05/16 Links Pt2: Phillips: Buried facts about the Gaza war; The Left’s Campus Protest Scam; Who Is Funding Anti-Israel Campus Protests?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Buried facts about the Gaza war

The extent to which the political class and the media are burying facts that undermine their poisonous narrative in order to defame and undermine Israel’s war of survival has become simply jaw-dropping.

The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to appease the genocidal and terrorist Iranian regime. It has funneled billions into Tehran’s coffers through sanctions relief. It has refused to effectively respond to repeated Iran-backed attacks on U.S. interests. And it is doing everything it can to prevent Israel from taking action that would damage America’s relationship with the Iranian regime, such as the destruction of Hamas, a vital force in Tehran’s proxy army against Israel and the West.

The American appeasement of Iran has left many people mystified. They should have been paying more attention.

Twelve days before the Oct. 7 pogrom, Jay Solomon reported on the Semafor site that Ariane Tabatabai, chief of staff to the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, was part of an “Iran Experts Initiative” created by senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials to bolster Tehran’s position on global security issues, particularly its nuclear program.

In other words, Tabatabai was an agent of influence for Iran at the heart of the U.S. government and with the highest level of security clearance.

Semafor and the Iranian opposition group Iran International obtained a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails. These revealed that, in 2021, Robert Malley—who was the point man on Iran under both the Obama and Biden administrations until he was removed in June 2023 following a still unexplained “mishandling of classified materials”—had infiltrated Tabatabai into the U.S. State Department to assist him in his negotiations with Iran.

The day Solomon’s article appeared, 31 U.S. Senators wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to express their concern. They wrote: “We find it unconscionable that a senior department official would continue to hold a sensitive position despite her alleged participation in an Iranian government information operation.”

They noted that, in March 2021, shortly after Tabatabai was appointed senior adviser to the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Iranian dissidents reported her long history of echoing the Iranian regime’s talking points.

That month, Adam Kredo reported in The Washington Free Beacon on these dissidents’ shock at Tabatabai’s appointment. They claimed she parroted the Iranian regime’s position at multiple public appearances and that her father was part of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s inner circle.

In April 2021, several members of the House of Representatives requested a review of Tabatabai’s security clearance. In response, the Biden administration dismissed these claims as “smears and slander.”

Even more astonishingly, Tabatabai runs the office overseeing hostage negotiations. Three weeks after the Oct. 7 pogrom, a reporter asked White House Spokesman John Kirby whether it was appropriate for Tabatabei to be in such a position given the claims made against her. Kirby stalled. Tabatabai is still there.

New York Times Unloads Immense New ‘1619-Project’-Style Attack on Israel

The New York Times has unveiled a new, 1619-Project-style attack on Israel — an error-ridden, overwrought, extensively hyped, self-referential, self-congratulatory, and super-long article.

Like the 1619 Project, this latest article comes with a catchy, short headline: “The Unpunished.”

Like the 1619 Project, this project is a product of the New York Times Magazine.

And like the 1619 Project, it comes with an introduction and display text that overstates and oversimplifies its claims: “How Extremists Took Over Israel” and “After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.” Not to mention: “This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.”

The Times article itself is so mind-numbingly long that the newspaper published a Cliffs-Notes-style summary of it that unfortunately isn’t much help, either.

The summary complains about what it calls a “two-tier situation” in which West Bank Arabs face military law while Israeli citizens there “are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel.” Yet nearly all countries, including the United States, distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in their legal system. The Times, in all its many words, doesn’t explain why or how the distinctions Israel makes are different or worse or unjustified given the extraordinary and unusual violent terrorist threat the country faces from Arabs opposed to its existence and determined to eradicate the Jewish presence there.

The paper also claims that, “in the West Bank, a new generation of ultranationalists has taken an even more radical turn against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. Their objective is to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish ‘Jewish rule’: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.”

That’s a sweeping over-generalization. Jews have prayed since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in ancient times for its rebuilding, speedily and in our days, as part of the messianic redemption. That hasn’t been a threat to anyone.

Survivor of Mao's political purge getting 'PTSD' watching history repeat on college campuses

A survivor of Mao's Cultural Revolution says she is experiencing post-traumatic stress witnessing history repeat itself on college campuses as "Marxist hordes" have taken over in anti-American and anti-Israel demonstrations.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Lily Tang Williams, who is currently running as a Republican candidate for Congress in New Hampshire's 2nd district, said she fears the country she left is coming back to haunt her again in the United States.

"I sometimes I get nervous, and I feel like I'm having a little bit of PTSD and like I can't sleep well whenever I see the way they're chanting, using drums and us[ing] slogans, [are] humiliating people and have a huge amount of young people…chanting ‘Death to America,’ not just ‘Death to Israel.’ I just feel like, oh my goodness the… Red Guards are in action again," she said.

The Red Guard was a massive student-led, paramilitary social movement in China that was mobilized by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966.

Young people were one of the most effective tools Mao exploited to fuel his revolution, Tang Williams said. Most of the young people protesting on college campuses today are "naive" and therefore ripe for manipulation by bad faith actors, she added.

"I think that a lot of students who were protesting on college campuses [are]… confused… Because that's what Mao said, the young people's mind is a blank piece of paper, and you can draw the most beautiful pictures," she said, adding that she thinks they are "naive and easily manipulated… [for] revolution"

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05/16 Links Pt1: Oren: Is America Still Israel's Ally?; America's dangerous game with Israeli security; The Gaza Health Ministry Flimflam; How Hamas Saved Egypt

From Ian:

Clifford D. May: Biden turns on Israel

Two days later, Hamas fired more missiles at Kerem Shalom — from a civilian shelter in Gaza. Hamas missiles were fired at the crossing again on May 8, 10, 11 and 12. Israeli military officials assured impatient reporters that the crossing would be reopened as quickly as possible.

If this does not strike you as grotesque, there is no point in reading the rest of this column.

On May 7, President Biden gave a moving speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Days of Remembrance ceremony, recalling the Nazi genocide of the Jewish communities of Europe and vowing “never again.”

The next day, in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, Mr. Biden lent encouragement to Hamas leaders, whose goal is to follow the Nazi example by exterminating the only surviving and thriving Jewish community remaining in the Middle East. The atrocities of Oct. 7, they’ve vowed, were merely a foretaste.

For months, Mr. Biden and other Democrats had slammed Republicans — quite rightly — for not passing a bill providing arms to Ukraine and Israel, democratic nations and friends of America under attack by enemies of America. Thanks to House Speaker Mike Johnson, the bill finally passed — with overwhelming bipartisan support.

But Mr. Biden told Ms. Burnett that he was holding up the delivery of munitions to Israel and would block further security assistance if Israel launched a major assault on Hamas in Rafah.

“We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” Mr. Biden equivocated. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”

Wars cannot be won on defense alone. Boxers don’t win fights just by blocking punches. “Deterrence by denial” not coupled with “deterrence by punishment” invites enemies to try, try again.

If Israelis must fight terrorists without American support, they will do so. They’ve done it before. Israel exists so that never again will Jews lack the means to stand up to those determined to slaughter their children.

But Israeli leaders can’t focus all their attention — or all their remaining ammunition — on Gaza. Hezbollah, a proxy of Iran like Hamas, continues to fire missiles from Lebanon. Some 80,000 Israelis have been forced from their homes in the north for more than seven months.

And last month, for the first time, Iran’s rulers launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel from Iranian soil. This time, those rockets were prevented from reaching their intended targets. But there will be a next time. The regime’s nuclear weapons program has progressed significantly since Mr. Biden moved into the White House and eased economic sanctions on Tehran.

Israeli leaders must prioritize and sequence as best they can. They agree that neutralizing Hamas’ military capabilities is imperative — and that sooner is better than later.

I can’t imagine them allowing Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, to emerge from the tunnels and declare himself the victor — the jihadi who beat the accursed Jews, the mujahid who humiliated the cowardly Palestinian Authority and the Arab Zionists who joined the hated Abraham Accords.

What I can imagine: The IDF bringing an end to this conflict without a “full-scale offensive” or “major military operation” — terms Biden administration officials have used to describe the military actions they adamantly oppose.

The Gaza Health Ministry Flimflam

Many of the ministry’s advocates in the West defend its figures by arguing that they are, if anything, an undercount. “Doctors say Gaza death toll could be higher than reported,” reads the title of a Washington Post video from earlier this month. An NPR headline from February reported that the death toll had passed 30,000, but “it’s an incomplete count.” Last November, the head of the State Department’s Middle East bureau said the same thing. The common thread in all these arguments is that there are likely numerous bodies trapped under the rubble in Gaza. While it’s impossible to know how many, when the ministry made its admission regarding incomplete data, it also shared information that provides significant insight into the number of missing people.

Gaza’s Government Media Office, which is separate from the Ministry of Health, has consistently reported since late November that there are 7,000 residents of Gaza “missing under the rubble,” of whom nearly 70 percent are women and children. The Media Office has never identified the basis for this estimate, nor has it explained why the number has remained constant for so long. Meanwhile, in January, the ministry introduced a system that enables residents to report the death of their relatives in cases where the body “remained under the rubble or was buried without reaching a hospital.” Relatives can file the reports in person or online.

Initially, the ministry’s statistical digests presented the number of reports filed by relatives as a category of fatalities separate from the main death toll. But on April 1, the ministry revealed that reports filed by relatives are part of the main toll. In effect, the ministry has already adjusted its total to account for missing persons. Spagat writes, “We should dismiss the common claim that, because many of the dead are trapped under rubble or are missing for other reasons, the announced totals are undercounts.” Whereas the Media Office continues to claim 7,000 are missing, relatives have filed 3,160 reports as of April 24. Of those reports, 1,762, or 55.8 percent, are for men ages 18–59, a figure at odds with the contention that nearly 70 percent are women and children.

Another potential adjustment to the ministry’s numbers concerns the number of Palestinian lives lost to rocket fire by Hamas and its allies. The ministry consistently describes its figure as “the cumulative number of martyrs since the beginning of the [Israeli] aggression,” language that could either include or exclude the victims of Palestinian munitions. From the incident at al-Ahli Hospital, we know that one errant rocket can claim scores or even hundreds of lives, even if the ministry exaggerated the number. In November, the IDF estimated that Palestinians had fired 9,500 rockets at Israel during the first month of the war, of which 12 percent, or more than 1,100, “failed and fell short, inside the Gaza Strip”—a rate comparable to that of previous conflicts.

Finally, there is the question of underage fighters, which Hamas has employed in the past. Among casualties under age 18, there is a disproportionate number of males, suggesting involvement in combat. For example, if one sorts the entries from the health ministry’s list of fatalities, there are 225 17-year-old males, compared with 132 females of that age. Among 16-year-olds, there are 226 males to 127 females. The imbalance becomes progressively smaller as age diminishes, with more girls than boys in some age brackets—an outcome consistent with the expectation that teenagers may fight, but younger children rarely will. All together, these data suggest there may be a few hundred underage fighters among the dead, which is enough to raise concerns about the exploitation of children but not enough to have a significant impact on the overall demographics of the casualties.

How Hamas Saved Egypt

Egypt, the self-proclaimed “Umm al-Dunia,” or “Mother of the World,” is increasingly irritated by its diminishing influence in the region. Its officials resent the Gulf’s growing economic and widely perceived political importance in Middle Eastern affairs. Its annoyance is particularly evident at the mere mention of mega-rich Qatar, the Gulf sheikhdom of 2.6 million people, only 300,000 of whom are of Arab origin. Yet Qatar, which hosts Hamas’ political leaders and supports the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot in Gaza, increasingly claims to be the leading negotiator between Israel and Hamas. The UAE, which championed the Abraham Accords recognition of Israel, has also jeopardized Egypt’s role as the Arabs’ main interlocutor with Jerusalem. Egyptians, who take pride in their country’s history and heritage, bristle at the loss of their nation’s diplomatic clout. By reviving its regional profile, Oct. 7 has bestowed another gift on Egypt.

But while Egyptians are disturbed by the Israeli-Hamas war and the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, the country seems increasingly focused on its grave domestic challenges. “Egypt obviously cares about the region, but our priority is building our country,” said Abdel Monem Said Aly, an influential Egyptian analyst.

Whether Egypt will be able to reform the militarized state capitalism that has battered the private sector and redistributed income from the beleaguered middle class to the army remains to be seen. “Sissi will do this because he knows he must,” said one non-American diplomat. “This is Egypt’s last shot to get it right.” But many financial analysts doubt that Sissi has the desire or ability to reign in his fellow generals upon whom his continued rule of Egypt depends.

Sissi may not have to face that choice. With 110 million people living on less than 10% of the land along the Nile, Egypt may well be, as Egyptians repeatedly told me, too big to fail. The reaction of the West and the Gulf Arab states following Oct. 7 gives the Egyptians every reason to believe it’s true.

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05/15 Links Pt2: Menachem Begin’s Lesson for Bibi and Biden; What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like in Practice; Peace in Our Time at Harvard

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like in Practice

The progressive masses that march regularly for Israel’s destruction believe the United Kingdom is deserving of precisely the same fate for precisely the same reasons. In fact, they hold the UK uniquely responsible for Israel’s creation and thus see the two states as part of the same holy war. Back in Berkeley as elsewhere in the U.S., the tentifada is organized and run by those who also admire the pluck of the “decolonization begins at home” psychopaths.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School (you can’t make this up) isn’t the first in the Bay Area to see trickle-down radicalization, the Jewish News points out: Schools in San Francisco and Oakland and other schools in Berkeley have walked out too. A couple of those walkouts took place just after Hamas’s attacks and well before Israel’s incursion into Gaza, which can only be understood as celebratory of the massacre.

Back in Britain, the police reassure the public that they “do not believe that there is a wider risk to the public connected to this case,” which is no doubt true. But there is a wider risk to the public that has been exposed by this case, and others like it.

For months, dishonest people have argued that the “river to the sea” chant, a variation on a line in the Hamas charter, isn’t necessarily indicative of a desire to carry out a genocide. But even offering the benefit of the doubt, is there a benign reason to gather outside a Jewish preschool and chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at the 4-year-olds inside? There is not. And that is crucial to this discussion: The actions of these demonstrators are indefensible from any angle.

There’s another chant that has been quite popular at the demonstrations and marches in the U.S. as well as those in Britain (and elsewhere): “Globalize the intifada.” Since the intifada refers to a campaign of mass terrorism against Jewish civilians, to globalize it would be to expand the battlefield without changing the goal. Some people try to deny this, but even they do not believe their denial, because it is ridiculous. They are not cheering on individual vision quests or yoga retreats. They are not shouting “have yourself a very merry intifada in the privacy of your own home surrounded by loves ones!”

Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein were in court today because they attempted to globalize the intifada. They heard the calls of the protesters, as others no doubt will. And they didn’t misunderstand.

Genocidal, But Mostly Peaceful

It is no “moral panic” to report that Students for Justice in Palestine, the major student group on campus behind these protests, praised Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel as a “historic win” against “the Zionist enemy,” or that students at protests on elite campuses such as Yale and Princeton and Stanford have proudly displayed Hamas and Hezbollah flags and other terrorist regalia. Nor to note, as the Anti-Defamation League reported and many social-media accounts confirmed, that a Columbia protestor said, “Never forget the 7th of October . . . the 7th of October is about to be every f—king day for you. You ready?” If Michelle Cottle thinks judgments of such actions are “in the eye of the beholder,” her eye does not know how to behold.

What this soft-pedaling of the horrors being spewed on campus has produced is a disastrously incurious media. Consider the question of how the college protests are organized and funded. The encampments that mysteriously sprang up like mushrooms on campuses in a matter of days across the country, with matching Coleman tents, were funded by big-name Democratic donors with last names like Rockefeller, Pritzker, and Soros. A Politico piece declared it “surprising” that “Biden’s biggest donors” are backing the protesters. “Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change.”

Politico’s article came out months after the protests began. It is a telling example of mainstream media’s ideological monoculture that journalists who delayed even asking such questions then found themselves surprised that left-wing dark money was funding radical protests on campus.

This willful blindness to the beliefs of the protesters they are covering also poses a challenge when trying to describe them. Some outlets, like the Associated Press, describe student activists as “antiwar protesters.” Others refer to them as “pro-Palestinian,” when the correct description would be “anti-Israel” and, in many cases, simply anti-Semitic. Not surprisingly, such reporters also end up uncritically repeating Hamas propaganda. The Post quoted a Barnard student who had been arrested for participating in Columbia’s encampment. “There’s these big mainstream media outlets that are making it breaking news that Columbia canceled in-person classes, but not breaking news that mass graves were discovered in Gaza,” she proclaimed. The Post reporter felt no need to mention that the claim about mass graves had been thoroughly debunked. Perhaps the reporter didn’t know. Perhaps her editor didn’t know. Perhaps no one at the paper knew. Perhaps they chose not to know.

Or perhaps they knew, and they wanted the lie to stand unmolested.

Biden can’t be trusted to take on anti-Semitism

The Biden executive branch sees the white male patriarchy behind every alleged failure of social justice, from ‘pay inequities’ that allegedly afflict females and persons of colour to ‘poor health outcomes’. No other causes of different life trajectories – personal choice, different skill levels, cultural background, substance abuse, etc – may be contemplated. The reason is always discrimination.

In February 2023, Biden ordered the federal government to incorporate equity thinking into every aspect of its operations. Ninety federal agencies have adopted ‘Equity Action Plans’ to address the ‘discrimination that underserved communities face’. The federal science agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, hand out lucrative grants to study intersectionality. They demand ‘diversity’ in research labs and clinical trials as a corrective to the racism of Western science. The US military is on a crusade to eradicate heteronormativity and colourblind meritocracy.

US representative Nancy Pelosi and US senator Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ legislative leaders, may voice support for Israel. But they and their party embrace the same philosophy that fuels the pro-Hamas campus protests. It is hard to find a Democratic state house or city hall that does not proudly proclaim its ‘anti-racist’ policies. Democratic school boards mandate ‘ethnic studies’ courses, which presume the existence of an enduring power struggle between the ‘marginalised’ and a white majority. State and local governments confer hiring preferences on non-white and female contractors, on the theory that merit-based systems of contracting are biased in favour of white males.

Democratic politicians promise ‘equity’, implying that American society is inherently unfair. They support the racial preferences in college admissions that have driven down the number of Jewish students, since highly qualified Jews take up slots needed to increase the presence of less qualified ‘underrepresented minorities’.

Biden received plaudits for his Days of Remembrance speech last week. But the performance was an exercise in hypocrisy. Campus anti-Semitism is the outgrowth of fundamental academic and Democratic commitments. Universities will not cure themselves unless they revamp their curricula and hire traditional scholars, rather than robotic practitioners of critical theory and activist wannabes. The ‘anti-Semitism training’ that administrators are proposing in the hope of extinguishing donor rebellions is a diversionary tactic. One can’t train one’s way out of a worldview that is baked into academic personnel and the courses they teach, even if adding to the diversity, equity and inclusion portfolio were not a patently counterproductive idea.

As long as the Democratic Party and its presidential standard-bearer remain committed to the narrative of white privilege and racial inequity, hatred of Israel and rationalisations for terrorism will be reliable products of the American left. No presidential speech will change that fact.

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05/15 Links Pt1: Kemp: Biden's cynical Rafah obsession only strengthens Hamas; Biden would veto Israel Weapons Bill; Fighting Against Western Media Anti-Israel Coverage

From Ian:

Richard Kemp: Biden's cynical Rafah obsession only strengthens Hamas

Most damningly of all is Biden’s withholding supplies of some armaments to Israel, including precision-guided munitions. This from a man who said in 2019 that any such action would be “absolutely preposterous” and “beyond comprehension”.

Biden hopes that this will all win back the anti-Israel elements of his support base. In his calculation that clearly trumps any and all damage inflicted on an ally that is fighting for its life on multiple fronts. The damage will be profound.

It may not have a decisive effect on a military offensive in Rafah. The IDF has sufficient stocks of munitions to complete that mission, although some ammunition may have to be rationed, potentially costing Israeli soldiers’ lives; and any shortage of precision weapons may have to be compensated by unguided bombs, which could cost some Gazan civilian lives.

But Biden’s actions will certainly strengthen Hamas. Its survival depends on Israel being stopped from its advance into Rafah. The growing U.S.-led international pressure on Israel can only encourage Hamas to fight harder and longer.

The terrorists’ only incentive to consider releasing hostages is a pause in hostilities to buy time and potentially lead to a full cessation. If those objectives can be achieved as a result of U.S. pressure, that incentive melts away and thus Biden’s policies reduce the prospects of getting the surviving hostages back, including American citizens, or at least raise the price of any who are released.

Biden is therefore prolonging the war, both by the time that is passing as Israel wrestles with how to achieve its objectives while trying to maintain the bilateral relationship, and by the encouragement he gives to Hamas.

That is why Biden’s election-driven obstruction against Israel will operate against his intentions. Assuming Israel goes ahead regardless, which it will have to do in some way, he will be seen not to have stopped the violence. That will continue closer and closer toward voting day with even greater adverse effects for Biden’s Democrats.

Biden has opened a Pandora’s box

In his never-ending attempt to cultivate the “Where would they go anyway?” Arab vote in Michigan and other possible swing states, US President Joe Biden has opened a Pandora’s box that he is likely to regret.

I suggest that he has just succeeded in creating for himself a “four-bag error,” one with potentially decisive significance, by refusing to arm Israel with kits to be used for providing greater precision for missiles and shells in attacking Gaza.

Biden's blunders
Specifically, Biden’s blunders are the following: First, he has demeaned America both as an ally and as a great power protecting the free world. He has sent a terrible message to current and would-be allies as to the risks and costs of siding with the United States.

Secondly, and ironically, he has freed Israel’s leadership of some of their reluctance to counter American dictates. He has just hit Israel with, if not his best shot, then something close to it. Israel will not stop as a result of this. Ironically, they might thereby be forced to use less precise weaponry, thus defeating the stated American goal of minimizing harm to civilians.

Thirdly, the American people will see this embarrassment for what it is: “fair-weather friending” a close ally and clearly showing a preference for its terrorist enemies.

And lastly, he has handed his opponent, former president Donald Trump, on a silver platter no less, an issue that Trump has already railed at, and which likely will become an integral part of his campaign.

Those observers who have been wondering where Trump stands on the situation in the Middle East will not be wondering much longer. Trump has been presented with a galvanizing series of American betrayals of its friendship with Israel; despite his often-expressed disillusionment with and dislike of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he is certain to use these actions to create a glaring contrast.

That contrast was already seen recently with his walking back of support for a two-state solution. Now, on social media (Where else?) Trump quickly responded to Biden’s withholding of weaponry: “Crooked Joe Biden, whether he knows it or not, just said he will withhold weapons from Israel as they fight to eradicate Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

“Hamas murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including babies, and are still holding Americans hostage, if the hostages are still alive. Yet Crooked Joe is taking the side of these terrorists... Remember, this war in Israel... would have NEVER have started if I was in the White House... But very soon, we will be back, and once again demanding PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!” (Emphases are Trump’s).

Decision to withhold bombs from Israel ‘damages entire US-led bloc’

The Biden administration’s decision to withhold shipments of air-to-ground munitions is having an adverse effect on the entire Middle Eastern pro-United States bloc, a Western official tells JNS.

Boeing-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), the precision kits that turn “dumb bombs” into all-weather precision-guided munitions, and Small Diameter Bombs are on hold, with shipments frozen of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs, according to a May 7 report by Politico.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed the suspension, saying during a Senate hearing on May 8, “We’ve been very clear … from the very beginning that Israel shouldn’t launch a major attack into Rafah without accounting for and protecting the civilians that are in that battlespace. And again, as we have assessed the situation, we have paused one shipment of high payload munitions. We’ve not made a final determination on how to proceed with that shipment.”

A Western official shed light on the broader implications of this decision, indicating that the public withholding of these munitions is a significant message in itself.

“The heart of the matter is the declaration. The fact that U.S. is not transferring and declaring it, this is the message,” the official explained.

This move is perceived negatively by America’s other Middle Eastern allies such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while members of the radical Iranian-led Shi’ite axis, including Hamas, see it as encouraging.

The Western official also expressed concerns about the broader regional perception of this decision, suggesting it has already caused considerable damage.

“Even if the U.S. wants to climb down from the ladder quietly, most of the damage has been done. The region has understood; if it happened to Israel, it could happen to me,” he remarked, indicating a loss of trust among American allies.

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05/14 Links Pt2: The Meaning of Israeli ‘Independence’; The Woke Jihad; Hamas terrorists use UN vehicles, UNRWA compound; Israel marks 76th Independence Day

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Meaning of Israeli ‘Independence’

“There is no question that this year, our Yom Ha’atzma’ut celebrations are different,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in an Independence Day message to Jews abroad. And indeed, the Jewish state’s transition from Memorial Day to Independence Day—as the former ends, the latter begins—was by all accounts less abrupt this evening, since the solemn and subdued atmosphere continued from one into the other.

The past seven months have been filled with fear and mourning, he said, but they “have reminded us, also, of our core qualities, of our power as a people to stand up, again and again, against hatred. To survive and speak our truth. Of our deep and sustaining caring for one another.”

Israelis used this moment to wrestle with what independence actually means to them, highlighted by two alternate takes on the traditional torch-lighting ceremony.

Forgoing the regular torch lighting in Jerusalem, reports i24 News, torches were “lit in Gaza border communities affected by the October 7 attacks, as well as in IDF bases that have suffered losses in the ongoing conflict. The individuals chosen to light the torches this year are being honored for their heroism during the October 7 attacks or their bravery in the subsequent war.”

One of those torches, notes the Times of Israel, sits “next to a giant stack of burned cars destroyed on the highway during the Hamas attack.”

As depressing as that scene sounds, it does well represent the state’s original idea of independence. As I noted in November, Israelis who lived in the Gaza border towns were raising their kids and their crops on the same land on which settled brave Jewish pioneers through the state’s birth pangs. Every inch of the land, right up to the borderline, had to be defended; anything that wasn’t guarded would be taken—some of the land that was guarded was taken anyway.

Then there is a fascinating, flipped version of the ceremony where torches are extinguished. Not torches representing Israel as a state, mind you—these aren’t anti-Zionist ceremonies. But they are harsh in their implicit and explicit criticism of the government. Relatives of hostages or victims, as well as survivors of the October 7 attacks, extinguish torches they hold that are symbolic of “sins” that led to the slaughter.

“I hereby extinguish the torch of the sin of conceit,” said one participant whose daughter was killed during the attacks. Two survivors extinguished the “the torch of indifference,” in their words.

Some were more profound than others, needless to say. But the theme seemed to be winning independence from assumptions that put the state in danger.

There is another aspect to the debate over independence that is made newly relevant by the events since October: independence from allies.

Abe Greenwald: The Woke Jihad

The first thing to understand about any left-wing protest movement is that its nominal cause is irrelevant. Black Lives Matter isn’t about saving black lives. Trans activism isn’t about protecting trans children. And intersectionality isn’t about the suffering of the diverse disaffected. Never were, never will be. Underneath their particular brands, social-justice movements are assorted fronts in a radical war against the good. And so it is for the “pro-Palestinian” encampments.

Would a group trying to save black lives have seized on a statistically tiny number of police killings as justification to rid black neighborhoods of police? That’s what Black Lives Matter did. And by the time the cops were hobbled, and violent crime spiked precisely where police were most needed, the movement’s leaders were using corporate donations to buy safe suburban palaces. BLM was an attack on law enforcement, because law enforcement maintains the good working order of the United States. Undermine that and you’re left with chaos, which is the objective.

And celebratory chaos is precisely the goal of the radical trans movement. Consider Rose Montoya, the trans activist who went topless on the South Lawn of the White House during a Pride Month celebration. How does that viral stunt protect trans kids or evoke empathy for an outcast demographic? Every aspect of the movement is designed to undo our common appreciation for a safe and sane way of life. Denying solid biological reality, throwing kids into emotional disarray, scaring the hell out of parents, endorsing ruinous medical procedures for minors, and trolling everyone who’s not convinced—that’s the game. And just as BLM leaders got rich, trans stars are furnished with endorsements and media deals once they’ve done their part to tear down the edifice of stability.

Intersectional ideology has infiltrated our lives mostly through the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training programs at work and school. To conquer, you must first divide. That’s the DEI trainer’s remit—splitting formerly cohesive groups into racial, ethnic, and gender camps, highlighting their differences and coaxing out ugly resentments. Not surprisingly, DEI work increases bigotry. As one DEI theorist recently admitted to the Wall Street Journal, “People often leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity toward other groups.” Because that’s what it’s supposed to do, especially regarding Jews. Soon after October 7, Tabia Lee, the disenchanted former head of DEI at California’s De Anza College, told the New York Post that she was called a “dirty Zionist” for bringing Jewish speakers to campus. And school administrators refused her request to issue a condemnation of anti-Semitism. Lee says, “I was told in no uncertain terms that Jews are ‘white oppressors’ and our job as faculty and staff members was to ‘decenter whiteness.’” Of the left’s post–October 7 bigotry, she writes, “This outpouring of antisemitic hatred is the direct result of DEI’s insistence that Jews are oppressors.”

Yes, there are well-meaning individuals who support civil rights, gay rights, and gender equality. And if these well-meaning people are still supporting social-justice campaigns because they believe their stated aims, then they’ll support anyone.

But the performative lunatics who turned identity fanaticism into a national pastime are enemies of Israel, the Jews, the United States, and human decency itself. That makes them natural allies of terrorists, whatever their do-good cover stories.

As with previous left-wing campaigns, the “pro-Palestinian” movement offers nothing in support of its supposed purpose. It sides with Gaza’s governing terrorists, who start wars with the express goal of producing a surplus of dead Gazans. American Hamas supporters chant “Cease-Fire now” as Hamas refuses every cease-fire offer that Israel and the U.S. put on the table. Why? Because a cease-fire means no more dead Gazans, and dead Gazans are Hamas’s chief natural resource and most valuable export. It’s what brings in the billions of aid money that’s used to build tunnels where Hamas hides—while civilians absorb the blows overhead. If Israel were to stop short of eradicating Hamas, as the protesters want, many more Gazans would die in the future wars that Hamas has vowed to instigate.

No, the encampments aren’t pro-Palestinian. They’re the latest expression of the social-justice left’s impulse to destroy the virtuous and raise up the wicked.

Jerry Seinfeld showed anti-Jewish protesters are a minority

Ironically, Seinfeld probably worked harder for a degree he received just for showing up than many of the Palestinian flag-waving, keffiyeh-wearing future unemployed people protesting him.

Not only that, but his speech was laden with advice that would make these students’ lives infinitely happier.

“The slightly uncomfortable feeling of awkward humor is OK,” Seinfeld said. “It is worth the sacrifice of an occasional discomfort to have some laughs. Don’t lose that. Even if it’s at the cost of occasional hard feelings, it’s OK.”

But while we certainly need to address the explosion of antisemitism that has made life hell for Jewish students on campuses across the country (let alone on city streets across the world), we must also be sure to appreciate the full picture.

At Duke University, while a handful of students decided to walk out like petulant children who just couldn’t bear listening to the apolitical advice of a Jewish man, the vast majority stayed, listened, and drowned out the protesters by chanting, “Jerry.”

And while Golan endured far worse before, during, and after the Eurovision Song Contest, she received overwhelming support from the voting public, including maximum points from 14 different countries, many of whom are experiencing their own explosions of antisemitism.

None of this is to downplay what we’re seeing across the world. Life for Jews has become immeasurably worse in the West following Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, which somehow acted as a catalyst for further anti-Jewish hate here at home.

But it does remind us that the people marching in the streets, the people making threats, and the people stomping their way out of their own graduation ceremonies are in the minority. An incredibly vicious and vocal minority, sure, but a minority nonetheless.

And while there is certainly work to do to ensure peace and safety for Jews in the West, we should take solace in the fact that while there are some people out there who refuse to listen to Jerry Seinfeld because he is Jewish, their voices are drowned out by the majority who wanted to hear from him and cheer obvious truths: “We’re embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things that we should be embarrassed about.”

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05/14 Links Pt1: Why Joe Biden Has Gone from Friend to Enemy; IDF kills Hamas terrorists embedded inside UNRWA school; The UN’s World of the Absurd

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Why Joe Biden Has Gone from Friend to Enemy

This political maneuvering just doesn’t pass the smell test. Nor do Biden’s expressions of disapproval at Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing, which has been the opposite of indiscriminate. Something else is going on here.

Now, I’m not saying the Biden people are being disingenuous. It could be, as Matthew Continetti points out in his column this month, that they’re just bad at politics and are miscalculating the electoral importance of the anti-Israel voter. But what if it’s not just that. What if it’s something darker?

For three years, Biden and his team have been fighting to get the American people to give him and themselves credit for a booming economy. Whether he deserves that credit or not, it’s not happening. They are beside themselves with frustration because they are not receiving the gratitude they think they deserve. Add to this that there’s nothing they can do about Biden’s own personal infirmities. These matters appear out of their control, and beyond their ability to fix, and it’s maddening to them. And they’re terrified—maybe even more terrified now that it’s clear that three of the four criminal cases against Donald Trump will not reach a courtroom before Election Day. They have been pinning their hopes on a turn in American opinion against Trump due to multiple Trump convictions. They might get the verdicts they want in the Stormy Daniels case, but the public’s lack of response to his being found liable for sexual assault and financial fraud might suggest even that anti-Trump moment will not be the knockout blow they desperately crave.

Ask yourself: Might there be something irresistibly seductive for the Biden team and Biden himself in the idea that his electoral woes have a foreign root? Doesn’t the disorder and crisis in and around Israel provide a convenient scapegoat for his own failings? No, it’s not that inflation has eaten away at the ordinary American’s financial gains. It’s not that Biden now needs his staff to stand between him and photographers to obscure video images of his halting gait. It’s not that he sounds like his throat is coated in sandpaper and that his tongue lolls about around his mouth when he speaks.

No, it’s that damn Bibi that’s threatening to drag him down.

The obsession with Netanyahu—when Israel’s prime minister is doing nothing more than reflecting the consensus opinion of his people about the necessity of winning the war—is reminiscent of another shameful moment in English history. “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Henry II is reputed to have said of Thomas à Becket, after which four knights cornered Becket in Canterbury Cathedral and murdered him. Perhaps, in his private councils in the White House and perhaps in conversation with Chuck Schumer before Schumer’s speech, Biden offered some woke variant of the same sentiment: “Who will rid me of this meddlesome Jew?”

Biden’s policy now is that Hamas should be allowed to live to massacre another day. In the end, then, while Biden spent months being the best friend Israel may ever have had in the White House, he has now become one of its worst enemies.

And, again, for what? For Wales?

The Gates of Gaza

The healthy alternative to the Star Wars paradigm, which has so visibly and spectacularly failed to assure Israel’s security, is “Mad Max.” This alternative paradigm states that new and old weapon systems will merge, thanks to innovative concepts of operations. Mad Max understands that the twenty-first century battlefield is home to T-64 tanks, which fought their first battles in the early 1960s, as well as state-of-the-art cyber-electronic warfare. Mini drones that are commercially available across the globe can spot for Cold War-era artillery.

Never underestimate technologically inferior adversaries, the Mad Max paradigm counsels. High-tech tools and weapons will never be the sole or even the primary factor determining the winner of wars. This dictum is especially true for the wars of the Middle East, where great powers external to the region determine the balance of power on the ground.

Because war remains today what it has always been, a political activity, we cannot gauge the true advantage of any weapon—be it new and technologically advanced or old and rusty—without first considering the political-military strategy that it serves. Victory comes not to him who kills the most enemy soldiers or who fries the most motherboards but to him who converts what transpires on the battlefield into the most beneficial political arrangements. Losers on the battlefield frequently win wars, by bleeding giants until they are too exhausted to continue fighting. For example, in Vietnam, the second Iraq War, and Afghanistan, the U.S. repeatedly outmatched its adversaries militarily but lost the wars, nevertheless.

The digital revolution has enhanced the powers of technologically advanced countries in many ways, but it has also exposed them to new risks while also delivering surprising new tools to underdogs. Even the poorest of powers, thanks to the internet and smartphones, now enjoy a bonanza of open-source intelligence that just a few years ago was not available to even the richest of states. Cheap drones purchased off the shelf can offer startling reconnaissance capabilities to Ukraine against Russia. Cyber-enabled supply chains and GPS present an otherwise ragtag group like the Houthis opportunities to disrupt global commercial shipping. The list goes on.

The Star Wars paradigm also rests on the assumption, often unstated, that taking and holding territory has somehow become a secondary part of warfighting. While it is certainly possible to name wars that have been won without territorial conquest, they are few and far between. Almost inevitably, the magnitude of such victories is small, because victors who impose their will from over the horizon—from the air, sea, or through economic leverage—lack the physical presence on the ground that is necessary to shape a new political order.

The Mad Max mentality cultivates a heightened sensitivity to the phrase “on the ground.” With minor exceptions, armies translate battlefield victories into lasting changes either by seizing territory or threatening persuasively to do so. In the brave new digital world, traditional warfighting assets—large combat formations, replete with artillery, rocket systems, engineering units, and heavy armor—will not disappear, because only they can take and hold territory decisively.

Under the influence of Star Wars, Israel neglected its role by allowing its land forces to atrophy. In 2018, Brigadier Roman Goffman, who was then the commander of the 7th Armored Brigade, took the extraordinary step of airing his concerns about this issue openly before the senior leadership of the IDF at a command conference. “Chief of Staff,” Goffman said, referring to his senior most commander, General Gadi Eisenkot, “I first want to tell you that we [in armored units] are ready to fight. There is one problem. You don’t activate us… [T]here is a very problematic pattern that is developing here, namely, the avoidance of the use of ground forces.”

Eisenkot sat in the front row of the audience flanked by the top leaders of the IDF. Behind them sat hundreds of senior officers who greeted Goffman’s remarks with smirks. But he continued undeterred. The non-deployment of ground forces, he argued, “ultimately affects the will to fight. What makes us into combat commanders over time is friction with the other side.” Absent friction with the enemy, he continued, the military enters a state of “clinical death.”

On October 7, the Israelis tasted what Goffman meant by “clinical death.” The Israeli military had at its disposal a glittering arsenal of exquisite weapons, including a large squadron of radar-proof F-35s, whose capacities previous generations would have considered to be the stuff of science-fiction. As it turned out, however, none of these weapons were of the slightest use against terrorist bands, armed mainly with Kalashnikovs, who were intent on murdering, raping, and kidnapping civilians.

The Legacy of the Maalot Massacre

Fifty years ago today, Palestinian terrorists attacked a school in northern Israel, taking hostages and murdering 22 students. The memories endure for those who survived, and the lessons learned in 1974 resonate anew for a country facing another hostage crisis.

An intersection opposite the central bus station in Tzfat illustrates the interwoven trauma between that city and the Galileean town of Maalot, a half-hour’s drive away. At the intersection, one sign designates the road’s name as 22 Children of Tzfat Street, while a sign at the adjacent bus stop calls it 22 Children of Maalot Street.

Fifty years after a notorious terrorist attack that killed 28 Israelis near and in Maalot, including 22 students on a field trip from a Tzfat high school, places and people testify to the lingering pain.

It’s there a few hundred yards from the Tzfat intersection, on the Fig Kindergarten sign for the school named after Sarah Madar, “murdered in the Maalot disaster of May 15, 1974, may her memory be blessed.” Bracha (meaning blessing), a teacher there, told me that it’s one of 22 flora- and fauna-named kindergartens in Tzfat that memorialize the victims.

It’s there in Maalot’s Founders Museum, where a wall placard tells of the tragedy that began May 13, 1974, when three Palestinians who’d trained in Lebanon infiltrated Israel through the border fence a few miles north, setting off a series of security failures and attacks that culminated in the same terrorists taking more than 100 Israelis hostage in the Netiv Meir School and murdering the 22 students.

It’s there down the street from the museum, where a sculpture memorializes the Cohen family, who lived in the next apartment building until the terrorists shot them to death en route to the school.

It’s in a memorial in the Maalot school building where the teens’ lives were extinguished; in Tzfat’s Amit School that they attended, since relocated and renamed The Religious Comprehensive High School in Memory of the 22; in that school’s first-floor room with a wall filled by the victims’ pictures on branches of a painted tree and, next to the tree, a stained-glass window with 22 chiseled brown circles containing their names; in a bomb shelter that a Maalot survivor renovated, inside whose entrance he hung pictures of his 22 classmates; and in the cemetery where the children were buried together down a hill from the ancient part of the city renowned for its holiness.

It is even 7,500 miles away in the Los Angeles suburb of Irvine, California, in a Reform synagogue that in 1975 renamed itself Congregation Shir Ha-Ma’alot in solidarity. The synagogue includes its namesake, out-of-the-way town on each congregational visit to Israel and a decade ago paid for the memorial site in the Maalot classroom that it also refurbished.

“It’s part of our hearts, part of our soulful connection, how much more so in the period we’re now living in,” said Richard Steinberg, the synagogue’s rabbi.

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05/13 Links Pt2: On Memorial Day, Israeli leaders promise brighter future; The UN and Eurovision: A tale of two votes on Israel; While we mourn, others celebrate murders of Jews and Americans

From Ian:

Richard Landes: The Paradoxical “Proof” that Jews are the Chosen People

The deeper motives of anti-Semitism have their roots in times long past; they come from the unconscious, and I am quite prepared to hear that what I am going to say will at first appear incredible. I venture to assert that the jealousy that the Jews evoked in other peoples by maintaining that they were the first-born, the favorite child of God the Father, has not yet been overcome by those others, just as if the latter had given credence to the assumption.” (Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism)

It’s well known that the thing about the Jews that most grates on gentiles – especially derivative monotheists and post-monotheists – is the notion that Jews are the chosen people. And yet, the claim is specifically enunciated in Jewish scripture that God chose the Jews to be mankind’s moral leadership.

Observe these laws carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” For what nation… is there so great, that has statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day? (Deuteronomy 4: 7-8).

The pretension to be “the chosen people” has inspired both hatred and emulation. Both Islam and Christianity, the two religions most likely to generate Jew-hatred, are also claimants to the status of God’s chosen people, replacing, erasing the Jewish claim.

Recently, modern progressives have expressed if not anger, then exasperation at so primitive and pretentious a notion. Nobel-prize author Jose Saramago deplored “the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God…” Science writer Jostein Gaarder declared (in the royal “we”):
“We do not believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God’s chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.”

Among those attitudes most associated with antisemitism is a hostility to, a resentment of the Jewish claim to be a chosen people. Indeed, a good progressive Jew views that problematic claim with great wariness if not scorn: ‘we are the same as everyone else.’

Of course, even if one rejects any divine claims, biblical or otherwise, about the Jews being chosen, there is historical evidence for the claim. Studies of the resilience of Jewish communities over time, of Jewish success in societies based on merit, certainly indicate that there is something special about Jews, whether God chose them, or they imagined that God chose them, or they chose a God they invented. The very survival – and vigor – of Jews to this day suggests that something unusual is at work.

But I think the most striking proof that the Jews are the chosen people comes from what social scientists call “non-reactive” evidence, that is from a pattern of evidence produced by agents who do not behave in reaction to being seen, but whose behavior nevertheless unconsciously reveals evidence they might deny, even vigorously, were they aware. And the proof, in our day, for the chosenness of the Jews, comes from the dual phenomenon of the extraordinary obsession gentiles display over Jewish behavior, on the one hand, and the extraordinary inversion of reality – both moral and empirical – that obsession takes, on the other.

The obsession is not hard to document. If one were to weight the international news coverage of countries by their population, then the coverage of the only Jewish state by international news organizations is skewed by several orders of magnitude. One study published in 2013, found that, aside from the US (“the uncontested world news hegemon”), articles about Israel and Palestine rank the highest, literally pushing out China, Russia, and Europe. If one factors in size and population, this means over a hundred-fold greater attention to this particular Middle East state and its behavior with its hostile neighbors, than any other global story including the entire US. Similarly, if one factors in casualty figures, then Israel/Palestine media footprint is the exact inverse of the Democratic Republic of Congo: about ten thousand dead in twenty years (1989-2009) has filled global media, whereas about four to six million dead in the same period in the Congo, remains nearly invisible to the world―one of many stealth conflicts.

Phyllis Chesler: The prophet unhonored

Is Joe Biden on Hamas’s payroll? If not, why is his administration withholding promised military equipment to America’s most reliable and stable ally in the Middle East? Does Biden fail to understand what Israel is up against?

Clearly, his administration is acting as if Iran and its proxy armies, beginning with Hamas, are “good” people, no different from the rest of us. He thinks they are “reasonable” people with whom he can negotiate or even outwit.

I strongly beg to differ.

Long ago, I was held captive in Kabul as a young bride. When I managed to get out, I understood in my bones that the West and the East are very different places. Other Americans do not understand this.

Although I loved many things about the Muslim world—the awe-inspiring mountains, the ancient bazaars, the ceremonial aspects of dining, rose petals in the pudding, the biblical barefoot nomads tinkling as they walked together with their sheep and camels—I saw that the East was very wild. It was rife with unending blood feuds, vigilante (in)justice, illiteracy, poverty, disease, cruelty and above all hatred.

Hatred of infidels, especially Jews, Christians and Hazaras who are Shiite, not Sunni Muslims. Hatred of women. Hatred of servants. Hatred of daughters-in-law. Hatred of their own political dissidents and free-thinkers. Hatred of Americans. But respect for Nazi Germany and German products.

One cannot blame any of this on imperialism or colonialism. These customs were all indigenous. It is crucial to understand this.

Why? Because this is the neighborhood in which Israel lives. The Jewish state has weathered every storm. We are an eternal people and will always survive. But the cost in blood has been high. The IDF is now fighting brilliantly. The Israelis are miraculously resilient.

Seth Mandel: Lifting Hamas’s ‘Fog of War’ Reveals a Very Different Conflict

The fog of war is no excuse to use unethical counting methods. And it is no excuse to lie.

Does anyone feel guilty for what they’ve done here? We’re left with a circus-like cycle of duplicity: Hamas puts out fake numbers, the White House promotes those fabrications, which fuels street protests, which the president uses as an excuse to shift policy against Israel, which incentivizes Hamas to publish more fake numbers, etc. Around and around the blood-libel Ferris Wheel we go.

Something in the machinery of the White House has come loose. The whole edifice most closely resembles the Boeing planes with faulty bolts that just started falling apart mid-flight. Instead of bringing calm, the Biden team increasingly brings chaos—and seems unwilling or unable to act responsibly. The media that report the Hamas numbers are complicit in transforming America into an erratic actor on the world stage.

All of this is now undeniable. The only question left is what Joe Biden is going to do about it.

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05/13 Links Pt1: UN seemingly halves estimate of Gazan women, children killed; The Betrayal of Israel by the US Administration Is Almost Complete

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: After 76 years of Israeli independence, Jews must still be Zionists

A new debate about Zionism
The antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the reality of the Nazi Holocaust destroyed the illusions of the Socialists (or at least should have), as well as convinced Western Jews that there was no alternative to a Jewish state. And once Israel came into existence, those who feared it for secular or religious reasons generally made their peace with it.

Today, there is a new anti-Zionist movement among the Jews that gets disproportionate coverage in the corporate press, yet represents only a minority of non-Israeli Jews. Unlike past opponents of Zionism, it doesn’t oppose Israel’s existence because they have a better idea to protect Jews. Rather, these Jews who belong to groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace exalt Jewish powerlessness and twist Jewish beliefs into a creed that believes Jews alone of the peoples of the world ought not to have the right of self-determination or the power to defend themselves.

It is no accident that they also traffic in antisemitic blood libels, such as the claim that Israel trains American police to murder African-Americans. As the reaction to Oct. 7 has shown, these Jewish anti-Zionists may be loud and have strong support from the mainstream media, but they have nothing to do with normative Jewish values and represent only themselves.

Yet the battle over Zionism isn’t merely this faint echo of past Jewish squabbles. Today, anti-Zionism is a main plank of leftist activists, whether they are environmental extremists like Thunberg (who want the world to give up air travel, the right to own cars, as well as to eat meat or cheese); Black Lives Matter activists in the United States who smear America as an irredeemably racist nation; or the LGBT+ community that sees Palestinians as fellow victims, even though unlike Israel but in most Arab countries, they would be in danger because of their lifestyle. Ze'ev JabotinskyRevisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky (bottom right) meeting with Beitar leaders in Warsaw, circa 1939. Future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin is on the left in the first row. Source: National Photo Collection of Israel

Another variant of antisemitism
They claim to speak for human rights but have little interest in any conflict or alleged humanitarian crisis unless it can be blamed on the Jews. Like intellectuals of the early 20th century who blazed the trail for the acceptance of Nazism, they claim to be moved by the suffering of victims of war but have a curious blind spot when those victims are Jews. The plight of the hostages or those who were slaughtered in the orgy of rape, murder, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction committed by Hamas and Palestinians on Oct. 7 move them not at all.

Their nurturing of Palestinian fantasies of Israel’s destruction is helping to doom the supposed objects of their sympathy to a future of more war, terrorism and destruction. The fact that their reaction to Hamas barbarism was not merely to oppose Israel’s justified war to eliminate a genocidal terrorist group, but to vow to “crush Zionism” and erase it from “the river to the sea,” remains proof that it is not so much an intersectional human-rights cause as it is just a new variant on the same old tropes of antisemitism. They aren’t merely criticizing an Israeli government’s policies or actions. Their problem is with the fact that there is one Jewish state on the planet.

They seem to believe the Jews are the only people on the planet whose right to self-determination deserves no respect. While they reject accusations of antisemitism, what else can you call those who discriminate against Jews and judge them by a standard they would never apply to any other people?

Jew-haters are now recirculating tropes that Soviet propagandists first issued a half-century ago to label Zionism as racism. The only rational reaction to this is for Israelis and Jews wherever they live to embrace not just the label of Zionist but the ideas behind it. Zionism recognizes age-old ties between a people and their land, and at its core is a fundamental expression of Jewish rights.

Zionism has created a nation that for all of its flaws and frailties is a unique experiment in the ingathering of a people in a democratic state. In the last 76 years, Zionist Jews have worked miracles not just in surviving wars waged by enemies bent on their elimination but also in a society capable of enormous economic, technological and cultural achievements. It should be celebrated—not reviled—and people of good will, whether Jewish or not, should know that by embracing it, they are identifying themselves with among the most just causes and most amazing stories in modern history.

Israelis are still mourning their dead since Oct. 7 while they battle Hamas and work for the safe return of the remaining hostages held captive in Gaza. But they are also celebrating a nation that needs no permission from any foreign power to exist and, false accusations of antisemites about “genocide” notwithstanding, whose conduct under excruciating circumstances has been exemplary by any standard.

Zionism isn’t dead. Nor will it be defeated by Hamas and its leftist enablers in the streets of Malmö or on North American college campuses. It is very much alive, and on Yom Ha’atzmaut—Israel’s 76th Independence Day—every Jew with a conscience and sense of self-respect should be proudly calling themselves Zionists.

The Jewish Oyster Problem

The one who best answered Steiner was Isaiah Berlin, who, in a witty article called “The Cost of Curing an Oyster,” compared the exile of the Jews to a disease. “A people condemned to be a minority everywhere, dependent on the goodwill, toleration or sheer unawareness of the majority, but made aware of its insecure condition, of its constant need to please, or at least not to displease … cannot achieve a fully normal development either individually or collectively.” Exile created distortions of personality: self-insulation, anxiety, aggressive defensiveness. True, the peculiar position of the Jews as a minority on the margins of society resulted in works of genius, like Kafka, Freud, or Heine. When your life depends on understanding the whims of the majority, you develop a clear and critical view of that majority, an outsider’s perspective. But that deeper insight possessed by gifted individuals was “purchased by untold suffering of entire communities” and “could not be accepted as natural or unavoidable.” Exile, in this sense, subjected Jews to mental illness and, as mental illness sometimes does, produced works of genius. But at what cost?

“Hundreds of thousands of oysters,” wrote Berlin, “suffer from the disease that occasionally generates a pearl. But supposing an oyster says to you, ‘I wish to live an ordinary, decent, contented, healthy, oysterish life; even though I may not produce a pearl. I’m prepared to sacrifice this possibility for a life free of social disease; a life in which I need not look over my shoulder to see how I appear to others.’”

Maybe Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, synthesized better the bargain that Jews needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, “How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?” “Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,” he answered.

The exercise of power is messy. Always. Not a single national liberation movement in the world was neat and blameless. Thinkers like Steiner don’t deny that. In fact, they admit to the dirty nature of statehood and consider that the only way for Jews to stay “pure” is to forego political power and submit to the rule of others. This is different than universalist utopians. Anti-Zionists who long for powerlessness don’t necessarily harbor a Lennonesque dream of “no countries and no religion.” Pointedly, they see nothing wrong in Palestinians exercising political power in the context of a Palestinian national state and even oppressing Jews—or killing them. It’s Jewish power that bothers them; it’s Jewish sovereignty that they disdain and rage against for exposing their own pretensions to moral superiority as fallacious.

That their supposed moral excellence is acquired by trading on the bodies of dead Jews doesn’t bother them, since they’ve established that playing the victim is by definition a morally superior posture. Jews need to be oppressed to produce their best.

Under the layers of intellectual distortion and self-righteousness, this pretension of moral superiority is, paradoxically, morally rotten. The carefully crafted self-image of privileged Jewish academicians, who observe the world from the heights of their tenured positions, seems ruined by Jews who refuse to be at the mercy of others. “How dare those plebeian oysters deny me the right to be a pearl? Don’t they know that they must die so that I can be an ethical beacon to the world?”

Those who criticize Israel for pushing “Jewish supremacy” are, in fact, advocating for another type of Jewish supremacy, probably more racist and self-righteous than the former. But more important than the question of whether being a Jewish oyster with or without a pearl is better, the argument that powerlessness is necessary for “the Jewish genius” to develop is factually false.

Yes, the diasporic persecution produced Freud and Kafka, but Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel produced the Bible and the Mishnah. Israeli Jews win more Nobel Prizes and gain more patents than French Jews or Russian Jews. The truth is that a people, any people, can develop its greatness only by being the master of its own destiny. True, you mess up bigger and more noticeably if you run an economy, an army, and a police force than if you run a corner store or a physician’s office. But avoiding power to avoid the problems of power is like starving to death to avoid obesity.

The anti-Zionism of powerlessness is deeply cowardly. It avoids the real challenges of power, its messiness, its insolvable moral dilemmas, and its endless shades of gray. Diasporism is a facile escape, for which someone else is expected to pay the tab. Easier to sit in judgment in an air-conditioned room at Columbia University writing about the virtues of powerlessness than to work hard to make prophetic visions a reality.

Zionism’s Israel presents a historical opportunity for Jews to deploy the values we developed in the Diaspora and move them from the abstract realm of books to the arena of real life. It may not be so pristine and pure as Steiner wanted, but that’s okay. Our values were never meant to be theoretical. They were meant as a practical guide to life in the here and now, not in the hereafter.

Refusing the opportunity and rejecting the challenge is craven. Doing so while putting other Jews at risk so that our unearned sense of our own superiority can remain intact is a morally criminal act.

The Betrayal of Israel by the US Administration Is Almost Complete

The Biden administration does not appear ever to have issued the slightest threat, warning or ultimatum to the authors of the war: Hamas, Iran or Qatar.

US Senator Chuck Schumer, after declaring himself a friend and defender of Israel, suggested overthrowing Israel's democratically elected prime minister, and -- as if Israel, and not America, were within his jurisdiction -- called for new elections.

Meanwhile in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where anti-government demonstrations began again, one of their leaders, Ami Dror, revealed on social media that the demonstrations and riots are part of a plan by the Biden administration to bring down the Netanyahu government.... The US State Department has, for more than a year, been providing financial support for protests hostile to the Netanyahu government.

Biden, it seems, is frustrated that Netanyahu is objecting to humanitarian aid -- which basically resupplies Hamas. Hamas, Israel's argument goes, released hostages only after unremitting pressure. Relieving that pressure by backing Hamas makes the probability of seeing any more hostages released less likely. Biden is also reportedly frustrated that Netanyahu, for some inexplicable reason, objects to the creation of a terrorist Palestinian state next door.

One cannot leave aside that the Biden administration, through ignoring sanctions on Iranian oil, has allowed the Iran's regime to earn up to an estimated $100 billion... Without those funds, the massacre of October 7 would not have been possible, Hezbollah would not have been able to fire so many missiles into Israel from Lebanon, and Iran itself would not have been able to launch more than 300 drones and ballistic missiles at Israel in April, and to attack US troops more than 150 times on, just since October 7, 2023 -- evidently in an attempt to drive the US out of the Middle East.

The Biden administration, it seems, does not want a definitive end of the conflict -- as with Ukraine as well -- especially if the end would entail the defeat of Hamas or Russia. Hamas is a protégé of Qatar and Iran, the world's two leading state sponsors of terrorism. The Biden administration has been rewarding them -- Iran with money and Qatar with renewing its protection by Al-Udeid Air Base, headquarters of America's CENTCOM, as well as controlling the new terror pier the US has built in Gaza At the same time, the Biden administration is falsely accusing Israel of violating human rights.

The Biden administration may even be complicit in the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other Israeli officials that might be issued by the International Criminal Court – possibly as a way to dispense with him.

The mullahs are, in effect, using their proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and so on -- as their "human shields".

The Biden administration has placed the existence of Israel in danger to protect Biden from the dangerous voters of Michigan.

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05/12 Links: US withholding ‘sensitive intelligence’ on Hamas from Israel; Europe's public vote shines for Eden Golan at Eurovision; Israel marks first post-Oct. 7 Memorial Day

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Liberal media is still in denial about post-Oct. 7 antisemitism

Seven months of an unprecedented surge in antisemitism that has turned American college campuses and even K-12 schools into hostile environments for Jews has changed a lot of minds about the issue. The willingness of much of the political left to downplay or even justify the atrocities of Oct. 7—and then to flip the narrative about the war that Hamas started to one in which the victims of terrorism are somehow the real villains of the story—has shocked even many political liberals into rethinking their assumptions about where the real danger for Jews lies.

But not The New York Times.

As two lengthy news features published in the paper this week confirmed, the flagship of liberal journalism in the United States hasn’t let events or the reality of a post-Oct. 7 world interfere with their ideological or political agendas.

In one story, the newspaper devoted the time of four reporters to take a deep dive into contemporary antisemitism. But the result of what is described as their extensive research is that they have come to the conclusion that the real culprits are not the people who seek the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet, legitimize a genocidal terrorist movement as justified “resistance” or attempt to allow those responsible for the mass murder of 1,200 people to get away with it. Instead, the Times believes that the problem rests with (surprise!) Republicans who are rallying in support of a beleaguered State of Israel and who are opposed to the deluge of Jew-hatred on display in the American public square since the current war began.

In another article, the paper reported a congressional hearing about the growing problem of antisemitism in K-12 schools throughout the country as primarily one about how those in charge of these institutions scored points against members of Congress who care about the issue.

These are just two prominent examples out of many that could be pointed to that show how the Times and other liberal media outlets manipulate coverage of this issue to promote their own partisan agendas. They are worth noting precisely because they illustrate how ideological agendas work to present a distorted picture of an antisemitism crisis that serves primarily to deflect attention from the real cause.

In this case, that means denying or downplaying the fact that the principal engines of antisemitism in 2024 America are left-wing ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality, which grant a permission slip to Jew-hatred. The pervasive influence of these toxic ideas in American education has helped to indoctrinate largely ignorant students to parrot what earlier generations might have easily understood to be Soviet-era Marxist propaganda about Zionism being racism and Israel being an “apartheid state” against which all “resistance”—even the orgy of rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that Palestinians carried on Oct. 7—can be justified.

Israel’s PR-War Pandemonium

The job of international spokesperson for Israel, in a state of war, is fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or better yet all three. For most of the past six months, it was occupied by Eylon Levy, a 32-year-old British Israeli with an affinity for television cameras and seemingly infinite ability to absorb the abuse that comes from publicly defending Israel, at its least defensible and at its most. When Israel was still picking through the corpses in the kibbutzim near Gaza, he reminded viewers of the carnage—both the dead concertgoers and elderly (who were real victims) and “beheaded babies” (who turned out not to be). When Israel began hunting Hamas in Gaza, he defended his country’s actions without reservation, even when the civilian toll became unbearable. His tenure ended on the last day of March, reportedly after British Foreign Minister David Cameron took exception to Levy’s rhetoric. The story goes that Cameron’s office sent a curt message to Levy’s bosses, who suspended him and encouraged his resignation.

Levy says that these reports are inaccurate, and that he was forced out because he is not, and never was, a Netanyahu loyalist. He told me he has “no reason to doubt” a conflicting report that Sara Netanyahu, the child psychologist and former El Al flight attendant married to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated his overthrow. Cameron was a pretext, he says. Levy’s version of events is one of many data points suggesting that the Netanyahu government is obsessed with the slavish loyalty of its staff. And Levy is not alone in wondering whether such a government is fit to lead a country as divided as Israel, during this time of maximum stress. (Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment on Levy and the circumstances of his hiring and departure.)

When I met him last month in Tel Aviv, Levy still seemed dazed by the speed of his rise and fall. He said he’d never met Sara Netanyahu or her husband, but if they thought he was less than devoted to Bibi’s politics, they were onto something. Before the war, he said, he had been among the hundreds of thousands who had filled Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to protest the government and heap disgust on Netanyahu. “The protests became a social happening—just what people did on a Saturday night,” he said. His presence was sincere, but also, in that sense, “entirely unremarkable and quite expected for someone in my demographic.”

And his distaste for Netanyahu did not evaporate after October 7. Levy’s feed on X (formerly Twitter) confirms much of what he told me about his personal distaste for the prime minister, before the Hamas attack and indeed even in the days after it. He tweeted witheringly about Netanyahu’s failure to stop the attack (“This will be [his] legacy”), and about his “useless” ministers’ failure to address the public. But he went into spokesperson mode in record time—even before he was officially tapped for the job. Levy, who says he was “taking a professional break,” when the attack happened, had previously worked as a media adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Now he saw an opportunity. “The prime minister’s office had been caught with its pants down,” Levy told me. “It was simply not prepared to deal with the deluge of media attention.” He stacked his laptop on a pile of books on his dining-room table and positioned his lamp and webcam just so. “I thought: I know how to do media. So I put out the message that I was available to give media interviews.”

The media took him up on the offer, and he did nearly a dozen TV hits. Within days, he says, an envoy from the prime minister’s office asked him whether he’d like to “come on board in some official capacity.” The envoy, Rotem Sella, was the Hebrew publisher of Netanyahu’s 2022 memoir and had now joined the government to correct the pants problem. Sella, Levy says, knew that Levy had protested Bibi but didn’t care. “It was a completely insane proposition,” Levy said—a guy in his living room, openly contemptuous of the government, would now be paid to defend it. “But everyone was doing their bit, so I said, ‘Absolutely. Count me in.’”

“Within 24 hours, I found myself effectively being nationalized,” he told me. The contemporaneous record strikes a vainer tone. He tweeted a photograph of himself at a lectern, with the comment “Cometh the hour,” a Churchillian line (“... cometh the man”) that is, like most compliments, best bestowed by others rather than by oneself. But as long as Israel’s actual leaders were bunkered away from public scrutiny—when they did appear, ordinary Israelis screamed at them—this living-room Churchill could run unopposed as Israel’s man of the hour.

Lowy’s lament: ‘I know how insidious antisemitism can be’

Looking in from the outside, Sir Frank Lowy is shaken by what is happening in Australia. He’s been watching as antisemitism seeps into the country and weakens its famous sense of “a fair go”.

This is new, something he never experienced in his 66 years in Australia.

“When I arrived in Sydney in 1952 and got a job in a factory, I was seen as a ‘New Australian’ and I took it as a term of endearment, not exclusion.

“In the canteen, we ate our sandwiches together and no one remarked on my foreignness or questioned my religion.

“And in six decades of running Westfield, I never experienced antisemitism. Once, a newspaper referred to me as ‘a Jewish businessman’. I objected, and it never happened again.”

While many believe the current conflict in Gaza has not led to antisemitism in Australia, Lowy has seen it before, and he does.

“In Europe in the late ’30s and ’40s, I experienced it directly. I know what it feels like, and I know how insidious it can be.

“In Europe back then, it had become safe for people to express antisemitism, and now it’s becoming safe to do so in Australia. It may take a different form, but the feeling is the same, and it’s deeply disturbing.”

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05/11 Links: Hamas’s hostages: Who are the five remaining Americans still held by the terror group?; Eden Golan gives a flawless performance in Eurovision final

From Ian:

Switzerland wins Eurovision, Israel lands in fifth place overall with second-highest televote

Switzerland wins the Eurovision song contest while Israel ends up in fifth place overall.

Israel got an impressive 323 points from the televotes — the second-highest amount — and 52 points from the jury.

Croatia got the most points from the televote, 337, but Switzerland’s Nemo ran away with the win with their song “The Code.”

Eurovision Song Contest 2024 results
Switzerland: 591
Croatia: 547
Ukraine: 453
France: 445
Israel: 375
Ireland: 278

Don’t let the Eurovision boycotters win

Thankfully, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises Eurovision, has resisted calls to ban Israel. However, it did force Israel to change the words of its song on the grounds that it was ‘political’. The original song was entitled ‘October Rain’, and was a moving lament for those murdered by Hamas last year. It has since been renamed ‘Hurricane’ and the lyrics have been rewritten.

Complaints that ‘October Rain’ was too political might have held a bit more water if Eurovision didn’t have a history of including political songs. A Greek entry in 1976 criticised Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus. Switzerland entered an anti-war song in 2023 in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year, the Dutch entry, ‘Europapa’, is a celebration of open borders within the European Union.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the efforts to banish Israel from Eurovision as trivial. It’s just a singing competition, they might say. But this boycott needs to be seen in the broader context of the BDS movement. Launched in 2005, its goal is to delegitimise and culturally isolate Israel. It targets academia, musical events, sport, theatre, visual arts and much more. In every case the goal is to purge all spheres of public life of Israeli involvement. So not only is BDS deeply intolerant of all things Israeli, it is also a movement against freedom of expression. Individual Israeli performers and competitors are targeted simply because of their national background.

The targets of the Israel boycotters range from big corporations and brands, such as Barclays and Zara, to iconic global events, such as the Olympics and of course Eurovision itself. The current anti-Israel student protests are part of the boycott-Israel movement, too. Their chief objective is to force universities to break all links with Israel.

For anyone with an understanding of anti-Semitism, this pervasive boycott campaign is driven by an all too familiar sentiment. Its main objective is to target, isolate and exclude Jews from wider society. They may not want to slaughter Jews, as Hamas explicitly says it wants to. But the boycotters would certainly like to erase all traces of the Jewish State from public life.

So while it might seem like a small thing, voting for Israel in Eurovision would be a great way of sticking two fingers up to those determined to turn Israel into a pariah state. We need to do all we can to resist this campaign to wipe Israel off the map.

Hysterics for Hamas

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:
“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”
“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”
“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. “The university would rather see us dead than divest,” said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department “would rather watch us be killed than protect us.” (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. “There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system,” said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.

It was not too long ago when administrators started bringing in therapy dogs to campus libraries and dining halls to help a female-heavy student body cope with psychic distress, especially after the election of Donald Trump. “Trigger warnings” were implemented to protect female students from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other great works of literature. Campus discourse and its media echo chamber rang with accounts of the mental-health crisis on campus, whose alleged sufferers were overwhelmingly female.

Hamas’s hostages: Who are the five remaining Americans still held by the terror group? Often overshadowed by the Israeli war in Gaza in response to last year’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, 133 surviving hostages are still held by Hamas. Five of them are Americans.

Here are their stories.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23
“I love you.” And then: “I’m sorry.” That is not a pair of text messages that a mother wants to receive from her son early on a Saturday morning. Rachel Goldberg-Polin looked at her phone and “knew something horrible was unfolding in my world,” as she would tell reporters at the United Nations later that month.

Rachel had moved to Israel with her husband, Jonathan Polin, when her son Hersh was 7 years old. He soon developed a love of soccer that his parents, who migrated to the Jewish state as adult Americans, couldn’t quite share — a fan especially of Hapoel Jerusalem, a century-old soccer team associated with the Israeli Left.

“He was always teased for being a lover of peace, a crunchy granola dreamer,” his mother told the Lever in December.

Hersh grew into a young man enthusiastic about travel and music. He left home on the evening of Oct. 6 to attend a music festival in southern Israel, just a few miles from the Gaza Strip. That festival would end in carnage as Hamas terrorists surrounded the remote site and murdered more than 250 attendees, according to first responders.

Hersh and one of his best friends, Aner Shapira, managed to reach a roadside bomb shelter where 27 others also sought refuge. Hamas terrorists surrounded the place and tossed 11 grenades through the door. Shapira, whose great-grandfather reportedly was a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, “managed to pick up eight of them and throw them back out,” as Rachel Goldberg-Polin emphasized during that October press appearance, before succumbing to his wounds.

A video recorded by Hamas confirmed the account and showed Hersh being forced into the bed of a pickup truck, bleeding from the stump of his left arm. Rachel Goldberg-Polin has emerged as one of the most internationally prominent advocates for the release of the scores of hostages held by Hamas.

“There are many of the 133 [hostages] that the world never hears about because there is so very much noise,” she told the attendees of an April 7 rally in New York City. “I don’t hear a lot about the eight Muslim Arabs being held hostage or the eight Thai Buddhists or the two black African Christians. There are hostages from Mexico and Nepal who are Catholic and Hindu. We do an injustice when we erase these people when we are talking about who is still being held hostage.”

A few weeks later, her son appeared in a new proof-of-life video released by Hamas amid fraught negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage deal. “We’re here today with a plea to all of the leaders of the parties who have been negotiating to date,” Jonathan Polin said after seeing the video. “That includes Qatar, Egypt, the United States, Hamas, and Israel. Be brave, lean in, seize this moment, and get a deal done.”

Watch the full interview: https://t.co/CEbOnNZNCL

Or listen to the audio at https://t.co/DaUOzc1iYx. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.

— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) May 10, 2024

@taliaraab took to the streets of NYC to ask Americans if they know about the American hostages being held in Gaza. Their answers will surprise you! #hostages #gaza #hamas #bringthemhome 🎗️ pic.twitter.com/HOuj89qQhN

— Gabby Klein (@GabbyKlein1) May 7, 2024

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