In the wake of the devastating floods earlier this week in Libya, the Palestinian Civil Defense Service, which operates under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority, announced that it was sending a 37-member team to assist with the humanitarian effort.

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The team, which includes search-and-rescue experts and two neurosurgeons, set off on Wednesday, joining similar efforts that have been mobilized by other Arab countries and the international community more broadly. A cynic would be right to say that the Palestinian contribution is strongly motivated by political and image considerations, especially given Israel's long-established reputation for offering safe, confident pairs of hands in responding to humanitarian disasters. But one can also acknowledge that since disasters do not recognize countries, borders and national identities, anyone in a position to provide assistance is obligated to do so, not least out of self-interest – the parties offering the aid could easily face a future crisis where they are the ones in need of it.

Nonetheless, Libya eschews Israeli assistance, unlike its neighbor, Morocco, where teams from the IDF, Magen David Adom, United Hatzalah, IsraAID and several smaller humanitarian agencies rushed to pitch in following the horrific earthquake that struck on Sept. 8, just days before Libya was flooded. Nearly 10,000 people have died so far in the combined toll from both North African countries, with thousands more missing or destitute – not because of war or terrorism, but because of structural and environmentally influenced catastrophes. A person facing such a dreadful situation is unlikely to turn down assistance, no matter where it comes from, but such an obvious realization has yet to dawn on much of the Middle East, where the notion of cooperation with Israel remains a taboo.

Ironically, Israel will have an indirect presence in Libya through the Palestinian emergency team, as the PA's Civil Defense Service has benefited in the past from Israeli training, joint exercises and expertise, originally provided through the now moribund Oslo Accords. Back in October 2017, Nael al-Izza, spokesperson for the Civil Defense Service, efficiently summarized the reasons for such cooperation in an interview with Al Monitor. "As Palestinians, we have an interest in participating in such exercises because we have geographic links with Israel. If disasters occur or fires break out in Israel, we would be harmed," he said. "The PA, Israel and Jordan cannot face crises single-handedly."

Al-Izza was speaking amid a joint exercise involving Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli teams focused on fighting forest fires. One hub of the exercise – funded in part by the European Union and including firefighters from Spain, Italy and France – was in Hebron while the other was in Beersheba. In the recent past, al-Izza added, Israeli and Palestinian civil defense teams had also held several joint exercises on road safety, underpinned by the same practical logic. "The focus on coordination in road accidents stems from the Palestinians and Israelis use of the same roads and vehicles and facing the same risks," he noted. "It is not possible to side with one party, religion or ethnicity at the expense of another when it comes to saving people's lives."

Amen to that last sentence, which could happily sit as the mission statement of any worthy humanitarian-aid agency. Yet the fire-fighting exercise drew howls of disgust from Palestinian hardliners and the antisemitic BDS movement targeting Israel alone. "Such projects give the impression that normal ties between Israelis and Palestinians under occupation are possible," complained an official statement from the BDS movement, which went on to depict the word "normalization" (a desirable end that would permit uncomplicated regional cooperation) as equivalent to an expletive.

I readily concede that it would be both unrealistic and unnecessary to demand that political conflicts are buried in the name of regional humanitarianism. Unrealistic, because clashing senses of history, memory and ideology still drive the Palestinian objection to Israel's existence; unnecessary, because while precisely these factors have frustrated every effort to find a permanent solution, that shouldn't obstruct less lofty yet much-needed practical cooperation on specific challenges, most of all natural disasters, which we can sadly, if confidently, predict will be a consistent feature of life in the Mideast and North Africa from hereon in.

With that in mind, I want to suggest what I'd call an exemption clause. When it comes to natural disasters – as distinct from matters of trade, cultural exchange, diplomatic relations and so on – all countries from the region, including Israel, should agree that political considerations will not, under any circumstances, prevent a nation in the region from providing aid. If Palestinian fire-fighting teams are able and willing to assist in extinguishing forest fires in Israel, as they did in 2015, then they should do so. If Israeli rescue teams are able and willing to provide assistance in Morocco and Turkey, as they have done there and in so many other locations, then they should continue as such.

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In the spirit of "Doctors Without Borders," we should be advocating – certainly, in the context of environmental disasters – for "Israelis Without Borders," and Palestinians, Jordanians, Turks, Egyptians, Omanis, Kurds without borders as well. The horrors we have seen in North Africa in the course of this month demand no less.

A proposal like this would, I am sure, meet with a positive response from the European Union, the United States and perhaps even the United Nations. But for the exemption clause to work, those implementing it would need to be careful not to overstep the mark by using the regional cooperation it would enable to secure political goals. In other words, this needs to be humanitarian assistance utterly disconnected from other regional imperatives. It would have only one objective: to provide the best and speediest assistance possible to the victims and those languishing in the aftermath. Therapists, doctors, water specialists, trauma experts, search-and-rescue teams and sniffer dogs are all needed. Politicians are not.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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There are many crucial details regarding the May 9 gun attack on the historic El Ghriba Synagogue on the island of Djerba in Tunisia, during which two Jewish worshippers and three security guards were murdered, on which we still await clarification.

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Nearly two weeks later, we still don't know the name or the rank of the assailant beyond the fact that he was a Tunisian naval officer serving on Djerba, and the Tunisian authorities have thus far refused to identify the atrocity as an act of terrorism. They have been describing it as "criminality," a word so imprecise in this case that it means next to nothing. We don't know whether other individuals were involved in the planning or execution of the attack, save for a vague report from a local radio station that claimed four people had been detained, though didn't name them or provide any other details. And we still don't know what, if any, additional security measures the Tunisians will put in place to protect the tiny Jewish community of 1,500 souls.
What we do know unmistakably is that the Tunisian government, and, most of all, the North African country's President Kais Saeid, doesn't believe that there is a problem and deeply resents anyone who suggests otherwise.

In the wake of the attack – itself a bitter reminder of the 2002 Al-Qaeda attack on the El Ghriba Synagogue that snuffed out the lives of 19 people and wounded more than 30 – Saeid was far more concerned with dismissing the contention that antisemitism exists in Tunisia than with reassuring the Jewish community. His argument centered on three points. Firstly, that those "who talk about antisemitism when we are in the 21st century," as he put it following a meeting last Friday with his cabinet, are laughably wide of the mark. Secondly, that the concerns raised about antisemitism are a sleazy attempt to divert attention from the real issue: the continuing plight of the Palestinian people. Thirdly, that Tunisians can be proud of their record in protecting the Jewish community during the brief Nazi occupation from November 1942 to May 1943, in distinct contrast to the shame Israelis and their supporters should feel when they examine their record towards the Palestinians.

These are all tropes that are familiar in Western contexts, but perhaps the most important observation about their manifestation in an Arab country is that they come on top of the historic refusal, in all parts of the region, to recognize that there is a specific form of bigotry and discrimination targeting Jews that is called antisemitism. Among the favorite clichés that you will encounter when you raise the subject of Arab or Muslim antisemitism with people from the region is the line that "we are Semites, so we can't be antisemitic" – a dunderheaded viewpoint that fails to grasp that the term emerged in Germany in the late 19th century in an attempt by professional Jew-haters to give their hatred a scientific gloss by presenting it as a necessary evolution in the long tradition of Christian religious antisemitism. Less frequently, you might be told that antisemitism is an irrelevant consideration when you recall that the Palestinians are – as one Palestinian diplomat memorably told me many years ago – "the victims of the victims." Or that Islam is a religion of tolerance and that Jews, like Christians, are a "people of the book" whose basic rights are therefore guaranteed.

Saied's utterances in the aftermath of the shooting demonstrate that this discourse, which fuses crudely antisemitic ideology with antisemitism denial, is willfully promoted by those in power. One might legitimately wonder why Tunisia – whose capital, Tunis, is situated 2,000 miles from Jerusalem – elevates the Palestinian issue to such existential dimensions, but then one can ask the same question of nearly every member state of the Arab League.

Historically, Arab leaders would invoke the Palestinians for one major reason; they were a useful distraction, a convenient instrument with which to redirect the anger and resentment that Arab citizens felt towards their governments in the direction of the State of Israel. But when that anger manifested on the streets, it was defenseless Jewish communities and not the Israel Defense Forces that confronted violence and rioting. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the collective Arab failure to strangle Israel at birth during its War of Independence found compensation through the persecution and then expulsion of more than 800,000 Jews across the Middle East – from Morocco to Iraq.

Against such a background, it hardly comes as a shock that an attack on a synagogue in which Jews and non-Jews lost their lives is interpreted through these filters. To deny that the El Ghriba attack was motivated by antisemitism is as absurd as denying that the October 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh was antisemitic in nature. Yet when expressed by an autocrat like Saied, who has spent much of the past three years reversing the democratic gains achieved in Tunisia during the "Arab Spring," such arguments become unarguable.
Last week, Saied paid a visit to the Tunis suburb of Ariana, the location of the house of his grandfather, whom he said had sheltered Jews during the Nazi occupation (a skillful way of pushing the myth that it was ordinary Tunisians who saved Jews from the Holocaust when the reality is that it was the conquest of the country by Allied forces that made the decisive difference). "The locals protected them from the Nazi army, and then they say we're antisemitic," he complained. "Our Palestinian brethren are killed daily … but no one is saying anything about that."
Sad as it is to say, the next time there is an attack on a Jewish target in an Arab country – and there probably will be – that same speech will be regurgitated.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The warlords who have brought untold misery to Sudan since it achieved its independence from the United Kingdom in 1956 are hardly loosening their grip. Over the last week, Africa's third-largest country has been plunged into a bitter civil conflict between two rival rulers, resulting in hundreds of dead, thousands of wounded, and tens of thousands of refugees spilling over its borders into neighboring states.

The proximate roots of the present crisis lie in the 2019 coup that led to the overthrow of the Islamist dictator of 30 years, Omar al-Bashir, following months of popular protests against his regime. An uneasy transitional council then took power, thwarting one military coup in September 2021 before another the next month led to the dismissal of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and replacement by the head of the Sudanese military, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

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Under al-Burhan, Sudan remained nominally committed to a democratic transition, through a December 2022 agreement that specified April 1 of this year as the deadline for a final resolution. The agreement included a commitment to integrate the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, into the national armed forces. But that didn't happen after Dagalo (better known by his nom de guerre, "Hemedti") declared that he wanted to postpone the process for 10 years. However, al-Burhan would not agree to a postponement longer than two years, setting the stage for the current brutal fighting.

The dispute between al-Burhan and Hemedti is not ideological or religious. As is true with many of Africa's wars, the current strife in Sudan is about control of resources, with Hemedti's RSF jealously guarding its control over the lucrative gold mines in the province of Darfur.

Consequently, there is no natural partner for Western democracies in either leader; nor is there any decent political project worthy of international support. On top of that, it's hard to see how a global consensus on Sudan could crystallize, at least beyond the obvious realization that a renewed collapse into civil war is in no one's interest. The world is more perilously divided now than at any other time since the end of the Cold War, and both Russia and China have long pursued economic and strategic goals in Sudan, meaning that they are unlikely to play ball with the United States or other Western nations, particularly as long as the war in Ukraine and the tensions over Taiwan persist.

One factor that makes this particular conflict in Sudan unusual is that Israel – once regarded as an implacable foe in Khartoum – is now a player, having signed a normalization agreement with the post-Bashir government in 2020, as part of the much-vaunted Abraham Accords reached with a handful of Arab states under the auspices of the United States.

According to a report in Axios, the process negotiated over the last three years between Israel and Sudan has afforded the Israelis unique insight into the mindsets of both al-Burhan and Hemedti and what may influence them. Israel reportedly wants the fighting to stop immediately, fearing that war will derail the formation of a civilian government and therefore the peace agreement. For the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing unprecedented unrest at home and renewed criticism of its treatment of the Palestinians abroad, every Arab state that signs up for a peace deal with Jerusalem must feel like a vindication. As a veteran member of the Arab League whose fate is closely aligned with its Egyptian neighbor to the north, Sudan's signature is, as Hemedti might put it, worth its weight in gold.

The problem is that the other states united by the Abraham Accords – namely, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco – are divided when it comes to internal stability. None of these states are democracies, and all of them possess woeful records on human rights, though some are more stable than others. Sudan is radically unstable, having experienced more coups since independence than any other country in Africa. And as well as being a failed state, Sudan has for much of its existence been a rogue state, providing a base for the late Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden back in 1993. Moreover, in the case of Israel, not every political force in Sudan supports the agreement; when Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen visited Khartoum in February, the People's Conference Party and the Islamic Bloc, which comprises 10 different Islamic parties, issued statements warning al-Burhan that he had no mandate to make peace with Israel. For numerous reasons, then, it would be foolish to present the peace between Israel and Sudan – more accurately, between Israel and Sudan's quarreling military leaders – as permanent.

Yet when Israeli leaders wax lyrically about the benefits of peace with Sudan, it seems as if they are in denial of reality. While in Khartoum, Cohen paid tribute to a "historic peace agreement with a strategic Arab and Muslim country," asserting that the "peace agreement between Israel and Sudan will promote regional stability and contribute to the national security of the State of Israel."

Such sentiments are misplaced in a country where power still comes from the barrel of a gun rather than the ballot box. The issue in Sudan is not which of al-Burhan or Hemedti should rule, but whether either of them can even be considered a legitimate leader. Among al-Burhan's abuses is the June 2019 massacre of peaceful protesters in Khartoum, with hundreds murdered, tortured, and raped, and reports of corpses thrown into the Nile River. For his part, Hemedti emerged from one of the most monstrous paramilitaries seen during this century – the Arab Janjaweed who engaged in a genocidal reign of terror in the Darfur region from 2003 until 2020. High-minded notions like the national interest or national reconciliation are utterly foreign to both men, for whom political power is primarily an opportunity to consolidate their personal wealth and eliminate their rivals.

Israel can try and broker a truce between the thugs, but even if one is achieved, it won't last. Peace is only possible in Sudan if the causes of nearly 70 years of instability are meaningfully addressed. When it comes to nation-building, Israel has a wealth of experience. But al-Burhan and Hemedti will listen to outsiders only for as long as it suits them.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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More than 10 years after five Israeli tourists lost their lives in a suicide bombing in a Bulgarian resort, the Balkan nation's supreme court last week affirmed the sentence handed down to two Hezbollah operatives: life in prison with no prospect of parole.

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The sentence might have been more meaningful if the terrorist pair were actually in custody. However, as at their initial trial a decade ago, the supreme court's decision was handed down in absentia. The whereabouts of Meliad Farah, a dual citizen of Australia and Lebanon, and Hassan El Hajj Hassan, who holds a Canadian passport, remain unknown, much to the chagrin of the families of those who were murdered.

The attack took place on July 18, 2012, at the airport in Burgas, a city that lies on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast. A bus carrying 42 Israeli tourists who had just flown in from Tel Aviv was blown up by a suicide bomber, snuffing the lives of Maor Harush, Itzik Kolangi, Amir Menashe, Elior Preiss, and Kochava Shriki, a pregnant woman, as well as the Bulgarian driver of the bus, Mustafa Kyosov.

One year into the investigation into the atrocity, the Bulgarian government concluded with confidence that Hezbollah – backed by the Iranian regime – was responsible. Prosecutors disclosed that both Farah and Hassan had entered Bulgaria about a month before the attack using false documents, as did the bomber, Mohamad Hassan El-Husseini, a dual French-Lebanese citizen whose remains were identified through DNA analysis.

Both Farah and Hassan are understood to have fled Bulgaria in the immediate aftermath of the attack and have not been heard from since. First charged in 2016 with complicity in terrorism, the two men were sentenced in September 2020. Prosecutors accused them of providing the explosive device and logistical support to El-Husseini and said the evidence linked them to Hezbollah.

At the time, the attack brought fresh scrutiny to Iran's mission of providing military, financial, and political support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to other terrorist organizations around the Middle East. It also resulted in the European Union adopting a new policy that many observers condemned as logically inchoate and morally feeble. In 2013, the bloc agreed to designate Hezbollah's "military" wing as a terrorist organization, but not its "political" wing. This bifurcation doesn't exist except in the EU's imagination, and its persistence bolsters the false belief that Hezbollah would be a legitimate entity if only it abandoned its military operations – as though political engagement alone would satisfy a group that is committed to jihad and responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents.

The Bulgarian Supreme Court's decision in the Burgas case presents the EU with an important, timely opportunity to correct its mistake. Hezbollah in its entirety should be designated, in keeping with the US decision to do exactly that in 1997.

While Israel's northern border has been relatively quiet for several years now, the threat posed by Hezbollah remains tangible. As was true during its bitter 2006 conflict with Israel, Hezbollah is still the world's most powerful terrorist organization, commanding up to 25,000 fighters with 30,000 more in reserve – larger than the official Lebanese army and in defiance of a UN Security Council resolution demanding the disbanding of its military operations. By many estimates, Hezbollah possesses an arsenal of 150,000 missiles as well. Additionally, it regularly boasts of its knack for deciphering Israel's military strategy and goals. "If a new situation compels Israel to take some steps, we have the ability to foresee what the enemy will do," one of its senior officials told the pro-Hezbollah news outlet Al-Akhbar in 2021.

The idea that Hezbollah might at some point be amenable to negotiations is laughable. Its favorite propaganda trope is the same as that advanced by its Iranian paymasters; the prediction, without a scintilla of doubt, that Israel is fated to violently disappear from the map, and that those Arab and Muslim countries tempted to make peace with the Jewish state had best realize that or face the consequences. "The course of developments in occupied Palestine indicates that the Zionists are moving towards downfall and collapse," Hezbollah's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, declared in a speech delivered on March 6. "We express our solidarity with Palestinian prisoners and take on our own responsibility in this regard. The entire Muslim world is obliged to support the Palestinian nation in the face of the Israeli regime."

At the present moment, Hezbollah is trying to engineer a favorable outcome to Lebanon's grave political and economic crisis. The country's parliament has failed to appoint a new president in the aftermath of the resignation last October of the incumbent, Michel Aoun. On March 6, Nasrallah confirmed that both Hezbollah and Amal, another Shia paramilitary organization, would back veteran politician Suleiman Franjieh for the post.

While the 57-year-old Franjieh is a Christian, he is distrusted by large swathes of Lebanon's Maronite community, in marked contrast to his main rival, Gen. Joseph Aoun, 59, who is also a Christian and who enjoys the support of the United States. Franjieh has established himself as a loyal supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, which like Hezbollah is backed by the Iranians, as well as the Russian dictatorship of President Vladimir Putin.

Despite Russia's past claim to be a reliable partner for Israel, Moscow has actively cultivated the Jewish state's deadliest adversaries, with the result that Iran has supplied the Russian military with hundreds of drones unleashed against civilian targets in Ukraine. Its position towards Hezbollah is similarly positive. "Some say Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. We maintain contacts and relations with them because we do not consider them a terrorist organization," was how Mikhail Bogdanov, then Russia's deputy foreign minister, explained it in 2015.

"Hezbollah was elected by people to the Lebanese parliament," continued Bogdanov. "There are cabinet members and ministers who are from Hezbollah. It is a legitimate sociopolitical force."

This airbrushed view of Hezbollah should hold no credibility in the West, especially as it is the official stance of a regime whose imperial appetite has created instability in Europe unprecedented since World War II. The EU's position remains that Hezbollah is half a terror group and half a political party. For the sake of the atrocity in Bulgaria a decade ago and the slaughter in Ukraine now, that position needs to be reversed immediately. There are no political penalties in doing so; what the EU needs to overcome most of all is its own reticence.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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In the world of Jewish advocacy, the "working definition" of antisemitism endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has almost acquired the status of a sacred text. Its observations and recommendations are widely regarded as unarguable, so much so that many pro-Israel activists are satisfied to simply cite the definition's insights on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism when they are confronted by BDS activists and the like.

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Meanwhile, every outside endorsement of the definition – so far, nearly 40 countries, the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States and numerous civic and voluntary agencies – is eagerly trumpeted as one more sign that the world is finally waking up to the true nature of its oldest hatred.

Please don't misunderstand me. I regard the extensive international support for the definition as an overwhelmingly positive development. I just think we could do a better job with the definition itself, and that doing so would only make our position stronger.

The latest edition of "Israel Affairs," an academic journal, includes my extensive paper identifying what are, in my view, the four key expressions of antisemitism in our own time. I break these down into "neo-traditional," referring to the recycling of medieval falsehoods about Jews during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with other dated tropes about shadowy Jewish financial clout; "anti-Zionist," referring to the assault on Jewish collective survival implicit in calls for the elimination of the State of Israel; "Holocaust relativization," referring to the invocation of the extermination of 6 million Jews as an analog for contemporary crises that are mostly frivolous when compared with the Shoah; and "anti-Judaism," referring to the various efforts to stigmatize and outlaw core Jewish rituals such as male infant circumcision and the slaughter of animals under the laws of shechita.

Taken together, these four forms represent a comprehensive assault on Jews as a self-identifying group, decrying their supposed hegemonic influence on international politics and finance, targeting their national identity and emotional affiliation with the State of Israel, questioning and undermining Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust, and caricaturing Judaism's religious imperatives as irredeemably inhumane.

My underlying point is that while antisemitic ideology isn't very imaginative, it compensates for that weakness by being highly adaptive – able to reinvent its obsession with supposed Jewish malignancy in almost any situation and winning supporters accordingly.

Because of that, I argue, we need an internationally accepted definition of antisemitism that is nimble enough to account for these nuances and courageous enough to undergo revision when circumstances demand. Rest assured that the antisemites will adapt, even if we don't.

To my mind, there are four main ways that the IHRA definition, which suffers from being poorly written and imprecise in key places, could be improved. To begin with, there's the opening sentence: "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews." This is far too vague and quite confusing for the uninitiated, particularly when the primary audience is studying the definition for its practical usage. More accurate and efficient would be a declarative formulation, for example: "Antisemitism is the negative, hostile or hateful perception of the Jewish people as a collective, expressed through a range of rhetorical, violent and discriminatory measures targeting Jews, or those perceived to be Jews, as well as their property and their communal institutions."

Then there's the proverbial elephant in the room: the complete absence of the word "Zionism" from the definition. This omission undermines the contention that contemporary anti-Zionism is a specific form of antisemitism that shares many of the same fixations over Jewish wealth and influence as do its other forms. It also dilutes the historic centrality of the Zionist movement over the last century as a focus for Jewish identity and as an instrument for the rejuvenation of the Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. Hence, the sentence in the definition that identifies as antisemitic "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor" might be rewritten to say, "Depicting Zionism, the Jewish national movement, as inherently racist and the State of Israel as an illegitimate entity."

An additional sentence on anti-Judaism needs to be added, perhaps by acknowledging as antisemitic those efforts to prevent, in my suggested wording, "Jewish communities from observing their most sacred religious practices, such as consuming kosher food and circumcising male infants at the age of eight days, through legislative or other measures."

Finally, the trend in many countries in eastern and western Europe to appropriate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust – as part of a wider attempt to stress the sufferings of non-Jews under Nazi occupation – should also become part of the definition's purview. To preserve the historical integrity of the Holocaust, a new clause in the definition might read, "Out of all the victim groups persecuted by the Nazi regime, Jews were held up as the ultimate enemy of humanity, in whose destruction the collusion of non-Jewish populations under Nazi occupation was often encouraged and in many cases received."

These small but important fixes would make the IHRA definition a much more comprehensive and persuasive text. The counter-argument that the definition is already in its final version, and that amending it would be overly cumbersome, given the number of parties that have already signed up to it, will merely allow the antisemites to stay one step ahead of those whose job it is to combat them.

I'm also acutely aware that the IHRA definition has been attacked by those who resent its identification of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, and I can understand how such a hostile environment might create anxieties about amending the definition among its supporters. Again, though, I don't find that argument very convincing. If anything, attempts to create an alternative to the definition like the so-called "Jerusalem Declaration" should animate our own intellectual efforts in its defense, to the point that we are willing to make revisions to it when warranted. Otherwise, history will run away from us.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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"The history matters here," noted the BBC's Jerusalem correspondent, Tom Bateman, in a report on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) operation in the West Bank city of Jenin last Thursday that resulted in the deaths of nine Palestinians – eight of them men affiliated with terror groups, one of them a woman civilian.

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In the annals of anti-Zionist demonization of the State of Israel, Jenin occupies a special place. The city was the location, in April 2002, of one of the most treacherous myths about Israel's military conduct that spilled over into open antisemitism.

As Bateman summarized it, back then "Israel launched a full-scale incursion – known as the Battle of Jenin – in which at least 52 Palestinian militants and civilians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed. It had followed a campaign of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, many of which involved perpetrators from the city." That wording is technically correct and marks a vast improvement of the BBC's original 2002 reporting of the "Battle of Jenin," which the broadcaster described as a "massacre" perpetrated by the Israelis.

The reality is that the IDF suffered heavy losses as it battled Palestinian gunmen precisely because it was unwilling, out of concern for the city's civilians, to take more drastic measures like aerial bombardment to pacify Jenin – the sorts of measures that Russia, Iran or China would take without blinking an eye. But within 24 hours of the alleged massacre, the late Sa'eb Erakat, the Palestinian Authority's principal negotiator with Israel, was fabricating lurid stories about the IDF's operation. "They want to hide their crimes, the bodies of the little children and women," Erakat told The Guardian without a shred of evidence to support this monstrous claim.

Other Palestinians in positions of authority told similar lies. The director of the main hospital in Jenin alleged that the Israelis had deliberately destroyed its west wing – a wing that never existed – as well as its water and power supplies. "IDF soldiers took care not to enter its grounds even though we knew that it was serving as a refuge for several wanted fugitives," a former IDF officer, David Zangen, wrote over one year later in November 2003. "We guarded the water, electricity and oxygen supplies to the hospital all throughout the fighting and assisted in setting up an emergency generator after the city's electrical system was damaged."

Nevertheless, the myth of a massacre persisted, not just in the Arab media, but in Western outlets too. The massacre that wasn't became a new blood libel for the 21st century, one that took painstaking efforts by Jewish groups to counter effectively. In the process, Jewish communities were confronted with a form of antisemitism that took spurious assertions as uncontested facts, rooted in turn in an antisemitic mindset that encouraged the worst beliefs about Jews.

No serious analyst of the Middle East these days persists with describing the 2002 fighting in Jenin as a massacre. But Israel has never received a formal apology from those news organizations and international institutions that full-throatedly endorsed the line about massacre, among them the UN, which hastily set up a commission of inquiry in the days after the fighting and then disbanded it once it realized that the massacre claim was unsustainable.

Sadly, the lessons of that sordid episode more than 20 years ago do not appear to have been learned. Not surprisingly, the most glaring offender is the Palestinian Authority, which described last Thursday's fighting as a "massacre" while accusing the international community of behaving like bystanders. "This is what encourages the occupation government to commit massacres against our people in full view of the world," Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for PA President Mahmoud Abbas, said afterwards. The PA also announced that it was suspending security cooperation with Israel – a measure it has taken in the past during its fits of pique.

However, as in 2002, the sympathetic chorus of international concern is bolstering the PA's outlandish allegations. "I am deeply alarmed and saddened by the continuing cycle of violence in the occupied West Bank," said Tor Wennesland, the UN's Special Coordinator for the Middle East. Arab and Islamic states also voiced their condemnation of Israel, including those states with diplomatic relations with Israel, among them Turkey and Egypt, and those, like Saudi Arabia, who are rumored to be amenable to a final peace deal with the Jewish state.

The stakes are getting higher once again. For the last few years, the Palestinians have smarted at the loss of their status as the world's "most important unresolved problem," as the international focus has shifted to Iranian and Islamist terror group activities in the region as well as more pressing issues like Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine.

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Not even an ugly little war in Gaza in May 2021, accompanied by antisemitic violence around the world, was able to engender a new, overarching effort to pressure Israel to make concessions to a foe that refuses to recognize its legitimacy.

Make no mistake – the Palestinians will try again, and they now have an opportunity. Last Thursday's death toll was the most extreme since the UN began maintaining records in 2005, a fact the PA and its acolytes will exploit to the hilt. The Iranians, too, are eager to push the narrative of Palestinian suffering, so as to distract attention from the continued repression of the anti-regime protests that have rocked the ruling mullahs, along with their military alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And because in western circles, the Palestinian cause is seen more as a humanitarian imperative, and much less as an insidious political campaign to strip away Israel's sovereignty, it isn't guaranteed that western governments will offer the uncomplicated defense of Israel that it deserves. Thus, will the myths continue.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Like the parrot in that wonderful Monty Python sketch, American and European diplomats have been trying to persuade themselves that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran isn't dead. It's just resting.

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In the period since the 2018 US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the technical name for the deal between Iran, the US and five other world powers – it has become painfully clear that the main foreign policy achievement of former President Barack Obama's administration is demised, passed on, ceased to be, expired, run down the curtain, no more. In a word, dead. The diplomats know this, but they have been unwilling to make the announcement, preferring instead to claim at frequent intervals that a revived deal at negotiations that have dragged on for more than a year in Vienna is "imminent."

Will that position change, now that amateur video of US President Joe Biden declaring that the deal is "dead" has surfaced? The answer, maddeningly, seems to be both yes and no.

Biden's comments on the deal were not intended for public consumption and he uttered them a while ago – on Nov. 4 to be precise, at a campaign stop in Oceanside, California, as voters headed to the midterm elections. In the video, a woman with a Persian accent can be heard asking the president off-camera whether he will declare the JCPOA dead.

"No," he answered.

Pressed as to why, Biden replied that it was a "long story" and that there were "a lot of reasons." But he then went on to explicitly acknowledge that the JCPOA is, in fact, "dead, but we're not gonna announce it."

While the video showed only a small portion of their encounter, it didn't sound like Biden's interlocutor was particularly impressed. "We just don't want any deals with the mullahs," she emphasized. "They don't represent us, they're not our government."

"Oh, I know they don't represent you," Biden replied. "But they have a nuclear weapon that they'll represent." He then headed off, only to appear later at a rally with a message of solidarity for the historic anti-regime protests that have raged across Iran since September. "Don't worry, we're gonna free Iran," he told a group of activists displaying "Free Iran" signs. "They're gonna free themselves pretty soon."

So, is the Iran deal dead? Going by these comments of Biden's, one can only conclude that his answer is both a yes and a no. He used the hardly ambiguous word "dead" to describe its status. But his remarks also begged the question of whether something like the Iran deal can truly be considered dead if this fact cannot, or will not, be recognized in a public forum.

Other voices in Washington, D.C., have been similarly downcast on the prospects for a revival of the JCPOA without going as far as calling it "dead." Back in April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken confessed that he was not "overly optimistic at the prospects of actually getting an agreement to conclusion," while in October, the US envoy to Iran, Rob Malley, said that the US administration was not going to "waste time" pursuing a deal while the Tehran regime engaged in its brutal crackdown against protestors. After the video of Biden surfaced, it was unclear whether senior US officials were bolstering his comments or undermining them, as they insisted that no deal was possible in the present climate but did not directly rule out such an arrangement in the future. As a result, according to John Kirby of the National Security Council, the administration's focus has shifted from the deal to "practical ways to confront Iran" over both its repression of the protests and its growing military alliance with President Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia, while for State Department spokesperson Ned Price, "the JCPOA is not on the agenda" and "hasn't been for some time." Very, very negative, to be sure, but it still leaves the door to a future agreement ajar.

What can explain this reticence? In part, it's the old negotiating tactic of not showing your hand if you don't absolutely need to; let the Iranians be the ones to take the blame for the failure of talks seems to be the idea here. Yet the Europeans are also a factor, in that the EU remains wedded to the goal of a revived JCPOA, despite announcing a new round of sanctions on the Iranian regime after the protests erupted. As long as the EU believes there is even the faintest hope of a breakthrough with the mullahs, the US is unlikely to place an official stamp upon its commander-in-chief's off the cuff comments.

This kind of ducking and weaving by the west sends the signal to Tehran that it still has a role to play, by arriving at an outcome that western nations badly want. To deliver on a deal, the regime has to remain in power. Yet if our goal now – as Biden stated at the rally in California – is to "free Iran" and to offer every assistance we can to the ordinary Iranians driven by this goal, then we need to do the exact opposite. The robust sanctions that have been imposed on numerous Iranian individuals, military organizations and government agencies need to be amplified by a freeze on diplomatic contacts with the Iranians.

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Foremost, this would mean formally ending the negotiations in Vienna to resurrect the JCPOA. Biden's judgement that the deal is dead would thus become official policy. And as well as ending the nuclear talks, Western nations should suspend diplomatic contacts by pulling their ambassadors out of Tehran while leaving lower-level staff in place to monitor the repression of the protests.

While it is perhaps too big of an ask that regime change should also become Western policy, there should be less of an objection to helping the Iranians achieve their liberation themselves. The JCPOA is dead. Let the Iranian regime follow in its path.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The first confirmed execution by the Iranian regime of a participant in the historic protest wave currently engulfing the country was reported widely last week. The victim, 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari, was arrested on Sept. 25 on Sattar Khan Street in Tehran and charged with attacking members of the Basij militia – the Islamic Republic's official thugs – with a machete.

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He spent a hellish 75 days in prison prior to his execution, during which time he was tortured. Video released by the official Fars news agency of Shekari's forced confessions showed him with bruises and scarring on his face.

At least another 10 protestors are presently sitting on death row in Iran. According to the NGO Iran Human Rights, at least 458 demonstrators have been killed at the hands of the authorities since the protests erupted in September following the death of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the regime for allegedly violating its hijab dress code. That number includes 29 women and 63 children – a distinctly vile record for a regime that regularly flings blood libel accusations at Israel over the treatment of Palestinian civilians.

Yet despite this ongoing bloodbath, the protests show few signs of weakening. The announcement of Shekari's execution came, observed The New York Times, "During a week that saw businesses, shops and traditional bazaars in more than 50 cities across Iran participate in one of the largest general strikes in decades in support of protests calling for the end to the authoritarian clerical rule that has been in place since 1979."

Shekari's execution is an ominous sign that the ruling mullahs are turning to more extreme forms of repression in their bid to crush the protests, which have now superseded the historic "Green Movement" of 2009-10 in terms of their scale and intensity. Hossein Ashtari, the regime's chief of police, bluntly stated last week that his officers "will not show restraint in dealing with security threats." In other words, any means will justify the end of cementing the regime's iron grip for the foreseeable future.

Now, a former Iranian president has stepped into this maelstrom, ostensibly on the side of the protestors. In a rare statement last week, Mohammad Khatami, a 79-year-old who served as the Islamic Republic's president from 1997-2005, praised the "beautiful slogan" of the protestors – "Women, Life, Freedom" – and urged the regime to heed their demands "before it is too late."

Khatami is correct that Iran is experiencing a revolutionary moment. But in that sense, his advice can be understood as aimed at stabilizing the regime, rather than bolstering the cause of the protestors.

There is little doubt that Khatami is a reformist. The presidential election he won in 1997 attracted a record 80% turnout, with 70 percent of the ballots cast going to Khatami, and he was re-elected in 2001. His supporters were drawn from a range of backgrounds, including students and businesspeople seeking greater opportunities for foreign trade. He also appointed a woman, Massoomeh Ebtekar, to his cabinet despite an official prohibition on women serving in government positions.

But Khatami manifestly does not seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and never did. A study published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy one year after this election offered an observation that remains valid more than two decades later: "Khatami embodies and confronts a paradox. He could run as a candidate only because he was a member of the clergy, had revolutionary credentials, and was part of the establishment. However, the people have become disenchanted with the establishment, and voted for him precisely because he was the least 'establishment' of the four approved candidates."

In his statement expressing sympathy with the protestors, Khatami underlined that regime change in Iran was "neither possible nor desirable" even as he regretted the deaths of "tens of people, many of whom are children and adolescents." And back in September, Fayyaz Zahed, a reformist academic, revealed in an interview with an Iranian opposition broadcaster that Khatami had told him clearly that "reformism does not mean opposition to the Islamic Republic system."

Moreover, as the Washington Institute pithily remarked in 1998, Khatami has spent his entire career in the service of the regime, even if, along the way, he has alienated the hardliners gathered around the country's main source of power, "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As early as 1980, one year after the Islamist seizure of power, Khatami was serving in the Majlis, Iran's parliament, before going on to direct different agencies created by the regime in the fields of culture and religious education.

In those guises, Khatami readily conformed to the regime's most extreme stances. According to a BBC Persian report over the summer, he may have even had a hand in the decision of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic's founder, to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, authorizing the assassination of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie who grossly offended the regime with his seminal 1988 work The Satanic Verses.

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Hours before the fatwa was issued in Feb. 1989, two visiting British Muslim clerics, Kalim Siddiqui and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, reportedly met with Khatami at Tehran Airport where they discussed the accusation of blasphemy against Rushdie. Khatami "was asking my view about Salman Rushdie," Ghayasuddin Siddiqui recalled. "I told him, 'you know, something drastic has to happen.'" By the following morning, Khomeini had issued the fatwa.

On the question of Israel, Khatami never wavered from the Islamic Republic's official position that the Jewish state should be eliminated from the international community. Indeed, there has never been any need for Israel to revise its initial assessment of Khatami. As an Israeli security official told Haaretz in March 1998, "There has been no change in Iranian aid to terror groups since Khatami was voted President. Khatami himself has met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and assiduously maintains contact with leaders of terrorist groups." The same official commented that "Khatami is simply more talented than his predecessors in presenting matters in a way that will sound better to Western ears."

That remains the case today, and his statement of support to the protestors should be interpreted in exactly the same way. The Islamic Republic cannot be reformed. Iran will only have a bright future once the Islamist regime is gone for good.

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Even before the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar kicked off, the tournament already had a hero: the former captain of the Iranian national team, Ali Daei.

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Now retired and working as a coach, Daei is without question the greatest footballer Iran has ever produced, playing at senior level both in his home country and in Germany. Daei was even the world's top international goal scorer until last year, when his haul of 109 goals was pipped by a certain Cristiano Ronaldo. Adored in Iran, he made 149 appearances for the men's national team, including the World Cup tournaments of 1998 and 2006.

Daei is also a devout Muslim who once turned down a lucrative offer to appear in a beer ad in Germany on the grounds that the consumption of alcohol is proscribed by his faith. But as with many Iranians, in Daei's case, belief in the religious tenets of Islam does not necessarily translate into support for the Islamic Republic that has ruled with an iron fist since 1979.

Last week, circumventing the restrictions imposed on internet access by the Iranian regime amid historic protests against its continued rule, Daei told his 10.6 million followers on Instagram that he had turned down an invitation to attend the competition from its Qatari hosts and FIFA, world soccer's governing body.

Daei cited the protests that have convulsed Iran as the reason for his staying away from Qatar. He wanted, he told his followers, to "be by your side in my homeland and express my sympathy with all the families who have lost loved ones these days." This was in keeping with Daei's previous statements, such as his message to the regime declaring, "instead of suppression, violence, arrests and accusing the people of Iran of being rioters, solve their problems." Daei also put his neck on the line last month when he publicly challenged the regime's claim that a young female protestor in his hometown of Ardabil had died of a pre-existing medical condition, and not at the hands of police officers.

Daei's announcement might be taken as evidence of the old observation that there are things in life more important than soccer. But in soccer-mad Iran, what happens with the national team both on and off the field frequently takes on a political significance unknown among those teams coming from democratic countries.

Iran's World Cup appearances are invariably an opportunity for Iranians living outside their homeland to express their patriotism while loudly opposing the ayatollahs. In Qatar, they may even be joined in those protests by the players, who have been told by coach Carlos Queiroz that they are "free to protest as they would if they were from any other country as long as it conforms with the World Cup regulations and is in the spirit of the game."

Certainly, that is a prospect which worries the Iranian regime. Speaking to the players as they were paraded in front of him before departing for Qatar, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi told them, "Some don't want to see the success and victory of Iranian youth and wish to disturb your focus. Be very vigilant on this." As much as that might sound like advice, it is in fact a threat – and given that the regime has murdered and arrested rioters since the protests began in September, it is a threat that should be taken seriously.

The regime is taking all the measures it can to ensure that mass sessions of soccer watching don't become the occasion for additional protests. To that end, they can count on their allies in Qatar, an obscenely wealthy Gulf emirate that thumbed its nose at the Abraham Accords with Israel some of its neighbors signed up to, and which continues to back the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza.

At the end of last week, the Qataris announced that they had revoked the World Cup credentials of Iran International (IITV), an anti-regime broadcaster based in London with a solid following in Iran despite the regime's various censorship mechanisms. The decision was made after Iran's rulers classified IITV as a "terrorist organization," with the influential conservative newspaper Kayhan reporting that Iran had pressured Qatar to comply with its wishes. IITV had intended to dispatch seven journalists to cover the World Cup, but only three were concerned with the soccer aspect; the remainder were going to cover the action off the field, which likely explains Iran's objections.

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Qatar's censorship on behalf of its Iranian ally aligns with the sly, underhanded manner through which it used its wealth and influence to get FIFA to award Doha the 2022 World Cup, an outcome that former FIFA President Sepp Blatter now belatedly admits was "a mistake." 

Those who tune into the games should at least be aware of the context in which they take place. Over 6,000 migrant workers have lost their lives in unsafe, unsanitary conditions to build the air-conditioned stadiums where the matches will be hosted. More than 90% of the population, consisting exclusively of foreigners, lives under a form of apartheid, to the point that they are banned from entering the swish malls where Qatari citizens purchase luxury goods and eat at western food outlets. Women are second-class citizens while homosexuality is the subject of medieval repression, with gay men who are also Muslim facing the death penalty if they are apprehended.

Earlier this month, the supporters of German side Borussia Dortmund – who in normal circumstances would never pass up the opportunity to watch a soccer match – unfurled a large banner before a domestic league game that declared, "Boycott Qatar 2022." 

Amid all the spin around the competition that the Qataris have generated, along with FIFA's insistence that we should all forget about the politics and concentrate on the soccer, that was a much needed and welcome statement. Those who choose not to heed this call are entitled to their opinion, but please do us all a favor, and don't call the spectacle in Qatar the "beautiful game."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Those who are nostalgic for the heyday of neoconservatism might want to know that on Wednesday, former US President George W. Bush will host a video discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyyy. Bush – whose famous 2002 "Axis of Evil" State of the Union address listed Russia's loyal ally Iran alongside North Korea and Iraq – has said that he regards Zelenskyy as a Winston Churchill for our time, while a statement from the George W. Bush Institute announcing the event urges the US to "provide the assistance, military and otherwise, to help Ukraine defend itself."

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Isolationists on the right and "anti-war" advocates on the left will doubtless sneer at this event as an exercise in the kind of warmongering we thought we'd left behind in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the concerns raised in those conflicts have little bearing on the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. No one is talking about deploying US or NATO troops on the ground in a combat situation, nor is there any discussion of an international administration to supervise the growing portion of Ukrainian territory that is being liberated from the Russian occupiers. The democratic government in Kyiv has asked for weapons, but it is Ukrainian fighters who will operate them and Ukrainian officials who will manage postwar reconstruction.

Moreover, the timing of the event with Bush and Zelenskyy is fortuitous. Last week, the Ukrainian armed forces achieved their most important breakthrough yet, as Russia was forced into a humiliating withdrawal from the southern city of Kherson it captured in the early days of the invasion. For months, Kherson was the locus of Russia's reign of terror, with thousands of the city's residents beaten, arrested and tortured for protesting the Russian incursion, the rape and abuse of women and girls as young as 12 and the abduction of nearly 2,000 Ukrainian children taken from their families and removed to Russia itself. Last Friday, Kherson's battered citizens emerged onto the streets to the welcome sight of the Ukrainian national flag and patrols of Ukrainian, not Russian, troops.

The exhausted smiles in Kherson were matched by the nervous scowls of the Russian top brass as they tried to spin their defeat in Kherson into a mere "redeployment." While it remains true that Kherson is a city fraught with danger, with boobytraps littering its streets and the remainder of Russian forces now gathered on the opposite bank of the River Dnipro, there should be no mistaking that Kherson also marks a decisive victory.

It's important, therefore, that the international community assists the Ukrainians to build on this momentum. If victory is defined as the total expulsion of Russian forces from Ukraine, then the triumph in Kherson is the best evidence so far that such an outcome is possible. It is also eminently desirable; it is, of course, the Ukrainians who have suffered the most from Russia's illegal aggression, but the rest of us, regardless of where we live, have been smarting from the war's impact on food and energy prices at a time when our economic health is seriously deteriorating.

The current situation has additionally exposed the degree to which Russia's leaders have alienated the international community. Indeed, there is only one state that is willing to concretely aid Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in his bid to eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation: Iran. Last week, the head of Russia's Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, flew to Tehran at the invitation of his Iranian counterpart, Adm. Ali Shamkhani. On arrival, Patrushev treated journalists to a rant about the nefarious western media's supposed "disinformation" campaign regarding Ukraine before heading into discussions with Shamkhani and others that focused on how Iran can shore up the crumbling Russian war machine. Chiefly, that involves the supply of lethal weaponry; the Shahed-136 and Arash-2 drones that have already wrought devastation on Ukraine's population centers and possibly Fateh-110 and Zolfighar missiles with ranges in the hundreds of miles. Such an equipment list is an indication of how Russia intends to fight this war going forward, by visiting destruction upon Ukraine's civilian infrastructure in order to provoke the exodus of millions more refugees westward as the bitter cold of winter sets in.

In war, timing is everything. Ukraine's armed forces have already proven the dictum that an army that believes in what it is fighting for is a superior force in the face of a larger, better-equipped enemy with low morale. The significance of this has been recognized in key international capitals, especially in Washington, DC, where the US government last week supplied a further $400 million in defense assistance that included the HIMARS rockets deployed so effectively by the Ukrainians as well as Humvees, Stinger missiles and ammunition rounds.

Other countries debating similar moves should follow the US example. That includes Israel, which – as I argued here last month – has been presented with a golden opportunity to underline its credentials as a leading member of the community of democratic nations. In addition, Israel also has an opportunity to inflict, through its involvement in Ukraine, a major defeat upon Iran and its aim of eliminating the Jewish state from the map in much the same way that Putin intends to do with Ukraine.

There will be those, as ever, who push caution with various arguments. Fear that poking Russia may cause it to destabilize other parts of the world, most obviously the Middle East, where it retains a notable if depleting military presence in Syria, is one. Observing that Russia is the world's second-largest provider of natural gas and the third-largest supplier of petroleum and that consequently, we need to keep its leaders sweet, is another. Apocalyptic warnings that a desperate Putin will turn his nuclear arsenal on western cities is yet another. Ultimately, the goal of all these perspectives – which present questionable assumptions as undisputed facts – is to stave off total defeat upon the Russians, thereby allowing Putin's regime to present its survival as a victory, just as Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq did after the 1990 Gulf War.

Dithering at a time when we should be focused on further defeats for the Russians in the Ukrainian theater only helps Putin, who is manifestly not the pragmatic, benevolent autocrat which too many Western politicians inanely believed him to be for two decades. Let us seize the moment and deal the Russian-Iranian alliance the blow it deserves.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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