Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Peter Beinart

Showing posts with label Peter Beinart. Show all posts

Sunday, June 22, 2025

The flip side of consequentialism: A response to Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart criticizes the US strike on Iran's nuclear program in terms of the US not considering the long term consequences of its actions:

Let's say the US does set back the Iranian nuclear program by a long way, and Iran is just too afraid or too weak to really do much in response. So it's a success, right? But over what time frame? I mean you could have said that the US had a big success when it overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in the fifties, because he was going to nationalize oil industry and do things that America didn't like, and it might have been for years after that it looked like a good idea. But you were laying the groundwork for a politics in Iran that was ultimately going to lead decades later to the overthrow of a pro-American leader, and the emergence of a militant anti-American leadership. The point, is, when you do things, you produce political consequences that play out over long, long periods of time and you don't know what the long term consequences are going to be.

I've mentioned a number of times that Beinart is a master propagandist, and this is yet another example of how he uses propaganda techniques brilliantly to promote a completely wrong and immoral anti-Israel and anti-American position.

After all, he has a point: there could be very bad long term consequences of any action by the US, or Israel, that could be worse than short term gains.

This actually is true of every decision we make, big or small, international or personal. Beinart gives examples of decisions in the Middle East that may have caused bad long term consequences. So, everything must be done with caution, and Beinart says that the US did not use the proper amount of caution.

There are three problems with his argument, and they are difficult to see without realizing that Beinart always frames his arguments to preclude serious disagreement.

The first one is simple: yes, sometimes the consequences are bad. And sometimes they are good. Israel decimating Hezbollah last year resulted in Hezbollah not raining down tens of thousands of missiles on Israel, today. That is a pretty good consequence! Similarly, Israel's destruction of Syria's clandestine nuclear program cannot be regarded as anything but a success. So consequentialism goes both ways, and there is no way for Beinart to know the long term consequences any more than anyone else - whether they would be good or bad. So should no one ever make any decision because we cannot know every possible consequence? That is absurd, but if we accept Beinart's logic, that is the result.

In the real world, you make the best decisions you can based on the information you have now. You don't stay paralyzed because you might make the wrong decision. Beinart knows this, but he doesn't want you to think about it.

Secondly, Beinart describes possible downsides of military action. But he ignores, completely, not only the possible upsides or action, but the the potential negative consequences of inaction. Iran clearly was hiding a secret nuclear program that is only compatible with weaponization. No one can seriously doubt it. What are the consequences of a nation that is the world's biggest sponsor of terror, that funds terror groups worldwide, having a stockpile of nuclear weapons? Beinart frames his argument in terms of actions, not inactions, so the casual consumer of his ideas does not realize that Beinart is creating a straitjacket in his argument that does not allow the thinking outside the box that Beinart deliberately constructs.

The third problem is when Beinart says:

I think Jewish tradition, like most other moral traditions, has some version of the idea of “what goes around comes around.” In Hebrew, it’s, “midah k'neged midah.”

Guess what? Jewish ethics is not consequentialist. In Jewish ethics, the top priority is preserving life, your own and your nation's before your enemies. Iran's actions that clearly point towards building a nuclear weapon, plus its genocidal rhetoric against Israel that goes back to 1979, all point to the fact that Iran intends to destroy Israel - either with nuclear weapons or by using the threat of nuclear weapons to attack with impunity without fear of, yes, consequences.. This is not morally acceptable under Jewish ethics. Beinart's argument here indicates that he does not give a damn about the survival of the Jewish state or the Jewish people who live there.

So when Beinart tries to use a Jewish ethical argument that Iran's nuclear weapons program must not be attacked, he is not only being deceptive. He is tacitly supporting the idea that Israel should not have the right to defend itself.

And it is hard to think of something more immoral than that.

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Morally depraved @PeterBeinart's new phrase to sanitize terror attacks: "Armed resistance against civilians"

Peter Beinart went to Harvard Divinity School to promote his new book about how difficult it is to be Jewish while Israel tries to destroy its enemies. His Judaism has very little to do with the Jewish scriptures.

His arguments and rhetoric are tired, even if they strike a chord among the ignorant. He says things like , "if you don't want people to fight you and kill Israelis...you have to deal with the roots of the problem, with the underlying grievances. " But he claims the grievances are the root of the problem when they are an excuse for the attacks. The root of the problem is Arab antisemitism and the honor/shame system that cannot deal with weak Jews having political power in their ancestral homeland. Because if you are looking for roots, you need to explain the Arab attacks on Jews before Zionism, the deadly attacks in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-39. "Grievances" do not explain why they beheaded little girls and murdered non-Zionist yeshiva students in Hebron before the State of Israel existed.

But there is one phrase Beinart used three times during his talk, a clearly deliberate choice of words that proves how utterly depraved he has become.

There was all kinds of Palestinian resistance before 1987, as after 1987. ...There's been Palestinian armed resistance against soldiers, and there's been Palestinian armed resistance against civilians.

And that didn't start with Hamas. In fact, one of the reasons the Israeli government was actually fairly sympathetic to Hamas in the late 1980s when Hamas was created was they couldn't imagine anything worse than the PLO. They couldn't do anything worse than Fatah and leftist groups like the PFLP, because those groups had been involved in armed resistance, including armed resistance against civilians.

....[P]eople in the Jewish community ...denounce Palestinian armed resistance against civilians, which I also oppose.

What the hell is "armed resistance against civilians"? Why can Beinart not say the words "terror" or "murder" or "jihad"?

In the ideological circles Beinart travels in—campuses, NGO salons, anti-Zionist conferences—the word “resistance” is a badge of honor. It connotes nobility. To even say the phrase “armed resistance against civilians” is to launder mass murder through the language of moral defiance. It’s how you make terror respectable. It’s how you turn Hamas atrocities into "tragic outgrowths of oppression."

That’s why he uses the term. Because his fans - those who wave "Resistance by any means necessary" banners and endorse BDS alongside open Hamas sympathizers - want their support of anti-Jewish violence given moral cover. And Beinart provides it.

He offers the progressive Left a sanitized vocabulary of terror: one in which murdering Jews isn’t antisemitic, just the inevitable consequence of how Jews act. In his view, Hamas isn’t genocidal, just misunderstood. To get published in the New York Times and invited to speak at Harvard, Beinart needs to nod to the idea that targeting the innocent is not ideal, while at the very same time excusing those same attacks.

Peter Beinart may claim to oppose killing civilians. But his language says otherwise. When you call terror “resistance,” you are not neutral. You are not moral. You are not Jewish in any meaningful sense of the word. You are a handmaiden to those who cheer when Jews are butchered.

Peter Beinart pretends to be against terror attacks, but his very deliberate phraseology shows that his opposition to attacking civilians comes with a wink to the type of people who will enthusiastically buy his book and use their quoting him as proof that they aren't antisemitic when they say that they support Hamas burning babies.

(h/t Eitan Fischberger)

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Once again, @PeterBeinart in the @NYTimes supports those who violate Jewish rights on campus

Peter Beinart writes in the New York Times with an article originally titled "You Want to Protect Jewish Students? What About Jewish Student Protesters? and later "Trump Doesn’t Want to Protect All Jewish Students — Just Those on His Team."

You can already see where this is going:

On April 29, 2024, Tess Segal, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Florida, joined her fellow activists at a prominent plaza on campus calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and boycott academic institutions in Israel. Some protesters studied or played cards. Later they read obituaries of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip.

Then law enforcement moved in. And although Ms. Segal says she did not resist arrest, she was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was held overnight.

....In an era in which students without U.S. citizenship are snatched off the street by federal agents, Ms. Segal’s punishment may seem comparatively mild. But her case contains a special irony. Ms. Segal is Jewish.

I didn't spend any time researching this specific case, but it is obvious from Beinart's description that Tess Segal was not arrested or discriminated against because of her Jewishness or her support for the Jewish state. On the contrary, she was part of a campus mob protesting against Jewish rights and to make an exception for academic freedom for Jewish Zionist students who may want to study in Israel or collaborate with their Israeli counterparts.

Beinart can argue all he wants for free speech rights for anti-Zionists, but pretending that Jews are being targeted on campus for anti-Zionist speech and require special protection as Jewish Zionist students do is peak Beinart-style deception.

His deceit extends to other examples in the article:

Since Oct. 7, at least four universities have temporarily suspended or placed on probation their chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace.

He doesn't mention that it was because they violated campus policies. Should Jewish students be allowed to violate policies because they are Jewish? Only if they agree with Beinart's anti-Zionist politics, it seems.

At a pro-Israel event at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York on Oct. 12, 2023, a Jewish student who briefly shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine” was reportedly suspended for the rest of the academic year.

This was an indoor event, a "Unity Gathering in Support of Israel," held while the kibbutzim were still smoldering. Most colleges recognize that disrupting an event is not free speech - it is a violation of the free speech rights of the organizers of the event. In fact, many of the college suspensions of anti-Israel protesters are for that exact reason - there is no inherent right to disrupt normal activities on campus.

Beinart is claiming, in effect, that pro-Zionist Jews do not have the right to have their own events free from being interrupted, disrupted and shut down by protesters. He is against free speech when that speech goes against his hateful "principles."

In May 2024, a Jewish tenured professor in anthropology at Muhlenberg College said she was fired after she reposted an Instagram post that declared, in part: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable.”

First of all, the post by Maura Finkelstein also said "Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist." She is directly saying that 90% of Jews - on campus or anywhere - should not have the same rights as anyone else and calling them fascists. Can anyone who attends her classes feel comfortable?

They don't. Beinart omits the other reason she was fired - because within a week of October 7 she taught two classes of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda. In her own words, on October 12, "I had dedicated both of my classes to contextualizing the events unfolding in Gaza and giving my students space to ask questions. ...In our first meeting, the provost told me that several Title VI complaints had come to her through the college’s Title IX office; “Multiple students felt you created an unsafe atmosphere and that you have been targeting and harassing them.”

Beinart, skillfully posting half-truths and omitting context about college policies and the events he is describing, is pretending that Jewish students and faculty are being targeted when in most cases they were violating the rights of Jewish students whose opinions they disagree with. On campuses where free speech is supposedly a sacred right, Beinart is supporting those who want to quash it - in one direction.

His last example is even more absurd:

Even when protest has taken the form of Jewish religious observance, it often has been shut down. Last fall, when Jewish students opposing the war during the holiday of Sukkot built Gaza solidarity sukkahs, temporary boothlike structures in which Jews eat, learn and sleep during the holiday, at least eight universities forcibly dismantled them, or required the students to do so, or canceled approval for their construction. (The universities said that the groups were not allowed to erect structures on campus.)

These groups obviously tried to use sukkahs as a way to get around existing regulations against building encampments or other structures by pretending that they are for a religious purpose. They clearly weren't - none of the people who built them would ever build a sukkah for religious purposes. They pervert Judaism for politics, and Beinart pretends that they were just practicing their religion - much like those who blow shofars at any "Jewish anti-Zionist" occasion and pretend that this is a religious obligation.

No one is saying that anti-Israel students, Jewish or not, do not have the right for protests and speech that do not violate campus policies. Beinart is claiming that anti-Zionists, uniquely, have the right to violate campus policies.

This is not a defense of free speech. It is a demand for privileged speech – for one side only.

By selectively presenting facts, omitting crucial context, and portraying violators of others' rights as victims, Peter Beinart is not merely misleading. He is manufacturing antisemitic propaganda: turning those who seek to destroy Jewish communal life on campus into the new “Jewish victims.” And the New York Times eagerly provides him the platform, without even basic fact-checking.

It’s not just deception. It’s complicity.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Peter Beinart's anti-Jewish Purim propaganda

Master propagandist Peter Beinart has written a polemic in The Guardian, adapted from his most recent book, that can only be described as antisemitic.

He describes the Jews of the Purim story as being genocidal:

The book of Esther doesn’t end with Haman’s death. It continues because although Haman is gone, his edict to kill the Jews remains. The king can’t reverse it. What he can do is empower Mordechai and his kinsmen to take matters into their own hands. Which they do. “The Jews struck at their enemies with the sword,” proclaims the book of Esther, “slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” On the 13th day of the month of Adar, the Jews kill 75,000 people. They declare the 14th “a day of feasting and merrymaking”. With the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry. That’s the origin of Purim.

Purim isn’t only about the danger Gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them.

...My hope, this Purim, is that when Jews encounter the slaughter that concludes the Book of Esther, we shudder. And that from this revulsion comes a new dedication to ending the slaughter being committed in our name in the Gaza Strip.

Beinart admits that the Jews of Persia had no choice but to proactively attack those who wanted to wipe them out. The king cannot reverse the edict. What else could be done? Yet even so, Beinart wants to frame the Jews defending their lives as a genocidal attack. He doesn't use that word here but his comparison with Gaza and his separate embrace of the lie that Israel is guilty of genocide makes this clear.

The analogy between the Gaza war and the Purim battles is apt, for the opposite reason. Hamas' charter and Haman's edict were both to exterminate the Jews. In both cases the Jewish goal was to eradicate only those who will stop at nothing in their attempts to utterly destroy the Jewish community. That is not immoral - on the contrary, self defense against those who want to murder you is supremely moral. That is the Jewish perspective. The only genocides are the ones that Haman and Hamas planned.

Beinart is upset that secular Jews aren't aware of the entire Purim story and gloss over the brief war mentioned in the Book of Esther. So am I. The war was justified and the killings as described in the story were justified as well.

Peter Beinart is not the first person to accuse Jews of genocide in the Purim story. It is a staple of antisemites. Beinart's perversion is to make this accusation while posing as a committed Jew.

Beinart will quote Jewish sources when they are convenient for him. He writes, as a Jew, "We have largely stopped wrestling with what our sacred texts say about Jewish ethical responsibility. " Yet this is what Beinart himself is doing - ignoring what the sacred texts say about Jewish self-defense.

Beinart cherry-picks Jewish sensitivity to violence but ignores how tradition distinguishes between what is and is not allowed in battle. He knows quite well that the Hebrew Scriptures, Talmud and Jewish commentators are critical of misconduct and excesses in war and other violence. When Levi and Simeon slaughtered the residents of Shechem, they were criticized by Jacob and this was reiterated on his deathbed. The Jewish sages noted that God rebuked the angels for singing as the Egyptians drowned, with God saying, “My creations are drowning, and you sing?"

Yet there is no such criticism of war against Amalek - except of Saul for not following Gods instructions to destroy them totally. The war in Esther was written as a clear analogy to the justified - and commanded - wars against Amalek, as Haman is regarded as a descendant of that people. Indeed, no classical Jewish commentary says a word against the destruction of the enemies of the Jews in Persia, and the sages were not reluctant to criticize actions that they felt were immoral.

It isn't that Jews aren't sensitive to unnecessary deaths, as Beinart's libels imply. It is that there is a big difference between obligatory wars, such as those motivated by self defense, and wars that go beyond the necessity. The battle in Persia was clear in its goals and its morality, hence no criticism.

Beinart pretends that he is more moral than the Jewish sages he himself claims that are a source of his ethical stance. Instead of understanding and learning from the sages, he arrogantly pretends to be more virtuous than they are.

Worse, Beinart’s depiction of Jews ‘feasting with blood barely dry’ revives medieval blood libel imagery, a hallmark of antisemitic propaganda, while cloaking it in progressive critique.

And he has the nerve to promote his book with these antisemitic arguments while posing in front of the very sacred texts that he is throwing in the garbage.

Jews know quite well what the lessons of history are, thank you very much. Beinart's claim that Jews do not properly learn from their own traditions is nothing less than a sophisticated version of the antisemitic argument that the Jews should have learned more from the Holocaust.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Not only Arabs: "Progressives" cheer and justify Arabs treating Jews like garbage

Earlier today I wrote about how Arab media is celebrating Arabs in Qatar refusing to speak with Israeli reporters.

I want to emphasize that Arabs have every right not to be interviewed by whomever they want, that isn't a human right. But the stories coming out of Qatar include Arabs kicking Israelis out of taxis and ganging up on/bullying (presumed) Israelis. That is what I am pointing out as a violation of Israeli human rights. (And let's be honest - lots of Arab Israelis came to Qatar and we haven't heard any issues with them.)

It turns out that it isn't only Arabs cheering and justifying Arabs ganging up on Jews.

Sarah Leah Whitson, formerly of Human Rights Watch and who now runs her own "human rights" organization, tweeted, "A good reminder that Israel's 'peace' with dictatorships (aka Abraham Accords) is not peace with the Arab people. And yeah, no justice, no peace."

Besides the idiocy of saying that Israel shouldn't make peace with dictatorships (who, exactly ,is eligible in the Arab world?) her "no justice, no peace" is a flippant way to justify treating Israeli Jewish professionals as subhuman. Which is a curious thing for a human rights expert to say.

Daoud Kuttab tweeted this justification for Arab antisemitism, heartily endorsed by Peter Beinart:

"Every action has a reaction?" Really? So Israel is justified in fighting back when Hamas shoots rockets? Israel can try to arrest those who kill Jews and try to hide in Area A? Please. Israel is never justified in protecting its citizens when Palestinian Arabs attack according to these masters of creating rules for Israel that do not apply to anyone else. You will never hear Kuttab or Beinart justify Israeli defensive moves to protect the lives of her citizens, saying "every action has a reaction."

The hypocrisy is obvious to everyone except for those who aren't already stuck in the mire of hate towards Israel, where Arabs have no responsibility for their actions yet Israel must be compared to a "turn the other cheek" ideal that literally no other country is expected to come close to reaching.

These hypocrites - all of whom swear up and down they are not antisemitic - always somehow manage to find the one exception to their own stated moral codes. It's awful that gays want to visit the World Cup must stay in the closet, but Israeli Jews who visit should expect abuse.

It's their own fault - for being Israeli.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The American Jewish Committee in the 1960s: Peter Beinart's NYT lies more egregious than I reported

I wrote my fisking of Peter Beinart's NYT op-ed quickly, but the true depth of Beinart's dishonesty can be seen from a deeper dive into one of the topics he mentioned and I touched upon.

He wrote, "Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”

Beinart links to a fairly obscure 1998 academic paper, "Transformation Through Crisis: The American Jewish Committee and the Six-Day War," by Lawrence Grossman, published in the journal American Jewish History. This is already a red flag - if American Jewish organizations in the 1960s were so uniformly critical of Israeli democracy, wouldn't there be a New York Times article about it that Beinart could link to?

The entire point of the academic article Beinart links to is to show that the AJC was out of the mainstream of American Jewish opinion on Israel and Zionism before 1967. It refutes Beinart's point - but Beinart quotes a small portion and pretends that the AJC's ambivalence on Israel represented mainstream American Jewish thought.

On the contrary - that attitude made the AJC nearly irrelevant in the 1960s. The paper makes the AJC's anomalous status clear:

The Jewish community had shifted massively toward the Zionist pole, and the AJC risked being marginalized if it did not adjust.

By the early 1960s, writes Naomi Cohen, AJC "had virtually stopped growing." In 1962 Executive Vice President John Slawson told a newly organized AJC Committee on National Growth that one reason Jews were reluctant to join was that "there is still a feeling that we are anti-Israel."

The article also notes that the AJC was literally the only Jewish organization in America to criticize Israel for a 1966 retaliatory raid in Jordan after a series of Arab attacks and not to condemn a UN anti-Israel resolution on the issue. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations, the major American Jewish umbrella group, condemned the UN resolution. The National Community Relations Council, the other large American Jewish umbrella group, was prevented from joining the Conference of Presidents resolution because its rules required a unanimous vote - and the objection of the AJC, which had only recently joined the NCRC, vetoed it.

Beinart must have read the entire piece to find the out-of-context quote he published, which means he knows very well that he was misrepresenting the opinions of major American organizations.

To be sure, American Jews in the 1960s had other issues to worry about besides Israel. There was still explicit antisemitism in America, and the plight of Soviet Jewry started gaining recognition. But I did a quick survey of the front page of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, as a representative of Jewish mainstream concerns, on its first issue in each year from 1960 to 1967. Israeli topics were featured as the top story in every issue (judged as the right-most story on the front page):

January 1, 1960: Golda Meir criticizes a World Bank loan to Nasser's Egypt

January 6, 1961: David Ben Gurion says a speech of his was distorted and he lauds US Jewry

January 5, 1962: Soviet-Egyptian pact on arms a concern for Israel

January 4, 1963: "Middle East arms race unfolding to Israel's disadvantage": Javits

January 3, 1964: Israel charges Syria with "barbarism" in treatment of Israeli prisoners

January 1, 1965: Cabinet decides against reopening Lavon affair

January 7, 1966: State Department confirms supplying Jordan with up to 100 Patton tanks

January 6, 1967: Israel complains to Security Council over Arab raids

Beinart is making things up, knowing full well that most people - and certainly the New York Times editorial board - will not fact-check him. This is a pattern with Beinart, who is not only lying, but attempting to rewrite history itself.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

08/27 Links: The Use Of Human Shields Is A War Crime. America Must Hold Terrorists Accountable; Why are Israelis so happy? Because Israel is small

From Ian:

The Use Of Human Shields Is A War Crime. America Must Hold Terrorists Accountable

The administration and Congress should take several steps to more effectively counter the widespread use of human shields by PIJ and other terrorist organizations.

First, the administration should implement its legal authority to designate terrorists who use human shields. Despite strong evidence of human shields use by PIJ and other terrorists, and the requirements of U.S. law, neither Trump nor Biden has thus far imposed any human shields sanctions on anyone. Imposing sanctions on PIJ leaders for their use of human shields would be an important first step.

Meanwhile, Congress should reauthorize and enhance the existing sanctions law,which is set to expire on December 31, 2023.

In addition, the US, Israel, and other allies should work together, including with NATO, to press the UN and other international organizations to investigate, condemn, and encourage penalties for human shields use by terrorist organizations and their material supporters. For example, the UN human rights high commissioner and council should be encouraged to vigorously investigate, condemn, and encourage accountability for the use of human shields.

Finally, the militaries of Israel, the United States and other NATO members, and other allies must coordinate in sharing best practices for more effectively addressing the use of human shields by terrorist organizations.

A robust U.S. government response to the use of human shields by PIJ and other terrorist groups would concretely advance several American national security and foreign policy objectives. These objectives include protecting U.S. and other NATO troops against terrorist use of human shields; setting the record straight in the face of UN and other efforts to falsely accuse Israel of committing war crimes; and undermining PIJ, Hamas, and other terrorist groups while supporting Palestinians who are prepared to make peace with Israel.

Jonathan Tobin: An end to the delusions about Biden, Iran and Israel?

Like any gambler who is willing to seize on any glimmer of hope that irresponsible betting will be rewarded with an unexpected reversal of fortune, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid was sounding hopeful this week. The Israeli government that he now leads spent the last year wagering the Jewish state’s security on the idea that better relations with the Biden administration and a decision to downplay differences would influence Washington to finally show some spine and stop appeasing Iran. So, it was hardly unexpected that Lapid would seize on the news that the United States had “hardened” its response to the latest Iranian counter-offer in the talks about renewing the 2015 nuclear deal.

The “good news” consisted of a report claiming that Lapid had been told by Washington that it would not give in to Iranian demands that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cease investigating Tehran’s nuclear program or take the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) off the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Shorn of context, that might be an encouraging development. But with the international media publishing multiple stories based on leaks from the administration about an agreement between the two sides being imminent, the notion that any victory on these two points, whether temporary or not, vindicates the decision Lapid’s tactics is risible.

Even taken in isolation, these points don’t mean that much.

As bad as giving in on that point would be, the IRGC issue is largely symbolic. If a new deal is reached, Iran’s terrorist arm will be immeasurably strengthened and enriched along with the rest of the regime, regardless of whether they’re on a U.S. list of terror groups. It’s also true that even if Iran doesn’t get Biden to agree to drop the involvement of the IAEA altogether, that means nothing. As the Iranians have demonstrated ever since former President Barack Obama’s signature foreign-policy achievement was put into force in 2015, violating they have no compunctions about repeatedly violating it, especially with regard to flouting the components requiring compliance with IAEA regulations.

More to the point, if these provisions and other points of equal importance are the only obstacles standing between an agreement, then Lapid knows his hopes of persuading the administration not to sign a new deal are negligible. As Lapid has recently reiterated, Israel’s position is that the United States and its partners in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are making a huge mistake. Mossad chief David Barnea has been adamant in insisting that the plan is a “strategic disaster” for Israel and based on “lies.”

‘Basmanny Justice’ and the Jews of Russia

Six months into the war in Ukraine, Russia is being Russia once again.

By that, I mean the predatory, bullying Russia that we know from history. The Russia that persecutes Jews and other minorities, whether under the tsars or the Bolsheviks. The Russia that sneers at freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the other precious individual rights that prevail in the democratic West, while pushing its own brand of nationalist, obscurantist ideology.

When it comes to the “Jewish Question,” as the Bolsheviks were fond of calling it, Russia’s hostility is eminently recognizable. For much of the Putin era, that reality has been obscured, as the Russian dictator actively promoted the impression of a benevolent disposition towards the country’s Jewish minority, assisted in this task by a number of Jewish influencers abroad who really should have known better. Yet as was predictable, with the first whiff of a geopolitical crisis, Jews have once again been cast in a villainous role.

In a recent interview with the Voice of America’s Russian-language service, Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet Jewish refusenik who served as head of the Jewish Agency from 2009 to 2018, observed that Russia is “almost completely isolated from the free world.” Like a wounded animal, it is lashing out at its adversaries as a result, trying to find and pressure any weak spots. Sharansky pointed to the example of Germany, where the coming winter is anticipated with dread given the German dependence on Russia’s heavily sanctioned energy sector.

“They are scaring Germany with the fact that people will start dying from the cold in winter,” said Sharansky.

In Israel, of course, the mild winters and the lack of dependency on Russian natural gas—earlier this year, the European Union even signed a deal to import Israeli and Egyptian natural gas as part of weaning the bloc off Russian supplies—mean that the regime in Moscow has to select a different pressure point. “In the same way, they are starting to put pressure on us, using the Jewish Agency,” emphasized Sharansky.

Russia’s campaign against the Jewish Agency, which assists Jews wishing to emigrate to Israel, was launched at the end of last month. The Russian ministry of justice filed a legal bid to close the agency’s local operations, alleging that a database of Russian citizens was being maintained in contravention of Russian law.