From Ian:
With empty chairs and forlorn homes, Israelis prepare for solemn Passover
Jewish people mark on Monday the start of Passover, a celebration of freedom, and around many holiday tables in Israel chairs will stand empty for hostages still held captive in Gaza.
The weeklong Jewish festival, also known in Hebrew as the “holiday of freedom,” celebrates the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery, as told in the Bible.
Passover is traditionally observed with a Seder: a holiday feast when families eat symbolic foods and read the Haggadah.
The text, which is nearly 2,000 years old, recounts the Jewish people’s Exodus from Egypt and their ties and yearning for the Holy Land.
For many this year, Passover will be stained by absence and anguish, particularly for the relatives of the hostages, grieving families, and more than 120,000 Israelis displaced from their homes in the north and south of the country because of the war in the Gaza Strip and ongoing hostilities between Israel and the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“All of the symbolic things we do at the Seder will take on a much more profound and deep meaning this year,” said Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh is being held hostage in Gaza.
These symbols include “the bread of affliction, the bitter herbs, the saltwater that represents the tears of the Jewish people when they were in captivity, in slavery,” she added.
Undoubtedly, millions will sing that verse this year with intense emotion, closed eyes, clenched fists, and the thought going through their minds that we are just reliving a scene played out time after time. It’s the same idea to destroy the Jews – only the actors on the stage have changed.
Someone will read this text somewhere and say, “Once it was Pharaoh, then Haman, then Torquemada, then Chmielnicki, then Hitler, now Sinwar and Khamenei.” Someone argumentative around that table will ask how one can compare Sinwar to Hitler, to which he who made the comparison will reply: “The intent is the same, only the capabilities are different.”
Some will read or sing that verse and be depressed by the thought that this is the fate of the Jewish people – that in every generation, someone will, indeed, rise up to destroy us. Others will focus on and take solace in the last part, that we will be saved from their hands.
That thought that we will face troubles – terrible troubles – but in the end will prevail is a powerful idea that has sustained the Jewish people throughout more difficult days than these. And it will sustain us during these trying times as well.
There are those on the outside looking at Israel’s current situation – the hot war in Gaza, the war of attrition with Hezbollah in the north, the terrorist war in Judea and Samaria, the frontal confrontation with Iran – and wonder how, and if, Israel will survive.
But Jews sitting around the Seder table laden with the bread of affliction and the Cup of Elijah will think to themselves, yes we will.
They will think: This is the promise. We have been here before, survived, and flourished, and we will do so again. It says so in this timeless text right here, a text Jews have been saying every year for centuries and whose optimism, as if by osmosis, they have internalized. Yes, they will rise up against us generation after generation. We have seen that in the past; we are living it today. But in the end, we will prevail. That, too, we have seen in the past and are living today.
Or, as a more contemporary source – Meir Ariel – wrote in an iconic 1990 song, “We survived Pharaoh, we’ll survive this as well.”
“Today we are slaves,” the Haggadah opens on a down note, but then quickly contrasts it by saying, “next year we shall be free; now we are here, next year in the land of Israel.”
That, too, has been internalized by the Jewish people. An eternal hope and belief that things will get better; that Jewish history has an upward trajectory; and that next year we will be in a rebuilt, peaceful Jerusalem.
Prime Minister’s Office: ‘No family in the world should celebrate like this’
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office released a video on Sunday, ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover, to raise awareness in the United States about the hostages whom Hamas terrorists continue to hold in Gaza.
“All of the various holiday meals around the world are characterized by values of families, closeness and warmth,” the office’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate stated.
“The ‘Empty Chair’ campaign draws attention to the absence of our beloved hostages, who have been held by Hamas for 198 days,” it added. “The campaign shows festive family gatherings and set tables around the customary holidays in the American tradition. Around the table is an empty chair, that breaks the festive atmosphere and around which the family observes sadly.”
“The video ends against the backdrop of a seder night meal with the message that the hostages will not be able to celebrate the Passover holiday with their families, and the call: ‘Let our people go,'” it added. “No family in the world should celebrate like this.”
The video will run on North American digital platforms and online television, per the Prime Minister’s Office.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
United States of Charlottesville
Because this racial hierarchy is fundamental to its proponents’ worldview, opposition to coexistence with Jews is global. The skinheads in Charlottesville weren’t deterred from their version of this ideology just because they live outside of Germany. Similarly, those who chant “Palestine is Arab” subscribe to this racial hierarchy wherever they are. That this chant was delivered outside the White House, for example, is not a protest of Israeli policy but rather a challenge to the foundational ideas and values of the United States.
Although the expression of this worldview isn’t limited to college campuses, those campuses are the main reason we are now witnessing three Charlottesvilles a day. After all, it means students are paying attention in class.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab” is a direct application of the popular academic theory of the day, “decolonization.” The idea of Jewish self-determination in Israel being a settler-colonialist project might be a flat-earth level of historical crankery, but it is all the rage—and I do mean rage—in the classrooms of our esteemed institutions of higher learning. Teaching young minds that Jews must be supplanted from their homes because they represent a race that belongs elsewhere has a long history of inspiring those students to carry out what they’ve been taught. It is no surprise that Jews at Columbia over the weekend were told to “go back to Poland.” The racial ideology at the heart of decolonization theory demands nothing less. As a now-infamous Twitter/X post, amplified by a writer and editor at the Washington Post among others, asked in celebration of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and sexual torture spree: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
And that helps us understand the look of absolute despondency on Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s face throughout her congressional hearing this week. She, and many of her peers at other institutions, are facing two problems. The first is the violence and harassment targeting visibly Jewish students. Contrary to various media figures’ attempts to spin recent events, this is absolutely taking place on campus and these violations absolutely are being committed by students. They are also, however, taking place outside of campus as part of the same demonstrations a few feet away. It’s not either/or. The campus-organized protests are spreading and so is the violence they incite.
The second problem is the ideological fuel for the violence, which is being pumped from the colleges themselves. It is much easier to increase the police presence on campus than it is to change a culture cultivated purposely and with great enthusiasm over the course of decades. These schools are churning out people who have extraordinarily sick and violent beliefs toward Jews. Those sick and violent beliefs earned them good grades at these same schools.
There has not yet been a solution proffered by any of these campus administrators that would fix the broken, anti-Semitic culture of these schools, just as figures throughout history have struggled to convince the sun not to shine.
At Columbia I Am Told: ‘Go Back to Poland’
Since the first protest on Columbia’s campus in support of a “Free Palestine” on October 12, I have committed, along with my twin brother and a number of our friends, to show up at these protests with our Israeli and American flags.
There are often hundreds of people chanting for “intifada” and a handful of us. Suffice it to say, I can think of more pleasant ways to spend a New York City night. We do it for a simple reason: we want to tell Jews at Columbia—and around the world—that we refuse to be bullied off of our own campus.
For nearly seven months, I have been asked the same question by many people in my life: “Do you feel safe on campus as a Jew?” I wear a kippah—I can’t pass. And I have always maintained the importance of standing our ground rather than letting fear drive us away.
Nothing will stanch that pride, but the situation at Columbia has escalated to a point where my physical safety is in danger.
That is not a metaphor, nor an expression of safetyism. On Saturday night, April 20, I was assaulted and harassed repeatedly inside the gates of Columbia University.
For five days now, protesters have been camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn demanding financial divestment from Israel, an academic boycott of Israel, a call for cease-fire, and an end to Columbia’s real estate purchases. Their newest demand is to defund Columbia’s public safety, the only people on campus supposedly tasked with keeping us safe.
On Saturday night, the situation on campus hit a new low. Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war.
For an hour, 20 of us stood on the sundial in the middle of Columbia’s campus with Israeli and American flags and sang peaceful songs such as Matisyahu’s “One Day” and “V’hi She’amda”—a much-needed ode to the hope and perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of enemies who seek our destruction.
Even as we sang lyrics such as “We don’t want to fight no more, there will be no more war,” we were met with hostility. Masked keffiyeh-wearers came to us face-to-face, trying to intimidate us. They chanted, “Fuck Israel, Israel’s a bitch!” We were told, “You guys are all inbred.” They threw water in our faces. These groups are not fairly described as “pro-Palestine.” They are active supporters of Hamas and they say so explicitly: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” one group chanted by the gates of my school. “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”
Brendan O'Neill:
A howl of rage against civilisation
Indeed, the anti-militarist mask has well and truly come off this movement. The Columbia camp makes clear as day that Israel-haters want more war, not less. ‘Burn Tel Aviv to the ground’, some bigots chanted. ‘Go Hamas, we love you’, said others. Nothing better captures the crisis of Western civilisation than this vision of trust-fund genderfluid blue-haired kids singing the praises of a movement that would hurl them from a top-floor window given half a chance. In one especially nauseating incident, a white girl in a keffiyeh was seen holding a placard with an arrow saying ‘Al-Qassam’s next targets’, referring to the al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The placard’s arrow was pointed towards Jewish students waving the Israel flag. Shorter version: Hamas, kill these people. How swiftly the anti-fascists became fascists.
Media-elite sympathisers with Columbia’s Gaza camp claim these pro-Hamas cries, these demands for the obliteration of Israel and this hanging of target signs around the necks of Jews are rare occurrences in an otherwise peaceful protest. Plus, it’s mostly outsiders doing this stuff, they say. I call bullshit. If you create a space in which anti-Semites feel comfortable, so comfortable that they’re happy to openly glorify Hamas’s cosmic racist violence, then that’s on you.
What’s more, the insistence that it’s ‘only’ a few voices celebrating 7 October, just a handful of agitators who are are cheering the rape, kidnap and murder of Jews, is desperate bordering on sick. That there are any such voices in and around one of the highest seats of learning in modern America should be viewed as unsettling in the extreme. Anyone who cares for the future of academia, and for the future of the West, should be alarmed that at Columbia, the college of Alexander Hamilton, of Amelia Earhart, of Barack Obama, people have been heard saying to Jews: ‘[7 October is] going to be every day for you.’ President Biden is right: this is ‘blatant anti-Semitism’.
We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.
More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.
How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.
From Ian:
Biden’s ‘starvation politics’ help with his base
In recent weeks, massive amounts of humanitarian aid have entered Gaza in hundreds of trucks. Around 500 trucks are entering the strip daily. What is particularly irksome to Israelis is the fact that this abundance is being showered on the Gazans, who democratically chose Hamas, have never revolted against it, and still support the horrific massacre - all while our captives languish in Gaza's tunnels, enduring unimaginable torture.
According to Israeli experts, Gaza is receiving far more than it needs, and the Americans know this down to the smallest details. The Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) has presented data to the Americans that 21 bakeries are operating in southern and central Gaza and another three in the north. They bake millions of pitas daily. The amount of water produced in the strip exceeds 5 gallons of drinking and cooking water per person per day. There have been 3,350 coordination efforts made between the IDF and aid organizations to facilitate the entry of aid.
This picture is well known to the official American representatives. Yet, they are hounding the Israeli leaders with endless demands. Everyone dealing with the issue knows that Israel is allowing far more than Gaza can absorb. "The Americans are driving Minister Ron Dermer crazy 24/7 with all these things, knowing there's no need for them. The UN inside Gaza is failing to distribute what's coming in. So why is more needed?" asks an Israeli who is privy to the data.
The American pressure results in an increasing burden for the IDF. Soldiers are required to secure the massive supply convoys, the construction of the seaport on the Gaza coast, the laying of a new water pipeline to the strip, and the opening of a crossing in the north. Defense Ministry inspectors spend nights and days examining the contents destined for the enemy, even though the enemy itself doesn't need it.
Meanwhile, the U.S. administration is tacitly endorsing, and sometimes explicitly using, the blood libel about "starvation in Gaza." Yet its officials are well aware that there was never any danger of starvation. Israel has been monitoring the humanitarian situation in Gaza from day one and would never allow this. Yet, the official and deliberate U.S. message is "immediate risk of starvation" - a lie that fuels the anti-Israel propaganda machine, which has been spreading the falsehood of "genocide in Gaza" around the world for months now.
One Israeli official said, "In direct conversations with the Americans, you see they are well-versed in the data. We, inside the room, wonder where they're getting these statements from. They know what's happening. They have an interest in not presenting what they know, and not affirming what Israel is saying. They should be saying, 'There is no starvation in Gaza, and Israel is doing everything it can to get food in. The bottleneck is not its fault.' But they choose not to say that."
Israel Is Hamas’s Most Potent Weapon
Sinwar took this strategy to a new level by building a massive underground city that would suck Israelis into killing Palestinians. Armaments, missile launchers, and terrorist command posts were positioned under hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential buildings, forcing Israelis to kill civilians, whether by airstrikes or in any conceivable ground operation if they were ever to stop the attacks. Sinwar, whose life was saved by Israeli medical intervention during his time in prison, knows that Israel does not execute even convicted murderers of Jews. His goal in provoking Israel into retaliation was to create and keep worsening Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis” and the toll of civilian casualties, thereby eliciting liberal sympathy for the Palestinians and international calls for an advantageous ceasefire while, most crucially, demoralizing the Israelis who must sacrifice their soldiers in a war they would have done anything to avoid.
Has the genius of Israel met its match in the genius of evil? Other commanders in the history of war have been known to sacrifice tens of thousands of their soldiers rather than surrender, but no invader ever turned his enemy into his primary weapon. Sinwar intends never to surrender, hoping that Israel will be forced to kill most of the population of Gaza in order to stop Hamas. The genocide of Jews that he undertook to engineer has already been equalized to a genocide by Jews against the innocent, harmless Hamas electorate.
When Golda Meir famously told Anwar Sadat, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children,” she divulged Israel’s greatest weakness. Coexistence is to Judaism as conquest has been to Islam, requiring the former to seek accord from the latter. Hamas was first to fully to exploit this political contrast. Liberal democracies are generally loath to go to war, but a look at the Middle East map shows why Israel—when you can find it there—has the ultimate disincentive for military action against neighbors whose acceptance it seeks. As a minority by choice, Jews have always been at the mercy of imperial powers, of which Iran with its proxies is currently the most threatening. To succeed, the aggressor has learned—and demonstrated—that he must come in the form of a victim.
Meir was wiser when she said, “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” The defeat of Hamas is the necessary precondition for that day, though not yet its guarantee.
And now that sizable numbers of pro-Hamas sympathizers and belligerents are already active in this country, testing its freedoms and liberal virtues, we are seeing whether Americans learn enough from the war in Israel in time to prevent the brewing war against them.
‘Assume Hamas leaders receive UNRWA funding’
People can be excluded from refugee status if they violate the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, per UNHCR’s Resettlement Handbook.
More specifically, those about whom there are “serious reasons” to believe they committed a “crime against peace, a war crime or a crime against humanity” or a “serious non-political crime outside the country of refuge” prior to being admitted to that country as a refugee or who have “been guilty of acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations,” can be excluded.
Elsewhere in the handbook, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees notes that most acts of violence commonly called “terrorism” qualify, “particularly if they indiscriminately endanger or harm civilians.”
The 1951 convention, which the handbook cites, states that “This convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.”
The United Nations has come to interpret that clause very broadly to include Palestinian “refugees” as “not only persons displaced at the time of the 1948 and 1967 hostilities, but also the descendants of such persons.”
Funding terror
“If UNRWA were truly applying universal principles, they would certainly remove anyone who belongs to Hamas from their employment from their staff but, in addition, deny them refugee status,” Neuer, of U.N. Watch, told JNS. “I’m not aware that’s ever happened.”
UNRWA has only suspended or removed an employee for belonging to Hamas in very rare instances, according to Neuer.
“I’ve never heard of anyone, though, including some of the chief terrorists, who are denied refugee status or denied aid,” he said. “We can assume that many, if not all, of the Hamas leaders are on the rolls as UNRWA refugees and are receiving funding in one form or another from UNRWA.”
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin:
The illiberal crusade to defend antisemitic mobs
Just as troubling is the willingness of many in the chattering classes to defend the protesters and pretend that expressions of antisemitism are a matter of free speech rather than hate. The Guardian’s Moira Donegan attacked Shafik in a column for what she described as “colluding with the far right” by calling in the police to enforce the university’s rules. She treated the entire idea that antisemitism was present as a right-wing talking point rather than an awful reality for Jewish students, whose plight interested her not at all.
The Times’ Michelle Goldberg sounded a similar theme in her denunciation of both the House committee investigating antisemitism and Shafik.
Both quoted comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a committee member whose questions were aimed at denying the antisemitic nature of the mobs that had transformed Columbia into a hotbed of Jew-hatred. That someone who has been censured by the House for her own repeated antisemitic rhetoric should sit on such a committee (or in Congress itself) is an irony completely lost on leftists. Both Donegan and Goldberg thought it was an outrage that Omar’s daughter—a junior at Barnard College—was among those participating in the pro-Hamas demonstration and rightly suspended from the school, though that piece of information was not generally known when Omar was trying to sabotage the hearing.
As with the rest of the debate about whether the antisemitism being vented on college campuses in the six months since Oct. 7 should be protected free speech, most of the arguments in defense of these mobs are disingenuous. The notion that the pro-Hamas activists are defending free speech is risible considering that most of their efforts are focused on silencing defenders of Israel and the Jews. These are not idealists acting out their sympathy for Palestinian victims but, rather, ideologues who have embraced the cause of a terrorist war to destroy the Jewish state.
What must also be acknowledged is that the crusade on the part of much of the liberal commentariat to defend or rationalize this epidemic of antisemitism is profoundly illiberal. This applies to those who, like the Times’ foreign-policy columnist Nicholas Kristof, have sought to mainstream blood libels against Israel. Their goal is to change the conversation about the war against Hamas from a necessary campaign to eradicate terrorists to an effort to legitimize a genocidal movement and its Western apologists.
The saddest aspect of this debate is the way it has been politicized by the left to make it appear that the fight against antisemitism is a Republican issue. It is deeply unfortunate that much of the liberal activist base of the Democratic Party that has been captured by advocates for critical race theory and intersectionality has taken sides against Israel in the war against Hamas. It’s also true that—as the daily drumbeat of incitement against Israel and its Jewish supporters in the Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC show—left-wing journalists are doing their utmost to legitimize anti-Jewish hate.
The effort to curb the surge of antisemitism in this country should not be conducted along party lines. Democrats and Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives, should be lining up against those who agree with Omar and her cheering section that antisemitic mobs are principled idealists rather than self-entitled hate-mongers. All decent Americans should—if not agreeing with Cotton about roughly preventing illegal protesters from taking over our public squares—be actively seeking to treat these antisemitic agitators with the disdain and punishment they deserve. If the defenders of the mobs prevail, the alternative is a nation where antisemitism is mainstreamed and Jewish safety a thing of the past.
Andrew Pessin:
The Indelible Stain of Antisemitism: The Failed Practice of ‘Jew-Washing,’ Part 2
The most famous here are perhaps the Neturei Karta, a fringe group whose members appear at anti-Israel events worldwide.[10] They are ideal for Jew-washers, since, in their ultra-orthodox appearance, they are quite visibly Jews—and what could better exonerate an Israel-hater from charges of antisemitism when such clear Jews hate Israel too? Yes, they are a small group, but they are real, and they do derive their anti-Israelism from their Judaism: the Hebrew Bible as they read it teaches that Jews will legitimately re-form their political collective in the Land of Israel only by divine means, upon the coming of the Jewish Messiah. The contemporary State of Israel, then, is a religious abomination. The fact that the state and its overall culture are largely secular—surely only worse. No wonder they have 3-D hatred toward it.[11]
But does the existence of Neturei Karta successfully exonerate the non-Jewish anti-Israelist from the charge of antisemitism? (Henceforth we focus only on the “invoking authority” mode of Jew-washing.)
To see why not, consider a distinction made by former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who famously described campus attempts to boycott and divest from Israel as “antisemitic in effect if not intent.” Effective antisemitism will roughly be any position, policy, or behavior that de facto discriminates in some negative way against Jews, whatever its actual content or intent. Intentional antisemitism is much harder to define, but doing so should not be necessary for our purposes. Suffice to note that sometimes a person’s intentions can absolve even his effective antisemitism from counting as antisemitism simpliciter.[12]
Neturei Karta’s ideology does seem to be effectively antisemitic, after all, for it discriminatorily denies to the Jewish people (pre-Messiah) the same right to political self-determination in their ancestral homeland that presumably all other peoples enjoy in theirs. Members of the group themselves may escape the charge of being intentional antisemites (or antisemites simpliciter), however, since they sincerely derive their position from bona fide Jewish principles.
But the same is simply not true for the non-Jewish Israel-haters who Jew-wash with Neturei Karta. They share the group’s effectively antisemitic doctrine that the Jewish state is illegitimate while not sharing precisely those intentions that would exonerate their antisemitism.[13]
So Jew-washing with Neturei Karta fails. Neturei Karta provide an illusory cover for Israel-haters’ antisemitism, but they do not remove it.
We turn in the next part to what we might call “ultra-non-orthodox Jewish anti-Israelism.”
Gaza cease-fire alone won’t repair larger enduring rift, political scientist says
Calls for a cease-fire in Gaza may be well-intentioned, but a halt to the current fighting will not repair the enduring rift between Israelis and Palestinians. That can only happen once the Palestinians abandon an ideology that rejects the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state, said Israeli political scientist Einat Wilf ’96.
During a conversation Friday with Tarek Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance and faculty director of the Middle East Initiative at HKS, Wilf spoke about the war in Gaza and why she thinks there’s been so little progress reaching a resolution over the years. The talk was the fifth in an ongoing Middle East Dialogues series at Harvard Kennedy School, organized by Masoud, which aims to showcase a range of viewpoints on the current crisis and promote informed dialogue.
Describing herself as “the poster child of the Israeli Two-Stater Left,” Wilf served in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, from 2010 to 2013 as a member of the Labor Party, which supports the creation of an independent Palestinian state. She said she still favors such a goal, but no longer believes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is just about land.
“I voted for [Yitzhak] Rabin; I voted for [Ehud] Barak,” she said of the former Labor prime ministers. “I was euphoric in the ’90s, like many Israelis … when Barak goes to Camp David,” she said. “I believed in the vision of a new Middle East.”
But in 2000 and again in 2008, she watched Palestinian leaders refuse the terms of proposals from the Israelis for a state in the West Bank in Gaza.
“And I began to ask myself, ‘What is going on? What do the Palestinians want — because it’s clearly not a state,’” said Wilf, a former intelligence analyst. “They could have had that, and they walked away” without being criticized by the Palestinian people.
She came to that realization after conversations she’s had with many highly educated, moderate Palestinians over the last 20 years. “They basically tell me things like, ‘The Jewish people are not a people. You’re only a religion. This idea that you have a connection to this land, you invented it to steal our own,’” she said.
“And I realized from the conversations with them that how they think about the conflict, and how I think about it, don’t even meet. For them, the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state is illegitimate.”
From Ian:
The Rape Denialists
Considering the overwhelming evidence that sexual assault took place, despite the inherent challenges in collecting such evidence in wartime, it’s difficult to fathom why so many on the anti-Israel left continue to deny that it occurred or cast doubt on its significance.
The most obvious explanation is that by questioning what happened on October 7, activists hope to undercut the rationale for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Showing that systematic sexual abuse didn’t happen would, they believe, demonstrate that Israel is engaged in a mass public deception to justify killing Palestinians.
But some experts I spoke with see other factors at play.
The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as “part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.” “Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,” Elman said, and “this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.”
One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. “There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,” she told me, “to centering ‘white feminism’ or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.” By this logic, white feminism is inherently “problematic”—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they “see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to ‘white feminism.’”
Moreover, claims of sexual assault against white women have historically been used to justify racial violence, which has, according to Elman and Petrzela, led some pro-Palestine activists to compare Hamas to Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South before his brutal murder. It’s “unhinged,” Petrzela said, “but in some ways totally predictable.”
Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance “armed resistance” but cannot do the same for sexual violence. “You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was ‘only’ guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.”
Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. “Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,” he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7 have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.
Seth Mandel:
Progressives’ Pro-War Protest Movement
Yesterday’s protests at Columbia highlighted a key difference between the left-wing protests of generations past and the current demonstrations: While both cheer America’s enemies, the 2024 version is ostentatiously, undeniably pro-war.
I used to shake my head when people would accuse others of being “warmongers,” because the term was so often reserved for people who very obviously did not fit the bill. If you want to know what a warmonger actually is, check out those who have for six months cheered rabidly for the very concept of war itself. Anti-war protesters usually lose interest when the U.S. isn’t involved. But personal interest has no role here; these protesters live vicariously through any fascist with a gun, drone, or rocket launcher.
“Never forget the 7th of October,” they shouted at Jews at Columbia last night. “That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, not 10,000… The 7th of October is going to be every day for you.”
This kind of enthusiasm for the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, complete with sexual torture and the dismemberment of young children, is important to note for several reasons, only one of which is that it highlights these protestors’ uncontrollable urge for the Mideast war to go on forever. It’s also notable because it’s honest: The Hamas-a-thons all around the country have been clear about what their participants want. Screeching bloodlust so explicit it would have made Nazis blush has become the ticket to ride in progressive activist circles.
“Iran, you make us proud!” they cheered in New York City, after the Islamic Republic launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones from its territory aimed at Israel, in what was an unprecedented region-wide act of war.
In January, another chant became popular at such gatherings: “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud; turn another ship around!” This was a reference to the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen who declared war on civilian ships traversing the Red Sea. Though the Houthis talk mostly about their hatred for Jews and America, their victims so far have been Vietnamese and Filipino. The Iran attack, lauded by Khamenei fans in New York City, badly injured one person: a young Arab girl. But it doesn’t matter to these psychos whose blood you draw so long as you pair your war strikes with demented comments about Jews.
Iran follows footsteps of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia
Iran’s case is different, and yet the principle – that aggression contains the seeds of its own defeat – applies to it all the same.
Iran’s aggression is unique both technically and substantively. Technically, unlike Germany and Japan, it is endowed with natural resources, and in this regard resembles the Soviet Union. However, unlike the other great aggressors, all of which were driven by secular ideas, Iran is driven by religion.
The ayatollahs believe Iran should dominate the Middle East, Shi’ism should dominate Islam, and Islam should dominate the world. This is what made Tehran spend billions on the creation of militias that destabilize the Middle East, this is what made them dispatch terrorists from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, and this is what now makes them help Russia confront the West in Ukraine.
The free world’s response to this aggression is the same as it was in all three previous cases: strategic reluctance and psychological denial.
It’s easy to say this in hindsight, but the fact is that Germany’s aggression could have been preempted militarily, had the free world not lied to itself that Hitler’s appetite begins and ends in the Sudetenland. Similarly, in May 1939, when Soviet and Japanese armies clashed in Mongolia, the democratic powers could have sided with Moscow, and thus prevented the following summer’s Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and also the subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor.
That, of course, is not how democratic statecraft works. Just like for fascists war is a national value, a moral ideal and a political weapon of first resort, for us democrats it is anathema, trauma, and a weapon of last resort.
That is why the free world in 1956 abandoned Hungary to its Soviet masters’ devices rather than help its anti-Soviet revolt, even after Budapest declared its desire to join NATO.
That is why there was nothing surprising about this week’s pleas to Israel from both Europe and America to avoid a grand retaliation against Iran.
It’s a time-honored tradition in which everyone plays their part: the aggressors keep upping the ante, the free keep denying aggression’s threat, and history, while leading the aggressor to its dustbin, keeps raising freedom’s price.
So yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran, like Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia, will sooner or later collapse. The only question is whether that will happen because of the free world’s conduct, or despite it.
From Ian:
Iran, not Israel, is escalating this war
The West’s admonishments of Israel certainly cannot be put down to simple wavering on Joe Biden’s part. Despite his oft-professed claim to be a staunch supporter of Israel, he has been equivocal in backing Israel in its war against Hamas. Crucially, he has also avoided discussing the Hamas-Iran connection despite it being transparently clear. As Gadi Taub, a veteran Israeli journalist, noted last year: ‘From the get-go, the US denied Iran’s fingerprints on the Hamas attack. National-security adviser Jake Sullivan said there was no “direct” evidence of Iranian involvement.’ That was despite the fact there was ample evidence, including public statements by Hamas leaders thanking Iran for its support.
Last month, the Biden administration approved a sanctions waiver worth $10 billion to Iran – a nation it has publicly declared to be a state sponsor of terrorism. America could have chosen to suspend or discontinue this waiver in the wake of Iran’s assault on Israel, but it has not done so. That it remains in place is all the more remarkable given that a drone attack by an Iranian-backed group recently killed three American soldiers and injured 30 others in Jordan. You don’t have to support the sanctions to notice the wide gap between America’s words and its deeds when it comes to Iran.
Biden’s relatively soft stance on Iran is actually in line with a political realignment among Democrats dating back to the Obama administration, when Biden was vice-president. As Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, has noted:
‘Those policies began in the week after President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. In one of the 44th president’s first acts of foreign diplomacy, Obama sent an offer of reconciliation to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That June, in his historic Cairo speech, Obama became the first president to refer to Tehran’s regime as the Islamic Republic of Iran – legitimising the oppressive theocracy – and stood aside while that republic’s thugs beat and shot hundreds of Iranian citizens protesting for their freedom.’
There are two distinct motivations for America’s long-term attempt to tilt away from Israel and towards Iran. The first is geopolitical and the second lies in the sphere of domestic politics.
Where geopolitics is concerned, the Democrats are keen to draw the Islamic Republic, a regime that has condemned America as the ‘Great Satan’, closer into the US’s orbit. Officially, the US has not had diplomatic relations with Iran since 1980, the year after the Islamists took power in the Iranian Revolution. They have instead tried to maintain relations by other means. These have included the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), unofficially known as the Iran nuclear deal, promoted by Obama and later by Biden.
This is all part of a broader US strategy known as the pivot to Asia. The aim is to reorient American foreign policy away from the Middle East and towards East Asia. Its priority is to contain China.
The Biden administration’s hope is that defusing tensions with the hostile forces in the Middle East will make its pivot to Asia easier. Yet since the pivot was announced, the US has found itself dragged into further conflicts in the Middle East, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. America has also found itself reluctantly drawn into the periodic conflicts between Israel and Hamas. Biden wants to untangle America from this bitter strife as much as he possibly can. This means downgrading its commitments to Israel.
What’s more, the Biden administration, like Obama before it, is increasingly influenced by domestic identity politics. Many grassroots US Democrats see the conflicts involving Israel in simplistic black and white terms. Israel is today portrayed as a regional bastion of privilege – supposedly akin to those who enjoy privilege at home in America – with the Palestinians representing the oppressed. The involvement of Islamist movements in the region, which have pledged to destroy Israel, is ignored or at least downplayed. The activists who hold this view have placed considerable pressure on Biden to withdraw support for Israel.
There are also notable overlaps between the Islamist worldview and the woke worldview. Both tend to see Israel representing the side of evil. Both fail to distinguish between the Palestinian people and Hamas, with its goal of an international Islamic order. And both also tend to downplay or even dismiss the role of anti-Semitism as a key motivating force in the current conflict.
Today, Israel faces not just the wrath of its genocidal enemies – from Hamas to Iran and its other proxies. It also has to contend with its increasing isolation from the West. This is a dangerous moment.
Bernard-Henri Lévy:
Israel Must Respond Forcefully to Iran’s Attack
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not just a failed regime, economically ruined, disavowed by its youth, women, and its living elements, revealed to have the force of a paper tiger.
It’s also a country that—like the USSR of recent times, where there coexisted both a real country devastated by economic misery and public demoralization, and decoupled from that, an ultramodern military-industrial complex able to compete with the United States—established a secret but effective nuclear industry.
It’s a country whose programs in that area have only grown and prospered as America changed course, over the last 15 years, oscillating between Obama’s ineffectual and misbegotten policy of détente and, under Trump, ineffectual ranting.
And, as for Iran’s nuclear programs, their sites have been moved and often buried over the years; their centrifuges have become capable of producing enough enriched uranium to build stockpiles 22 times above the limit authorized by the 2015 nuclear deal; IAEA inspectors no longer have meaningful access to them. These sites have become giant black holes, off the radar, from which the world could learn, in six months, in a year, suddenly, that Iran has been allowed to join North Korea and Russia in the club of dictatorships capable of setting the planet on fire …
I’ll add that the same Iranian drones that, with the exception of a young girl in the south of the country, systematically missed their targets are the very ones that Putin has used, for two years now, to ravage Ukraine.
And I’ll add that the same Iran that was mocked, this Monday morning, for its pathetic failure in the face of the solidity of the Iron Dome, recently engaged, in the Persian Gulf, in joint naval maneuvers, largely unnoticed, with the Russian and Chinese navies.
Let’s imagine, then, that the Iranian regime emerges unharmed from this adventure.
Let’s imagine that it sees this adventure not as a lamentable defeat, but as a dress rehearsal. And let’s suppose that they repeat it, six months, a year from now, with faster and more accurate drones and missiles, equipped with operational nuclear warheads.
That, for Israel and, beyond, for the region, is a terrifying prospect. It is a clear existential threat.
And that is why it feels unreasonable to me that “cowardly relief” reigns among Israel’s allies and dictates, everywhere, the same recommendation for “de-escalation” and “restraint.”
Iran has declared war.
There is no other choice, alas, but to retaliate.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?
Before the Biden appeasement of Iran, the Trump administration had isolated and nearly bankrupted Tehran and its proxies. Its Revolutionary Guard terrorist planners proved to be easy targets once they operated outside Iran.
Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.
Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.
Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shia neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?
Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?
Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?
Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon—as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?
In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression—and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The Columbia Anti-Semitism Hearing
Columbia’s anti-Semitism problem is so advanced that today’s hearing was devoted solely to the esteemed former King’s College. The school’s representatives at the hearing were President Minouche Shafik, trustee cochairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, and its anti-Semitism task force head, law professor David Schizer (a one-time COMMENTARY contributor).
In December, the three school presidents failed to answer in the affirmative when they were asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their institutions’ policy on student harassment. Shafik and Co. were ready for that question today…but were unprepared for a host of others. Ironically, Stefanik saved Shafik from a late-hearing blunder regarding one of the most important questions of the entire proceeding.
It began when GOP Rep. Bob Good asked Shafik: “Have there been any anti-Islamic demonstrations on campus? Any anti-Muslim demonstrations on campus? Any anti-Arab demonstrations on campus?”
Shafik’s initial response, a telling indication of the warped worldview prevailing in academic spaces, was: “There have been many pro-Israeli demonstrations on our college campus.”
That was, by far, her worst answer of the day. Good stopped her and the two of them clarified together that as a matter of fact, there have been no anti-Arab or Islamophobic rallies on the Columbia campus.
That stands in contrast to the fact that the Columbia campus exists in an almost perpetual state of anti-Jewish agitation. That is true of plenty of other schools around the country as well. The key fact of the past six months in university life has been this: whether it be protests, harassment, intimidation by teachers and students, or administrative discrimination, no other group has been facing anything like what Jews have faced. University faculty, administrators, and student groups are guilty of no other organized campaign of out-group harassment. No other group is consistently told by campus security officials to hide evidence of their religion or ethnicity for their own safety. On the nation’s college campuses, nothing else exists that is comparable in any way, shape, or form to the campaign against Jews.
Matti Friedman:
Homage to Orwell
Many of Orwell’s comrades took his honesty about Soviet Communism as heresy, and he spent years afterward avoiding old Stalinists in pubs. An account of this time appears in a superb new biography by D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The New Life, which was published last year. Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, wouldn’t touch his book about Spain because of its anti-Soviet angle, as the biography recounts, and the New Statesman turned down his essay “Eye-Witness in Barcelona” for the same reason: it would “cause trouble.” The magazine’s editor, Kingsley Martin, explained later that though the article may indeed have been true, the editor’s decision must actually be based “on general public grounds, to the end that one side might win rather than the other side.”
All of this sounds as if it were drawn precisely from my own experience seven decades later working in the Western press in Israel, which left me with similar conclusions and ultimately led me to Orwell’s essays. It is obvious that the story in the Middle East and North Africa in our times is the rise of violent and conflicting strains of Islam and the move of these ideologies and their adherents into the West. A great deal of effort goes into obscuring this, even though the phenomenon is visible from Algeria through Syria and Yemen and Iraq to Afghanistan, and from the Twin Towers to the Bataclan theater to the Nice promenade and the Manchester Arena. For a reporter in Israel, the main local incarnations of the phenomenon are the Islamic Resistance Movement (known by the Arabic acronym Hamas) and Islamic Jihad among Palestinians and the more formidable Party of God militia (Hezbollah) in Lebanon, all allied to some extent with the Islamic Republic of Iran, all working to forge a new Islamic order, and all explicitly dedicated to erasing the unbearable pocket of Jewish sovereignty on 0.2 percent of the land of the Arab world.
This is depressing but not very complicated. However, during my time in the press, we were expected to tiptoe politely around Islam’s two billion adherents and pretend the region’s key story was a group of six million Jews oppressing a minority, the Palestinians, who only wanted a peaceful state beside Israel. Because this was mostly fictional, my colleagues and I were forced into increasingly ludicrous contortions as we “built emotional superstructures over events that had never happened,” in Orwell’s words, and buried much of what was actually happening—like Israel’s rejected peace offer of late 2008, for example, which we were instructed not to cover, or like the way Hamas followed Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza by methodically wiring the territory like a suicide bomber, building a system of tunnels under the entire civilian landscape and quite clearly condemning vast numbers to death in the holy war they promised was coming.
This all fits what Orwell understood about the way Western observers are guided chiefly by their own politics and imaginations. Atrocities in war, he wrote, “are to be believed in or disbelieved in according to political predilection, with utter non-interest in the facts and with complete unwillingness to alter one’s beliefs as soon as the political scene alters.” He would have understood the refusal by many observers in our times to believe the details of the Hamas murders, rapes, and kidnappings of October 7, while being eager to believe a few weeks later that Israel had purposely bombed a hospital—and also the unwillingness of some on my own side to admit any civilian suffering in Gaza, and the desire to dismiss anything that makes us feel bad as “Pallywood.”
Some elements of Orwell’s writing suggest he would grasp the nature of Israel’s dilemma. One example stands out in particular: a striking line from a 1938 article phrasing the horrific dilemma of modern industrial war, which I read for the first time in Taylor’s biography. “The only apparent alternatives,” Orwell wrote, “are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with lumps of thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more willing to do these things than you are yourself.” He hated wars, nationalism, and the British Empire, whose rapaciousness and racism he’d seen up close while a young man serving as a colonial policeman in Burma. But when World War II came, he tried to join the British Army, was rejected because of poor health, and ended up an enthusiastic recruit to the Home Guard. A responsible person will have to choose among poor options or different kinds of evil.
Everyone has right to self-determination, except Jews
We have recently been provided with fresh evidence of this moral collapse: Starting with the high priestess of progressivism, Judith Butler described Hamas as a progressive movement and the events of October 7th as acts of resistance. And it continues with the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT, who shamefully failed to condemn the call to genocide of the Jewish People.
The events of October 7 brought antisemitism to new heights of insanity and hatred: blatant support for the rape and murder of innocent men, women, and children, the demonization of IDF soldiers and the state of the Jewish people, comparing them to Nazis, the distortion of the Holocaust, and the application of hypocritical double standards tailored to specifically target one people and one state alone.
Streets in Europe are once again unsafe for Jews, and many of its leaders, instead of showing courage, are demonstrating weakness.
Instead of standing with the truth, they align themselves with false Palestinian propaganda. Instead of supporting the victims of the attack, they choose to side with the aggressors.
This moral laxity may serve short-term interests, but make no mistake: The ultimate result will be the intensification and strengthening of radical Islam barbarism.
It is enough to see what is happening on the streets of London to understand where we are heading. Just recently, British MP and friend of Israel Mike Freer was forced to step down from his position due to threats on his life from Islamists after his office was set ablaze by Hamas supporters.
Freedom is waning in the country that brought the Magna Carta to the world, and people can no longer speak freely; even Churchill’s statue requires protection to keep it from being vandalized.
Freedom is waning here, in the capital of the European Union, as we are all currently experiencing at this important conference. With strong “progressive” forces, doing everything to not allow up to speak up and share our voice.
As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminds us: “What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.”
Those who turn their back on the righteous war we are fighting against absolute evil will eventually bring it to their doorstep.
Those who seek to deny us our historical rights in our eternal homeland will see their rights undermined.
The future belongs to those nations that will relegate political correctness and woke culture to the dustbin of history.
The future of the West hinges on courageous nations willing to swim against the current, and re-cultivate the values that Judeo-Christian civilization has brought to the world: the importance of tradition, the sanctity of the family, and the vitality of a robust community.
It depends on education that fosters a familiarity and appreciation of the past to comprehend the present and shape the future.
Dr. Chazoni, in one of your essential articles on conservatism, you wrote the following lines: "...The only forces that grant the state its internal consistency and stability are our national and religious traditions."
The unique national tradition is the foundation, and upon it is added the floor of individual freedoms and the limitation of executive authority, not vice versa. This is the essence of the conservative view.
This worldview is shared by a series of exceptional leaders, some of whom are with us here today, such as Prime Minister Victor Orban. Under his leadership and action, Hungary is one of the safest countries in Europe for its citizens and also for its small Jewish community that can express its identity in public freely without fear of harassment and violent attacks.
The leaders who stand firm on the right of Israel today do not do so because it is a startup nation, nor because of its cherry tomatoes.
They do it because they draw inspiration from the history of an ancient nation that has risen from the ashes and rebuilt its ruins. They are inspired by the eternal book that forms the foundation of our civilization.
They do so because of the values we share — human life, faith, family, and freedom. Eternal values that will survive both the storm of Jihadism that sanctifies death and the storm of "progress" that sanctifies nothingness.
This world is fundamentally good, this is our belief, which is why we bring sweet children into it even during difficult times, and why our anthem is "Hatikvah", The Hope.
From Ian:
Elliott Abrams:
How Israel Can Win in Gaza - and Deter Iran
In the wake of Iran's attack on Israel with hundreds of drones and missiles last weekend, Israel must decide how to calibrate its response. One part of Israel's response must be to stay the course in Gaza, despite tremendous pressure from the U.S. and others to retreat. That means entering the southern Gaza city of Rafah and eliminating the Hamas brigades and leaders based there.
In 2006, Hizbullah attacked Israel, and the George W. Bush administration, in which I was serving at the time, gave the Israelis strong support - but only for a couple of weeks, after which Washington pressured Israel to end the war by extending assurances that have never been met and never seemed likely to be.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006 included an end to arms transfers by any state to Hizbullah and total Lebanese army control of Lebanon's south. Neither stipulation has ever been enforced - a testament to the dangers of relying on a paper peace rather than conditions on the ground. That is why Israel is resisting international pressure, especially from Washington, for a ceasefire that would leave Hamas in control.
Israelis across the ideological spectrum agree that Hamas must be crushed because they see the fight as an existential conflict. All of Israel's enemies are watching to see whether Israel can fully recover from the Oct. 7 attack. If they conclude that it cannot, the Jewish state will find itself in mortal peril. Israel gained Arab partners in the region through demonstrations of strength, not acts of restraint.
Polls make it clear that both Israelis and Palestinians are highly unenthusiastic about and wary of the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gallup polls found that 65% of Israelis opposed the two-state solution and only 25% supported it. Among Palestinians, polls that Gallup conducted before Oct. 7 found that 72% of Palestinians opposed the two-state solution and only 24% supported it.
Moreover, the PA lacks the ability to lead a Palestinian state that would be free and democratic, have a decent and effective government, and build a prosperous economy. Palestinian nationalism still seems to be more about destroying the Jewish state than about building a Palestinian one. In addition, an independent Palestine would represent yet another route through which Iran would seek to attack Israel.
In last weekend's mammoth Iranian aerial assault, the Islamic Republic deployed hundreds of drones and rockets against Israel. Israelis understand that their country's long-term survival depends on reasserting deterrence by striking back: displaying resilience, determination, and military prowess.
Caroline Glick:
What happens when children seize the wheel
Since Saturday night, U.S. officials and supportive commentators have played up the “international coalition” that came together to prevent Iran’s missiles from causing harm to Israel. This ad hoc group, which included Jordan and Saudi Arabia, it is said, are proof that Israel can depend on America and that if Israel follows Washington’s directives, it will enjoy peace and security even as Iran grows in power, and its proxies prevail, thanks to America’s protection.
But the truth is far different. The Saudis and the Jordanians are directly threatened by Iran. Unlike the children running U.S. policies, the Jordanians and Saudis were aghast at Iran’s assault, which they rightly understood was not a tit for tat, but an unprecedented escalation of Iran’s war. They realized that the attack was a sign that Iran believes that thanks to the Biden administration, it is now immune from counterattack, to the point where it dares to attack Israel directly. Their intervention wasn’t on Israel’s behalf, per se. It was self-defense, as officials from both countries have stated.
The U.S. posture in this war has rattled Israel and the U.S.’s Sunni allies to their core. Like Nasrallah, all of them now understand that while the United States is the most powerful actor in the region, it is also delusional. It fails to understand the reality of what is happening. Washington’s policies for contending with the war that Biden and his top officials refuse to acknowledge are just making things worse.
If Israel fails to defeat Hamas in Gaza, then there will no longer be any restraints on Iranian and Iranian-proxy aggression against Israel. And there will also be no restraints on Iran’s efforts to overthrow the regimes of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. If the United States successfully forces Israel to stand down in the face of Iran’s shocking attack, then that attack will be the baseline for future assaults—conventional and unconventional—against Israel and the Sunni Arab states.
Iran itself is so certain that this is the case that its top officials are now speaking openly about using nuclear weapons. As the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported, on April 7, Iranian nuclear scientist Mahmoud Reza Aghamiri said in an interview with Iranian television that Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei can change his religious ruling forbidding the production of an atomic bomb whenever he wishes. Aghamiri said that Iran’s nuclear capabilities “are high,” and that once a country has nuclear capabilities, making a nuclear bomb “is not complicated.”
The administration’s refusal to recognize the existential nature of the war Iran and its proxies are now waging against Israel places Israel in an existential dilemma.
Israel today is compelled to decide between two options. It can fight the war to win it, in Iran and Gaza, first and foremost, and risk a rupture of relations with the United States.
Or, it can lose the war and accept the position of a U.S. protectorate, with the full knowledge that the United States will not permit its protectorates to challenge Iranian hegemony.
In other words, if Israel fails to risk a rupture in relations with the United States, it will accept a position that will lead to its destruction.
Matthew Continetti:
Biden's Bad Advice for Israel—And America
In statecraft, defense without retaliation is exceedingly dangerous. It leads to a false sense of security. It emboldens the aggressor. This isn't academic international relations theory. This is Hamas 2024.
For over a decade, Israel believed it could disengage from the Gaza Strip by relying on its layered missile defenses and periodic "mowing the grass" air campaigns to degrade terrorist capabilities. The two-pronged strategy would hold Hamas in check. The promise of economic integration, with Palestinian workers crossing from Gaza into Israel, might even promote reform within the Strip.
Such was the logic behind the "Conceptzia" that governed Israeli policy toward Hamas.
The Conceptzia died on October 7. Land-based missile defenses such as the Iron Dome and David's Sling are remarkably effective. They have saved lives. But they haven't changed the nature, aims, and objectives of Hamas. They changed its tactics.
To protect its personnel and weapons from the Israeli air force, Hamas built a submerged state of tunnels and spider holes. Meanwhile, Hamas's leadership planned the surprise land, air, and sea attack that killed 1,300 Israelis, wounded thousands, and took hundreds captive.
You can shield your population from harm, but threats will remain until the source of the attacks is neutralized. That was the lesson of October 7. It should be the takeaway from April 13.
If Iran's attack goes unanswered, a new precedent will be set in the region. Fire whatever you want toward Israel, and so long as we intercept the projectiles, you won't pay a big price. Such an outcome would be a disaster. No sovereign state should be forced to accept such vulnerability. Yet that is precisely what will happen if Israel takes the "win" as President Biden suggests.
A real win would reestablish deterrence against Israel's and America's enemies. It would make Iran think twice before launching any more drones in Israel's direction. And the way to reestablish deterrence is to ignore the arms of the octopus and go straight for its head.
Take away something Iran's leaders hold dear—their nuclear program. By destroying Iran's nuclear infrastructure, you not only exact a heavy cost for the regime's malign behavior. You guarantee Israel's security.
After all, why did America come to Israel's defense but not to Ukraine's? Both nations are under assault. The difference is Israel's assailant has no nuclear weapons. Ukraine's enemy has thousands.
Would America coordinate a similar operation to defend Israel if Iran had nukes? Maybe a future president would do that. This president would not.
I understand Netanyahu's position. A superpower is not easily dismissed. Especially when that superpower—despite counterproductive rhetoric and diplomatic incoherence—continues to deliver unconditional military aid for operations against Hamas. Especially when that superpower helped Israel fend off the Iranian attack. Israel wants to keep America on its side, where America belongs.
Yet lines must be drawn. Leaving Iran to fight another day, and leaving Hamas intact in Rafah, weaken the state of Israel and diminish the future of the Jewish people. Talk all you want, Mr. President. But if you call this a win, God help us if we lose.
From Ian:
Phyllis Chesler:
Behold the 21st-century boycott
Some 73 years after Adolf Hitler fired Jewish professors from German universities—and burned and banned Jewish books—British academics were leading the pack against Israelis.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science condemned the British boycott, as did one of my groups, the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. We launched our own petition. Many who signed were professors of physics, medicine, math and computer science who were not as “politicized” as those in the social sciences and humanities. And many of them described the British boycott as “shameful,” “repugnant,” “indefensible,” “anti-academic” and “dangerous group thinking.”
By 2010, the leading British journal of medicine, The Lancet, published a scurrilous article that blamed indigenous gender apartheid practices (wife-beating, etc.) among Middle Eastern Arabs on the so-called “Israeli occupation.” Their so-called study was funded by the Palestinian National Authority and was collected by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. No control group based in Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia (where similar violence against women was normalized) was used. The Lancet did it again in 2014, by publishing an Open Letter that accused Israel-only of crimes it had not committed. This letter had also been funded by known Palestinian terrorist organizations.
The Lancet has long been viewed as a distinguished journal of science. Increasingly, their work descended into political propaganda which, no doubt, has influenced (or bullied) the coming generations.
Recently, I have been told about some authors in the West who were discouraged from writing—or submitting—anything “Jewish,” be it about Judaism or Israel. Publishers are shying away from this topic.
This is where it all started—in the academy. It influenced two or three generations of professors and students, journalists and international organizations, and is now flourishing in the streets, jihad-style, at loud and aggressive anti-Israel demonstrations all across America and Europe. Cheers for Iran after it attacked Israel with missiles and drones. Remember, there were similar shouts of joy for the Hamas demons on Oct. 7.
I must note that each successive wave of Israel-blaming took place when the Jewish state was under attack and fought back to save itself. That is again the case now.
Seth Mandel:
Media Revive the Classic ‘Jewish Oppressor’ Stereotype
So here’s how the Washington Post frames the Rutgers situation: Pro-Hamas people are having their lives ruined by Jews who highlight their public comments, and this Rutgers fellow is an example not only of that but of essentially doxxing. (Doxxing means to reveal personal identifying information that is either nonpublic or requires enough effort to find that it is, in a practical sense, nonpublic.)
Here’s what actually happened. Members of the Student Bar Association sent their group chat anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas messages after the Oct. 7 massacre, and an Orthodox Jewish law student in the chat, Yoel Ackerman, responded. He shared the messages with the Rutgers Jewish Law Students Association. For this, the law school opened disciplinary proceedings against Ackerman, with the law school dean telling her colleagues “we have a Jewish law student seeking to take and publish the names of those he deems to be supporting Hamas.” He was then subject to a Sovietesque impeachment hearing from the Student Bar Association. Ackerman, without receiving sufficient explanation, was berated for three hours in what amounted to administrative harassment. In order to dispense of their troublesome Jew, the SBA then moved to suspend its own constitution in order to expel Ackerman.
That’s when Rutgers University stepped in, and briefly suspended the SBA while it could sort out the mess that Hamas propagandists and their enthusiastic supporters among the deans had made of the school. The SBA was soon reinstated.
This, the Washington Post tells us, is an example of a Jew oppressing the poor gentile.
This is not biased reporting. It is Jew-baiting propaganda with a long and very disturbing history. The rest of the article, meanwhile, is biased reporting: Verma simply launders the exterminationist language of domestic extremists into legitimate criticism of a foreign government.
The whole article is science fiction. But the apology the paper owes Ackerman is very real.
Congress must pass Define to Defeat Act as definitive stand against antisemitism
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has been embraced by President Biden, former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, 36 U.S. states, and dozens of other countries — not to mention the vast majority of Jews across every spectrum. It underwent a comprehensive, decade-plus-long review conducted by a multitude of experts and is the only definition with an actual track record of demonstrable effectiveness in curbing anti-Jewish hate and bigotry.
As it relates to this act, the IHRA definition of antisemitism also contains the appropriate caveats and carefully balanced safeguards that take into account the importance of nuance and context in situations that involve allegations of discriminatory intent.
For example, the definition makes clear that criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic and that all of the examples are not meant to be dispositive but rather are the types of things that could, taking into account the overall context, be evidence of antisemitism.
The Define to Defeat Act builds on the bipartisan momentum created by Rep. Mike Lawler’s Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify Executive Order 13899 and require the Department of Education to make use of the IHRA definition when assessing unlawful discriminatory behavior under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Mr. Lawler, who has long been a leader on this issue, was working on that bill well before Oct. 7. Since that time, however, it has unfortunately only become clearer that the Jewish community needs the protections clarified in other contexts as well. Hopefully, that bipartisan support will continue; it is hard to imagine someone being supportive of Jewish people being properly protected under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act but not, for example, under Title VII of that same law.
According to the FBI, the majority of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States are committed against Jewish people. That number is on the rise despite the fact that Jews make up only about 2% of the population. This trend is terrifying, and there is much work to be done to defeat it.
That work starts with defining the problem, and God willing, Congress, led by the members from New York, will now do that.
From Ian:
The World Is Paying A Deadly Price For Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy
Just because you shoot at someone and miss doesn’t mean you’re not trying to kill them. Yes, the Iranians were embarrassed. But they almost surely view this as a win. And they also crossed a red line by firing on Israel from their own territory. Yet Israel is apparently the only nation on Earth that is permitted to fully defend itself only if its enemies succeed.
Then again, virtually every conflict against Israel unfurls the same way: Its enemies threaten or attack the country. Israel responds and heads for a victory. Only then does the world demand “restraint.” Finally, the antagonists demand Israel rewind history to a more convenient spot. (Modern Democrats demand that Israel show restraint before it even has a chance to respond. That’s a new twist.)
Those, for instance, who contend that Israel started the conflict when it hit a “diplomatic mission” in Syria last week are engaged in restarting the historical clock when it suits them. There are no Iranian diplomatic missions in Syria. There are buildings where IRGC terror leaders coordinate attacks on civilians — against Arabs as well as Jews. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the “general” Israel killed last week, helped plan the barbarism of Oct 7.
Recall that the United States atomized Qasem Soleimani at a neutral nation’s airport. Though, of course, Obamaites protested that killing as well.
Now, it is something of a cliché to contend that Israel must be right 100 percent of the time while its enemies only need to be right once. It also happens to be true. The lo-fi Hamas attack last year was a devastating failure for the Jewish state and its leadership. Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a dense population area, relies on deterrence and preemption.
Democrats blamed their strawman, Benjamin Netanyahu, not Hamas or Iran, for trying to “drag” the world into war. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, perhaps the wrongest person ever to tread on this planet, theorized that the prime minister wanted “a war to shore up his own crumbling political base.”
Meanwhile, Axois reports that Netanyahu was reluctant to strike back while his cabinet wanted to move immediately. Anyone who’s paid five minutes of attention to Israeli politics knows that Netanyahu is frustratingly cautious. The “war hawk” perception of him is a myth, created by the left because of the prime minister’s open opposition to Obama’s mullah bootlicking.
We have no idea what Israel will do. Maybe caution is the best policy. The notion that the Jewish state simply lashes out in revenge and doesn’t rationally consider all its options is preposterous. Whatever happens, it should be Israel’s terms, not Iran’s.
Despite what Obama’s retreads demand.
Richard Goldberg:
The path that led to Iran’s attack on Israel was one of US appeasement
Amazingly, America became even less hawkish than the Europeans on Iran in some respects. What Iran learnt from all of this is that it can get away with anything. The regime can keep moving towards that nuclear threshold and still get offers of economic relief.
It was only the murder of Mahsa Amini by Iran’s “morality police” and the protests this sparked across the country that briefly halted the appeasement.
Last year, the US offered to open up spigots of money while allowing the regime to trade oil freely with China. In exchange, they asked Iran to stay below the 90 per cent weapons-grade uranium threshold, to not send short range ballistic missiles to Russia and to stop attacking Americans in the Middle East.
Iran came into a major windfall as oil exports rose above two million barrels per day for the first time since the JCPOA period, and $6 billion was released to them as part of a ransom payment to free five American hostages.
Then October 7 hit. What was the response of the US, the UK, and everyone else? Nothing. We downplayed Iran’s connection to Hamas and insisted the Islamic regime was not behind this attack.
A UN Security Council embargo on missile sales to Iran was due to expire ten days after October 7. All the UK, France and Germany, with US support, had to do was send a letter to the Security Council to trigger a snapback sanctions resolution that would have stopped that embargo from expiring. But they didn’t.
Perhaps they fear escalation. But again, what is Iran learning? A $10 billion sanctions waiver allowing the Iraqi government to buy energy from the regime got renewed in November a month after October 7 and it got renewed again last month.
Meanwhile, three Americans have been killed in Jordan by Iran-backed militias, missiles are now raining down on the Red Sea from the Houthis, and Israel is being attacked from Lebanon.
International pressure is applied to Israel while we see ever greater escalation from Iran. Over the past three years, we have allowed an arc of accommodation that has emboldened the Islamic Republic and increased the chances of regional war. It must end now.
WSJ Editorial:
Hamas Rejects Biden’s Hostage Deal—Again
After months of negotiations over the release of 40 hostages among the women, older men and the sick, Hamas now says it can produce only 20, and it wants far more Palestinian terrorists in return. It demands 30 for each civilian hostage and 50 for each captive female Israeli soldier, including 30 terrorists who are serving life sentences.
As usual, the needs of Palestinian civilians mean nothing to Hamas, but how about the needs of the U.S. President? Mr. Biden staked his Gaza strategy on coercing Israel to make the concessions to get a deal and cease-fire. But the holdup wasn’t on the Israeli side.
The more desperate the President appeared for a cease-fire, the more distant it became. When he blamed Israel for all civilian suffering and demanded new Israeli concessions, Hamas raised its demands.
“Thank you to the Americans,” as the Israeli commentator Amit Segal put it on Tuesday, “for your deep understanding of the principles of the Middle Eastern bazaar.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment.
Hamas scorns a deal because the President has given it reason to expect to get the cease-fire it wants without releasing any hostages. Mr. Biden had been slowly delinking the two while creating a public breach with Israel. Doubtless he thought about the signal these steps would send to Dearborn, Mich. Did he think about the signal he is sending Hamas about the five American hostages who may still be alive?
Hamas is unlikely to cut a deal until it feels the knife on its neck, as it did when Israel stormed Gaza City. That yielded the release of 105 hostages. But since Mr. Biden declared himself Protector of Rafah, Hamas’s final stronghold, and Israel withdrew most of its troops, the odds of a deal have declined.
The best hope on the horizon is from Iran’s miscalculation in striking Israel directly. This gives Mr. Biden an opportunity to reset his policy and exert real pressure. When Rafah is on the table, and the terrorists in fancy suits are threatened with expulsion from Qatar, there will again be a reason to talk.
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill:
How woke leftists became cheerleaders for Iran
The truth is that Iran has been laying violent siege to Israel for decades. Through its proxies, it has slaughtered thousands of Israelis. The fascistic pogrom of 7 October was the bloody handiwork of an anti-Semitic army backed by Iran. Two other Iran-backed militias – Hezbollah and the Houthis – have fired hundreds of missiles at Israel since 7 October. The idea that Israel’s bombing of Iranian military men in Damascus was unprovoked, out of the blue, a cunning ploy to drag poor little Iran into a war, is a grotesque inversion of reality. Iran had already declared war on Israel. And visited war on Israel. And made clear its desire to destroy Israel. It isn’t even coy. ‘Death to Israel!’, Iranians cry at regime-sponsored gatherings. The same words are emblazoned on the literal flag of the Houthis movement that does Iran’s dirty work in Yemen.
Surely, it makes more sense to see Israel’s Damascus attack as a ‘retaliatory strike’? Retaliation for the unspeakable barbarism of 7 October, for Hezbollah’s missiles, for the Houthis’ virulently anti-Semitic warmongering? Those who rage against Israel and make excuses for Iran are about as far from being anti-imperialists as you can get. Rather, they’ve thrown their lot in with Iranian imperialism, with the theocratic tyranny’s deployment of war, terror and political favour to the end of fortifying its regional influence. Whatever their placards might say, these activists are objectively pro-war, objectively pro-domination.
The Western left’s blaming of Israel for everything, and its implicit absolution of Iran, is grimly revealing. These people seem to view Israel as the only true actor in the Middle East, and everyone else as mere respondents to Israel’s actions. Israel is the author of the Middle East’s fate, while the rest of them – Hamas, the Houthis, even Iran – are mere bit-part players with the misfortune to be caught up in Israel’s vast and terrifying web. This is identitarianism, not anti-imperialism. A new generation of radicals educated into the regressive ideology that says ‘white’ people are powerful and ‘brown’ people are oppressed can only understand the Middle East in these terms, too.
The end result is that they demonise Israel and infantilise Iran. The Jewish State comes to be seen as uniquely malevolent while Iran is treated as a kind of wide-eyed child who cannot help but lash out at its ‘Zionist’ oppressor. Israel is damned as a criminal state, while Iran’s crimes against humanity are downplayed, even memory-holed. This is where wokeness leads, then: to sympathy for one of the most backward and repressive states on Earth on the deranged basis that its criminal strikes against Israel represent a blow against the arrogant West itself. In encouraging our young to hate their own societies, we’ve made them moral fodder for a far worse society.
Seth Mandel:
Who, Exactly, Does the Hezbollah-Flag-Waving Dirtbag Represent?
Politicians used to chase the Soccer Mom vote. Now they appear to be chasing the Execute-the-Soccer-Mom vote.
Also among the demonstrators were those wearing Hamas headbands. Hamas is the Gaza-based version of Hezbollah and it started the current war by murdering and kidnapping Americans and Israelis. These protesters are ostentatiously anti-American: They were burning American flags and yelling “death to America.”
Again, non-rhetorical question for the politicians who cower before those who yell “death to America”: How many of your constituents do they represent? What is it you stand to lose by forfeiting their vote? What slice of your political coalition chants “death to America”? And why, pray tell, are the opinions of Lebanese terrorists so important to your assessment of the war in Gaza?
We hear a lot about the way these folks intend to deter President Biden’s reelection prospects, which is why the president sent his aides to try to placate a large group of them in Michigan. Can the president explain why he wants the vote of somebody who burns American flags on behalf of a group holding Americans hostage?
The political behavior of a fair number of Democrats has changed in accordance with the demands of these groups of protesters. That is what you do when you must be inclusive of all parts of your electoral coalition. So don’t just obliquely refer to the demonstrators; claim them. Tell us what they mean to you, and why you need them, and why U.S. policy should be shaped by them.
Or stop running from them and start standing up for yourselves.
The News Media Has Helped Normalize Hamas
As a former foreign correspondent in the Middle East, I've frequently found myself defending the industry with Israelis who charge media bias. But as I observe the cluelessness of Hamas apologists worldwide, I realize we have failed to tell the story of a jihadi outfit considered a terrorist group by the U.S.
Support for Hamas in this war is not support for the Palestinian cause of an independent state on a share of the Holy Land. That is not only not the cause of Hamas - it is precisely what Hamas has for decades been laboring to prevent. Hamas is not in power in Gaza due to elections but because of a coup. It runs a quasi-theocratic mafia state where opposition will get you killed, and it seeks eternal war till total victory. Since the 1990s, whenever there were peace talks, Hamas tried to scuttle them with terrorism.
In the case of the Gaza war, the media has largely stuck to its instincts for impartiality: "Both sides" have their narratives, and both have good and bad. One may be a terrorist group and the other a Western-leaning democracy, but in this era of progressive decolonization narratives, an association with the West will not get you very far with much of the Western media.
Hamas is a violent fundamentalist movement that seeks not just the demise of Israel but also, with its jihadi fellow travelers, of the West. Hamas and its accomplices share none of the values that drive the modern world, from respect for human rights to freedom of speech to the rule of law. Are so many Westerners too feeble-minded to get this?
Some argue that no one appointed journalists to connect the dots for people, and that the wisest approach would be to just "report the facts." But when the result is the normalization of a monstrosity like Hamas, that is malpractice.
Pro-Hamas ‘Journalists’ Blur the Line between Coverage and Propaganda
The latest high-profile Gaza-based journalist to have her terror support on full display is Hind Khoudary, who has even been profiled by the New York Times, among other papers. After briefly examining her social-media pages, I posted a thread last week on X (formerly Twitter) that highlighted some of the publicly available content from Khoudary’s social-media accounts to show that she was unfit to don a press vest, including her affiliation with the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Switzerland-based organization with deep ties to Hamas, and the fact that she has repeatedly glorified terrorists and violence. Such behavior should be completely unacceptable for any media outlet using Khoudary’s work (as well as for the United Nations World Food Programme, for which she works as a content producer).
Unsurprisingly, upon posting the findings about Khoudary, I faced the wrath of pro-Hamas activists for supposedly putting a “kill target” on her and insisting that I should be held responsible if she were to be killed. All because I simply reposted her own content.
A similar situation occurred when the founder and editor of the Free Press, Bari Weiss, brought attention to disturbing posts by Refaat Alareer, a Gazan professor, poet, writer, activist, and journalist who once tweeted, under the account “Gaza Writes Back,” “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are.” Weiss was subject to the mob’s ire for flagging a post in which Alareer mocked babies who were slaughtered by terrorists on October 7. When Alareer was later killed in an Israeli airstrike, radicals unjustly placed the blame on Weiss.
Journalists in conflict zones bear a significant responsibility. Ideally, they serve as objective sources from which the public can derive reliable information on which to base their own opinions. However, the reality often falls short of this ideal.
Given these alarming examples, perhaps the most troubling revelation is that the objectivity of a journalist, once the cornerstone of trustworthy reporting, is no longer a chief concern for many. This shift, evident in the media’s acceptance and even glorification of biased narratives during the current war, underscores a worrying trend in the dissemination of news and information.
In a world increasingly fragmented by biased narratives, the role of journalism becomes even more critical. And in such a world, contrary to the claims of some vocal online activists, journalists should be subject to the highest level of scrutiny.
Monday, April 22, 2024
