the most significant assault on academic culture in my lifetime,’ while others pressed her about why the university had not countersued the government.
“None of the faculty members, however, raised concerns about the treatment of Jewish and Israeli students on campus or about the conduct of protesters, which led to the cancellation of in-person classes and the school’s graduation ceremony at the close of the last academic year, as well as to the Trump administration’s concern about the climate on the Morningside Heights campus. Just a year ago, a rabbi affiliated with Columbia urged Jewish students to leave campus to celebrate Passover and not to return until conditions on campus had improved.”
To review, in order to again be eligible for federal funding, Columbia has been told to centralize its disciplinary process; ban masks with health-related and religious exemptions, so that campus rules can be enforced and to reduce student vandalism and hostage-taking; adopt a consistent definition of anti-Semitism so that its rules are clear to all; give its provost oversight powers over its particularly lunacy-ridden Middle East department; and a few others.
Nothing to see here.
That’s what Columbia University president Katrina Armstrong told approximately 75 faculty members who assembled on a Saturday morning Zoom call to hear from her about a letter sent by the school to the Trump administration on Friday outlining a series of steps Columbia says it is taking to address "legitimate concerns raised both from within and without our Columbia community, including by our regulators" about the eruption of anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.
Throughout the conversation, which lasted approximately 75 minutes and included Columbia provost Angela Olinto and general counsel Felice Rosan, Armstrong and Olinto downplayed or denied that change was underway, particularly when it came to meeting the Trump administration’s demand to put the school’s Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership.
"This is not a receivership," Olinto told the group. "The provost will not be writing or controlling anything. It's the faculty," she continued, adding, "Your department is totally independent."
Columbia’s Middle East Studies department has been a flashpoint in the disputes that have roiled the university since Oct. 7, with critics citing its faculty members as a leading source of anti-Semitism. One of them, Joseph Massad, described the Hamas massacre as "awesome."
Armstrong went on to say the school had made "no changes" to rules surrounding the sorts of masked protests that plagued the university last year, though Friday’s letter announced that masks are no longer allowed "for the purpose of concealing one’s identity in the commission of violations of University policies or state, municipal, or federal laws."
The Washington Free Beacon obtained a transcript of the meeting, which seems to have been created because Columbia administrators were unable to disable the Zoom function that generates an audio transcript. The transcript itself captures administrators struggling to prevent the software from creating a transcript and then moving forward without success.
"I am unable to turn it off, for technical reasons, so we’re all just going to have to understand," an unnamed administrator said at the outset. "This meeting is being transcribed. If you are the requester of this, I would ask you to turn it off."
"Yeah, that seems to be the default. I keep telling my people to stop this thing," Olinto, the provost, responded.
Throughout the discussion, Armstrong—who assumed the presidency on an interim basis in August after former Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned just over a year into the job—fielded questions from furious faculty members. One described the Trump administration’s actions as "the most significant assault on academic culture in my lifetime," while others pressed her about why the university had not countersued the government.
