The shallow claim that anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism
You can tell if they are serious by looking at their anti-racism policies. Organisations cannot pretend to oppose antisemitism unless they define it. Without a definition they cannot discipline members for racist conduct.Seth Mandel: Can Elaine Luria Handle the Squad’s Heat?
If you cannot define it, you cannot oppose it.
Ominously, many want to shut down any attempt to limit Jew hate. They want a world without boundaries, where anything goes, and anti-Jewish racism can never be called by its real name.
Their first target is the widely used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been circulating in various forms since the early 2000s. The global left denounces it because it says that the definition has been used to “wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic”.
Within a day of becoming mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani showed his political priorities by withdrawing the city’s endorsement of the definition.
The precise form of words the IHRA drafters used is that it is antisemitic “to deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.
You can argue about that. As I said above, people who want to abolish the world’s only Jewish state need to bend over backwards to prove that they don’t just hate Jews.
Good-hearted left-wing Jewish academics took the complaint seriously, and went out of their way to accommodate Palestinian and leftist concerns.
They produced the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism in 2021. It emphasised that it was not antisemitic “to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants between the river and the sea, whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state [or] federal state”.
All true opponents of racism need to do was oppose anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and race hatred.
A bare minimum you might say. But even this stripped down, permissive, definition of antisemitism is too much for many on the left to bear.
I hoped that the election of the Jewish Zack Polanski to the leadership of the Green Party would mark a break with the antisemitism that so disfigured the Corbyn movement,
Not if a faction among Green Party members has its way, it won’t.
A motion before the Green Party spring conference calls for the party “to reject the IHRA and JDA [Jerusalem Declaration] definitions which have been weaponised to silence legitimate criticism of the state of Israel”.
When the conference starts in March, we will see whether Polanski has the political courage to fight back, or whether he’s just another empty sloganeer.
Turn to the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, and it is the same story,
It too will not even accept the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism because it is “being used to reinforce the illegitimate policing of speech about Palestine and advocacy for Palestinian rights.”
You search its website in vain for examples of the Jerusalem Declaration silencing legitimate debate – and of course there are none. You search for any definition of antisemitism that would be acceptable to pro-Palestinian activists – and of course there isn’t one.
They have no formal means of condemning The Protocols of the Elders Zion, Mein Kampf or the Hamas Charter.
More pertinently from a modern left-wing point of view, they have no means of condemning Nick Fuentes and the antisemites flourishing in Donald Trump’s America.
The Maga movement is loathed by leftists. But at least some on the left would rather give the far right a free pass than accept the smallest restraint on the loathing of Jews.
Luria was once the kind of Democrat that party leaders wanted to recruit: liberal but poised, with a military career on the resume. (Luria spent 20 years in the Navy.)Iran's Options: Talking or Fighting
Military experience tended to go hand-in-hand with support for Israel, just as exposure to reality tends to increase support for Israel. Those with national security experience in the field would be much less vulnerable to the paranoid conspiracism of the Code Pink world and campus activists, the thinking went. An inherent toughness could make it less likely they’d bend or break in the face of progressive pressure.
And all of that was true—except that last part. One by one, “moderate” Democrats fell in line. Elissa Slotkin, now a senator from Michigan, entertained the idea that AIPAC should register as a foreign agent. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Marine, folded like a cheap suit in the face of anti-Israel primary pressure this cycle. Accommodating progressive anti-Semitism became the norm, with very few exceptions (Ritchie Torres, John Fetterman).
Luria says she wants to turn back that tide, or at least show it some resistance. The question is how far she is willing to go when locking horns with her party.
During Luria’s time in Congress, she was at the forefront of a group of Democrats criticizing Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism, but she opposed removing Omar from her committee assignments, as Republicans had done with Steve King.
Luria’s willingness to call out some of the anti-Semitism from her own party has the potential to shift the debate if she gets back into office. But the extent of her impact will be decided by where Luria places the limits of her posture. Would she go beyond statements? That is, would she support actual consequences for Democrats who engage in rank anti-Semitism?
Most of the time, Luria seems willing to criticize Omar by name. Will she do the same for Rashida Tlaib, who has been headlining a conference tied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine? How about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the thin-skinned Squad ringleader and blood libel specialist who may run for president in 2028?
As of now, the odds are in Luria’s favor. Virginia Democrats still nominate ostensibly moderate candidates, and the national mood certainly seems to have swung against Republican incumbents. (Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, who defeated Luria two years ago, holds the seat.)
Is Luria prepared to be a Slotkin/Moulton Democrat, living in fear of the Hamasniks in her party, or can she envision herself as a Torres/Fetterman Democrat, the much more rare breed with a spine strong enough to stand on principle? The fundamentals of the midterm elections mean we’ll probably soon find out.
President Trump's ultimatum to Iran calls for it to negotiate away its nuclear program or face a possible attack. Either path risks putting the already weakened regime in a more precarious position. Along with insisting that Iran halt domestic enrichment of nuclear fuel and hand over its stockpile of uranium, Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff has indicated Tehran must accept limits on its ballistic-missile arsenal and abandon its support for militias in the region.
A decision to halt enrichment of uranium would be a humiliating public retreat on a core national priority for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Rebuffing the demand is increasingly likely to prompt Trump to order strikes, further exposing the government's vulnerability.
"Their strategy right now is just buying time," said Alan Eyre, a former senior U.S. diplomat who specialized in Iran and is now at the Middle East Institute. "Their whole strategic outlook is when you're in a weak position you don't compromise, because that invites further aggression."
"The supreme leader is able to do compromises, but those compromises cannot touch the basic pillars of the regime, meaning he won't forgo a missile buildup, he won't forgo helping proxies and he won't forgo enrichment," said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli intelligence officer and a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
Citrinowicz said killing Khamenei or expecting the other members of the regime to turn against him under U.S. pressure is a faint hope, given Iran's unity at the top. Even if Khamenei was somehow removed, the regime would likely coalesce quickly around a new leader, he said. For all the setbacks the regime has suffered, there are few signs it is facing imminent collapse, such as splits within the leadership or defections.
"They still have cohesion. The regime is still functioning," Citrinowicz said. "If they feel this war is aimed at toppling this regime, it won't topple this regime, because to do it will take time, and Trump has no intention to invest that time."
"You could do airstrikes that significantly restrict this regime's ability to control its population and to project power abroad," Eyre said. "But to get from there to a better form of government in Iran? You can't get there from here."






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