Aug 25, 2024

Another long Sunday post to read through including details on a major preemptive operation in the North that resulted in the airport closing to all flights (it has since reopened). Thank you for the continued support, and more importantly, I hope you find these reports useful. Please share with friends and family (anyone can sign up via the link below) and I always welcome your feedback. Please continue to pray for the people of Israel. Am Israel Chai!

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The North

  • Barak Ravid reports in Axios: Israel said on Saturday it launched a preemptive strike against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon ahead of what Israeli and U.S. intelligence say is expected to be a major missile and drone attack on Israel by Hezbollah. He also reports that despite the escalation with Lebanon, the negotiation summit in Cairo will take place today as planned.
  • According to the NYT, Israel’s preemptive strike was aimed at missile launchers in Lebanon that had been programmed to be fired at 5 AM in the direction of Tel Aviv. Several thousand rocket and missile launching barrels were destroyed in the strike which targeted 40 different launching compounds.
  • “The IDF identified the Hezbollah terrorist organization preparing to fire missiles and rockets toward Israeli territory. In response to these threats, the IDF is striking terror targets in Lebanon,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a statement.
  • Iron Dome saving lives over northern Israel tonight
  • Thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers were struck simultaneously by some 100 IAF fighter jets in the preemptive attacks, the military said.

    While central Israel, including Tel Aviv, was in the terror group’s crosshairs, the majority of the Hezbollah rocket launchers struck by the Israeli Air Force were aimed at the north, according to the IDF.

  • Per the Jerusalem Post: Hezbollah’s ‘phase one’ failure: Israel foils attacks on Mossad, IDF intel bases
    • Hezbollah has listed 11 bases it said it targeted, but it and the IDF have also implied that it was also hoping to target Mossad headquarters and IDF headquarters.

  • Yesterday, there were 185 red alerts, and a total of 450 in the past week

Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel

  • According to Israeli journalist Marc Schulman: The North continues to burn due to the impact of Hezbollah rockets.
    • During the war, 189,000 dunams (46,703 acres) have been scorched. Of this, 61% of the land affected is in the Golan Heights, 29% in the Upper Galilee, and the remainder in the Lower Galilee. The vegetation in the Golan Heights is expected to recover the fastest.
    • The Health Authorities in Lebanon (which are more reliable than those of Hamas) report that 564 Lebanese have died since the war began, with the overwhelming majority (421 fatalities) being Hezbollah fighters. Additionally, another 1,800 have been wounded.

To give you a sense of what life is like in Israel today, my friend Michael Granoff shared this screenshot from his phone on X: Good morning from Israel.


The Numbers

Casualties

  • 1,659 Israelis dead (+5 since Wednesday) including 699 IDF soldiers (336 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza: +5 since Wednesday)
    • Sergeant Ori Ashkenazi Nechemya (19) was killed by anti-tank missile fire in southern Gaza’s Rafah
    • Sgt. First Class (res.) Danil Pechenyuk, 27Sgt. First Class (res.) Nitai Metodi, 23, and Sgt. First Class (res.) Evyatar Atuar were killed in an explosion in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood when an explosive device planted on the outside of a building they were searching detonated.
    • Sgt. Maj. (res.) Yaniv Itzhak Oren, 35 was killed in a separate clash in Gaza City
  • Additional Information (according to the IDF):
    • 2,249 (+20 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 422 (+4 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
    • 4,376 (+27 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 650 (+6 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
  • According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 40,265 (+42 since Wednesday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 93,144 (+163 since Wednesday) have been injured during the war.
    • We also encourage you to read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
    • The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry.” The analysis found that “9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data” and that “an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates.”

Hostages (no change since Wednesday)

  • The bodies of the six hostages recovered by the IDF from southern Gaza’s Khan Younis this week all have signs of gunshot wounds, according to initial autopsy findings released Thursday. IDF representatives showed the families of Alex Dancyg, Yagev Buchshtav, Chaim Peri, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popplewell, and Avraham Munder the findings from the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute. According to the institute’s report, the bodies of the six hostages all have signs of gunfire, likely indicating they were killed by their captors. Channel 12 reported that the military believes that they were executed by their captors during an IDF operation near where they were being held, with their guards possibly believing a rescue operation was underway.
  • There are currently 109 hostages currently in captivity in Gaza
  • On October 7th, a total of 261 Israelis were taken hostage.
  • During the ceasefire deal in November, 112 hostages were released.
  • 146 hostages in total have been released or rescued
  • 66 hostages have been confirmed dead.
  • This leaves an estimated 109-111 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
    • 36 hostages are assumed to be dead and held in captivity
    • Thus, at most, 81 living hostages could still be in Gaza.

(Sources: JINSAFDDIDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education CenterYediotJerusalem PostIDF Casualty Count, and the Times of Israel)


Humanitarian Aid

Source: Israel Humanitarian efforts – Swords of Iron


Listen

[PODCAST] Honestly with Bari Weis: The Palestinian ‘Traitor’ Risking Everything to Speak Out

  • A few months ago, we learned about a young man whose name we’re withholding, which is something we very rarely do, because he insists it’s for his safety.
  • This young Palestinian man is from a small village in the West Bank, and he grew up there with limited access to water and without a regular supply of electricity. Most of the kids he grew up with dropped out of school and went into manual labor. But this young man chose a different path. He won a scholarship to study abroad for college. He earned three degrees in three different countries. And then he landed a tech job with an Israeli company, of all places. (For context, among the 360,000 workers in the Israeli tech sector, there are only a few dozen Palestinians from the West Bank.)
  • His story is one of setbacks, hardships, and discrimination, but also of hard work, perseverance, unlikely friendships, and in the end—against all odds—success.
  • But then his life was ruined. . . by a social media post. On October 7, he woke up in his home in the West Bank to the news of the massacre happening inside Israel. While some people in his community celebrated, he was horrified. He posted how he felt online: “What sad and horrible news to wake up to and out of words and unable to digest what’s going on right now. I’m Palestinian and firmly stand against this terror. I pray for the safety of my friends, colleagues, their loved ones, and everyone else affected.” He continued to post about how he felt—six posts in total.
  • Link to the Free PressThe Palestinian ‘Traitor’ Risking Everything to Speak Out
  • Link to Podcast: The Palestinian ‘Traitor’ Risk – Honestly with Bari Weiss

[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: A Deal on the Verge of Collapse – with Nadav Eyal

  • As Israelis continue to brace for a kinetic strike from Iran, or Hezbollah, or both, this long-anticipated attack may have been put on hold by Tehran while Israel and Hamas were negotiating the last details of a hostage and temporary ceasefire deal. Now, as we learn today from our guest Nadav Eyal, that deal appears to be slipping away.
  • Nadav Eyal is a columnist for Yediot. He has been covering Middle-Eastern and international politics for the last two decades for Israeli radio, print and television news.
  • Link: A Deal on the Verge of Collapse – Call Me Back

Watch

College campuses began to welcome students back this week. As expected, we are seeing a number of antisemitic events occur, again:

  • Students for Justice in Palestine at the University at Albany interrupted orientation by disrupting the President’s Picnic for the Freshmen Class.
  • Imam Tom Facchine spoke at a Muslim Student Association (MSA) event titled, “Islamic Political Activism,” on Tuesday. @ColumbiaSJP advertised the event and were surely in attendance. In this short segment of the 2.5 hour Zoom event, the imam suggests that student activists make an example of outspoken pro-Israel professors like Professor @ShaiDavidai in order to silence other pro-Israel professors. He also suggests that students a part of the pro-Hamas movement gather in large numbers to avoid backlash from the university.

What We Are Reading

War, Legitimacy and Context in the Middle East, by Geoffrey Corn and Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula (Ret.) in The Cipher Brief

  • Gaza. The word immediately evokes images of wartime carnage. For us, however, it represents something else: an example of the danger inherent in wars in which civilian casualties are an enemy’s principal ammunition for winning the strategic information battle; enemies who simply do not anticipate or seek military victory.
  • Since Israel launched its military campaign against Hamas in the wake of the barbarity of October 7th, this trend has produced truly troubling consequences. Israel continues to be widely vilified for what is broadcast in the media to be a policy of indiscriminate warfare and inhumane treatment of Palestinian civilians. And international legal tribunals have fueled this narrative by entertaining spurious accusations of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity directed by Israeli political and military leaders.
  • To most military professionals, these allegations ignore the critical significance of context in the assessment of legality and legitimacy of a military campaign. Gaining a better understanding of that context led both of us to join a fact-finding mission to Israel as part of the High Level Military Group. That one week visit in July provided us with important insights into the operational military realities that are widely misunderstood or ignored by those who posit that Israel, and its defense forces are engaged in an illegal campaign. Instead, it confirmed for us (and our entire group) the exact opposite: that the IDF have executed a military campaign defined by tactical excellence and overall commitment to the law of armed conflict – the law that is and must remain the touchstone for assessing legitimacy in war. These conclusions are the foundation for an amicus brief filed by our group challenging the request to the International Criminal Court to secure arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defense.
  • U.S., and most allied military commanders, are taught early in their careers the importance of considering mission, enemy, terrain, troops, time, and civilians (METT-T-C) when planning and executing military operations. This is how the military mind incorporates context into mission execution. Our visit enabled us to gain insight into how all these factors impact IDF operations in Gaza, and why they are so important to inform any credible assessment of operational legitimacy. We will address our observations in relation to several of these considerations.
  • Further complicating the mission are the illicit tactics employed by Hamas. To understand the IDF’s actions, one must first understand how Hamas operates. Fundamental to Hamas’ mode of operations is its strategic choice to blend into the civilian population. It does so for three reasons:
    • First, to confuse and confound the IDF by deception.
    • Second, to increase the probability that Palestinian civilians are killed in error by the IDF by creating confusion between belligerents and noncombatants.
    • And third, to use Palestinian civilians as human shields as a means of defense.
  • The fact is the killing of Palestinian civilians is a cruel and illegal element of Hamas’ strategy. There is no denying that civilians are dying because of unfortunate yet permissible collateral effects of IDF combat action. Yet the pervasive drumbeat of condemnation directed against the IDF for these casualties completely ignores the tactical realities they confront; realities created by Hamas. First, none of these casualties would have been inflicted had Hamas honored the cease-fire that was in effect the morning of October 7th instead of launching their barbaric and illegal attack. Second, their tactics deliberately expose Palestinian civilians to the deadly consequences of combat with the IDF by pervasively embedding fighters among the civilian population. Indeed, in many cases it appears they are not only seeking to shield their assets by hiding behind civilians and highly protected property but seeks to compel the IDF to conduct attacks that kill and injure civilians. Combined, this means Hamas, not the IDF, bears principal responsible for the civilian casualties in this war.
  • Our group left with two overriding impressions.
    • First, is that the disconnect between the reality we observed, and the public perception of Israeli military operations is truly unfortunate.
    • Second, our concern is how this Hamas playbook may be replicated by future enemies of democratic states. Those enemies are learning that the most effective way to turn the public against a righteous war is to create conditions that maximize—not reduce—civilian casualties.
  • Link: War, Legitimacy and Context in the Middle East: The Cipher Brief

Iran’s global terrorist ambitions must be crushed, before it’s too late, by Israel Katz in The Telegraph

  • The recent elevation of Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7 massacre, to Hamas’s top political position reveals two alarming truths. First, Hamas remains as extremist as ever. Sinwar’s rise – marked by his brutal hostile tactics, including mass rape, civilian hostages, and the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – proves that Hamas endorses his war crimes and crimes against humanity. This move shatters any illusions about a moderate faction within Hamas or a distinction between its political and terrorist wings. The entire organization is a terror group under Iran’s control.
  • Iran’s destabilisation efforts are increasingly evident in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Tehran is undermining the Palestinian Authority, supporting extremist groups with truckloads of weapons and money. If not for Israel’s vigilance, Judea and Samaria would quickly devolve into another Iranian stronghold, threatening both Israeli and regional stability. Iran’s ambitions extend further, as its attempts to smuggle arms through Jordan endanger this key moderate Arab state.
  • Looking ahead, any solution for Gaza, Judea, and Samaria must account for this reality. Palestinian self-governance in internal affairs, coupled with Israeli security oversight, offers the best near-term option to counter Iranian influence while allowing Palestinians the maximum opportunity to govern their own affairs. This arrangement is crucial to breaking the cycle of violence that fuels Iran’s ambitions. History proves that whenever Israel steps back from overseeing security, the first to fill the vacuum is an Iranian-controlled terror proxy.
  • Israel is at the forefront of the free world’s fight against Iranian encirclement. Supporting Israel against the Ayatollahs in Tehran, Sinwar’s Hamas in Gaza, and Nasrallah’s Hezbollah in Lebanon is an act of self-preservation for all free states. The world must recognize that today’s battle against Iran’s construction of a “ring of fire” around the Middle East may well be a prelude to broader confrontations. The writing is on the wall; the question now is whether the world will heed its warning before it’s too late.
  • Link: Iran’s global terrorist ambitions must be crushed, before it’s too late: The Telegraph

The Philadelphi Corridor, an AIPAC memo that contains all relevant information regarding the small border between Egypt and Gaza.

  • What is it? The Corridor was originally established under the 1979 Israel- Egypt peace treaty as a 100-meter-wide buffer zone. The zone was later expanded beginning during the Second Intifada to be several hundred meters wide. It covers the entire 8.7-mile-long border.
  • The Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza is within the Philadelphi Corridor.
  • In 2005, as part of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Egypt and Israel signed an agreement by which Egypt would secure the border between Egypt and Gaza to prevent the smuggling of weapons into the Strip. Egypt maintains a one-kilometer-wide buffer zone on its side of the border, with plans to expand it.
  • The Philadelphi Corridor is the primary way that Hamas has smuggled

    advanced weapons and ammunition into Gaza

  • In late May, Israel took control of the Corridor, which was a “lifeline” for Hamas, according to IDF Spokesperson Rear-Admiral Daniel Hagari. The IDF “located dozens of launchers along the Corridor, loaded and ready to fire rockets, and launch pits from which Hamas fired rockets and mortars into Israeli territory.” Hagari added, “Hamas exploited the Philadelphi Corridor, using it to build this infrastructure just dozens of meters from the border with Egypt so that we would not strike them.”
  • Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on August 21 that more than 150 tunnels have been demolished so far along the Philadelphi Corridor. 
  • Earlier in August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “[Hamas] demands that we withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah Crossing — its lifelines — which would allow it to rearm and rebuild its strength. It is important to set out the principle: We are not leaving from there.”
  • Link: The Philadelphi Corridor: AIPAC

The new leaders of the Free World, a Y-Net News analysis by Dr. Avigdor Haselkorn

  • It is becoming increasingly clear that the war in Gaza is not only a regional conflict but is tied directly to an effort by extremist regimes to tilt the global balance of power in their favor. To accomplish this grand strategic goal a group of countries—a radical entente,—is working together to expel the U.S. from the Middle East and block Israel from achieving its objective of undoing Iran’s proxy strategy aimed to take over the region. Simultaneously the entente is hard at work to ensure Russia prevails in its war in Ukraine and, like in the case of Israel, the West’s zone of influence is progressively shrinking.
  • On January 8, 2024, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) of South Korea verified that Hamas had been using weapons from North Korea in its war with Israel in Gaza. The NIS released a photo of a North Korean F-7 rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) with Korean letters inscribed on it.
  • In addition, Israeli forces operating in Gaza had reportedly found North Korean Bang-122 artillery shells and 122-mm multiple rocket launchers. These finds were in addition to the huge stocks of arms provided directly or indirectly by Iran which were uncovered in the Strip, including Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets (43 km/27 mi and 75 km/47 mi range respectively), Italian-designed TC/6 anti-tank mines copied by Iran’s arms industry, copied Iranian-designed kamikaze drones and AM-50 Sayyad (Arabic for “hunter”), an Iranian-made a sniper rifle that fires a .50- caliber round.
  • The operation is clearly a copy of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) modus operandi which relies on subterranean infrastructures to enable trucks to transit to missiles’ launch pads. A platform or a slope leading up from the tunnel is constructed allowing the truck to exit the tunnel, fire and retreat back down so as to avoid detection.
  • Syria has been the host of Russian air and naval bases. Alongside the Hmeimim airbase, from which Russia launched air attacks in support of the Bashar al-Assad regime, Moscow also controls the Tartus naval facility in Syria, its only naval foothold in the Mediterranean. Russia’s defense ministry said in January 2023 that Russia and Syria had restored the al-Jarrah military air base in Syria’s north for joint use.
  • The Syrian militia known as Quwat Al-Ridha—an armed group that is part of Iran’s main proxy force the Lebanese Hezbollah—is directly trained by Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). On October 30, 2023, Syrian Hezbollah militants fired rockets targeting the U.S. military base located in the Conoco gas field in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor province. Another attack was launched on August 13, 2024. Following the attack, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed militia, launched retaliatory shelling against the group in western Deir ez-Zor.
  • The London Guardian reported March 11, 2022, that Syria’s military has begun recruiting troops from its own ranks to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine promising payments of $3,000 a month – a sum up to 50 times a Syrian soldier’s monthly salary. Enlistment notices have been posted on regime-linked websites, including profiles linked to the 4th Division, one of Assad’s core units. One such advert stated that troops who sign up will be fighting in Ukraine.
  • Accordingly, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light for what he claimed would be up to 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East deploying alongside Russian-backed “rebels” fighting in Ukraine. Russia’s defense ministry said the deployment would be made to the breakaway Donbas region of eastern Ukraine where much of the fighting had been focused.
  • In direct contrast to “[the U.S.] assessment that the conflict between Israel and Hamas has been contained to Gaza,” as stated by Gen. Ryder in his Pentagon press briefing of Aug. 13, the Israel-Hamas war was never confined to the Strip. Similarly, the war in Ukraine has been transformed some time ago and is no longer an armed conflict between two nations. The reason is the same—both battlefields are increasingly part of a radical entente’s effort to establish a “post-West,” multipolar order that will end “U.S. domination of the international system” and in effect make the world safe for authoritarianism. In this sense, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are today the de-facto leaders of the Free World. The rest is noise.
  • Link: The new leaders of the Free World: Y-Net News

Israel Is Winning: But Lasting Victory Against Hamas Will Require Installing New Leadership in Gaza by John Spencer in Foreign Affairs

  • War is the pursuit of political objectives through force. A war has a start and a finish, so its progress can be assessed based on how close each side has come to meeting its political objectives. By this measure, it is Israel, not Hamas, that now holds the advantage.
  • After Israel’s devastating counterassault, however, Hamas’s objectives are clear: to survive the attacks, maintain power, and retain Palestinian and international support.
  • Israel’s degradation of Hamas’s military and political strength puts it in a position to move toward a postconflict phase in some areas of the Gaza Strip. Even if significantly lowering the intensity of the fighting is possible in only a small part of the territory right now, Israel must show constituencies in Gaza, in the international community, and within Israel itself that it has a larger political plan to follow its military achievements. Israeli leaders need to understand and clearly communicate that the focus of the war must begin to shift. If Israel does not take this opportunity to secure new leadership in Gaza to replace Hamas, it will forfeit its current advantage and end the war in defeat.
  • Some argue that the fact that a majority of the hostages—105—were returned to Israel through prisoner exchanges means that negotiation, not military force, was the only viable way to bring them home. But it was Israeli military action in Gaza that created the conditions for Hamas to agree to release hostages during the temporary cease-fire in November 2023.
  • In the past, Israel relied on just a wall at the border for protection. Now Israeli forces are creating a security zone of around half a mile from the wall. They are clearing all buildings from the area, which will allow Israeli forces to more easily patrol and to set up outposts along the border.
  • The Israeli military is also establishing control of a passage through the middle of the Gaza Strip, the Netzarim corridor, which connects Israel to the Mediterranean Sea. This corridor and various new humanitarian entry points and roads will allow Israeli forces to move freely and rapidly into Gaza on security missions or to provide other forms of support to a post-Hamas governing body.
  • Hamas also built one of the world’s most expansive military tunnel networks, estimated to be more than 300 miles long—longer than the New York City subway system—and range in depth from a few feet below the surface to more than 200 feet underground
  • It is almost impossible to say what percentage of the tunnels in Gaza have been destroyed, as Israeli forces have not yet discovered all of them. That process will take years. But Israel has demolished many of the most valuable tunnels, including two separate mile-long tunnels that ran under the river valley that divides the northern and southern ends of Gaza, large tunnels that opened within a few hundred yards of the Israeli border and were designed for launching attacks, tunnels that crossed from Gaza to the Sinai, and many tunnels that connected brigade areas within Gaza and served as command-and-control areas.
  • For all the progress Israel has made toward its war aims, however, it will lose in the end if it fails to secure a replacement for Hamas as a new ruling power in Gaza.
  • But to win, Israel needs to emphasize its strategy. It must consolidate the gains it has made against Hamas by pushing forward a political solution. If Israel cannot fully remove Hamas from power, demilitarize the strip, and back a new authority in Gaza, then Hamas will likely reconstitute itself and fight another day.
  • Link: Israel Is Winning: But Lasting Victory Against Hamas Will Require Installing New Leadership in Gaza

Antisemitism

The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism, by Adam Kirsch with The Atlantic

  • One of the most striking things about the ideology of settler colonialism is the central role played by Israel, which is often paired with the U.S. as the most important example of settler colonialism’s evils. Many Palestinian writers and activists have adopted this terminology. In his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, the historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the goal of Zionism was to create a “white European settler colony.” For the Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, Israel is a product of “European Jewish Settler-Colonialism,” and the “liberation” referred to in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization is “liberation from Settler-Colonialism.”
  • Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.
  • The concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement. In the past decade, settler colonialism has become one of the most important concepts in the academic humanities, the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of papers, as well as college courses on topics such as U.S. history, public health, and gender studies.
  • Israel also fails to fit the model of settler colonialism in another key way: It defies the usual division between foreign colonizers and Indigenous people. In the discourse of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples aren’t simply those who happen to occupy a territory before Europeans discovered it. Rather, indigeneity is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive. And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—­white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.
  • Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, “We are not Red Indians.” But today’s activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that “Palestinian claims to life” are based in having “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land.” Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land.”
  • When those embracing the ideology of settler colonialism think about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity. Perhaps the most troubling reactions to the October 7 attacks were those of college students convinced that the liberation of Palestine is the key to banishing injustice from the world. In November 2023, for instance, Northwestern University’s student newspaper published a letter signed by 65 student organizations—­including the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico Northwestern, and All Paws In, which sends volunteers to animal shelters—­defending the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This phrase looks forward to the disappearance of any form of Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but the student groups denied that this entails “murder and genocide.” Rather, they wrote, “When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-­Blackness, militarism, occupation and apartheid.”
  • Link: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism: The Atlantic

I was a captive of Hamas. After I was freed, I was imprisoned by online trolls, former hostage Agam Goldstein-Almog writes for The Washington Post.

  • Growing up in Kibbutz Kfar Aza next to Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip meant a childhood that could be interrupted at any moment by sirens warning of a Hamas rocket attack. Sibling fights or quiet nights were instantly turned into a scramble for the nearest safe room. Hamas took control of Gaza a few months before I was born in 2007, so living in its shadow is all I have ever known.
  • Then came Oct. 7. Hamas terrorists charged into our home, shooting my father, Nadav, and sister, Yam, in a furious ecstasy of hate. I was dragged out of the house together with my mother and two younger brothers and forced into a car to Gaza. I see my father’s fading eyes when I close mine at night.
  • Arriving in Gaza, the car was surrounded by a mob, mostly people who appeared to be about my own age, 17, or younger. They smiled and laughed as I wept.
  • In Judaism, there is a tradition that baseless hatred — hatred divorced from all reason — is what led to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70. I now know what it means to be hated baselessly — for all that I am and all I am not.
  • My Hamas guards hated me for being Jewish, so I was coerced into reciting Islamic prayers and made to wear a hijab. I was forbidden from mourning my father and sister, and often ordered to look down at the ground. Six female hostages I met in a tunnel told me about men with guns who came into their shower rooms and touched their bodies.
  • Hearing about these young women’s fear of sexual abuse was agonizing. When one of my guards told me that he would find me a “husband” in Gaza, and that I would live the rest of my life as a chained slave-wife, my mother interrupted, deflecting his advances. I was fortunate to be released, along with my family members, in a prisoner exchange after 51 days. But those six young women are still in captivity, held for more than 300 days, without their mothers. They all should have come home a long time ago.
  • But then, in an instant, the low buzz of conversation was drowned out by Hamas launching rockets, just meters away from us, from inside the school compound. The hall erupted in joy, and as the Gazans celebrated, I realized that Hamas had moved us there to serve as human shields.
  • But the world I came back to was deeply divided and seething with anger. The hatred that I thought I had left behind in Gaza was waiting for me online.
  • My social media feeds were flooded with trolls, falsehoods and conspiracy theories, all with seemingly one objective: driving hate. The comment sections of news articles mentioning my name were battlefields, as hatred from one side was met with hatred from the other.
  • Link: I was a captive of Hamas. After I was freed, I was imprisoned by online trolls: Washington Post

UN exhibit memorializing terror victims completely ignores Jews, Erdan says, writes Jewish News Syndicate’s Update Desk

  • When the United Nations marks International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to Victims of Terrorism on Wednesday, it will treat some victims as more equal than others, according to Gilad Erdan, the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.
  • There are mentions of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001 and the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, as well as references to terror in Indonesia and Kenya. “But what’s missing?” Erdan asked.
  • “There’s not a single mention of any attack carried out by Palestinians against Israelis,” he said. “We are about to mark one year since the massacre and the largest terrorist attack against Jews and Israelis since the Holocaust. Yet the U.N. doesn’t think it needs to be displayed on its walls.”
  • There is a display of a “Palestinian victim,” which the U.N. exhibit identifies as occurring in “Palestine,” Erdan noted, “so that people might think she was harmed in Israel, but when you read the fine print, it turns out she was actually injured in an attack in New Zealand.”
  • The exhibit “Memories,” which is on view until Aug. 27, “aims to raise awareness about the human stories that lie at the heart of each victim and survivor of terrorism, as well as the long-lasting impact each terrorist attack has on its surviving victims,” per the U.N. website.
  • The Global Victims of Terrorism Support Programme of the Counter-Terrorism Center of the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism organized the show, which the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism also endorsed, according to the U.N. website.
  • Link: UN exhibit memorializing terror victims completely ignores Jews, Erdan says: Jewish News Syndicate

A Reality Check for Woke Jews by Suzy Weiss in The Free Press

  • Joshua Leifer—a leader of the anti-Zionist organization IfNotNow and author of the new book Tablets Shattered, about how American Jewish life has gone down the tubes—was denied entry to his own book launch at an indie bookstore in Brooklyn. Why? Because the rabbi who was supposed to interview him is a Zionist, and, according to Leifer, “they would not permit a Zionist on the premises.”
  • I guess life comes at you fast when you spend your career making dizzying academic arguments against the existence of a Jewish state, only to be told, “Nice words, Jewboy, leave the store immediately.” (The bookstore owner came out and blamed a lower level staffer.)
  • Leifer’s real-time mugging by reality must sting. Antisemites, to Leifer and his ilk, carry tiki torches and have shaved heads. They don’t live in Brooklyn and have pronoun pins and tiny tattoos.
  • His relationship to Judaism, which has nothing—Hear that, Dad? NOTHING!—to do with the Jewish state or the Jews who live there is echoed among similarly overthinking Jews. A Jewish Voice for Peace zine (s/o Blake Flayton for combing through it so I wouldn’t have to) offered the sage advice that “Hearing Hebrew language can be deeply traumatizing for Palestinians. Therefore, prayers are best said in English or Arabic, rather than Hebrew.” Sababa! Naomi Klein has advocated in The Guardian for a Judaism that prays at the “altar of solidarity and mutual aid.” And I thought she was supposed to be the sane Naomi? This type of Jewish leftist is Talmudic about everything except, you know, the actual Talmud.
  • Link: A Reality Check for Woke Jews

TikTok shown to be reliant on biased anti-Israel sources

  • Since October 7, Israelis and most Jews in the diaspora on TikTok have felt that the social media platform is biased against them. The N12 report revealed what goes on inside one of the most important departments at TikTok – the one that determines which content will be blocked from being distributed to users and which videos will resonate with hundreds of millions of people.
  • “TikTok has a team whose role is called packet checking. It’s a team that is supposed to handle everything that is considered a claim or establishing a fact that is uploaded to TikTok, and it is difficult to make a decision about it,” N12 quoted an Israeli who works in TikTok’s training department and spoke to Israeli media for the first time.
  • An example that the employer collected from her work includes a video uploaded on TikTok in December that claimed that the number of dead in Gaza was 17 thousand and that 45% of them were children – a number that Israel denied.
  • Users reported to TikTok that this was false information and asked to remove the video. TikTok decided that it was not wrong information and stated that their reasoning was based on data from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and Al Jazeera.
  • Another video that TikTok’s content reviewers approved claimed that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, N12 reported. Users complained to the company that Hamas is a terrorist group, but the department’s employees determined that it was not wrong information. They reason that “Some countries define Hamas as a terrorist organization, and some do not. The claim is an opinion.”
  • However, TikTok‘s fact-checkers, when users asked them to reject a video that Zionism is the same as Nazism, decided not to, the report said. “The final product, for the users who experience TikTok, is completely biased and fundamentally anti-Israeli,” said the Israeli employee of the company.
  • The N12 report claimed that the examples they presented present a different picture than what the social media platform claims – one of a systematic policy to support one side over another, even if this meant spreading lies about Israel and taking a clear position.
  • Link: Exclusive by Israeli media shows TikTok reliant on anti-Israel sources

Silence Is No Answer to the Pro-Hamas Protesters Outside the DNC, by Aviva Klompas with Newsweek

  • The mask-clad protesters who have descended upon the Democratic National Convention in Chicago have been abundantly clear where they stand on Israel and America.
  • In front of cameras and for all the world to watch, they chant “Long live the intifada,” burn the American flag, and threaten to “bring the war home.” They also bluntly dismiss a two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution, screaming “We don’t want no two states. We want all of ’48.”
  • The party seems to have adopted a policy of silence that they hope will appease protesters, but that is woefully out of sync with most of the nation.
  • The vast majority of Americans understand the threat posed by terror groups in the Middle East. According to public polling this summer, 80 percent support Israel over Hamas; two-thirds believe Israel is trying to avoid civilian deaths in Gaza, and 70 percent say they would only support a ceasefire if Hamas is removed from power and the Israeli hostages are released.
  • Similarly, anyone who wants to lead this country should have the courage to stand up to the extremists in the streets who praise terror groups, call for the annihilation of the Jewish state, terrorize Zionists, and spout a hateful ideology.
  • Even President Joe Biden, who has shown himself to be a steadfast and longstanding friend of Israel, refused to denounce the protesters, choosing instead to indulge them. In his remarks to the convention and the country, he said, “The protesters on the street have a point. A lot of people are being killed on both sides.”
  • The protesters outside the DNC—much like the ones who set up encampments on college campuses—are not voicing disgust at the Oct. 7 slaughter of 1,200 people in southern Israel. They are not condemning the barbaric terrorists who took 251 hostages and still hold more than 100 of them. They are not denouncing the daily rocket and drone attacks on Israel’s northern border, one of which recently claimed the lives of 12 Druze children on a soccer field.
  • Link: Silence Is No Answer to the Pro-Hamas Protesters Outside the DNC: Newsweek

Columbia’s president has gone but antisemitism remains, an Melissa Langsam Braunstein analysis details in The Jewish Chronicle

  • A virtual cheer went up on social media last Wednesday night when the news broke that Columbia University’s president Minouche Shafik had resigned. After a school year filled with constant anti-Israel hostility, it looked like there might finally be some poetic justice for the institution’s Jewish and Israeli community.
  • Unfortunately, that satisfaction was tempered by the details of Shafik’s departure, her resignation letter and the reality that remains as she flees to a job in the UK Foreign Office.
  • After presiding over an explosion of open Jew-hatred, Shafik resigned on her own terms, because “this period has taken a considerable toll on my family”.
  • Shafik never appeared to see or hear the campus antisemitism. And that took effort, considering how pervasive it was.
  • Over the summer, Columbia faced a new scandal as four administrators’ text discussion became public. Three deans who mocked a panel discussion about antisemitism at Columbia subsequently resigned but the fourth, the dean of Columbia’s undergraduate college, remains.
  • The university’s refusal to set boundaries last year makes harassment, discrimination and violence only more likely this autumn. In fact, it has already begun. Masked protesters carried signs and chanted while “walking in circles, apparently trying to interfere with Barnard College move-in”, Columbia Engineering Professor Gil Zussman posted on social media.
  • Reflecting on what might improve the situation at Columbia, Davidai posted, “The solution is simple: 1. Permanently ban Students for ‘Justice’ in Palestine and fire its faculty adviser. 2. Expel the leaders of the pro-terror organisations. 3. Sanction or fire professors who engage in pro-terror and/or antisemitic activity on campus.”

Link: Columbia’s president has gone but antisemitism remains: Jewish Chronicle