11/04 Links Pt2: Israeli anxiety, America and the ayatollahs; Who made antisemitism a partisan issue? Chuck Schumer; Pro-Palestinians seek to undermine US from within

From Ian:

Not two sides of the same coin

Modern political Zionism is unique in that its values are ancient. The axiom that the Jewish people deserve to live in and govern the Land of Israel comes from the Jewish people’s 4,000-year connection to the land. For the last 3,000 years, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.

This is in contrast to the Palestinians whose ancestors, the Arab people, arrived in the Land of Israel, then renamed by the Romans as Palestine, 1,300 years ago. The largest influx of Arabs into the Land of Israel actually occurred after Jewish Zionists began their return to the land in the late 1800s. Zionist investment and infrastructure improvements encouraged poor Arabs from surrounding lands to immigrate to Palestine. So, while Zionism is the modern fight for an ancient longing, Palestinian nationalism only began recently and arguably only as a response to Zionism.

Another significant difference between the two is that Zionism’s foundation is based on democratic values, peace and sharing the land with others. Juxtapose Zionist values with the values of the Palestinian nationalist movement, which is based on exclusivity to the land and the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, and the contrast is obvious. Even when Palestinians have spoken of agreeing to an Israeli state, they don’t acknowledge it as a Jewish state, arousing suspicion that their true intention isn’t to allow for a Zionist and Jewish state, but a democratic state they can win over through demographically challenging the Jewish nature of the State of Israel.

Zionism began as a peaceful movement that reached out to its opponents and enemies. Israel’s declaration of independence calls for peace with Arabs inside and outside of Israel’s borders. Palestinian nationalism has proven to be an intolerant movement set on a violent culture. While calling Zionists peaceful and Palestinians violent is a gross generalization, there are outliers on both sides.

Palestinian nationalism didn’t have to be inherently anti-Jewish and anti-Israel. It can stand for the self-determination of its people on its own land without expressing hate for the Jewish people. Zionism did exactly that, expressing its hope for a Jewish state on the Jewish people’s historic homeland without hate towards the Arabs living on the land.

For peace to overtake battle, there must be a meeting of the two nationalist movements to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For that to happen, the first thing that must change is the hateful nature of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Until it begins to transform into a more Zionist-like movement that inspires tolerance and acceptance, there will never be peace between the two peoples, and Palestinian nationalists will never achieve their goal of an independent state.

'Hamas doesn't want peace': Bill Clinton defends Israel, discusses peace work at rally in Michigan

Clinton then addresses his own work to bring peace in the Middle East, saying, "Look, I worked on this hard."

"The only time Yasser Arafat didn't tell me the truth was when he told me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out."

He reiterated that his deal would have created peace and that the terms were favorable to the Palestinians.

"It would have given the Palestinian a state in 96% of the West Bank and the remaining 4% from Israel, and they got to choose where that 4% in Israel was."

"They would have a capital in east Jerusalem and two of the four quadrants of the Old City of Jerusalem. They would have equal access, all day, every day, to the security towers that Israel maintains all through the West Bank."

Clinton said that Ehud Barak and his cabinet had approved this deal, "and the Palestinians said no."

Clinton said that he believed part of the reason for this rejection was that Hamas didn't actually want a Palestinian state but wanted to kill Israelis.

"Well, I've got news for them. They were there before their faith existed."

Referring to Israeli political infighting, he said, "The whole fight that you have seen play out was present in the beginning."

"Two parties, Likud and Labor. Likud says we want the whole West Bank because we had it in the time of David, and to heck with whoever came later. Labor said we will take what the United Nations has offered us and we will make a garden in the desert and we will have friends and we will work through it. They're still fighting this fight."

"Here's what I'm gonna do everything I can to convince people that they cannot murder their way out of this, neither side. You can't kill your way out of this."

He then addressed the issue of protest voting, saying that not voting because the Biden administration has upheld the US's historic commitment to prevent the destruction of Israel would be a mistake.

He said that he didn't think Donald Trump's ideas would help Israel, saying, "We have to find a way to share the future; we cannot kill our way out of conflicts. But we do have to fight our way to safety."

He said that Iran and its coalition of proxy groups were not good for the Palestinian people.

Clinton recalled a meeting between Arafat and Barak where Arafat said that Barak "cares much more about Palestinian children than the Arabs do. They only care about us when their people are upset, and they need to blame the US and Israel."

"This [conflict] is far more complicated than you know, and all I ask you to do is keep an open mind," he said finishing off the speech.

Ruthie Blum: Israeli anxiety, America and the ayatollahs

Tensions are high in Israel as the United States enters the last lap of its presidential election. Given the level of public concern surrounding the race and the amount of space devoted to it by local analysts, an alien observing from Mars might mistakenly assume that the vote is taking place between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, not across the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s already been established, through surveys and punditocracy consensus—including among those more predisposed politically to Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats in general than to former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party—that most Israelis are praying for the latter to emerge victorious.

Polls showing that the candidates are basically tied, with daily fluctuations in swing-state percentages, is causing a lot of nail-biting, and not exclusively in U.S. capitals or Jerusalem. No, it’s safe to say that the entire world is watching and waiting with bated breath for the outcome.

Though Joe Biden will remain at the helm in the White House until the beginning of 2025 regardless of the results at the ballot box, nobody thinks he’s running the show in any respect, nor has he been for at least two years. It’s assumed in Israel, however, that the figures behind him could engage in serious lame-duck sabotage in the weeks leading up to the inauguration of his successor.

After all, during a similar period at the end of 2016, outgoing President Barack Obama and his sidekick, Secretary of State John Kerry, pulled a few stunts that made Israel’s enemies proud. Key among these moves was the abstention on U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted on Dec. 23.

Resolution 2334, which passed by 14-0, condemned Israeli settlements and called for all construction of them to cease. It also called for further labeling of Israeli goods, not only those made in settlements. In addition, it categorized the Western Wall as “occupied Palestinian territory.”

Naturally, the resolution greatly pleased and was a boon to the BDS movement, Students for Justice in Palestine and other organizations hostile to the Jewish state. The Palestinians lauded it in general and stated outright that it paved the way for divestment, sanctions and lawsuits at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Still, Kerry proceeded to suggest that Jews building apartments in Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem prevent the Palestinians from being able to believe that Israel is acting in good faith, attributing the stalemate in peace talks to Israel’s “extremist” right-wing government (sound familiar?) rather than to the terror masters in Ramallah and Gaza.

Far more outrageous was his nod to the Palestinians’ mourning of the “Nakba,” the “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment in 1948. In other words, he acknowledged that the problem wasn’t the “occupation” of territories that Arab states lost in the 1967 Six-Day War, but the existence of Jews on any inch of the land, from the “river to the sea” and from Metula to Eilat.

Jonathan Tobin: Who made antisemitism a partisan issue? Chuck Schumer

The committee’s report reveals how the behavior of a number of elite universities was actually worse than it was initially reported in the media. And it makes an ironclad case that their actions were clearly in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which prohibits federally-funded institutions from engaging in discriminatory behavior.

The report is important in its own right. But it begs the question as to why the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, rather than the largely powerless and ineffective Department of Education, isn’t addressing the issue of antisemitism in our education system.

The answer is that the current regime at the DOJ is much more interested in enforcing the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that is primarily responsible for enabling exactly the sort of outrages that are detailed in the House report. What is needed is a change in federal policy that will produce a DOJ that is interested in rolling back the widespread discrimination produced by DEI rather than supporting it.

Schumer’s contemptible denials of his complicity in what happened at Columbia remain unsurprising, but they are compounded by the fact that a new book is expected to be published under his name (though likely ghost-written by a staffer) in February is reportedly devoted to his analysis of contemporary antisemitism. Given Schumer’s inveterate partisanship, it’s likely that the book will talk more about false accusations against former President Donald Trump than it will about the real antisemitism happening within his own party. But after the House report, his publishers would be wise to spare themselves further embarrassment and shelve plans for rolling out the senator’s book.

Antisemitism shouldn’t be a partisan issue. While clearly outnumbered, there are still Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) who provided the country with a profile in courage when it comes to standing up for Israel and against the woke antisemites in Congress. The two parties have largely exchanged identities in the last half century as each changed course on Israel. Whereas once the opposite was true, today, the Democrats are deeply divided when it comes to support for the Jewish state while Republicans have become lockstep in their support. Their attitudes towards antisemitism directly stem from this sea change.

And though they haven’t demonstrated the kind of influence that the radicals of the House “Squad” wield over the Democratic Party, there are Jew-haters on the right, like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who deserve close scrutiny and condemnation.

Schumer’s public and private conduct as Senate Majority Leader made it clear that the Democratic Party establishment would rather be called out for going easy on antisemites than confront the hate within their own ranks. Regardless of the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional elections, that decision demonstrates a trend that is at the heart of the nation’s antisemitism problem.

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11/04 Links Pt1: Israel May Have Set Back Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions; In the progressive sacrament, Gaza has no ‘agency’ but UNRWA

From Ian:

The U.S. Should Stop Trying to Solve the Israel-Palestinian Conflict and Focus on Iran

Iran’s nuclear program isn’t just a threat to Israel, but a major concern for the United States, one recognized by the past several presidential administrations. Unless the IDF destroys key nuclear facilities in another attack on the Islamic Republic—which is not an impossibility now that it has taken out Iranian air defenses—it will be a problem the next president will have to reckon with. And regardless of what happens next in the current war, the victor in tomorrow’s election will not be able to ignore the Middle East.

Michael Mandelbaum, reviewing Steven Cook’s recent book The End of Ambition, has some advice on this score:

The country that now threatens American interests is the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is conducting an active campaign to achieve dominance in the region by unseating governments friendly to the United States and evicting American forces from the Middle East. That campaign has met with considerable success. Iran now exercises substantial, indeed sometimes dominant, influence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

If . . . the Islamic Republic should acquire nuclear weapons, as it is actively seeking to do, its capacity to harm America’s friends and American interests would expand dramatically. The most important task for American Middle East policy is, therefore, to prevent that from happening.

Past American Middle Eastern policy has another implication for the future. For decades, successive American administrations pursued a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians living in Gaza and on the West Bank of the Jordan River. These efforts all failed, and for the same reasons that American democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East came to nothing: the political, cultural, and institutional bases for a Palestinian state willing to live peacefully beside Israel have never existed, and the United States cannot create them.

Absent, however, the Palestinians becoming what they have thus far never been—a genuine partner for peace—the American government should waste no more time on what has come, over the years, to be called the peace process. The United States has more urgent Middle Eastern business, business that can, and must, be successfully concluded, with Iran.

Israel May Have Set Back Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions

After Israel’s most recent attack on Iran, this newsletter noted that IDF jets struck not only ballistic-missile facilities but also a site connected to the nuclear program. J.E. Dyer presents a thorough examination of publicly available information, and concludes that this particular structure, known as Taleghan 2, was what experts call a “critical node” in the Iranian quest for atomic weapons:

A “critical node,” in the analysis of an enterprise like developing a nuclear weapon, is a bottleneck: something that previous paths funnel down to, and something that must be passed through successfully to reach the goal of the enterprise. A critical node cannot be bypassed. It must be successfully negotiated. In the case of this target, the critical node in question is developing a “detonatable” weapon.

Taleghan 2 is . . . not just a component; it’s a unique one. If Israel’s strike took out infrastructure inside the building—and I consider it likely that it did—that’s a setback in getting through the critical node of actually weaponizing fissile material to produce a bomb. The infrastructure, if left in place from the work done before 2004, would be hard to replace. . . .

[I]n a limited strike, Israel thought it worthwhile to hit Taleghan 2. The decision to do that was probably not intended as a mere warning to Iran about Israel’s knowledge of Tehran’s nuclear-weapons program. An isolated warning of that kind would be counterproductive, informing Iran of peril but having no practical impact on the overall situation.

My bet would be on Israel wanting to have a practical impact: setting Iran’s program back by destroying a facility needed to get through the critical node of weaponization successfully. There’s a real probability Israel achieved just that.

Snapback sanctions on the table as Iran threatens to go nuclear

Snapback sanctions, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal’s fail-safe mechanism, may be back on the West’s agenda after recent threats and aggression by the Islamic Republic.

U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy is prepared to trigger snapback sanctions as Iran gets closer to nuclear breakout, The Telegraph reported over the weekend, citing a Foreign Office official who said that London is “committed to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons using every diplomatic tool available, including the snapback mechanism if necessary.”

The report comes in the immediate aftermath of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s top foreign policy advisor, Kamal Kharrazi, saying that Tehran has “the technical capabilities necessary to produce nuclear weapons” and would do so if facing an existential threat.

In the past year, Iran has twice directly attacked Israel with missiles, in addition to sponsoring Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been at war with Israel for the past year, as well as the Houthis in Yemen, who have sporadically attacked Israel in addition to disrupting global commerce by attacking ships in the Red Sea.

In addition, Iran has sold ballistic missiles and drones to Russia for use in its war against Ukraine, leading the EU and U.K. to impose sanctions last month on Iranian airlines as well as arms procurement and production firms and individuals involved in Iran’s arms industry and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Deployment of the snapback mechanism means that the sanctions regime of the Iran deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), would revert to its original state.

The JCPOA included “sunset clauses,” by which sanctions on Iran would gradually expire; all sanctions would return if snapback is invoked.

A Message for America: A Free Lebanon Is the Only Path to Truly Stopping Hezbollah

Then-Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, who planned to turn his country into a services hub at peace with its neighbors, revolted — along with a coterie of oligarchs. Washington and Paris rushed to their support in 2004, passing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demanded that Assad withdraw and Hezbollah disarm.

Despite threats, Hariri stood his ground and was assassinated in February 2005. The crime backfired: It solidified Lebanon’s national consensus, forcing the Syrian dictator to pull out in April.

To deflect Lebanese pressure, Hezbollah triggered a war with Israel in 2006 that ended with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which not only reaffirmed 1559, but instructed a 10,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, to help keep Lebanon militia-free south of the Litani River.

But Hezbollah sent “villagers” hurling rocks at peacekeepers, and burned tires to stop the UN force from inspecting suspected Hezbollah arms depots. The villagers even killed some UNIFIL personnel.

Hezbollah built massive fortifications, at times tens of yards away from UNIFIL’s observation towers. Those bunkers were to serve as launchpads for invading northern Israel, like Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed 1,200 people.

The 20-year anniversary of Resolution 1559 has come and gone. Iran spent two decades building up Hezbollah’s capabilities and cemented its control of the Lebanese state, driving Lebanon’s economy into the ground in the process. The US, France, and the UN all failed to change this trajectory.

But something has happened over the last few weeks. In response to a year of non-stop attacks on northern Israel, the Israel Defense Forces decimated Hezbollah’s leadership and degraded its capabilities to such an extent that Lebanon has a window to replicate the consensus that ejected Assad.

The White House is now pushing a framework where Israel would halt its military operations in southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese military would oversee Hezbollah’s withdrawal to north of the Litani River. But if the Lebanese state remains politically controlled by Hezbollah, the agreement will end the same way as Resolutions 1559 and 1701: Non-enforcement and Hezbollah’s resurgence.

If the United States wants to find a viable diplomatic path in Lebanon, it needs to work with willing Lebanese leaders to reclaim Lebanon’s sovereignty from Hezbollah and free Beirut from Tehran’s yoke. That starts with the election of a new anti-Hezbollah Lebanese president.

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11/03 Links: Israel Is Now the Middle East Strong Horse; UNRWA’s existence violates UN charter; Why I, a progressive feminist Democrat, am voting for Donald Trump

From Ian:

Israel Is Now the Middle East Strong Horse

The 14th-century Arab Muslim historian and political theorist Ibn Khaldoun assessed that history is a cycle of violence in which strong horses replace weak horses. After Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre, Israel, by necessity, has become the Middle East's strong horse in its ongoing battle against the Iranian regime and its terror proxies.

The Arab world knows this. They witnessed the IDF's destruction of both Hamas and Hizbullah's command structure and leaderships, and the detonation of much of their weaponry and ammunition stockpiles. They then watched as Israel's air force decimated Iran's anti-aircraft defenses and dominated Iranian air space.

Arab League members widely denounced Israel's counterassault against the Iranian regime, while at the same time, Abraham Accords diplomats from Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE have remained in Tel Aviv, as have ambassadors from Jordan and Egypt, and even assisted Israel during Iranian regime missile and killer drone attacks.

Israel's strong horse status is a key to winning peace and moderation in the Middle East but has been misunderstood in the West. America's mistaken mirroring of Israel as a small version of itself has constrained it from defeating radical enemies.

Victory cannot be achieved against radical Islamic terrorism using Western principles and methods of compromise, ceasefire, diplomacy, and territorial concession. The Middle East does not work that way. Different rules apply.

Compromise signals weakness. A ceasefire is merely a cessation of hostilities to rearm and resupply. Territorial concession is the fate of the vanquished. The unilateral territorial concession of Gaza in 2005 led to five Hamas wars, climaxing in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7. "Goodwill diplomacy" and territorial compromise opposite jihad, as demanded by the U.S. and Europe, proved to be a strategic disaster and existential threat to Israel.

Israel's evolving self-awareness as an indigenous ethnic minority in a chaotic, unstable, and unforgiving Middle East recognizes that there is no alternative to the strong horse.

Ruthie Blum: Amos Schocken’s lies, Bill Clinton’s truths

Which brings us to the second speech, that also had a jaw-dropping effect, but for the opposite reason. This one was delivered by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

At a rally on Wednesday for Kamala Harris in the swing state of Michigan, Clinton appealed to the voters who’ve come out against the Democratic candidate for her administration’s ostensibly unforgiveable support for Israel. He did this by setting the record straight about the Palestinians’ attitude to the Jewish state.

Though opening with a call for a re-start of the “peace process,” he acknowledged the culprit behind its repeated failure.

“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died,” he began. “But if you lived in one of those kibbutzim in Israel, right next to Gaza, where the people there were the most pro-friendship with Palestine—the most pro-two-state-solution of any of the Israeli communities were the ones right next to Gaza, and Hamas butchered them.”

He continued: “The people who criticize [Israel’s response] are essentially saying, ‘Yeah, but look how many people you’ve killed in retaliation. How many is enough for you to kill to punish them for the terrible things they did?’ That all sounds nice until you realize what you would do if it was your family and you hadn’t done anything but support a homeland for the Palestinians, and one day they come for you and slaughter the people in your village. You would say, ‘You have to forgive me, but I’m not keeping score that way.’ It isn’t how many we’ve had to kill because Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.”

Invoking the authority born of having hosted the 2000 Camp David Summit to forge a treaty that would result in the creation of an independent Palestinian state, Clinton admitted, “Look, I worked on this hard. And the only time [PLO chief] Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth was when he promised me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel—and they got to choose where the 4% of Israel was. So they would have the effect of the same land of all the West Bank. They’d have a capital in east Jerusalem.”

Pausing to express sadness mixed with frustration, he interjected, “I can hardly talk about this.”

He proceeded to spell out the reality of the situation, emphasizing the details.

“They [the Palestinians] would have equal access, all day, every day, to the security towers that Israel maintained all through the West Bank up to the Golan Heights. All this was offered, including—I will say it again—a capital in east Jerusalem and two of the four quadrants of the Old City of Jerusalem, confirmed by the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and his Cabinet. And [the Palestinians] said no. I think part of it is that Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians. They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable.”

Well, he declared, “I’ve got news for them. [The Jews] were there first. Before their faith [Islam] existed, [Jews] were there, in the time of King David, and the southernmost tribes had Judea and Samaria.”

He concluded by explaining why destroying Israel isn’t in the interest of either the Palestinians or of the Americans who support them. Whether his argument persuaded some undecideds remains to be seen. It’s hard to imagine the “From the River to the Sea” crowd accepting his historically accurate account.

Too bad he hasn’t been shouting it from the rooftops throughout the past two and a half decades. The same goes for Barak, who’s been too busy bashing and attempting to topple the Netanyahu government to engage in veracity or soul-searching.

Were he and his subversive bubble of Haaretz-reading followers to get their noses out of the air and hang their heads in humility, if not shame, they might understand why the Israeli peace camp has been evaporating over the years, until basically disappearing on Oct. 7, 2023.

Jake Wallis Simons: Israel is not a ‘settler-colonial state’

Portraying Israel as a colonial imposition on indigenous people, a ‘settler state’ expropriating their land and culture, is a major pillar of Israelophobia. As I explain in Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It, it is rooted in the suggestion that Jews have no place in the Middle East and are alien to the region, a claim that is easily dismissed with even the briefest look at history. Yet the demonisation persists.

Take Akub, a fashionable Palestinian restaurant in London’s Notting Hill. It is more than just a high-end eatery. In an interview with the New York Times in 2022, its French-trained chef and founder, Fadi Kattan, said his mission was to ‘reclaim a cuisine that is part of a broader Arab tradition involving foods like hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, fattoush and shawarma, that he felt was being co-opted by Israeli cooks’. It seems that whereas normal people cook food, in the eyes of Kattan, Israelis ‘co-opt’ it. This position relies on a highly selective view of history. As one reader remarked in the comments section: ‘Jews have also been making these foods for centuries and have appropriated nothing. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for thousands of years. What’s more, many of these foods are not limited to the land of Israel, but common across the former Ottoman Empire.’

People often forget that Judaism is two millennia older than Islam and 1,500 years older than Christianity. Israel was the cradle of Jewish civilisation. At least a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Jerusalem’s most famous Jew, King David, made the city the capital of the Land of Israel. It has been home to greater or lesser numbers of Jews – the very word ‘Jew’ is a shortening of Judea, the ancient kingdom radiating from Jerusalem in the Iron Age – in Jerusalem ever since.

Culturally, Jews have always intertwined their identity with the land of Israel, particularly since they were exiled to Babylon around 598 BC, when their powerful yearning for return took hold. For millennia, Jews in the diaspora have prayed facing towards the Holy City, exclaimed ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at Passover, mourned the destruction of the Temple by breaking a glass at weddings, longed to be buried there, prayed at the remaining walls of the destroyed Temple, and visited on pilgrimage. Many throughout history have taken the step of uprooting their families and returning to their homeland. All these practices continue to this day.

A thread can be traced backwards through Jewish history that shows the ancient roots of the ideal of repatriation. Beginning in 1516, Palestine – as it had been renamed by the Romans – fell under Ottoman rule, which would last for more than 400 years. Less than 50 years after the conquest, Joseph Nasi, the Duke of Naxos, a Portuguese Jewish diplomat favoured by the Ottomans, attempted to return Jews to their homeland without regard for scriptural prophecies about awaiting the coming of the messiah. In a way, he was the first Zionist.

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11/02 Links: The Clash Between Academic Freedom and Antisemitism; Not Satire: BBC staff sign letter accusing broadcaster of pro-Israel bias

From Ian:

“Never Again”… Again

Freedom of speech propels democracy. But when employed incorrectly, we inch closer towards the kind of tyranny and oppression in Nazi Germany, when Jews were systematically silenced through censorship, propaganda and ultimately the Holocaust. In that dark time, Jewish books were burned and Jewish voices were excluded from public life and, as we are seeing again today, in academia.

The clash between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli Americans has been so intense because of our mutual right to free speech. But Columbia University’s temporary restriction of Shai Davidai — a Jewish Israeli professor at the Columbia Business School — from entering campus has infringed on this very right.

Davidai has spoken out against what he calls “pro-terror” protestors on campus since Oct. 7, 2023. He has encouraged students to film him confronting pro-Palestinian protestors. His confrontations are not intended to “harass” or “intimidate,” as Columbia claims, only to educate. Last week, at the University of Toronto, Davidai posted a video of an encounter with a student who claimed Israel’s history started in 1948. The student professed to understand the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but when asked about the Hebron massacre, the Great Arab Revolt or the British Mandate — all events prior to 1948 — he had zero clue about any of it.

Davidai ended by giving the student book recommendations and captioned the video: “The only cure for indoctrination is education. It’s OK not to know. It’s not OK to say that you do when you don’t, and it’s DEFINITELY not OK to protest something you have no idea about.”

Davidai believes that the rise in pro-Palestinian protests is largely due to ignorance. His mission is to educate and, for this, he has suffered consequences. People think he’s some kind of fanatic who deserves the academic equivalent of a time-out. But let’s examine the context and see if he’s really the maniac he’s been portrayed as on social media.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel, kidnapped 254 hostages, likely raped women and murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians — the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. At Columbia, on the anniversary of this genocide, Jewish students wanted a day to mourn. They gathered, wrapped themselves in the Israeli flag and called a prayer in Hebrew for the victims. But masked “Free Palestine” advocates felt a need to protest this mourning of mass rape and murder and vastly outnumbered the Jews gathered. These protesters were not peacefully demonstrating for peace between Israel and Palestine. They were promoting the opposite, shouting that there will be no peace until Palestine is victorious.

Davidai is seen as a radical for referring to these protestors as “pro-terror,” but Hamas is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States Bureau of Counterterrorism. Protestors hold Hamas signs that read “glory to them.” Protestors shout “No peace” and “Globalize the Intifada.” They say this “speaks to liberation” and “to free Palestine from the apartheid regime and the military occupation.” For me it calls for freedom and for change. But to many Jews, this phrase is inextricable from the violence towards Israelis during the First and Second Intifadas. So the word “Intifada” feels as charged as if someone were to say “Holocaust.” A phrase that calls for aggressive resistance against Israel and those who support Israel around the globe. By the same token, “From the River to the Sea” is an implicit rallying cry for the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. “There is only one solution” is a rejection of the co-existence of Israel and Palestine with shades of Hitler’s “final solution” to exterminate Jews from the face of the earth. As is “resistance by any means necessary.”

By any means necessary. Think about that. If that is not condoning the “means” of rape, the “means” of murder, the “means” of mutilating, defiling bodies and using people as human shields. If that is not condoning terrorism, I don’t know what is.

The Clash Between Academic Freedom and Antisemitism

Academics who cherish free speech have been pushed into a corner by the rapid rise of anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric and action on our campuses. The concept of free speech covers speech we abhor and regard as not merely false but dangerous. As Justice Louis Brandeis said, the proper remedy for bad speech is more speech—to argue against that with which you disagree. That is a splendid concept, but what if that freedom of speech is abused by partisans who spread hatred and intimidate anyone who dares to respond to them?

University of Illinois professor Cary Nelson addresses that question in his book Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles. As Nelson begins, “Antisemitism is on the rise worldwide and academia plays an important role in rationalizing its character and application, indeed in applauding and promoting antisemitism’s culture and political strategies.” Nelson surveys the stunning resurgence of antisemitism (usually presented as the merely political “anti-Zionism,” though, he argues, the two are hardly distinguishable) at American colleges and universities and ponders the correct response to it. Can we protect academic freedom without letting loose the vicious hatreds that caused so much misery in the last century?

After World War II, most people saw the Jews as the victims of a horrible ideology spun by the Nazis to justify conquest and mass murder. They wished the Jewish people well in their new state of Israel. Within just a few decades, however, many professors and public intellectuals had begun referring to Israel as an “apartheid state” and declaring that it was the worst human-rights violator on the planet.

Why this shocking turn? Nelson observes that many people on the left need “a community of pure victims” with whom they can declare their solidarity and from which they can recruit support for their agenda. The Palestinians fit that need. They are the victims, the Jews their oppressors. Facts and civility were readily abandoned as this narrative gained momentum.

The frenzy to attack the Israeli government (anti-Zionism) has spilled over into hatred directed at Jews anywhere (antisemitism). We saw that on display on many college campuses following the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas. Character assassination, bold lies, and violence have become normalized, and our academic leaders mostly look on helplessly, or even approvingly. Professors and speakers who adhere to the “Israelis are the new Nazis” line can say whatever they want, but woe betide someone who dares to rebut their claims. Many students get a steady diet of virulently anti-Israel rhetoric and never hear a word to the contrary.

To make matters worse, anti-Zionism has become institutionalized. We now find scholarly organizations adopting resolutions condemning Israel even though such controversies have nothing to do with their fields (e.g., anthropology), as well as academic departments putting forth declarations that embrace anti-Zionist viewpoints. (That is most often the case in those fields that are more about the grievances of the faculty than about conveying a body of knowledge.) As a result, young scholars who don’t buy into the demonization of Israel and the Jews (whether they are Jewish or not) realize that they have little hope of making it through their programs unless they can manage to hide their dissent from the antisemitic orthodoxy. That badly undermines the university as a place where truth is sought.

Another ugly aspect of the success of the antisemitic movement is that publishers are now getting in on the act. Nelson points out that the University of California Press is now upfront that it won’t consider manuscripts by authors who disagree with the “Israelis are the new Nazis” narrative. This is a spreading plague.

FreePress: SCOOP: The Nationwide Conspiracy to Indoctrinate Anti-Israel Students

Author Abigail Shrier breaks down her recent piece in The Free Press on the Kinderfada Revolution, a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel.

LA - meet the antisemitic groomers indoctrinating young kids to hate Jews:

👉🏽 Ringleader Ron Gochez - Maya Angelou Community Senior High

👉🏽 William Shattuc - John Adams Middle School

👉🏽 Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona - Roybal Learning Center

👉🏽 David Feldman - Santee Education… https://t.co/jLoRQ6RkgJ pic.twitter.com/UaEufac9mo

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) November 1, 2024

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11/01 Links Pt2: The Freedom to Be Sharansky; Chuck Schumer’s Ultimate Betrayal; Thom Yorke vs the anti-Israel bigots; Sally Rooney’s anti-Israel intolerance

From Ian:

Gil Troy: The Freedom to Be Sharansky

Historians rarely write in collaboration with those who make history. A few years ago, I was fortunate to do just that.

Natan Sharansky at 76 starts his workdays at 5:30 a.m. He has been married to Avital for 50 years, although she adds “minus 12” because she refuses to count the ones during which the Soviet authorities forcibly kept them apart as they dared to defy the Communist system and seek emigration to Israel. Those years of separation include the nine from 1977 to 1986 when he was trapped inside the Soviet prison system, including stays in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo jail and Perm 35 in the Gulag archipelago.

In 2018, as he completed another nine years—his near-decade leading the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Jewish world’s largest nongovernmental organization—Sharansky felt compelled to recount some key episodes and lessons of his life in his effort to balance the twin goods of freedom and identity, thoughtful patriotism and civil dialogue. He asked me to co-author that book.

We made an odd couple. I was raised with my name, “Gil Troy,” to fit in as an American while being a proud Jew, living in one of the most Jew-friendly countries; he was forced to stand out despite his perfectly Russian original name, “Anatoly,” because he was a Jew living in one of the most Judeophobic countries. I spent most of the 1980s at Harvard, learning to be an American historian. He spent most of the 1980s in the Gulag, fighting to stay alive as a political prisoner. When I first noted our Harvard-Gulag ’80s gap, without skipping a beat, Natan quipped, “That means I have moral clarity, and you don’t.”

Miraculously, Avital’s unlikely but determined campaign of persuasion—during which she crisscrossed the globe and lobbied Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, and many others for years seeking their assistance in securing the freedom of her husband—finally paid off. In 1986, many of us watched Sharansky zigzag across the Glienicke Bridge connecting East and West Berlin after a KGB agent had told him to “walk straight” to freedom, a final act of defiance.

But that’s not actually what we saw. In fact, after landing in East Berlin, it was on the airport tarmac that the then-named Anatoly Shcharansky (note the Russian letter “shch” he bore as the opening sound of his surname rather than the softer Hebrew “shin”) zigzagged away from his Communist captors into a waiting car. In a 1988 speech, Ronald Reagan said of that moment, “It was one of those moments when laughter and tears commingle, and one does not know when the first leaves off and the second begins. It was a vision of the purest freedom known to man, the freedom of a man whose cause is just and whose faith is his guiding light.”

By the time he had reached the bridge, he was already free and no longer had Communist masters to disobey. Nevertheless, people keep telling him, and me, how they are still inspired by that moment, which I’m sure they are, only it wasn’t on the bridge!

Although we wrote the book collaboratively, the most pressing question I was trained to ask as a biographer stayed with me: What made this man tick? There were 250 million Soviet citizens, including 2 million Jews. Why did he become not just a refusenik—a Jew who sought and was then refused permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel—but one of the few Jewish activists who also worked as a dissident with Andrei Sakharov and the Soviet human-rights movement? That synthesis made him the regime’s most famous political prisoner. And how did he endure nine years of solitary confinement, punishment cells, hunger strikes and forced feeding, yet then emerge with a ready smile and quick wit?

Sharansky explains, matter-of-factly, that in 1967, when he was 19, the anti-Semitic jibes he had grown up enduring suddenly changed form. After Israel won the Six-Day War, even close friends started joking about his being a bully and not a coward. Fascinated that something that happened in a country he had never visited could change people’s impressions of him, he started learning more about the Jewish state and his Jewish identity.

“Once I discovered my identity, I then discovered my freedom,” he explains. Still, discovering your freedom is not the same as fighting for it.

Editor's Notes: The dilemma of raising children during the war is almost like 'Life is Beautiful'

Beyond the tragedy, we also witness the incredible resilience of our people – thousands of initiatives aimed at bringing light into these dark days.

People reach out with stories of kindness, courage, and unity, hoping we can give them a platform, a voice in this storm. And while we long to honor each one, the hard truth is that we can’t.

We don’t have enough time, enough staff, or enough space on our pages to truly do justice to every single story. It’s a painful compromise, one that eats at us, but it’s the reality we’re up against.

In the end, though, we keep going because that’s what we’ve always done. In a way, being Jewish has always meant living on, pushing forward, and finding light amid the darkness.

We may be shaken, but we are not broken. We have no time to fall into despair because our purpose keeps us grounded.

Getting the news to you – truthful, fast, and clear – is our mission, even as our own hearts are sometimes weighed down by it all.

There’s an unbreakable resolve in us. We won’t allow ourselves the luxury of crumbling.

We keep going, keep telling the stories, keep bearing witness, because it’s our role.

As a father, as a journalist, and as a Jew, I look at these challenges, these daily battles, and realize they are woven into who we are. And, as always, we’ll endure.

When Jews Lived Under Muslim Rule

The Land of Israel is Different
As we mentioned, yes, there were golden eras in the history of Arab-Jewish relations. However, a claim put forward by some ardent anti-Zionists is that things were actually better for Jews in the land of Israel under Islam and before Zionism came on the scene. It is saying that Zionism changed the dynamic. And in that sense, they are correct, but only insofar as it introduced a Jew who fought back – not in terms of antisemitic attacks and persecution.

First, let’s begin with the basic fact that the Muslim Arab conquest of the land of Israel in 636-37 was a settler-colonial enterprise. And they are proud of it, calling it the “Palestine Conquest” - Fatah Filastin (yes, the same word Fatah, “Conquest”, is used as the name of the movement currently in charge of the Palestinian Authority). After the occupation, the majority of Christians in the land of Israel adopted Islam and Arabized and the building of new synagogues was banned.

With the construction of the Dome of the Rock in 691 and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 705, the Muslims established the Temple Mount as an Islamic holy site. Jews were banned from it for the next 1,000 years. Periodic social and economic discrimination in the following centuries caused substantial Jewish emigration from the land of Israel.

Other notable events under Muslim rule include:
- The expulsion of the Gaonate – the main Jewish academy of learning and religious authority – in 1071, after Jerusalem was conquered by the Seljuq Turks.
- The imposition of a dhimmi tax on Jews and Christians and the curtailment of their rights, with more intense enforcement in the 10th and 11th centuries. In the Mamluk period (13th-16th centuries), the dhimmi laws were cranked up to include additional discriminatory practices intended for humiliation. Jewish and Christian communities declined precipitously.
- The Mamluks also banned Jews (and Christians) from the Cave of Our Patriarchs in Hebron. To this day, you can still see where Jews had to stop for about 700 years, on the seventh step leading into the building, until Israel put an end to the ban after the Six Day War in 1967.
- In the 18th century, Jewish communities throughout Israel were extorted and oppressed by local tribal and regional chiefs. In Jerusalem, Ottoman authorities restricted the number of Jews allowed to live there and expelled all Ashkenazi Jews from the city due to a debt some of them owed to Muslims.
- In 1831, Muhammad Ali of Egypt took over the land of Israel. In 1834, there were 33 days of looting and murder targeting Jews in Tzfat (Safed) and Hebron. More than 500 Jews were murdered, unknown numbers of women were raped, property was ransacked and looted, and synagogues were set on fire.

That’s all before the Zionist movement as we know it was a thing.

Then there’s this inconvenient fact, which is worth noting even though it does relate to a time after the Zionist movement was already well established: there are more than a dozen Jewish communities in the land of Israel that were destroyed by Arabs before 1947. But not a single such Arab community.

This partial review is a corrective to manipulative misinformation promoted by anti-Israel terror-apologists on US campuses, in European streets, and in the international media. It is admittedly far from comprehensive. However, an honest and open-eyed review of Arab-Jewish relations can provide a new perspective on our history as Jews, on the Middle East generally, and on the State of Israel’s struggle for survival.

Of course, this does not mean that Israel is always right. Just a reminder that views on current events should be grounded in reality – however complex it may be.

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11/01 Links Pt1: The Iranian Period Is Finished; The UN’s Kosher Stamp for Terror; Albanese report slammed as ‘gross perversion of history,’ ‘weaponizing Holocaust comparisons’

From Ian:

Israel’s Mistake Was Viewing Hamas as a Minor Nuisance

Thirty years ago, Netanyahu warned that the Oslo Accords would turn Gaza into a launching pad for rockets, and Yitzhak Rabin accused him of abetting Hamas. That was the first articulation of the now common—and slanderous—claim that “Netanyahu has supported Hamas.” The truth was that Netanyahu was proved right in the summer of 2007, shortly after the terrorist group seized control of Gaza, when its first rocket barrages fell on Sderot. The late military analyst for Haaretz, Ze’ev Schiff, at the time wrote a biting column titled “Israeli Defeat in Sderot,” in which he called what had happened a national disgrace. And it was: Israel had no response to a heavily armed organization at its doorstep that went on to build a vast subterranean fortress beneath its territory and to amass missiles that could reach Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion airport. In an article for Israel Hayom, I described Gaza as a “mini-North Korea” and argued that Israel couldn’t live with this sort of hostile statelet on its southern border.

Only a handful of individuals believed that Israel should have done then what it is doing now at a much greater cost, that is, reoccupy Gaza and eliminate Hamas: the former head of the Shin Bet Avi Dichter (now minister of agriculture), the erstwhile finance and energy minister Yuval Steinitz, the late former defense minister Moshe Arens, and perhaps one or two others. The IDF, meanwhile, formulated various plans for conducting retaliatory strikes and restoring deterrence, but not for achieving a decisive victory, let alone reoccupying the Strip.

For the past fifteen years Israel has had several governing coalitions and a parade of defense ministers who were prepared to go no further than carrying out limited ground incursions into Gaza. Gadi Eisenkot, who was chief of staff of the IDF from 2015 to 2019, said not too long ago that Hamas was Israel’s weakest foe in the region, and that fighting against it weakens the army. Only a few days before the October 7 attacks, the security services, headed by the Shin Bet, formally recommended that the government continue strengthening Gaza’s economy to ensure continued calm. Shouldn’t a PM be able to trust the army to secure a 42-km border?

If there were political considerations that shaped Israeli policy in Gaza, they were those of left-wing leaders and high-ranking IDF officers who didn’t want to re-enter, let alone reoccupy, the territory, since doing so would be an admission of the massive failure of the policies they had long supported.

To identify the flawed concepts behind the intelligence failures of October 7, we should look at the inability of technocratic military leaders to understand the psychology of the enemy. A large section of the media, the intelligence services, and the IDF saw Gaza as a hostile territory only in a technical sense, instead of realizing that it was governed by bloodthirsty Islamist fanatics. And the problem goes further still: if you are alienated from your identity as a Jew, it becomes harder to understand an enemy that wants to murder you merely because you are Jewish.

This fundamental failure of imagination manifested itself concretely in the behavior of the IDF on October 7 of last year. Unlike the surprise attack of October 1973, when Golda Meir and members of her cabinet were informed of the threat but told to ignore it by the head of military intelligence, in October 2023 the military didn’t communicate the warnings it received to the prime minister or defense minister at all. The chief of military intelligence went back to sleep on the night before the attack. The IDF didn’t even order the units defending the border to go on high alert.

Even then, as Brigadier General Guy Hazot has written, the army is supposed to abide by the motto, “Even if we are surprised, we won’t be defeated.” That is, even when confronted with a surprise attack, it should be able to muster an effective defense immediately. Instead, what ensued on that awful day was a systemic failure of the security apparatus. It’s only thanks to the extraordinary heroism and grit of the Israeli people that the state regained control of the Western Negev after only three-and-a-half days.

October 7 saw a complete breakdown from the IDF top brass on down. In seeking to identify modes of thinking that led to disaster, we should begin with the conceptual error that caused a heavily armed and fanatical enemy to be perceived as a minor nuisance.

The Iranian Period Is Finished

Two months of war have transformed Lebanon. Hezbollah, the Shiite movement that seemed almost invincible, is now crippled, its top commanders dead or in hiding. The scale of this change is hard for outsiders to grasp. Hezbollah is not just a militia but almost a state of its own, more powerful than the weak and divided Lebanese government, and certainly more powerful than the Lebanese army. Formed under the tutelage of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it has long been the leading edge of Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance,” alongside Hamas, the Shiite militias of Iraq, and the Houthi movement in Yemen. Hezbollah is also the patron and bodyguard of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, with a duly elected bloc in the national parliament (Christians and Muslims are allocated an equal share of seats). Hezbollah smuggles in not just weapons, but billions of dollars from Iran. It runs banks, hospitals, a welfare system, and a parallel economy of tax-free imports and drug trafficking that has enriched and empowered the once-downtrodden Shiite community.

Hezbollah has long justified reckless wars against Israel with appeals to pan-Arab pride: The liberation of Palestine was worth any sacrifice. But the devastation of this conflict extends far beyond Hezbollah and cannot be brushed off so easily. Almost a quarter of Lebanon’s people have fled their homes, and many are now sleeping in town squares, on roads, on beaches. Burned-out ambulances and heaps of garbage testify to the state’s long absence. Many people are traumatized or in mourning; others talk manically about dethroning Hezbollah, and perhaps with it, Lebanon’s centuries-old system of sectarian power-sharing. There is a millenarian energy in the air, a wild hope for change that veers easily into the fear of civil war.

A few stark facts stand out. First, Israel is no longer willing to tolerate Hezbollah’s arsenal on its border, and will continue its campaign of air strikes and ground war until it is forced to stop—whether from exhaustion or, more likely, by an American-sponsored cease-fire that is very unlikely before the next U.S. president is sworn in. Second, no one is offering to rebuild the blasted towns and villages of southern Lebanon when this is over, the way the oil-rich Gulf States did after the last major war with Israel, in 2006. Nor will Iran be able to replenish the group’s arsenal or its coffers. Hezbollah may or may not survive, but it will not be the entity it was.

I heard the same questions every day during two weeks in Lebanon in September and October, from old friends and total strangers. When will the war stop? Will they bomb us too—we who are not with Hezbollah? Will there be a civil war? And most poignant of all, from an artist whose Beirut apartment was a haven for me during the years I lived in Lebanon: Should I send my daughter out of this country?

The UN’s Kosher Stamp for Terror

Having a U.N. agency of multinational toy soldiers in white armored personnel carriers backed by the U.S. and ostensibly representing the “international community,” whose actual function is to shelter military positions inhabited by Iran’s chief terror army, presents a real threat to Israel’s national security. Given its function and purpose, UNIFIL will always necessarily be enmeshed with Hezbollah and with its “social support base”—employing them, relying on their goodwill, and servicing them. Because this partnership with a terror group serves U.S. objectives, and because UNIFIL’s ability to appear to fulfill its mandate requires it to whitewash and buy off Hezbollah, Israel will find itself having to compromise its security to appease its superpower ally, while the latter will utilize its U.N. instrument to place constraints on Israel’s sovereign decision-making.

By its nature, this dance with a terror army is obscene. Letting that army entrench itself on Israel’s northern border for the past two decades under U.N. protection is a joint act of madness by American policymakers of both parties and especially by Israel’s leaders, who can only thank some form of divine protection for the fact that the attack tunnels that UNIFIL helped shelter were never used to massacre Israeli civilians in the north, on a scale much larger than the attacks that UNRWA helped to support and perpetrate in the south.

Yet it’s no surprise, on the eve of the election, that the Biden administration is tripping over itself to resuscitate the UNIFIL-LAF arrangement in Lebanon and impose it again on Israel—which is what the U.S. peace proposal for Lebanon, leaked by an Israeli TV channel this week, is all about. In addition to beefing up UNIFIL, the administration wants to enlarge the LAF, and underwrite legions of new recruits—many of whom will no doubt come from Hezbollah’s support base, if not Hezbollah itself.

The added twist in the proposal is the formation of a so-called monitoring mechanism which would include the U.S.—an outgrowth of the 2022 maritime deal brokered by special envoy Amos Hochstein, which introduced the idea of Washington as a direct arbiter between Israel and Hezbollah. Now, Hochstein wants to formalize this role. As a bonus, his proposal also calls for picking up where he left off with his maritime deal to initiate a land border demarcation process. Inserting the U.S. in this so-called monitoring mechanism as an official arbiter reaffirms the status of Lebanon as a special province under U.S. protection, where Israeli security interests would need to pass through Washington. If Israel has intel about new Hezbollah tunnels, it can pass it along to the CENTCOM security coordinator who will then share the intel with the LAF—which is controlled by Hezbollah—or with a “strengthened” UNIFIL, whose role as Hezbollah’s protector in the south has been well established for the past decades, and at the same time has never been more urgent.

Luckily, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to understand the stakes much better than American politicians do. In an address on Thursday, Netanyahu had this to say about the American plan: “The agreements, documents, proposals and numbers—[UNSCR] 1701, 1559—with all due respect, are not the main point. The main point is our ability and determination to enforce security, thwart attacks against us, and act against the arming of our enemies, as necessary and despite any pressure and constraints. This is the main point.”

In the event Donald Trump wins Tuesday’s election, Israel will likely have a wider margin vis-à-vis Iran and its proxies. However, Jerusalem should not underestimate how similar Republican impulses toward Lebanon are to those of Team Obama, even if their ostensible motives are different. On the right, the growing, poisonous sectarianism that’s been infused into Lebanon policy in Washington—a toxicity that the Lebanese (and Lebanese American) lobbyists have consciously encouraged and exploited—fantastically views Lebanon as an arena for “empowering Middle Eastern Christians.” Another, related variant draws on cliches about Lebanon as the “Paris” or “Switzerland” of the Middle East—a naturally pro-Western society that’s just waiting for the proper amount of U.S. political and financial investment, the same way Iraq was a natural democracy waiting for U.S. liberation in order to fulfill the reality-free fantasies of Freedom Agenda ideologues. In reality, Lebanon is a bankrupt terror haven controlled by Iran whose fake “state institutions” are run by sectarian jackals who are unable to supply basic services like electricity to their supporters. Yet that hardly stops Republican lawmakers in Congress from being among the most ardent supporters of the disastrous Obama policy of underwriting the LAF.

None of these deranged fantasies—whether of an American partnership with the mullahs in Tehran that runs through Beirut, or of a “Lebanese state” built on infusions of U.S. dollars into “institutions” controlled by Hezbollah—can alter reality, however. Washington can entertain itself by pumping billions into the UNIFIL-LAF charade to maintain the appearance of running its own special Levantine province. For Israel, such Napoleonic parade ground antics will remain detached from the reality on the ground. Only by preserving its freedom to act independently and at will to remove threats from its northern border will Israel be able to live in peace.

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10/31 Links Pt2: Purging Jews From the Arts; Abigail Shrier: The Kindergarten Intifada; Bubble-Wrapping Coates; Ministries cut ties with Haaretz

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Purging Jews From the Arts

You are to be unpersoned, that is, if you write about Israel without denouncing the Jewish state—a rule that is intended to disqualify Jewish writers of any and every nationality—or if you are Israeli and have not renounced your country and your people, like any Good Jew apparently would. Israelis are currently under fire from seven fronts in a war that began with an explicitly genocidal invasion by Iranian proxies, and if you do not do something to help the cause of exterminating your own people, you are heretofore banished from the arts.

I’m not sure it’s possible to top the reaction from the poet Gillian Lazarus, who said:

“The likes of Sally Rooney would boycott the likes of Amos Oz, David Grossman and Yehuda Amichai. It’s as if a composer of advertising jingles boycotted Mozart.”

Look, if Sally Rooney could write like Howard Jacobson she would probably not be trying to purge her competition.

But she can’t, and so we all must suffer.

As I said, what’s interesting about Rooney is seeing who else joins her fatwas—especially if they don’t have to. Arundhati Roy is on the list calling for a loyalty oath for Jews in the arts, sadly. Jonathan Lethem, too. Other fellow listers: Jasbir Puar, an academic who invented a blood libel about Jewish organ harvesting; Naomi Klein, professor of “climate justice”; Mohammed El-Kurd, who accused the Jewish state of having an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood”; and other such literary luminaries.

The loyalty oath has made something of a comeback among Western institutions, especially in the academic world, where Jews are occasionally permitted to participate in campus activities as long as they publicly call for the ethnic cleansing of their fellow Jews from whichever part of the world is currently trying to expel them.

Then there is the other angle to the purge: In addition to being irredeemably immoral, it’s also very stupid. Fania Oz-Salzberger, daughter of the late Israeli writer Amos Oz, responded on social media: “My late father, Amos Oz, would have been sad, disgusted, but proud to be banned by these 1000 writers and literati. And ban him they would. Not because he didn’t care for the Palestinians, of course he did, but because he’d be the first to tell these virtue signallers that they are historically and politically ignorant.”

I would go further and point out that Amos Oz, simply by being both an Israeli cultural giant and an advocate for Palestinian self-determination, did more for peace every moment he was alive than Rooney and Kushner will do in a lifetime—not least because a cultural boycott of influential left-leaning figures can only sabotage the Palestinians who want statehood and isolate them from likeminded Israelis.

But that point is only relevant if you believe Sally Rooney and Rachel Kushner and the other inquisitors are interested in helping Palestinians. If they only care about harming Jews, then this purge makes perfect sense.

Howard Jacobson: Political boycotting of the arts paints a picture of tyranny

Thus, to be a boycotter you must believe there is a hierarchy of compassion and condemnation. Only those whose anguish is as vociferous as theirs are allowed a voice. What makes this inquisition so grotesque is that the inquisitors are themselves artists or art-enablers.

Art matters. The pleasure we take from looking long at a painting or grappling with a complex novel or symphony is not some idle luxury. It transforms, invigorates and inspires. It redeems that belief in our shared humanity, which it is so easy, especially in angry and divisive times like these, to lose. And it does that not by confirming what we already think and feel, but by daring us to risk everything we hold dear on the turn of a single page. Creativity, in whatever sphere, is the means not of finding but of losing ourselves.

Everything must be permitted for artists but the silencing of their fellows. To boycott authors, agents or publishers on the grounds that they hold views objectionable to you is to violate art and the part it has played in stirring and individuating the imaginations of men and women since the first cave drawing appeared.

Art is not to be confused with a post on social media. It is not a statement. It is not susceptible to thumbs-down disagreement for the reason that it doesn’t invite thumbs-up consensus. It is not an echo chamber. It is a meeting place, not only of people who read and look and listen differently to one another, but of the hostile and the loving, of the real and the imagined, of colours that are not meant to go together, of words that clash and contradict.

Those who cannot bear such vitality of contradiction congregrate with the like-minded in a safe space they call a boycott, but for which the real word is tyranny.

BHL Boycott Backfires

Fortunately, in the case of Mr. Lévy’s Israel Alone, this cynical pandering to antisemites, ideologues, and to those who worship at the altar of the bottom line backfired. Education may enlighten the prejudiced, which is why Mr. Lévy’s book is so urgently needed, but there are few antidotes for stupidity, except the free market, which is working brilliantly in this instance. Interest in the book is quite robust and will undoubtedly have a positive effect on sales. So, we owe thanks to Shelf Awareness for the unintended consequences of its malfeasance.

We are pleased to add that our organization, in partnership with B’nai B’rith International, has raised funds from generous private donors to purchase and distribute for free thousands of copies of the book to college students around the country. Mr. Lévy will also be speaking in November at select American and Canadian universities. As he explained, “curbing this hate begins by going to the source.” It is abundantly clear that far too many universities and far too many journalists have failed to provide what Americans need to understand about Israel and the Middle East.

Censors can cause a lot of short-term damage, but history tells us that they ultimately lose and their disgrace follows. This comes from the first-century Roman author Tacitus: “When what has been created is persecuted, its authority grows. Neither foreign despots nor others who employ such savagery beget anything except infamy for themselves and glory for those they persecute.”

The ironic good news is that despite the efforts of Shelf Awareness, many more people are now aware of Israel Alone. They can make up their own minds about its message.

Bubble-Wrapping Coates

CBS News is in turmoil following an appearance by Ta-Nehisi Coates that actually included probing questions about his new book on Israel. All it took was one interview during which Coates received some pushback for the legacy media to lose its mind and denounce the CBS anchor, and for the network to quickly rebuke him. Top CBS newsroom brass—i.e., woke PR types with zero actual newsroom experience who now run the network—apparently believed Coates should be coated in bubble wrap and only given friendly questions, preferably fed to him in advance.

But babying American intellectuals is not the American way. Feuds and sharp elbows have been a long-standing part of the American intellectual tradition—and signal the public’s appreciation for robust debate.

One of the greatest feuds in American intellectual history was between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman. Hellman was an apologist for communism, something for which McCarthy had no patience. In 1980, McCarthy went on the Dick Cavett show and famously said of Hellman that “everything [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Hellman responded with a $2.25 million libel suit, which was never resolved before her death in 1984.

Cavett’s various shows, which ran on multiple networks from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, often served as a showcase for great American intellectual brawls. After Gore Vidal lumped together Charles Manson, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer for their poor treatment of women, Mailer was understandably incensed. Shortly afterward, Mailer appeared with Vidal on an episode of Cavett’s show. Things were headed south while the two men were in the green room, where Mailer headbutted Vidal. They didn’t get much better on camera, with the two men trading barbs and Mailer at one point approaching Vidal menacingly. Cavett thought Mailer was going to take a swing at Vidal, but he didn’t, and just angrily pulled the papers Vidal was holding from his hand.

Mailer was still mad six years later when he saw Vidal at a cocktail party at Lally Weymouth’s New York apartment. In front of an impressive crew of literati, Mailer threw a drink in Vidal’s face and followed up with a punch. As Vidal wiped the blood from his face, he responded with a retort that landed harder than Mailer’s blow: “Norman, once again words have failed you.”

Vidal also feuded with the author Truman Capote. They didn’t trade physical blows, but instead took swipes at each other in the press. Vidal sniffed that Capote’s prose was like Carson McCullers, combined with “a bit of Eudora Welty.” Capote countered that Vidal got his literary influence from the New York Daily News.

Vidal was threatened with physical violence in perhaps his most famous feud, with National Review founder William F. Buckley. The two men appeared on ABC News during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Vidal had prepared extensively for the debates and got under Buckley’s skin by calling him a “crypto-Nazi.” An angry Buckley responded, “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” For the rest of his life, Buckley regretted that loss of composure.

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