Israel Update: August 21 (Day 320)
Situational Update
The Times of Israel reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with US President Joe Biden by phone on Wednesday as efforts to reach a hostage deal floundered after recent optimism that a breakthrough was in the works. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, also joined the call, according to the White House. During the call, Biden “stressed the urgency of bringing the ceasefire and hostage release deal to closure and discussed upcoming talks in Cairo to remove any remaining obstacle,” the White House said in a readout of the conversation.
Per Barak Ravid with Axios: Biden discussed with Netanyahu at the planned negotiation summit in Cairo this weekend and emphasized that it was designed to remove all remaining obstacles to an agreement
Talks between Israel and Hamas to bring about a ceasefire and hostages-for-prisoners deal are “on the brink of collapsing,” Politico reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed US and Israeli officials. While Washington has been publicly expressing optimism, the officials said efforts to bring Hamas on board the latest proposal — endorsed by Israel — have so far been unsuccessful, with White House officials said to be frustrated by the Palestinian terror group’s hardline rhetoric against it.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says more than 150 tunnels have been demolished along the Philadelphi Corridor, the Egypt-Gaza border area, and that Hamas’s Rafah Brigade has been defeated.
According to the Israeli public broadcaster KAN, American Airlines has extended its suspension of flights to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport (TLV) until next April (2025!). However, the airline has not disclosed specific reasons for this long-term suspension. Other international airlines have halted their flights to Israel. As of August 7, 20 foreign airlines had suspended their operations to and from Israel, according to KAN.
The Numbers
Casualties
1,659 Israelis dead (+2 since Sunday) including 694 IDF soldiers (331 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza: +2 since Sunday)
Lieutenant Shahar Ben Nun (21), a Paratrooper commander, was killed when the building he occupied was struck by a bomb from our own Air Force.
Hezbollah launched four suicide drones toward the North. Three were successfully intercepted, but the fourth crashed into an Army base, resulting in the death of Chief Warrant Officer Mahmood Amaria (45).
Additional Information (according to the IDF):
2,229 (+10 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 418 (no change since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
4,349 (+16 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 644 (+1 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 40,223 (+218 since Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 92,981 (+580 since Sunday) have been injured during the war.
We also encourage you to read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled "Gaza Health Ministry." The analysis found that "9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data" and that "an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates."
Hostages (6 bodies recovered)
The bodies of six Israeli hostages abducted by terrorists on October 7, including one hitherto presumed alive, were recovered in an overnight operation in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, the military announced Tuesday morning.
The deceased hostages brought back were Alex Dancyg, 75, Yagev Buchshtav, 35, Chaim Peri, 79, Yoram Metzger, 80, Nadav Popplewell, 51, and Avraham Munder, 78.
Munder, Dancyg, Peri, and Metzger were all abducted alive by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, while Buchshtav and Popplewell were taken hostage from Kibbutz Nirim.
Munder had not been previously declared dead by the IDF, although the army had some information that had raised concern for his wellbeing. As such, until Tuesday morning he had been listed among the hostages presumed alive.
There are currently 109 hostages currently in captivity in Gaza
On October 7th, a total of 261 Israelis were taken hostage.
During the ceasefire deal in November, 112 hostages were released.
146 hostages in total have been released or rescued
66 hostages have been confirmed dead.
This leaves an estimated 109-111 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
36 hostages are assumed to be dead and held in captivity
Thus, at most, 81 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
(Sources: JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, IDF Casualty Count, and the Times of Israel)
Rocket/Drone Alerts
Since August 1st, Hezbollah has caused 714 rocket alerts
Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon launched more than 50 rockets at the northern Israeli city of Katzrin in the Golan Heights on Wednesday morning, moderately injuring a man and causing damage to homes.
Green = Hamas; Yellow = Hezbollah
Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel
Listen
[PODCAST] Raphael BenLevi, Hanin Ghaddar, and Richard Goldberg on the Looming War in Lebanon with Mosaic
Right now, over 50,000 Israelis from the northern reaches of the country are not living in their homes. The intensity of rocket fire from Hizballah, arrayed across the Lebanese border, is too dangerous. For that reason and several others relating to Hizballah’s patron, Iran, a war to Israel’s north looms. In April of this year, the Israeli security analyst and IDF reserve intelligence officer Raphael BenLevi published an essay in Mosaic that explains the history of Israel’s northern border security, and what Israel can do now to restore it. To discuss that essay and its arguments, Mosaic’s editor and the podcast’s host Jonathan Silver convened a conversation with the Lebanese writer Hanin Ghaddar and the Iran expert Richard Goldberg.
Link: Raphael BenLevi, Hanin Ghaddar, and Richard Goldberg on the Looming War in Lebanon
[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: Holding Pattern(s) – with Jonathan Schanzer
Israelis are stuck in a tense holding pattern, each day waiting for a response from Iran, or Hezbollah, or both - an attack that was expected to occur last week, then later forecasted to occur over Tisha B’Av. And yet, each day… nothing. What is going on — in Tehran? In Jerusalem? And in Washington D.C.?
At the same time, there is a similar pattern in the hostage negotiations. Today, senior officials from Israel, the U.S., Qatar and Egypt met in Doha to resume negotiations for a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal - talks, as we are learning, that will continue into tomorrow.
Israel seems to be on the brink of major developments - and yet, Israelis are left questioning: when will they occur? And against that backdrop: is Israel on offense, or is Israel on defense?
To help us assess all of this from a broader strategic perspective, our guest is Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, who is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Watch
[VIDEO] The Last Man in Metula, by Tablet Magazine
Despite growing up in Israel’s northernmost town, where residents found Hezbollah tunnels under their houses and heard terrorists talking from their living rooms, Yaniv Elhadif never wanted to leave.
Yaniv Elhadif’s family has been in northern Israel for 21 generations, ever since they fled the Spanish Inquisition. Yaniv grew up in Metula, surrounded by hostile Lebanese villages, where life entailed everything from terrorist invaders to Hezbollah digging tunnels under people’s houses.
But Metula is Yaniv’s home, and he never left, even during wars with Lebanon. He even stayed there to raise his children—and then, for the first time in his life, Oct. 7 forced him away from home. See the video link for more.
Humanitarian Aid
Source: Israel Humanitarian efforts - Swords of Iron (gaza-aid-data.gov.il)
What We Are Reading
“So now we’re not allowed to eliminate terrorists?”, Yair Lapid asks in Times of Israel
Twelve innocent children were killed by Hezbollah at a soccer field in northern Israel. The next day I visited the site. Bloodstained bicycles were still strewn on the ground. I hugged and talked with heartbroken, crushed people. A few days later, Israel eliminated a senior Hezbollah terrorist in a surgical strike in Lebanon in response. Yet, Israel is expected to endure a massive attack from Hezbollah as if this is an inevitable, even justified, response. A few days later, a senior Hamas terrorist was killed in Tehran. Reports indicated it caused “embarrassment to the Iranians.” Again, Israel is expected to face volleys of rockets and drones in response.
When the United States eliminated Osama bin Laden, no one thought it justified an al-Qaeda attack on Washington or New York. When al-Baghdadi was killed in Syria, no one expected the US to calmly accept the inevitable revenge of ISIS. Terrorists thrive because they don’t play by the rules, yet today the world behaves as if their rules are reasonable. The discourse that “everyone has their own narrative” has been transplanted into the war on terror. Even against the world’s most heinous murderers, there’s no longer right and wrong. Those who kill terrorists must consider that their feelings might get hurt and that we have no choice but to accept their revenge.
We have a choice. There is good and evil in the world. Liberal democracies represent justice, morality, and freedom, while terrorists are murderers who want to rob us not only of our way of life but also to slaughter our children. A high moral standard does not include acceptance of their hate-filled narrative. Terrorists have no immunity. They have no right to retaliate. They do not operate within the law. They live and operate outside the rules and we are justified in making them pay the price. Hezbollah and Hamas target innocent civilians, hide behind innocent civilians, and indiscriminately shoot at our innocent civilians. Iran, despite its attempts to portray itself as a normal state, has been and remains the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. The world needs to tell the Iranians that if they don’t want terrorists to be killed in Tehran, they should not welcome them into their homes.
By what moral code should Israel accept rocket barrages from terrorist organizations and rogue states? The narrative is outrageous. It equates a legitimate defensive action by a law-abiding state with the blatantly illegal actions of a terrorist organization. This kind of untenable and unethical narrative is to be expected from fringe groups that rationalize terror, but it can’t be something we accept in mainstream discourse.
Link: So now we’re not allowed to eliminate terrorists?: Times of Israel
Iranian Subversive Efforts in Jordan: A Strategic Threat Requiring a Robust Response, by Colonel (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman in The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security
Back in November 2014, following Operation “Protective Edge”, Iran’s Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamenei published a tweet explaining, in nine questions and answers, why and how Israel (“the fake Zionist regime”) should be (in his own language) eliminated. As an answer to Question Seven– “What is the most urgent action to take for militarily confront Israel” (the lame English is his) – he stipulated that “The West Bank should be armed like Gaza and those who are interested in Palestine’s destiny [i.e., Iran] should take action to arm the people of the West Bank so that the sorrows and grieves of the Palestinian people will reduce in the light of their powerful hands and the weakness of the Zionist enemy”.
Most significantly, as the arrests in March 2024 indicate, the Iranian regime and the proxies and allies working for it on Syrian soil are actively engaged in organizing traffic across the long and relatively porous Syrian border with Jordan. This frontier is liable to become a crucial point of tension as the Jordanian authorities seek to stem the flood of drugs and weapons aimed at destabilizing Jordanian society.
Moreover, the Iranian regime now has all the more reason to seek the destabilization of the Hashemite Kingdom. While never officially acknowledged, Jordan’s role supporting the joint effort to foil Iran’s drone, cruise and ballistic missile attack is well known; many of the incoming threats were intercepted in Jordan’s air space. As one of America’s most consistent partners in the region (except for a period of affiliation with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf crisis of 1990-1991), Jordan is viewed in Tehran not only as a physical barrier on the road to the West Bank but also as a sworn ideological and strategic enemy.
At the level of intelligence cooperation, all efforts should be made to monitor, and where possible jointly foil, Iran’s efforts to run munitions, drugs, and subversive elements into Jordan. As indicated above, the security forces are quite willing to use force when necessary: what the J.I.D. and the Jordanian leadership need is to be on constant alert against inventive Iranian and Hezbollah methods.
Is a hostage deal in Israel's best interest, by David M. Weinberg in Israel Hayom
According to government sources, the deal currently under discussion between Israel and Hamas would see between 500 and 1,000 Palestinian terrorists, 100 of them considered "heavy" terrorists (i.e., bloodthirsty butchers), released from Israeli jails in exchange for 22 live Israeli hostages, mainly women and other civilians, alongside the bodies of another dozen deceased hostages.
Many Israelis will say that the deal under discussion is sad but necessary and that it is the government's moral obligation to free as many hostages as possible as soon as possible despite the high price. The suffering of our hostages and their families is intolerable on personal and national levels. Giving freed hostages one big national hug will be the greatest triumph of all, something so necessary for Israel's collective spirit and its resilience over the long term. Many Israelis might feel this to be so even if the deal entails the complete withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza. In other words, even if Hamas retains power and essentially wins the war.
Oh, what a horrible situation! How can the heart not bleed in pain? However one finesses the moral and strategic dilemmas here, there is one additional grand security calculus that seems absent from public discourse. This is the piercingly high price of releasing so many Palestinian terrorists.
The released terrorists assuredly will strike again, with G-d-only-knows how many Israeli casualties in the future. Their release certainly will incentivize future kidnappings, pour gasoline onto the terrorist fires already raging in Judea and Samaria, and catapult Hamas towards its intended takeover of Judea and Samaria, too.
I know this to be a fact because this has been the case with every previous terrorist release. Israel repeatedly has erred by letting terrorists loose to murder more Israelis. And each time, in advance of every deal, the Israeli "security establishment" arrogantly and falsely has assured Israeli politicians and the public that it "would know how to manage the situation," i.e., how to track the terrorists and crush any nascent return to terrorist activity without too much harm done. But this has never proven to be true. Every deal involving the release of terrorists has led to much bloodshed, planned and carried out by these released terrorists.
Dvora Gonen, whose son Danny was murdered near Dolev in 2015 by a terrorist released in the Shalit deal, told journalist and researcher Nadav Shragai last month, "The difference between the hostages currently held in Gaza and the next generation of Israeli victims who will be murdered by those released in the impending Hamas hostage deal – is that the hostages have faces and names, while future victims remain as yet unknown. On the other hand, the previous generation of terrorist victims like my son Danny, murdered by Palestinian terrorists released in previous deals, have both faces and names."
Link: Is a hostage deal in Israel’s best interest: Israel Hayom
The Way to Fix the Middle East Conflict Looks Obvious—Except to Israelis and Palestinians, by Marcus Walker, Fatima AbdulKarim and Anat Peled in The Wall Street Journal
Most of the world has long agreed on what it will take to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has now brought the Middle East to the brink of a regional war that would almost certainly draw in the U.S.
In fact, support for side-by-side states has been dwindling for well over a decade. While surveys from the late 1990s until around 2010 showed solid majorities of Israelis and Palestinians backing the two-state solution, it has been downhill ever since. Now only 32% of Palestinians believe in the formula, according to a PCPSR survey released in June. Among Israeli Jews, belief in peace based on two states has collapsed to 19%, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center published in May, from 32% shortly before Oct. 7.
Israel needs security control over all of the land west of the Jordan River, and that “conflicts with the idea of sovereignty” for the Palestinians, Netanyahu said in January.
“It is the only refugee camp where people can see their own land,” said Fareed Bawaqneh, a soft-spoken electrician who lives in Jenin camp. “Maybe our great-great-grandchildren will get it back.”
Bawaqneh, who rejects partition, said he can see only two solutions to the conflict: “Either we die and they live, or we live and they die.”
High on the hill, young militants with assault rifles took shots at glass bottles and kept missing. A middle-aged former militant, Mohammed Amer, took over a rifle and hit the bottles. Amer looked weary. Two of his sons were killed during an Israeli raid last year.
If Israel agreed to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, Amer said, he would wholeheartedly support peace.
“The problem is not what I want,” he said. “It is what Israel will give. They won’t give us 1967 borders. They won’t even give us the borders of Jenin.”
In liberal Tel Aviv, the prospect of two states was intellectually irresistible, said Taub, the historian. Israel’s declaration of independence had proclaimed “the self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, like all other nations, in its own sovereign state.” How could the Palestinians be denied that universal right?
“And then buses began to explode,” Taub said. Suicide bombers from Hamas and other militants opposed to Oslo killed dozens of Israeli civilians. Taub recalled the dreaded sound of booms followed by sirens.
Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political consultant and opinion pollster, said Israelis remembered only disappointment and Palestinian terrorism. Right-wing coalitions under Netanyahu portrayed the Palestinians as implacably hostile and Israeli peace advocates as leftist enemies of the state.
A series of short wars in Gaza between Israel and Hamas also hardened public attitudes. As Israel’s economy enjoyed a technology-driven boom, many Israelis felt they were doing just fine without answering the Palestinian question.
On the Palestinian side, settlement expansion under Netanyahu convinced many that Israel had no interest in ever ending the occupation. Abbas’s standing sank as Israel ignored him and the Palestinian Authority became associated with repression and corruption.
The United States Was Just Called a "Plague" by Mahmoud Abbas. Now what, by Elliott Abrams with The Council on Foreign Relations
For decades, Yasser Arafat spoke of peace in English—but only in English. In Arabic, not a word about peace and compromise. In Arabic, not a word about peace and compromise. (Here, from 1997, is an example of the many articles about this phenomenon.)
He began this way:
Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to start my speech by praying for the souls of the tens of thousands of martyrs who have met their Lord because of the Israeli aggression and the war of genocide and ethnic cleansing that [Israel] is waging against our people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. The latest [incident] was the crime against the leader and martyr Ismail Haniyeh.
Those words are a full endorsement of Hamas and a claim that every Hamas terrorist killed by Israel—including those who conducted the bestial murders, rapes, burnings, and maimings on October 7 of men, women and children—is a martyr.
Then we come to the United States. Abbas said this:
The U.S. has used its veto power in the Security Council three times, against the world's demand to stop the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip. Three times, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. stood up in the Security Council, and used the veto power, all by herself, while the other 14 members demanded to stop the fighting. This is America. America is the plague, and the plague is America.
One wonders what the average American would say if confronted with those words from Abbas, and then asked if American tax dollars should continue to flow to that man. Well, actually, one does not wonder; it’s crystal clear.
Abbas should not get away with this. A retraction and apology should be demanded, and until it is received not one more dime should move. No self-respecting country should permit itself to be treated this way. We are happily past the ages when such comments led to duels among men or wars among nations. But paying for such insults ought to be out of the question.
Negotiate hard, watch Sinwar back down by Michael Oren in YNet
Opinion: The key question is whether Hamas is genuinely interested in a deal, or if it sees a greater advantage in escalating tensions between Israel and Iran
In his ninth visit to Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken leaves little doubt that the primary, if not sole, objective of the United States right now is securing a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages.
At a press conference held Monday night, Blinken updated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted the American mediation proposal, saying that the ball is now in Hamas' court. The pressing question is whether Hamas is even interested in a deal or if further escalation between Israel and Iran better serves its interests.
This dilemma stems from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s understanding that he cannot achieve his minimum demands in negotiations: a permanent cease-fire and the withdrawal of all IDF forces from Gaza, including from the Philadelphi Corridor. Without such concessions, Sinwar is unlikely to give up the "assets" in his possession (the hostages) for a deal that would allow Israel to restart the war in the future and block the flow of weapons through the corridor.
The United States, having deployed massive naval and air forces to the region, must unequivocally declare its readiness to exact a heavy price from Iran should it or its proxies dare to attack Israel.
Iran, which so far has not paid even the smallest price for its ongoing and monstrous aggression in the Middle East, must be convinced that there is no chance of attacking Israel without bringing a severe economic and strategic disaster upon itself.
Only this way can Sinwar be made to realize that he has no military backing from Iran or Hezbollah and that he will be left to his own devices, in a tunnel somewhere underground. Only then will he be willing to agree to a limited cease-fire, allowing Israel the opportunity to prevent Hamas from rearming and reorganizing through the Philadelphi Corridor. Only then will he be ready to release a significant number of hostages and agree to a cease-fire that would bring much-needed relief to the residents of northern Israel.
Joe Biden, as the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, could decide otherwise. He has the power to act in a way that would leave him a legacy, recording him in the annals of history as a courageous leader who not only brokered a hostage deal but also put an end to Iranian aggression throughout the Middle East and the world. By declaring his willingness to go to war, Biden could be remembered as a hero of peace.
Antisemitism
Unmasked: The Pro-Hamas ‘Sources’ Used by International Media, by Rachel O'Donoghue in Honest Reporting
The Associated Press was recently exposed over its long-running usage of the unreliable eyewitness accounts of the director of Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital, who was unmasked as an associate of recently-eliminated Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh.
The issue of untrustworthy sources extends beyond the Associated Press and its reliance on Naim. We can now reveal that numerous other leading news organizations have also published information from questionable sources in Gaza. These individuals, often cloaked in professional titles that lend them a veneer of credibility, have been found, like Naim, to support violent terror activities.
In one recent Guardian piece, Alaqad repeated the false claim that a Lancet “study” stated that up to 186,000 people could be dead in Gaza, a figure that actually came from a letter to the journal and was discredited.
Alaqad has also been known to spread Hamas propaganda and anti-Israel libels, including claims of genocide and the false assertion that went unchallenged during a BBC interview that Israel killed 1,000 Palestinians in a “massacre” at the Al-Ahli Hospital—an explosion that was later determined to have been caused by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket.
However, Abu Rahma’s social media history tells a very different story. HonestReporting uncovered numerous posts where she celebrated the October 7 Hamas massacre, glorified violence against Israelis, and expressed antisemitic views. On the day of the attack, she tweeted with apparent glee about the invasion of Israeli communities, even expressing a desire to participate in the violence. In another instance, she lamented that Adolf Hitler did not finish his Holocaust of Jews.
The international media’s reliance on testimony from eyewitnesses in Gaza is expected. However, it is unacceptable to present as credible journalists, medical workers, activists, or bystanders those who, in some cases, have a history of disseminating violent, pro-terror rhetoric.
These sources, with their troubling views, are shaping Western audiences’ understanding of the conflict. Media outlets are failing in their most basic duty to perform due diligence by not properly vetting the individuals they rely on for information.
Link: Unmasked: The Pro-Hamas ‘Sources’ Used by International Media: Honest Reporting
The surprising way to engage Gen Z, by Julia Malkin Reger in eJewish Philanthropy
As the COVID-19 pandemic wound down in 2022, the world began grappling in earnest with returning to a new normal. After two years of working from home in a Zoom-centered universe, for instance, many executives, program directors and organizations urgently felt the need to get back to some type of in-person work environment. While most understood that our online world wasn’t going to disappear completely, it was taken as a given that live in-person interaction was still the preferred paradigm, an approach backed by plenty of research. Though many leaders appreciated the convenience of working from home, they also saw enough value in in-person interactions to institute mandatory office days, replete with incentives ranging from Krispy Kreme donuts to massages to lure people back in.
But one demographic group in particular has pushed back: Gen Z, defined by the Pew Research Center as the generation born between 1997 and 2012.
As a Gen Z-native initiative, we at Changemakers constantly strive to better understand our audience: who they are, what they need and how Changemakers, Jewish federations and the Jewish community overall can best support them. To deepen that understanding, we conducted a survey in June 2024 gathering insights from 763 Jewish young adults aged 22 to 30 on topics like career, leadership and community involvement. Some of the results mirrored or expanded on the findings of Jewish federations’ impact and growth research; but we also gained further insights into our respondents that we are eager to share more broadly, in the hope that other organizations and initiatives can benefit from what we learned.
For Gen Z, the pandemic came during a critical developmental moment. Many of them finished their high school careers or had much of their college experience online. Significant numbers entered the workforce in a hybrid reality, their first professional internships and work experiences taking place on living room sofas, at dining room tables or in their parents’ basements.
Additionally, people in their 20s are often more geographically mobile, meaning they have even more reason to prefer building their communities online. It’s easier to keep an online network together as one moves from job to job, city to city or school to school than to put all of one’s eggs in one place-dependent basket; the resulting networks are broader, more resilient and more diverse.
In addition to keeping a virtual-first approach, we adapted the program to respond to Gen Z’s needs in other ways. We offered ongoing mentorship opportunities to help address the 31-point gap between those who said mentorship was important and those who said they had a mentor. We provided small, achievable leadership opportunities to help build their leadership confidence, an area where they expressed self doubt.
By meeting this generation where they are, we have achieved notable results. A surprisingly high 29% of alumni of the program are already working for Jewish organizations. And whether or not they aspire to serve the Jewish community in a professional capacity, 82% of alumni declared that Changemakers had helped them develop leadership qualities and taught them how to put them into practice.
Link: The surprising way to engage Gen Z: eJewish Philanthropy
Colleges Can’t Say They Weren’t Warned, by David French in The New York Times
“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the U.C.L.A. campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” Those are the first words of an angry court opinion by Mark Scarsi, a Federal District Court judge in California.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, a number of universities were taken by surprise by the sheer sustained disruption and by the antisemitic animosity on their campuses. They struggled to respond effectively. As the war continues — and as the conflict with Hezbollah escalates on Israel’s northern border — universities can no longer claim to be surprised.
They know what might happen this school year, and this knowledge has legal significance. If they fail to protect the free speech of students or to protect students from antisemitic or Islamophobic harassment, there will be consequences.
The case at U.C.L.A. includes claims by Jewish plaintiffs that they were discriminated against and blocked from gaining access to parts of campus because of their religious support for Israel, a viewpoint the First Amendment protects. The other two cases — one at M.I.T. and the other at Harvard — focused on claims of antisemitic harassment under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
As the court writes in its Harvard opinion, M.I.T.’s failure was “its failure to anticipate the bigoted behavior that some demonstrators — however sincere their disagreement with U.S. and Israeli policies — would exhibit as events unfolded.” But, the court writes, “despite M.I.T.’s failure of clairvoyance, it did respond with a perhaps overly measured but nonetheless consistent sense of purpose in returning civil order and discourse to its campus.”
In still another allegation of disparate treatment, the plaintiffs claim that “Harvard required Chabad, a campus Hasidic Jewish community center, to remove its Hanukkah menorah from campus each night to prevent it being vandalized” yet provided round-the-clock security to a pro-Palestinian “Wall of Resistance.”
The intersection of free speech and harassment can be fraught and complex. There are times when universities inhibit free speech to prevent harassment, and there are times when universities wrongly permit harassment in the belief that they’re protecting free speech.
As the new school year approaches, it presents a second chance to do the right thing. Campus unrest has now cost three Ivy League presidents their jobs. The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and now Columbia University have resigned under pressure. And — as the decisions against Harvard and U.C.L.A. make clear — campus unrest may result in severe legal and financial penalties against universities that fail to maintain order or fail to protect speech.
Link: Colleges Can’t Say They Weren’t Warned: The New York Times
The Anti-Zionist Protesters and the Left: An End to Denial, by Jonathan Chait in New York’s Intelligencer
A week and a half ago, anti-Israel demonstrators began chanting during a Kamala Harris rally outside Detroit. Harris stared down the protesters and told them she was speaking. The crowd cheered wildly, but the scene disturbed some progressive observers.
“Ms. Harris managed to quickly dismiss them when they interrupted her rally speech in Detroit, but she will not be able to so easily dismiss the shocking reality against which they are protesting. Failing to adequately address protesters’ valid outrage could cause Democrats’ newfound party unity to quickly unravel,” wrote Farah Stockman in a New York Times op-ed. A similar view was expressed by Masha Gessen, also in the Times, who suggested the protesters “cannot stand to live in a world in which Joe Biden’s vice president, who has not voiced any disagreement with the administration’s Middle East policies, wins the presidency. It’s not that they want Trump to win; it’s that the level of political cynicism they are being asked to adopt feels unbearable.”
SAFE, like other branches of SJP, takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, “Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.” The group sent masked protesters to the home of a Jewish regent in the middle of the night and vandalized his law office.
If you recall the tea-party protests, liberals generally equated the most offensive or racist signs and statements at rallies with the general thrust of the cause, rather than trying to imagine a sympathetic purpose. (Conservatives, of course, did the opposite, ignoring the offensive bits to project their desired motive onto protests that turned out not to care about their professed goal of reducing the budget deficit.) And the groups organizing the protests exert significant control over their messaging, which is why you never see a sign or a chant at an encampment denouncing Hamas along with Israel or calling for a two-state solution.
The inclusion of Israel as a settler-colonialist state is the move that transforms the theory into something more threatening. It is a curious connection, as Kirsch notes. While Israel’s founding did displace many Palestinians, it did not precipitate their virtual eradication. (The Palestinian population, despite undeniable oppression, has grown dramatically since 1947.) More importantly, the Jewish population in Israel has a long-standing connection to the land it inhabits and no other place to “return.”
The only humane solution to the predicament is a negotiated agreement between Jews and Palestinians. Settler colonialism, instead, denies Jewish Israelis any right to live in the region, rendering any act of the Israeli state illegitimate and any action to dismantle it permissible.
Any complaint about violence or antisemitism by a member of the movement inherently divides it and raises questions about its political and moral character. To reject out of hand any such possibility is to repudiate the very idea it must abide any standards of behavior in the tactics it uses against its targets.
The movement could not be any more clear on this point. Its members will not stop harassing and intimidating Jewish people. Nor will they adopt any standard of behavior. When they say they believe they are part of the Palestinian liberation movement, and that the movement is entitled to use any means necessary, that is exactly what they mean.
Link: The Anti-Zionist Protesters and the Left: An End to Denial: New York Magazine
Why Israel’s Critics Stopped Pretending To Want a Ceasefire by Seth Mandel in Commentary
The narrative all along, and pushed relentlessly by the Biden administration, has been that Netanyahu is the obstacle to a deal. But that narrative crumbled when the New York Times obtained internal documents related to the ceasefire negotiations. It turned out that Netanyahu was surprisingly conciliatory, and while his own negotiators wanted him to give up even more for a deal, they conceded that Bibi had reasonable demands: namely, that returnees to northern Gaza not be armed and that Hamas not be permitted to retake control over its crucial resupply tunnels to Egypt.
While plenty of folks still disagreed with Netanyahu’s positioning, it was no longer tenable to say he was negotiating in bad faith or deliberately trying to torpedo the talks. Hamas and its supporters reoriented their talking points.
Then Secretary of State Antony Blinken, forced to concede Bibi wasn’t the villain, handed the Israelis another test in the form of a compromise proposal intended to bridge the gaps between Israel and Hamas. Israel accepted these terms. Hamas flipped out, taking credit for an attempted mass suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and mobilizing terrorists in the West Bank in the hopes of expanding the war to yet another front.
To a true ceasefire supporter, let alone a person of any moral fiber, Hamas’s attack would have been the great unforgivable crime of the century.
Since it’s never actually been about a ceasefire, it has been easy for the “pro-Gaza” protest movement to pivot in its demands. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ringleader of the Democratic anti-Zionist caucus who has long demanded that the U.S. go far beyond a ceasefire and take action against Israel, had a prime speaking slot at Harris’s nominating convention last night.
Link: Why Israel’s Critics Stopped Pretending To Want a Ceasefire