The growing chorus of voices on the political left that have been loudly demanding that Israel's war on Hamas be stopped have been waiting for this. After months of seeking to leverage false stories such as one about a missile attack on a hospital, downplaying or denying the way Hamas embeds its terrorist forces in hospitals, schools and civilian homes, and flogging statistics about Palestinian civilian casualties that are clearly bogus, the anti-Israel lobby thinks that it finally has a way to force the Jewish state to stand down in Gaza.

A mistaken strike that caused the deaths of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers who were bringing food and other supplies into the Strip is being treated as not merely a tragic accident all too common in wars, but as an act of transcendent symbolism that proves that Israel's tactics are too brutal to be allowed to continue.

That was not merely the substance of a torrent of unhinged comments from World Central Kitchen founder Chef José Andrés who, without a shred of proof, accused Israel of deliberately murdering the aid workers. It was also the substance of the threats directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by President Joe Biden in a tense 30-minute call. Reportedly, Biden said that future military aid to Israel – vital for the resupply of Israeli forces in order for the war on Hamas to continue – would be linked to whether it satisfies his demands about ensuring that both civilians and aid workers are not harmed.

Backing away from Israel

Biden has been slowly but surely backing away from his initial support for the war and the goal of eradicating Hamas since the Palestinian terrorist group started it with unspeakable atrocities on Oct. 7. The administration has toyed at times with the idea of linking aid to halting the offensive, but never previously acted on the idea, despite the constant urgings of left-wing Democrats to do so. The aid worker incident thus is a turning point as this is the first time that Biden has directly said that he would impose conditions on military assistance.

This takes the dispute between the two governments to a very different and far more dangerous level.

It's important to be clear about what is happening. While the deaths of the aid workers were the result of a terrible blunder by the Israel Defense Forces, the firestorm of criticism aimed at Israel in the days since the incident occurred isn't really about their tragic fate, sad though it is.

Nor is it really rooted in a substantive argument claiming that the IDF is failing to take precautions to avoid civilian deaths or to anything to hinder the flow of aid into Gaza, including the area that is still controlled by Hamas. The world's leading experts on warfare, including John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, and historian Andrew Roberts, have already declared that not only is Israel upholding the laws of war in its Gaza campaign but has done so in a manner that has caused fewer civilian casualties in such a battle than any in modern history. The claim that Israel has engaged in an "indiscriminate" bombing campaign or is "over the top," as Biden has claimed, simply isn't true.

Biden's hypocrisy

It is also breathtakingly hypocritical.

Mistakes in war always happen as US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and famously before that, in Korea and Vietnam – proved.

On his first day in office in January 2009, President Barack Obama ordered drone strikes in Waziristan, Pakistan, which led to the deaths of as many as 20 civilians. That would be only the first of 540 strikes on diverse targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq in which more than 300 civilians would be killed during his two terms in office, though that number might be underestimated since the strikes were conducted in areas where reporting casualties was not as organized as it is in Gaza. Though Obama would later joke that he had discovered in the White House that "it turns out that I'm really good at killing people," no one in the corporate press assumed that the Nobel Peace Prize winner was deliberately slaughtering civilians by the dozens as part of a "targeted killings" of terror suspects.

Biden has direct responsibility for killing civilians in error as well.

On Aug. 29, 2021, during the disastrous and humiliating US withdrawal from Afghanistan, American forces conducted a strike on what they thought was a member of the ISIS-K terror group transporting bombs. They were operating under orders from Washington; however, it turned out to be a tragic mistake, and the missiles launched from MQ-9 Reaper drones killed 10 innocent civilians, including seven children.

While Biden issued a lengthy and passionate statement denouncing the deaths of the seven aid workers, he did no such thing when his own orders led to the accidental deaths of innocents. Instead, he let military officials make the statement about the error and take the fallout while he went to the beach for the weekend.

Of course, Obama and Biden didn't intend to kill civilians while Americans were trying to take out terrorists. But it happened quite often for the same reasons that this week's tragedy occurred. Even with the most sophisticated weaponry and satellite imaging of target areas, amid the fog of war, there are no guarantees that even missions fully vetted with great care and intended to take out only combatants will go according to plan.

Indeed, in December, the IDF conceded that about 20% of soldiers that had been killed during the current war were victims of "friendly fire" in which they were mistaken for foes by their own side. Many Americans have died under similar circumstances in wars fought by the United States.

Even when armies take special care to avoid accidents, anyone who enters a combat zone where bullets and bombs are flying is at risk of being killed or wounded. That is always going to be true whether or not those put at risk are combatants or non-combatants.

In the case of the World Central Kitchen victims, the problem, which remains ongoing, is accentuated by the fact that Hamas terrorists lurk near aid convoys since they steal most of what has been brought into Gaza for civilian use. Indeed, it is fairly obvious that if Hamas terrorists weren't taking the food, fuel and other supplies that have flowed into Gaza with Israeli permission these past six months, there would be no talk about people starving there.

That doesn't lessen the grief of the families of those who die as a result of errors. But it should put the situation in perspective. Their deaths – like those of everyone else who has been killed since Hamas attacked southern Israel in an orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7 – are the responsibility of the terrorists and their many supporters.

Letting Hamas win

Though Israeli military and political leaders have had numerous discussions with their American counterparts in which the counter-offensive into Gaza has been criticized, the latter has had no realistic suggestions about how Hamas terrorist forces might be eliminated other than by the methods the Jewish state has been employing. The notion that Hamas can be eliminated without Israeli troops taking physical possession of their last enclave in Rafah in the south and striking at the four remaining intact Hamas battalions there is risible. Therefore, Biden's demand for "tangible steps" by Israel can only mean one thing: stop the war or conduct it in a manner that ensures that the goal of the complete defeat of Hamas and the end of its control of any part of Gaza cannot be achieved.

That means that if Israel is to continue receiving military aid, it must agree to a situation in which the war against Hamas simply cannot be won. Should Netanyahu decide that those conditions must be accepted, it virtually guarantees that the Islamist group will emerge from the conflict it began not only alive and well but as its victor, with undoubted primacy in Palestinian politics for the foreseeable future.

These conditions are the inevitable result not of the specific incident involving the aid workers but of an incessant campaign of incitement and smears directed at Israel even before ground troops entered Gaza after the Simchat Torah pogroms in 22 Israeli communities and at the Nova music festival.

Biden's threats are the culmination of the opprobrium that has been directed at Israel from left-wing editorial pages and the genocidal chants from mobs supporting Hamas that have been heard on the streets of American cities and on college campuses. Indeed, so successful has been the effort to demonize the Israeli war effort that Biden said his own wife Jill had demanded that he do something to "stop it, stop it now."

Political motives

His willingness to heed these calls to halt the Israeli effort to defeat Hamas goes beyond a desire for domestic peace in the White House. The entire left wing of the Democratic Party, including many so-called "progressives" in Congress, has been clamoring that he use the threat of aid cutoffs to end the war prior to the release of the more than 100 hostages still being held by Hamas, including five Americans. Isolated in the White House, Biden and his advisers truly believe that the reason he's currently trailing former President Donald Trump in his battle for re-election is because he's considered insufficiently hostile to Israel by the intersectional activist wing of his party that is ever more hostile to Zionism and the Jewish state.

When measured against the yawns and shrugged shoulders from the White House under Obama and Biden when civilians died as a result of their orders, it's easy to see that the outrage about the aid workers has little to do with humanitarian concerns. Instead, it is about hatred for Israel that has taken root in left-wingers who have come to believe that Israel must not be allowed to defeat Hamas and that any civilian casualties that occur as a result of the terrorists' actions are too many.

If Biden really wants to end the fighting in Gaza, then he should be directing all of his anger and threats against Hamas and its backers, not the Israelis. If Hamas surrendered and released the hostages – ranging from a baby to an 86-year-old man – the war would be over immediately. Instead, by threatening to trash the alliance with Israel and the mandate that it must live with Hamas terrorism, including the threat of more Oct. 7 massacres in the future, he has only strengthened the resolve of the Islamist murderers to stand their ground, secure in the belief that the United States will save them from the justice they so richly deserve for their crimes.

As much as we may all mourn what happened to the aid workers, the willingness of Israel's foes and false friends like Biden to use this incident to end the war against Hamas should not be considered a manifestation of humanitarian sentiment. If their tragic fate provides the leverage that Washington uses to end the war, then the blood of the Israelis – and those in other nations who will fall victim to a revitalized international terror movement funded by Iran – will be on the heads of those who cynically exploited their deaths.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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A late-night comedy show isn't the place you generally go for insights on the prospects for stability in the Middle East. But the appearance this week of President Joe Biden on NBC's "Late Night with Seth Meyers" gave us more than just another example of the broadcast network's daily in-kind contributions to the Democrats and Biden's re-election campaign.

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The fawning interview served up softballs to the 81-year-old president, intending to undermine concerns about his age and declining abilities. It also served as an opportunity for him to tell us just what the United States stands for in international affairs. The fuzzy rhetoric of the president about being a "Zionist" notwithstanding, his statements about what he wants to happen in the Middle East showed that he was primarily interested in currying favor with his party's intersectional left wing that despises Zionism and that is well-represented in Hollywood. Working to ensure that Islamist terrorists no longer pose a threat to Israelis or Americans wasn't high on his "To Do" list.

That was evident in his comments about the imperative for a ceasefire in the current war against Hamas as part of a deal to free Israeli hostages, for Israel to halt its campaign to eradicate the last strongholds of Hamas in Gaza and to pause the fighting before the start of Ramadan. It was also inherent in his insistence that the Palestinians should be rewarded for the Oct. 7 massacres with a diplomatic process that will lead to statehood that they don't want, but which they can use to continue their genocidal campaign to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet.

An immoral hostage deal

For nearly five months, the Jewish world has been calling for the release of hostages taken by Hamas during the Oct. 7 massacres in southern Israel – all of them. Indeed, the freedom of the hostages is one of Israel's two main war goals alongside the elimination of Hamas. But as ongoing negotiations for the release of the more than 100 Israelis still being held captive by Hamas in Gaza continue with flurries of diplomatic activity involving the United States, as well as Hamas's ally Qatar, something is missing from the discussion of the proposed terms for such a deal. And that is a moral compass.

Trading the lives of innocent Israeli civilians who were kidnapped from their homes amid an orgy of mass slaughter, rape and torture that took place on Oct. 7 for the release of Palestinians who have been convicted of acts of violence against Jews, including murder, is a bizarre and immoral concept that has already become normalized. Indeed, it is Israel's government that has done more to normalize this idea because of its record of paying exorbitant prices to free Israelis held by terrorists. The most recent was in 2011, when Jerusalem traded 1,027 prisoners, including hundreds with Jewish blood on their hands, to gain the release of Gilad Shalit, a young soldier who had been kidnapped by Hamas in 2006. That decision by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now hangs over the current negotiations as not just a terrible precedent but a benchmark of extortion that Hamas – and its foreign enablers – believe can be made to look as if it were a bargain.

That's because Israel is reportedly willing to trade large numbers of terrorists for each individual hostage with the number of female Israelis held captive by Hamas (undergoing who knows what torment at their hands) being especially high. The hostage releases are supposedly also going to be strung out over weeks as part of a process in which Hamas can play with the emotions of Israeli families as they hope and pray that their relatives will be let go – and that they are among those still alive (dozens of those still unaccounted for are believed to be dead). Hamas doesn't want to include captured soldiers, particularly female soldiers, in the early stages of the deal, preferring to hold them as bargaining chips for even higher prices. The terror group that ruled Gaza as an independent state in all but name until Oct. 7 also wants many of the terrorists released to return to the Strip, thus giving them the opportunity to kill more Jews.

More than that, each hostage released, in addition to terrorists freed, will gain Hamas a day of halted fighting and increased supplies to go into the parts of Gaza controlled by the Islamist group. As such, the freedom of Israelis will not just ensure that Palestinians who have committed acts of violence will evade justice; it will mean that the terrorist group itself – pledged to the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its population – is the main beneficiary of the deal. It will be allowed to regroup, resupply and prepare to continue its war on the Jews.

With Biden promising to treat any pause in combat as an excuse to work for a permanent ceasefire, the main outcome of the next hostage deal (and there inevitably will be another) will be not so much an egregious act of extortion as a political victory for Hamas that will solidify its hold on Gaza and its place as the preeminent voice of the Palestinian people.

Pressure on Netanyahu

We know that as far as the families of the hostages are concerned, no price is too high to pay for their loved ones. They are fully entitled to advocate for a deal at any price, and no one should blame them for doing so. Who wouldn't trade the whole world to save our children or other relations?

It's true that the campaign inside Israel to pressure Netanyahu to accede to Hamas's terms is inextricably tied to the country's politics. To listen to the speeches at weekly Saturday-night rallies in Tel Aviv's "Hostages Square," as I did recently, you'd think it was Netanyahu and not Hamas who was the kidnapper, and that he was holding them in his basement rather than desperately waging military and diplomatic campaigns to free them from captivity inside the Islamist group's remaining tunnel strongholds.

But as sensitive as the prime minister is to that kind of political pressure, the most worrisome aspect of the effort to force Israel to halt the war against Hamas is not coming from within the Jewish state but from its closest ally.

If the reported terms of a hostage deal – the prospects for which seem to change every day, if not every hour – are true, then it's an astonishing result that ought to give everyone in the civilized world pause. The hostages are important. Still, those tasked with keeping the world safe from terrorism and working against forces that threaten the stability of the Middle East should not just be appalled by the terms, even if they mean freedom to the hostages. They should be actively using all of their political, military, economic and diplomatic leverage to ensure that it doesn't happen. A Hamas victory in the war, sealed by a hostage deal, would not simply be a defeat for Israel but a devastating blow to the interests of the United States with implications that go far beyond the conflict with the Palestinians.

American interests at stake

Yet it is exactly the outcome that the president of the United States seems most interested in achieving.

Hamas's leverage would ordinarily only depend on the number of hostages it holds. But in these negotiations, it has other assets. It has an international movement of sympathizers – wittingly and unwitting – and an American government that is more eager to end the war than to eliminate the group that started it with unspeakable atrocities on Oct. 7.

Biden has been at pains to appease those voters who support Hamas. The results of the Michigan Democratic primary this week, in which 13.2% of voters cast ballots as "uncommitted," will only heighten the pressure on him to do more to please those who regard the terrorist group's survival as an imperative.

In an act of unintended irony, during his late-night appearance, he claimed that his likely opponent in November – former President Donald Trump – was the candidate of "old ideas" that were discredited. Yet Biden's position on the Middle East and his insistence that Israel must, sooner or later for the sake of its "survival," accept a two-state solution is the oldest and most discredited policy option that could be imagined. At this point, it's not just something that has been tried and failed repeatedly. Palestinians have made it clear they have no interest in a state if it means living in peace next to a Jewish one.

It's bad enough that Biden still pretends, by every measure of public opinion notwithstanding, that Hamas isn't broadly popular and representative of the Palestinian people. That's made all the more egregious by his comments to Myers, in which he called for the toppling of Netanyahu's democratically elected government because it's "incredibly conservative."

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It's also absurd that Biden pretends that the whole world is behind Israel but that it will lose that support unless it stops its campaign against Hamas due to Palestinian casualties falsely labeled as "genocide," which are regrettable but only continue because the terrorists refuse to surrender. This is much like the Nazis – whose ideology is echoed in Hamas's goals – in the last days of World War II as they preferred to see Germany destroyed and its people slaughtered rather than concede to the inevitable. His talk of the need for a holiday pause for Ramadan is equally off-base since no one in the international community seems to think it was wrong for Hamas to start a war on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.

Israelis have their own reasons for their views on a hostage deal. Some will support it because of their sympathies for the hostages and their families, or because they think it will hurt Netanyahu. Others oppose it because it will likely mean more Jewish bloodshed in the future. But American interests are also involved. This is a deal that will not just grant a victory to the perpetrators of the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust; it will mean that Hamas would exist as the main force in Palestinian politics for the foreseeable future with unknowable consequences for regional stability. It will be a gift to their Iranian funders and allies elsewhere, like the Houthis, who are threatening the global economy because of Biden's foolish pre-Oct. 7 appeasement of Iran. Above all, in a world in which the United States still plays an irreplaceable role as the defender of Western values and security, the eagerness with which Biden is pursuing this amoral deal is a measure of just how far American foreign policy has fallen on his watch.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The world looks a lot different from Kibbutz Kfar Aza than it does in the United States or any other point on the planet. The difference is obvious in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, or anywhere else in Israel. Throughout the world in most mainstream media accounts and commentary from supposedly enlightened members of the chattering classes, the current war being fought in Gaza between Israel and Hamas is seen as merely the latest twist in a long cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. From that perspective, it's just more evidence of the cruelty of war to which the only possible moral response is to tell everyone involved to stop it, especially when the alleged underdogs – the Palestinians – are being defeated.

To those who look on from afar, the history of the conflict or the rights and wrongs of how the war started – even the unspeakable atrocities committed on Oct. 7 at Kfar Aza and 21 other Israeli communities when Palestinians associated with Hamas violated a ceasefire, crossed the border and murdered, raped, tortured and kidnapped people – are just details that act to incite the combatants.

A just war

This war is between a democratic nation fighting for its existence against an Islamist movement whose goal is the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. Yet many outside of Israel, even those who do know the history and essential nature of the two sides in this struggle, such as President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are increasingly speaking as if the only thing to do is to end the war as soon as possible. They say the aftermath of the war must mean that Hamas survives – and gets away with mass murder. That means the Palestinians are rewarded for such abominations with an independent state that will likely have the ability to pursue the terrorist organization's goal for many more days like Oct. 7. Somehow, that makes sense in Washington and other places.

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But not in Israel.

The overwhelming majority of Israelis, including many, if not most, of those who oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, see it very differently. And to understand why, maybe you need to go to Kfar Aza and see the ruins and makeshift memorials to the people who lived in that small kibbutz near the Gaza border who were brutally murdered, raped, or kidnapped by Palestinians.

If so, you'll soon realize that the battle with Hamas isn't one about Israelis ruthlessly harming Palestinians. Nor is it about "white" oppressors seeking to dominate powerless "people of color," as many left-wing Americans think. Nor is it one in which tired diplomatic theories about a "two-state solution," which have repeatedly been rejected by the Palestinian people, can be employed to get a messy situation under control, not to mention ease some of Biden's political problems.

To be in Israel during this war is to experience both the strength and the fragility of the Jewish state. Yet the general public wouldn't necessarily think that if all they know of the Middle East is what's seen on news shows. After all, life goes on pretty much as normal, even if some businesses and farming areas in southern and northern Israel have clearly suffered due to the absence of employees because so many people have been called into active military service. The buses and trains are running, and people still go to the movies and concerts, as well as other normal activities.

The hotels are also full, but not with tourists. That is a key giveaway that something isn't right. Walk into many hotels in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, and something is a little off. They're packed with people but not tourists on vacation from abroad. Chat with even a few of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis – families with small children and elderly people prominent among them – who were forced to flee their homes in the south near Gaza and the north near Lebanon, and you get a view of the war that is omitted in the breathless coverage of Palestinian suffering.

These people were chased out of their homes by either the Oct. 7 attacks and continued rocket fire by Hamas, or the ongoing missile fire from Hezbollah. They can't go home until the terrorist threat at both borders is eliminated.

A country united by grief and determination

To understand what's going on, you need to talk to Israelis who have been called back into the military and willingly risking their lives fighting in Gaza. Though they're eager to resume their regular lives, many I spoke with are just as ready to return to the battlefield because they know the job of destroying a deadly threat to their country isn't finished. While international opinion deplores the possibility that Israel will attack the city of Rafah – Hamas's last major enclave inside Gaza – few Israelis I spoke to, including those who have served, are prepared to halt the war until all of the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 massacres are stripped of the ability to repeat their crimes.

You don't have to do a lot of reporting before you realize that morale among Israeli soldiers is high and stretches across all the cultural, political, and religious debates that divide Israeli society. It's not because they relish war or bloodshed. They don't want to kill Palestinians and also grieve the loss of so many of their comrades – casualties made more likely because of the strict rules of engagement that prevent the Israel Defense Forces from fully utilizing the firepower at their disposal to lower the number of civilians killed because Hamas uses them as human shields.

Their spirit remains strong. They know that what they are doing has nothing to do with the lies about "apartheid," settler-colonialism," "occupation" or "genocide" that are thrown about at antisemitic demonstrations in U.S. cities or on college campuses and are treated as acceptable discourse in mainstream publications like The New York Times.

Israeli soldiers – young conscripts and veteran reservists alike – aren't down about the war because they know that what they are doing is defending their homes and families. It's the civic faith in the justice of their cause that resonates throughout Israeli society and pervades the thinking of those who have sent their loved ones to battle. It is also felt by the grieving families of those who didn't come home. Israel is a nation that is united by both anguish and determination.

Americans understand war differently

This may come as a shock to Americans, who are used to thinking of wars in a very different way.

Since World War II, Americans were sent to fight dismal and bloody proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, where the rhetoric about defending democracy against communism rang hollow for many. That was just as true about the attitudes toward the wars fought in Afghanistan and Iraq in this century. Despite any initial enthusiasm about punishing the perpetrators of 9/11 or toppling dictator Saddam Hussein, those conflicts turned into messy quagmires that most Americans – whether on the right or the left – wished to escape. Though the opponents of the United States were clearly evil, by the time both wars ended in what history will record as defeats, they hardly seemed worth the sacrifice of blood and treasure that had been expended on them. Even before the final rout of Americans during the Biden administration's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, these wars had already been sealed in the country's collective memory by both popular culture and the opinion of most serious commentators as terrible mistakes.

Coverage of Israel's war against Hamas makes it seem as if it is another version of hapless and brutal Westerners fighting Muslims in futile efforts that cannot succeed, similar to the way Americans failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the overwhelming majority of Israelis – from secular left-wing Tel Avivians to pious Jerusalemites and all points in between – know their war is different.

They understand that their opponents are not in far-off lands like America's in recent decades, and their raw violence directly threatens them. Though Israel has prospered in the 75 years since the Jews regained sovereignty in their ancient homeland, it hasn't known a day of complete peace. Palestinian Arabs, their foreign allies and enablers in the Muslim and Arab world, as well as those in the West and international community, have never given up their quest to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet.

The horrors of Oct. 7 were not a one-off act of despicable and pointless anti-Western terrorism like the Sept. 11 attacks. Israel has suffered many terrorist attacks in which large numbers of civilians were killed by Islamist murderers, but Oct. 7 was the worst of them all. Despite the barbarism shown by the Palestinians involved, what made it resonate throughout Israeli society was the certain knowledge that it was intended as a trailer for what Hamas – and the majority of the Palestinian population that supported and still supports those actions – intends to do to the rest of Israel.

Wrecked cars from attendees of the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 are piled up as a gruesome reminder of the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel. Photo by Jonathan S. Tobin.
Places of pilgrimage

That's why the view from Kfar Aza, and other Israeli kibbutzim and towns throughout southern Israel, is so different.

The sites of the massacres have become places of pilgrimage for Israelis and visitors to the country – and rightly so. To see the homes in places like Kfar Aza that were riddled with bullets and/or burned by the terrorists, and to learn of the horrible fates of their inhabitants, is a searing experience. The same is true for the fields where the Nova music festival took place, and where hundreds of young people were slaughtered, raped, and kidnapped – and which are now filled with makeshift memorials to the victims and those taken hostage. Just as haunting are the nearby fields where the wreckage of hundreds of burned-out cars of festival attendees have been piled up and for the time being, left as a gruesome reminder of their fate.

After a brief period of interest and empathy, most of the international media lost interest in the story of Oct. 7. Americans don't hear from those who survived the attacks or those who risked their lives to rescue some of the victims. But their stories do resonate with fellow Israelis, who understand that they could have just as easily found themselves the prey of Hamas murderers hunting for Jews to torment and kill on that terrible day.

The fate of the hostages also hangs over the country. The pain of the families of those who are still held in captivity by Hamas is felt by everyone there. And while politics has intruded into the discussion – as the anti-judicial reform movement that paralyzed the country has taken control of the weekly "hostage square" protests in Tel Aviv and focused their animus at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than Hamas – support for the war effort remains largely unshaken.

The notion of stopping the fighting to allow Hamas to survive while still armed and in control of part of Gaza is widely considered reasonable elsewhere, but not in Israel. There, they understand that if Hamas is allowed to fully escape the consequences of the war it started, it will only mean that it will be allowed to make good on its promise to repeat the Oct. 7 atrocities again and again.

The widespread assumption in America – even among major Jewish organizations that are supposed to have Israel and the Jewish people's best interests at heart – that a Palestinian state must be created after the war ends is opposed even by most on the Israeli left. They know that rewarding Hamas and its supporters with such a gesture isn't just an invitation to more bloodshed. It's also immoral and will ensure that the conflict never ends. The independent Palestinian state in all but name ruled by Hamas in Gaza before Oct. 7 was evidence of what such a "solution" would mean for Israel. They understand that a state in Gaza, as well as one in Judea and Samaria, controlled by genocidal terrorists and their morally equivalent political rivals – the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah Party – could place the entire country in danger.

But that's hard to see in Washington, even by those not motivated by leftist ideologies to hate Israel and to cheer the slaughter of Jews. Still, it's a truth that is hard to escape when looking at the ruins of Kfar Aza.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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We could look at it as just another day in New York, where protests on behalf of one cause or another have been part of the culture of the place for more than a century. But the organized effort to snarl traffic with demonstrations blocking a tunnel and three major bridges by people chanting support for the killing of Jews ought to be treated as more than just another day in Gotham.

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The answer as to why this is happening is linked to recent controversies about college presidents who had trouble deciding whether advocacy for the genocide of Jews violates their academic institutions' rules of conduct. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, there has been an epidemic of antisemitic incidents throughout North America. Jewish businesses and even Jewish neighborhoods have been targeted for boycotts or harassment. Jewish students are harassed and heckled with vicious antisemitic taunts, most recently during a high school basketball game.

The people committing these antisemitic actions are not right-wing extremists, neo-Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan—groups that Jews have long feared and whose existence was highlighted by the 2017 "Unite the Right" violence in Charlottesville, Va., as well as the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, Calif., in 2019. Instead, so-called "progressives" are the ones engaged in behavior that seeks, at the very least, to silence and drive Jews from the public square unless they are prepared to join with those opposing efforts to defeat genocidal anti-Jewish terrorists.

The reason for this is no secret. The pervasive influence of intersectional and critical race theory (CRT) teachings, coupled with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is the cause. These toxic ideas divide the world into two immutable groups: white oppressors and people of color, who are always the victims. It has created an atmosphere in which people who think of themselves as enlightened liberals think it is acceptable to single out Jews for opprobrium and ill-treatment because the woke catechism that is their secular faith falsely labels Israel and the Jewish people as "white" oppressors. The side whose goal is to destroy the Jewish state and slaughter its people are considered the victims, not terrorists who must be defeated rather than appeased.

Peaceful protest or domestic terrorism?

While The New York Times referred to it as a "pro-Palestinian protest," those who shut down the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, as well as the Holland Tunnel, on Jan. 8— effectively preventing vehicular access to Lower Manhattan during rush hour on a Monday morning—were doing more than demonstrating support for a cause or inconveniencing tens of thousands of people. They were effectively holding a city hostage and creating circumstances that might have led to the loss of life had there been an emergency of any sort during the two hours they blocked these arteries on which the city's economy and normal life depend.

That, in of itself, ought to dictate that those involved—125 of them were arrested by the New York Police Department, which struggled to regain control of the situation for hours—would be subject to serious punishment. But there is an aggravating factor that also ought to be taken into account.

They and their apologists claim that they are only doing this to show New Yorkers what Gazans are allegedly experiencing during the war begun by Hamas by the Oct. 7 atrocities. While blocking traffic, they were also voicing chants that were a thinly veiled call for more terrorist attacks on Jews, both in Israel and around the world.

That's what the "long live intifada" and "globalize intifada" slogans heard at these and other "pro-Palestinian" protests mean. Along with the "from the river to the sea" chant, this is ample evidence that what was going on was an antisemitic protest carried on by a coalition of groups, including some like Jewish Voice for Peace that pose as Jewish, which make no secret about the fact that they share a goal with the Hamas terrorists: the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet. It's also a goal that can only be accomplished by the genocide of the Jewish people.

That ought to mean that such protests would be treated as hate crimes or at least prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Unfortunately, it's likely those involved will—like those involved in other recent protests in what they themselves describe as an effort to "flood" various sites, a reference to the "Al-Aqsa flood," the name Hamas gave its orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnapping—get the usual slap on the wrist that weary city officials have given to most demonstrators in recent memory.

Much like the crowds that participated in the "mostly peaceful" protests in the summer of 2020, the antisemitic traffic disruptors will likely get off scot-free. In the Black Lives Matter riots, many of those who assaulted cops, destroyed property and looted stores went largely unpunished. Indeed, the Times referred to what happened at the bridges and the tunnel as "peaceful."

Prejudicial double standards

But just imagine if three New York City bridges and a tunnel were similarly shut down by MAGA red-cap-wearing supporters of former President Donald Trump, protesting efforts to prosecute or throw him off the 2024 presidential ballot. They would almost certainly be labeled as "insurrectionists" and deemed by the U.S. Department of Justice to be "domestic terrorists" whose tactics were a threat of civil disorder not to be tolerated. And the treatment they'd get from authorities would be harsh.

But because endangering New Yorkers while calling for the death of Jews is treated by the chattering classes as merely exercising free speech about a topic on which reasonable people ought to agree to disagree, the protesters will likely be free to terrorize some other thoroughfare as soon as they like.

Similar incidents have happened elsewhere in the country, with highways blocked and businesses that the "pro-Palestinians" associate with the Jewish community subjected to harassment with few, if any, repercussions for those engaged in this conduct.

In Toronto, Canada, "pro-Palestinian" demonstrators were even less subtle about their antisemitism. They have been blocking traffic on a highway bridge in a Jewish neighborhood, causing not just inconvenience but creating an atmosphere of intimidation for its residents. Yet rather than throw these people in jail, the police brought them coffee and doughnuts in a vain effort to "manage" the situation rather than restore public order.

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This isn't supposed to be the president with the social media problem. For four years, President Donald Trump bypassed the press by tweeting his thoughts to more than 87 million followers on what used to be called Twitter. Trump's feed was must-reading for anyone who followed politics or just wanted a good show as he shared his unfiltered thoughts about just about anything. The chattering classes hated it, considering it unpresidential and crude. But Trump's willingness to be outrageous or to go for his opponent's jugulars only endeared him to his supporters.

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Social media chaos at the White House was supposed to be a thing of the past once President Joe Biden took the oath of office. Biden has his problems, many of which revolve around his apparent physical decline as he heads deeper into his 80s. But unfiltered or ill-considered posts on X (as Twitter is now called) aren't supposed to be one of them.

Yet a post on X published on Biden's personal account (@JoeBiden), as opposed to the official presidential one (@POTUS), at 5 p.m. on Nov. 28 had the potential to turn the Middle East upside down. It read: "Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace. To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can't do that."

The next day, an anonymous "senior Biden administration official" pooh-poohed the idea that it was a policy shift, and noted that it was taken from a longer statement issued days earlier and shouldn't be taken out of context. Yet that was exactly what the unknown White House staffer who posted it on Biden's account – unlike Trump, who did most of his own tweeting, no one thinks the current president is typing out such posts on his phone – had done. We don't know whether he did it under orders or on his own, but the impact of the post was not inconsiderable.

What did the post really mean?

Many among the president's 37.6 million followers read that and not unreasonably concluded that he was taking a page out of Trump's book, announcing a policy change on social media rather than through normal channels. Posted on a day when the future of the current ceasefire in Israel's war with Hamas was in doubt, it seemed to be declaring the White House's support for its indefinite continuation.

That was cause for grief and consternation among supporters of Israel. Jerusalem was forced to accept a halt in its Gaza offensive in order to secure the freedom of some of the hostages Hamas took during its Oct. 7 attacks. But if Biden was now saying that he opposed the continuation of the war, then that would not just contradict the president's repeated pledges of support for Israel's effort to eliminate Hamas. It would mean the Islamist group that committed unspeakable atrocities six weeks ago – and whose purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of its people – would be allowed to get away with mass murder.

By contrast, the considerable segment of the Democratic Party that opposes Israel and wants an immediate and complete ceasefire was thrilled. The push to save the terrorists in Gaza with a ceasefire has blurred the line between those who openly support Hamas and scream the "from the river to the sea" chant about Israel's destruction, and those merely unsympathetic to Israel and/or concerned about the Palestinian Arabs who have been killed as a result of the war launched on Oct. 7. Either way, the revolt inside the Democratic Party and among the staffers at the White House, the State Department and other government agencies is at the point where it is potentially endangering the president's re-election chances.

As a series of articles in The New York Times – the latest of which was published the morning the controversial X post was published – have made clear, Biden's support for Israel is deeply unpopular among the younger generation of Democrats. That's especially true for those who are working for the government and are likely to constitute the next generation of Democratic members of Congress, diplomats and government officials. These disgruntled staffers are backed up by the anger among the intersectional left wing of the party that produces most of the activists who work to elect Democrats. On top of that, groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that support Hamas against Israel and speak for the Muslim-American community, are also venting their anger at Biden.

With polls showing Biden currently trailing Trump – his likely GOP opponent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls of the 2024 presidential race – the generational divide among Democrats about Israel is causing Biden real problems. Younger voters who have been subjected to critical race theory and intersectionality indoctrination in colleges oppose Israel far more than older ones. The loss of their enthusiasm, as well as the possibility that Arab voters who helped put Biden over the top in Michigan in 2020 might stay home or vote for a third-party candidate, puts the Democrats in peril.

That's the real context of the Biden post on X. Whether the president intended it or not, it reflected the way that the administration's pro-Israel stand has been crumbling under pressure from its supporters. The liberal corporate media that normally acts as his bodyguard against criticism is pushing hard to persuade him to listen to young anti-Israel Democrats – and abandon his support for the war against Hamas and force Israel to accept defeat.

The pressure on Israel to continue the ceasefire from Washington as Hamas shamelessly barters the hostages in an inhuman fashion is growing. Though the administration insists that it still wants Hamas defeated, it is also declaring that it opposes any real effort to clear the terrorists out of southern Gaza as Israel has begun to do so in the northern part of the Strip. Biden declared last week that he considers left-wing proposals for conditional military aid to Israel "a worthwhile thought," though not one he is presently willing to implement. Still, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands that is an open threat to cut off the resupply of his military and effectively end the war whenever Biden decides the pressure from his intra-party critics is too much to bear.

Biden has justly received credit from the pro-Israel community for his stalwart statements of heartfelt support for Israel since Oct. 7, as well as for the revulsion that he and other administration spokesmen have expressed for Hamas's goals and its crimes. But it's far from clear how long he can continue balancing the desire of centrist Democrats like himself to stick with Israel against the increasingly unhinged accusations of "genocide" being hurled at Israel by the activist wing of the party and fueled by biased media coverage of the war.

White House meetings such as those described in the Times show he is bending over backwards in private to signal to the anti-Israel crowd that he is really on their side while reaffirming his support for the Jewish state in public.

Two states advocacy won't help Biden

The administration is trying to use its support for a two-state solution at the end of the war, whenever that happens, as the exit ramp from its current predicament. That the Oct. 7 atrocities – launched from territory that was an independent Palestinian state in all but name ruled by Hamas – demonstrated exactly why the overwhelming majority of Israelis will never consider giving up security control of Gaza, or Judea and Samaria, for the foreseeable future.

It was no small irony that Biden's latest gesture of support for a Palestinian state occurred this week on the 76th anniversary of the 1947 U.N. partition resolution. That measure divided the British Mandate for Palestine into three parts: an Arab state and a Jewish state with Jerusalem under international control. The Jews accepted the plan, but Palestinian Arabs – supported by the surrounding states – rejected it, declaring that they would never countenance the existence of a Jewish state in the ancient Jewish homeland under any circumstances. They launched a war to ensure that the newborn State of Israel would be crushed. But they failed utterly with hundreds of thousands of Arabs becoming refugees and an even larger number of Jews forced out of their homes in the Muslim and Arab world.

The United Nations commemorates the anniversary of the partition plan vote with an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, thereby repudiating their own effort to create a two-state solution. And Palestinians – whether supporters of Hamas or the supposedly more moderate Palestinian Authority that autonomously rules the Arab population in the West Bank – continue to reject two states if it means ending their long, futile war to destroy Israel.

Biden is wasting his time talking about two states, and not just because the Palestinians have repeatedly demonstrated that they will never agree to such a deal. What he won't acknowledge is that the push for a ceasefire is not motivated by a desire for peace but implicit support for Hamas's right to "resist" Israel and thereby pursue its destruction.

Biden has sought to appease the left by forcing the entire government to adopt the woke diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) catechism that grants a permission slip to antisemitism by labeling Israel and Jews as "white" oppressors of "people of color." But he fails to understand that the forces he was mollifying believe Israel to be an illegitimate state and oppose peace. And the more he tries to navigate between their antipathy for Israel and his own desire to oppose Hamas, the more he will undermine Israel's efforts to defend itself.

The Democrats' political dilemma as the country moves deeper into the 2024 election cycle is real. The idea that Biden can convince both sides in the civil war going on among Democrats over Israel that he is with them is not a game that can continue indefinitely. Oct. 7 was an event that forced an administration trying to appease Hamas's sponsor, Iran, and equivocal about its support for Israel into a laudable position of moral clarity. If it steps away from it, that will hurt, not help, him.

Contrary to the judgment of those in the White House who think that Biden can be all things to all people on the war in Gaza, the balancing act won't win over the anti-Israel progressives while stymying his chances with the pro-Israel independents he needs to defeat Trump. This two-faced strategy hurts Israel. But the more Biden moves away from his principled stand behind the Jewish state and its just war to eliminate Hamas or pretends he is doing so, the worse it will be for his re-election chances.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Israel's government knew that it had no choice but to accept the deal it was offered in which some of the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 would be freed in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners and a temporary ceasefire in the war to eliminate the terrorist group from the Gaza Strip. Pressure from the families of the hostages and a Jewish tradition that prioritizes the redemption of captives swamped all of the objections to giving Hamas what it wanted in exchange for the lives of Jewish women and children.

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But the question before the Jewish state and its allies isn't so much whether the deal was one that enhances Israel's security or if, instead, it strengthens the barbaric group that committed unspeakable atrocities last month and makes it easier for them to survive. Rather, the key dilemma facing it and those who claim to be its friends is whether this is the start of a prolonged bargaining process that will bring victory to Hamas. And the party that will have the most to say about that is President Joe Biden, not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If Washington pressures Israel not to resume the fighting and to make subsequent deals for more halts to the Israel Defense Forces' operations, then it will be a turning point for its alliance with the Jewish state with implications that go far beyond the current war or the political fates of Biden or Netanyahu. That would mean that Hamas will not just be allowed to get away with mass murder. It would also emerge, however battered and bloody, as the victor of the war this genocidal movement began on Oct. 7.

It also sets up a dynamic by which the terrorist group can seek to prolong the ceasefire by bartering more hostages – assuming, that is, as we must pray is true, that enough of them are still alive in order to continue such a process over the next few weeks. In this manner, Hamas can stall Israel's offensive in Gaza for not just a few days but perhaps indefinitely.

The recriminations about the hostage deal are a reminder of the failure of Israel's political, military and security establishments on Oct. 7. Having failed to protect its citizens from mass slaughter, gang rape, torture and kidnapping, the government Netanyahu leads is now forced to pay almost any price to free as many civilians as he can.

There are sound reasons for refusing to play the terrorists' game. And perhaps a less politically vulnerable leader than Netanyahu could have held out against the emotional appeals of those who believe that the fate of the hostages must take precedence over the long-term best interests of all of Israel's citizens. But the hostages, especially the children who were traumatized by witnessing the murder of parents and neighbors before being kidnapped, have become the focus of an international campaign on the part of Israel and Jewish communities to remind a world that seems primarily focused on the suffering of Palestinians that this war was launched with atrocities committed against Jews.

For Netanyahu to have done anything that could be interpreted as prolonging the suffering of the hostages, even if freeing them helps the murderers and makes it more likely that others will be subjected to their cruelty in the future, was a non-starter.

Once this deal is set in motion, the debate about it will further undermine the prime minister. He may still harbor illusory hopes that a decisive victory over Hamas in Gaza will enable him to survive in office. Nevertheless, he must shoulder responsibility both for a bad deal and for a catastrophe that happened on his watch because of the failure of his policies toward Gaza, even if his political opponents didn't oppose them at the time.

Yet regardless of its impact on postwar Israeli politics, the outcome of this conflict now depends on whether it marks the beginning of the end of the campaign to destroy Hamas. If the terrorists have more innocent hostages to barter in exchange for more humiliating releases of captured terrorists, such as those with Israeli blood on their hands, then that would give them the ability to put off, perhaps indefinitely, the next stages in Israel's efforts to wipe out the terrorists' hold on both northern Gaza and the as-yet uninvaded southern part of the Strip.

Pulling the plug on the war

It remains to be seen whether having gained the release of some hostages, the dynamic this establishes means that Netanyahu will have no choice but to pay whatever Hamas asks for the freedom of those remaining in the hands of the terrorists. Equally important is whether the negotiations will be the excuse Biden has been waiting for to pull the plug on his support for the war.

From the moment this conflict began, observers have spoken of Israel having only a limited amount of time to achieve its objectives. The assumption on the part of the country's critics was that the tsunami of international condemnation of Israel's push into Gaza to rid the Strip of its Islamist terrorist overlords would eventually force it to stop.

Such expectations were based on the belief that the international media would almost immediately forget about the atrocities of Oct. 7 and quickly adopt the Palestinian narrative in which they were the innocent victims of Israeli "disproportionate" force. That assumption was correct, as it was soon apparent that the Hamas propaganda machine had corporate media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and much of the broadcast and cable-news channels eating out of their hands. Their willingness to quote Hamas's almost certainly inaccurate casualty figures and to treat the war as one in which Israel was engaged in "collective punishment" of an "occupied" and "oppressed" people helped incite not just pressure for a ceasefire that would be a gift to Hamas but also a surge in international antisemitism.

Biden's choice

This also created a political problem for the Biden administration, which has been bleeding support from its left-wing base and its own staffers who are deeply hostile to Israel. But to date, Biden has been willing to endure a storm of criticism from his own party and has stuck with his support for the war against Hamas, even if he also seems determined at times to prevent Israel from winning it.

Now that the hostage negotiations have resulted in one deal that will grant a reprieve for Hamas, Biden has a choice to make.

If he listens to his left-wing critics, Biden will use the effort to free the hostages as an excuse to turn off the spigot of arms resupply and thereby prevent Israel from resuming the war. That would effectively end a conflagration that is causing him grief and, if the polls are correct, may well be dooming his hopes for re-election next year. Biden can then use the freedom of the hostages to declare victory for his policies and resume his pre-Oct. 7 policies of appeasing Hamas's sponsor: Iran. He can also begin pressuring Israel to accept a resumption of talks to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict even if this failed policy proposal after Oct. 7 showed Israelis what a Palestinian state would really mean. Both appeasement of Iran and pressure on Israel will be very popular among the left-wing Democrats Biden needs to keep in his fold.

While that might make the president's life a little easier, it would also prevent Israel from achieving the destruction of Hamas, which is a prerequisite for the security of Israel's citizens. Netanyahu can say "no" to American demands to wind up the fighting in Gaza. But given that the task he has assigned his military is one that will take months to complete, ignoring Washington in this instance is not as easy or cost-free as past spats he has had with Biden or former President Barack Obama.

This is the moment when the world will see just how serious Biden's commitment is – both to Israel's security and to eliminating Hamas. To its credit, the administration has acknowledged that it is a terrorist movement and death cult comparable to ISIS, whose genocidal goals are akin to those of the Nazis. But with so much of his base pushing for an end to the fighting, Biden may prefer to let it survive rather than to have to spend another few months defending a war to ensure that they never repeat their crimes.

That is why American Jews who have rallied around the cause of freeing hostages must be equally vocal about pushing back against the pressure for a permanent ceasefire with Hamas. Sympathy for those being held by the terrorists is important, as is the effort to free them. But if the hostage negotiations provide Hamas with a path to survival, then it will be more than a blow to the already shaky morale of Israelis. It will only mean more Oct. 7-style mass slaughters and more kidnappings of innocent victims. More than that, Hamas and its Iranian funders won't be satisfied with targeting Israel; their ultimate goal is to do the same in Europe and the United States. If decent Americans – both Jewish and non-Jewish – don't push for Biden to continue supporting a just war on Hamas, then we are dooming Israel as well as Americans to a future of endless Islamist terrorism.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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On Oct. 27, 2018, American Jews experienced the worst incident of violence against them in their history. The shooting at the Tree of Life*Or L'Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh left 11 worshippers, most of them elderly, dead as they prayed during Shabbat-morning services. It was every American Jew's worst nightmare come to life, but it was also a threat they thought they understood and could place in proper perspective.

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But five years later, as American Jews are facing a massive surge of antisemitic activity in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks in Israel on Oct. 7 that left more than 1,400 dead, the challenge is one that many in the community are finding it harder to cope with or to comprehend. The threats and acts of intimidation, as well as the open display of hatred towards Jews on the streets of the nation's largest cities and on the campuses of universities, have not yet led to a crime of the magnitude of the Pittsburgh shooting.

As the title of Dara Horn's collection of essays on antisemitism goes, Everyone Loves Dead Jews. But if there is a lesson to be learned by an increasingly embattled Jewish world, it is that as popular as dead Jews may be, the identity of their killers goes a long way towards determining just how much solidarity Jews should expect after a terrible crime is committed against them.

If the assailant is a right-wing extremist who can be linked – whether or not it is completely unfair – to a politician that liberal Jews and their political allies detest, the attack can generate enormous sympathy and support for Jewish communities. But if the people brutally assaulting Jews claim to be intersectional victims of white privilege and their supporters, then don't be surprised that those thought to be "allies" suddenly become either silent or join the ranks of those vilifying the Jewish victims and actually supporting the murderers.

Blaming Pittsburgh on Trump

The shooters in both cases – lone gunmen motivated by a mixture of extremist right-wing ideas – were exactly the sort of people most members of the Jewish community recognized as their natural enemy. And many Jewish organizations and their leaders knew just what to do about it. They blamed the terrible crime on someone most American Jews already despised: President Donald Trump. He was, after all, the man who had said there were "good people on both sides" at the neo-Nazi "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. If America no longer felt like a safe place, then many, if not most, Jews were sure it was his coarse rhetorical style and social-media posts, as well as stances on issues like illegal immigration, which had made it so.

For all of Trump's faults, that was an injustice. He hadn't actually characterized the Nazis as "good people" or anything like that. And the Pittsburgh shooter's crazed writings made it clear that he despised Trump as much as the Jews because of the president's historic support for Israel.

True or not, putting the blame on him and political conservatives was the sort of thing that allowed many Jews – whose politics and historical memory make them inclined to think that all antisemitism comes from the right – to view Pittsburgh as something that made sense rather than the random act of a lunatic.

And it was that sense of solidarity with fellow liberals and minority communities that sent many Jews into the streets in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis created a moral panic about American racism. The Black Lives Matter movement and the rest of the intersectional left may have been linked to antisemitism and hatred for Israel. But liberal Jews had no doubt which side of that argument they should be on, and what happened in 2018 played a significant role in that way of thinking.

Sympathizing for the murderers

Five years later, many of the same Jews who were most determined to stay in sync with their minority allies are now realizing that solidarity is a one-way street. In an America where critical race theory teachings declare Jews to be guilty of "white privilege" and Israel to be a white state oppressing Palestinian people of color, the Oct. 7 atrocities could not be viewed in the same way as the Pittsburgh shooting.

What happened along the border with Gaza was the worst mass slaughter since the Holocaust. The toll of more than 1,400 dead men, women and children – with thousands left wounded and more than 200 kidnapped by Hamas terrorists – along with acts of rape, torture and desecration of bodies was a crime of an order of magnitude that made it impossible to compare to the synagogue shooting.

Yet instead of generating an even greater wave of sympathy for Jews than was expressed in 2018, what followed was something that shocked even the most cynical observers. Many of the "allies" that liberal Jews counted on the most were silent. Celebrities, including Jewish ones, had nothing to say about that many dead Jews.

Worse than the silence, however, was the open support that Hamas generated on the political left. Instead of sympathizing with the Jewish victims, Muslims and their leftist supporters cheered the killers. That led to acts of intimidation on the streets and on campuses as Jews were bullied and/or assaulted.

In New York, the spectacle of crowds bellowing hate for Jews in Times Square was hard to ignore. The same was true this week when Jewish students barricaded themselves in the library at Cooper Union College as pro-Hamas demonstrators taunted them. And with the prospect of a mass pro-Hamas rally at the Brooklyn Museum on Oct. 28 – not far from the center of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Crown Heights, a neighborhood that has seen a pogrom before – Jews were being warned to stay home and not take Shabbat walks near the expected mob of supporters of Jewish slaughter. Even in the city with the largest Jewish population in the country, they aren't safe.

This appalling situation doesn't lessen our sense of mourning for the Pittsburgh victims or our concern about right-wing extremism where it exists. But it does require the Jewish community to rethink the post-Pittsburgh obsession for seeing violent antisemitism as purely a right-wing problem.

No one should be under laboring any illusions about the support for the Palestinians after Oct. 7 being a function of humanitarian sentiments or worries about the plight of those who live in Hamas-ruled Gaza as the war against the terrorists continues. The hatred expressed in the rallies against Israel should make it clear to even those most determined to ignore the problem that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The terrorists want to kill as many Jews as possible and those Americans supporting them aren't shy about showing us that more dead Jews is exactly what they want.

Instead of being able to ascribe those threatening us to a political bogeyman, American Jews must instead acknowledge that they are the targets of an international antisemitic movement that is supported by supposedly liberal opinion and rooted in the same intersectional politics that created the Black Lives Matter protests.

Dealing with this threat requires more than heightened security measures and indulging prejudices against traditional political foes. It requires American Jewry to accept that they are, like Israelis, locked in a battle with an enemy that cannot be reasoned or compromised with. As sad and as dangerous as the Pittsburgh shooting was, five years later, the threat Jews now face is far more insidious. And they are confronting it without the help of the traditional friends who have abandoned them.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Iran has been in the news lately for a number of reasons. One is the Biden administration's latest instance of appeasement of the Islamist regime in which it paid $6 billion in frozen funds to it as a ransom to gain the release of five US citizens. Another involves the revelations published last week in Semafor in which the world learned about Iran's influence operations in the United States and the way Biden administration officials like the currently suspended Robert Malley enabled them.

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As important as those stories are, they pale in significance beside one that has yet to be even mentioned in The New York Times or The Washington Post. It involves the US Department of Defense's 2023 Strategy for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction report that was, in a typically deceptive strategy known as the Friday afternoon news dump, published late last week. In an echo of past American intelligence failures, it assessed that Iran is "not pursuing a nuclear weapons program at this time." However, it added the following ominous statement, noting that Tehran now "has the capacity to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear device in less than two weeks."

In other words, the game is over. After a decade and a half of American and Israeli hand-wringing about Iran's quest for nuclear weapons – and knowledge about their program is necessarily incomplete because it has barred inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency from carrying out their already inadequate efforts to monitor what they are doing – Washington is acknowledging that Tehran has become a threshold nuclear power.

In theory, fear of American and/or Israeli military action – however unlikely the former might be – might permanently deter Iran from moving forward to put together a nuclear weapon in the 12 days the DOD's report says that they can do it. Alternatively, once that process is set in motion, it is theoretically possible that military threats or attacks could prevent the Iranian bomb from becoming a reality.

Let's leave aside that sort of unrealistic fantasizing about a resolute Western response to Iran or Israel finally acting on its statements that it would never allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon. If the mullahs and their terrorist shock troops of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are that close to a nuke, there's very little chance that they will be stopped from assembling one if they wish to do so. There is equally just as little chance that the CIA or Israel's even more formidable Mossad will acquire this knowledge in time for someone to do something about it.

The Israelis, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the various defense and intelligence agencies there, have repeatedly promised that they would act to stop Tehran from getting to this point. By contrast, President Joe Biden has merely promised that Iran won't get a bomb on his watch – a pledge that he can be said to have kept, absent proof that the Iranians have not actually put together a nuclear device.

The triumph of containment

This means that whether anyone is prepared to formally acknowledge this new reality or not, the only viable option for dealing with a nuclear Iran is the one that many so-called foreign policy realists have been advocating for nearly 20 years: containment.

Supporters of containment, like the American Enterprise Institute's Kenneth Pollack, who wrote a 2013 book on the subject, have long asserted that short of launching a war that Israel may not be capable of fighting and the United States had no interest in after its bad experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the only thing to do is to treat a nuclear Iran the way the West has other nuclear powers, including Russia and China.

In this scenario, instead of trying to roll back the clock to the point where their program could be stopped, measures are put into place to deter Iran from ever using it. Those who have preferred containment to pre-emptive actions have also proposed pressuring or somehow tempting Tehran to change with bribes that would entice it to become a more responsible player on the international stage rather than a rogue terrorist state.

Though both the Obama administration spoke about stopping a nuclear Iran, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was its signature foreign-policy "achievement" was really about containment and not prevention because once it expired at the end of the 2020s, an Iranian bomb was a given.

Containment has always been predicated on the idea that while Iran's leaders were Islamists who sought Israel's extinction and hegemony over the Middle East, they were rational actors rather than fanatics who were prepared to risk their own regime's survival, as well as the devastation of their country, by using a nuclear weapon. There are reasons to doubt the wisdom of that assurance, but such debates are now officially moot. Barring a decision for a strike against Iran by Netanyahu or a reckless Iranian announcement that will remove the ambiguity about their nuclear capability that the 12-day breakout period minimally preserves, containment is what Israel or America is left with. But the problem with this essentially defeatist strategy is that even if Iran never uses its nuclear weapons, the fact that they have them makes them far more powerful and potentially gives impunity to the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.

The debate about how best to pursue containment is an argument for another day. Right now, it's appropriate to ask – after all the promises, speeches, threats, and analyses about how Iran could be prevented from becoming a threshold nuclear power – how this happened.

Since many of the same people who brought the world to this point are still in power in Washington, it's hardly irrelevant to discuss how and why they failed. Some people "lost" Iran; identifying them and demanding accountability for their abysmal failure is appropriate.

George W. Bush's and Iraq

Any discussion of the rise of Iran in the 21st century must begin with the George W. Bush administration.

One of the unintended consequences of the Iraq War was that it empowered Iran to a degree that would have been difficult to imagine if the barbarous Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had been left in place. The war's remaining apologists can rightly assert that Saddam was a bloody tyrant, as well as a state sponsor of terrorism. Eliminating him was a just act and removed Iraq as a dangerous military power. But Saddam was also Iran's sworn enemy, and as long as he was in charge in Baghdad, Iran had to be primarily concerned with the threat of a renewal of the war between the two countries. The American military victory in 2003 changed that equation, as well as gave Tehran the ability to have outsized influence in, if not control of, Iraq via a Shia population that had long been repressed by Saddam's Ba'ath Party.

While Iran's nuclear program predated the Iraq War and would have continued anyway, the war was an essential step towards the Islamic Republic becoming a regional power that could threaten the Gulf States and Israel, as well as keep its ally Bashar Assad in power in Syria. The disaster in Iraq also ensured that the American people would not tolerate anything that might mire them in a third war in the Middle East – something Iran knows. Moreover, Bush's own disinterest in taking action against Iran at a point early on in its progress essentially ensured that American military power – the only force that we can be sure could take out Iran's nuclear program – was never going to be deployed against this nuclear threat.

Netanyahu's empty threats

Next, we must also acknowledge that Netanyahu must accept some responsibility for the triumph of containment.

That may seem counterintuitive since he has been a fervent advocate of tough action, including sanctions and military threats, against Iran, this entire time. Moreover, his eloquent and prescient advocacy for stopping Iran has helped mobilize opposition to the appeasement of Iran in both the United States and among the Arab states that now look to Jerusalem as an ally against the threat from Tehran.

It's equally true that the always-cautious Netanyahu passed on a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities back in 2012 when he was drawing red lines on cartoon bombs at the UN podium.

Israel did undertake covert actions to delay Iran's nuclear program, including the joint operation with the United States in which they introduced the Stuxnet virus into their system. But these were merely temporary measures. Israel's undercover work inside Iran (including its spiriting away of a warehouse full of records proving that Tehran had lied to the world about its actions and intentions) was amazing, but it was never going to be a substitute for taking out those facilities.

In his memoir, Bibi, he blames opposition from the leaders of the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence agencies for the failure to strike Iran. He's right that Israel's prime minister isn't the commander-in-chief of the armed forces like an American president. But had he made it his sole priority, does anyone doubt that he could have enforced his will on the defense establishment? He did not, and there were a lot of good reasons for that since Israel acting alone might not have permanently ended the Iranian threat and would have complicated its alliance with the United States, as well as endangered those entrusted with the mission. Still, the fact remains that like Bush, he didn't risk everything in order to stop Iran at a point where it was much farther away from nuclear capability. And that's one more reason why Iran succeeded.

Kerry's Iran collusion and Trump's failure

Another possible scapegoat is former President Donald Trump.

Obama apologists do blame Trump for withdrawing from the JCPOA and attempting to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear quest with sanctions and threats. They say his decision torpedoed an imperfect but still working plan to stop Iran without a viable alternative in place. That's mistaken because the Obama deal was a failure from the start and was going to have to be replaced sooner or later.

In the end, Trump failed during his four years in office to achieve a better Iran nuclear deal or to stop their efforts altogether. But the primary blame for that failure was not his. Had Iran believed that it had no alternative but to return to the negotiating table or to face complete isolation and economic ruin, Trump's plan would, at the very least, have had a chance to succeed.

They didn't believe that. The reason was that they were betting on Trump being defeated in 2020 and being replaced with a Democrat who would return to Obama's strategy of appeasement/containment. Had Biden acknowledged while running for president that the JCPOA was a sham and made clear that he would stick with pressure to get a better deal that would end the threat rather than merely kick the can down the road, Iran might conceivably have been left with no choice but to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Instead, he promised more appeasement.

Even worse than that, former Secretary of State John Kerry met repeatedly with the Iranians in 2018 and advised them to ignore Trump's moves and "maximum pressure" campaign. He assured them that if they merely sat tight and waited for 2021, they could have everything they wanted. They took his advice and that, as much as anything, is why Iran is now only 12 days away from a bomb.

Kerry's collusion with Iran wasn't merely ill-advised; his actions advising an enemy of the United States to thwart government policy was arguably one of the most disgraceful actions undertaken by an American in the history of the republic. That he got away with those actions, which are close to treasonous, and subsequently received the reward of another high office as Biden's climate czar only makes it worse. While Americans spent three years being lied to by the media and the Democrats about Trump's supposed collusion with Russia, it was Kerry's open collusion with Iran that should have generated outrage rather than shrugs and yawns. The "echo chamber" that Obama staffers like Ben Rhodes created in the media ensured that Iranian appeasement stayed on track even after Trump won in 2016.

Obama's bad deal

Kerry doesn't stand alone as the man who is most responsible for ensuring that Iran became a threshold nuclear power. Former President Barack Obama came into office determined to realign American foreign policy away from traditional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and his Iran appeasement did just that. It did have the unintended consequence of bringing Israel together with the Arab states in a way that made the Abraham Accords possible. But in 2013, when Obama and Kerry began their initial secret negotiations with Iran, the international community had – thanks in part to Netanyahu's warnings – endorsed tough sanctions. With American leadership, that could have brought Iran to its knees. Instead, the United States wound up being the ones begging Iran for a deal and abandoning sanctions.

It took 20 years of bad decisions to bring the world to the point where everyone must acknowledge that Iran has succeeded, and Israel and the West failed.

But Obama, Kerry, and their foreign-policy team that embraced Iranian appeasement must bear the primary guilt for this appalling and dangerous situation. Honest histories of this debacle – assuming a future in which anti-Trump and anti-Netanyahu partisanship is no longer assumed from the academy and supposedly reputable historians – will judge them harshly. The consequences that will ensue from an Iran terrorist state that is only 12 days from a nuclear weapon are terrible, even unimaginable. In the years to follow, we will learn just how much their feckless policies, lies, and collusion with Islamist murderers will cost the peoples of the Middle East and the rest of the world in blood and agony.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Elon Musk may have thought that he was being shaken down by the Anti-Defamation League. But even though he believes that he's turned the tables on the group, it turns out that he's given them a priceless in-kind contribution after all.

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By focusing all of his fire on the ADL as part of an effort to fend off a campaign to starve the platform formerly known as Twitter (now called "X") of advertising, and by engaging with accounts that are clearly antisemitic and even blaming them for antisemitism, Musk has allowed the organization not just to play the victim in this dispute. He's enabled them to change the subject from the way ADL has been part of the push for Big Tech censorship of political viewpoints to one about enabling Jew-hatred. In so doing, Musk has played right into the hands of ADL CEO and national president Jonathan Greenblatt, and given critics of his effort to use X to protect free speech on the Internet a weapon with which they can discredit him as well as the anti-censorship cause.

The recent dustup began over the course of the week when, in the aftermath of a meeting between the ADL and an X executive, Musk began publicly attacking the organization for its aggressive efforts to force the company to ban certain accounts. In various posts, he supported attacks on the ADL by right-wing antisemites like Keith Woods and Alex Jones, claiming that the group is itself the "biggest generator of antisemitism on this platform." He then followed that up with a post that claimed: "To clear our platform's name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League … oh the irony!"

That, in turn, helped fuel a surge of vile antisemitic screeds on X supporting the #BanTheADL hashtag that X allowed to trend on the platform.

An avalanche of antisemitism

For the ADL, this proves the point they have been trying to flog for the past year, ever since Musk bought Twitter. Greenblatt has been saying all along that dropping the company's censorship policies was a green light for hate. Musk's decision to target the ADL has produced exactly the kind of avalanche of antisemitic posts that seem to vindicate the ADL's pro-censorship arguments.

As columnist Daniel Greenfield has rightly pointed out, there is something sinister about the way that Musk chose to single out ADL as the main actor seeking to demonetize X. Some 40 organizations, including ADL, GLAAD, the NAACP, Muslim Advocates, National Hispanic Media Coalition and United Church of Christ, urged an advertiser boycott of Twitter after the Musk takeover, in addition to 60 other leftist groups that are part of a #StopToxicTwitter coalition. But Musk only threatened to sue ADL, and his posts amplified the voices of some of the worst extremists, including the disgusting Jew-hating "Groypers" led by Nick Fuentes.

Musk is a mercurial figure hard to pigeonhole in any one political slot. He seemed to be motivated by a desire to overturn the social-media censorship regime when he paid $44 billion for Twitter in a deal that was completed in October 2022. The purchase price was vastly overinflated, and since then, Musk has struggled to keep the platform's enormous financial losses under control. But there is little doubt that his grand gesture was a response to a genuine problem.

Big Tech censorship

The public learned a great deal when he opened up the company's files to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, and Alex Berenson shortly after the sale was completed. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of threads known as the Twitter Files. What they found was a shocking pattern of censorship of conservatives and critics of government COVID policies on the platform, as well as collusion with the Biden administration in silencing views they didn't like. They also helped unravel the story of how Big Tech companies like Twitter coordinated with Democrats and others to silence reporting about the corrupt business practices of President Joe Biden's family in the weeks before the 2020 election.

As I wrote in the weeks after the Musk purchase, the pushback he got from the ADL, and other left-wing and liberal groups, was purportedly about hate speech but really about something else. In its current guise in which it has become more of a biased attack group rather than one devoted to defending the Jews, ADL was part of the effort to censor right-wing views.

Its work consulting with Silicon Valley giants like PayPal, Facebook, and Twitter demonstrated that it was part of a combined assault on the part of liberal activists, corporations, and the government against free speech and not a defense of democracy, let alone a campaign devoted to expunging hate from the Internet. As such, though they represent themselves as fighting tirelessly against extremists, the impact of their efforts posed as much a threat to freedom as many of the nutcases that it singles out as arguments in favor of their censorship goals. Yet pursuing this path was immensely profitable for ADL, both in terms of the corporate contributions it was able to solicit and the power it gave them.

At the same time, it is important to note that in the 11 months since he took control of Twitter, Musk has proven to be anything but a steadfast defender of freedom. He sounded the right notes at the start, indicating that he understood that ownership of the platform gave him effective control of the world's virtual public square. That's a position of enormous power that—as his predecessors at the company proved—could lead to great harm.

But since then, he has broken with the journalists who uncovered the Twitter files he had opened to them. It's also far from clear that some of the same problems that plagued Twitter have been thrown out along with much of the old staff. Shadow banning—the silencing of some voices, whether by an algorithm or individual action without the knowledge of the person affected—of conservative opinion accounts seems to have continued.

Rather than take on some of the larger leftist groups that have been pushing for advertiser boycotts of the platform, he preferred to ally himself with antisemites by trying to make the argument solely about the ADL.

It's the same sort of bad judgment that led him to rebrand the company from Twitter and its eponymous tweets to calling it X, a bizarre blunder that may be among the worst marketing decisions in the history of modern business.

Who can we trust?

In short, it's clear that Musk can't be trusted to be the guardian of free speech he wants us to think he is. Yet no matter how disappointing his conduct has proved to be, none of that justifies the ADL's desire to reinstate the old Twitter censorship of conservatives.

This is a debate that has been raging for the past four years since actor/comedian Sacha Baron Cohen was given a platform by the ADL to push for more censorship on Facebook in the name of eradicating antisemitism. He argued that social media companies should be booting Jew-haters off of their platforms, and their failure to do so was fueling a surge in antisemitism.

The problem with that point of view was proven in the following years as Big Tech began to listen to him. Instead of just banning lunatics and trolls like the Groypers, the Silicon Valley oligarchs who run these companies put in place practices that enabled wide-ranging censorship of political viewpoints on a range of subjects from conservatives, including pushback against authoritarian and pointless government policies that aimed at curbing the coronavirus pandemic.

For all of my disagreements with Greenblatt and the ADL, there can be no compromise with or rationalization of the likes of Jones, Woods, Fuentes, and his Groypers. Still, that shouldn't be interpreted as a justification of ADL's position on Internet censorship. While social media platforms are within their rights to shut down accounts that promote hatred, they seem incapable of doing so without engaging in censorship of legitimate political stances.

The world would be better off if the Jew-haters were silenced, but we can't trust the ADL or Big Tech censors to do so without engaging in conduct that undermines the freedom of expression that is essential to democracy. It's difficult to weigh the right balance between these two concerns, but as much as Musk is deserving of criticism for conduct that can be justly described as enabling antisemitism, that shouldn't be treated as a vindication of ADL's position or its pose as the arbiter of what should or shouldn't be allowed to be posted online. Jewish security can't be obtained at the cost of sacrificing free speech.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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