Situational Update

• Per the Times of Israel: The IDF says US-Israeli hostage Cpt. Omer Neutra was killed on Oct. 7 and his body is being held in Gaza. Israel Defense Forces on Monday said it had confirmed that Cpt. Omer Maxim Neutra, 21, was killed amid the attack and his body was being held hostage in the Gaza Strip. Neutra, a “lone soldier” from New York — called that because his parents were not in Israel — served as a tank platoon commander in the 7th Armored Brigade’s 77th Battalion. Until now it had been believed that Neutra was alive and being held hostage.

  

• On the morning of October 7, 2023, he was stationed in a tank on the Gaza border near the southern community of Nahal Oz. Neutra was the tank commander, Sgt. Shaked Dahan was the driver, Sgt. Nimrod Cohen was the gunner, and Sgt. Oz Daniel was the loader. Dahan’s death was confirmed in November 2023 and Daniel’s death was announced in February. Now, after 14 months, Neutra’s death was also confirmed. All three were killed on October 7, 2023, according to the IDF. Cohen’s fate remains unknown, though his father, Yehuda, told Ynet news on Monday, “We have received indications that Nimrod is alive. I am sure my son is alive, and I am fighting.”

• Israeli Air Force aircraft targeted and eliminated Hezbollah’s envoy to the Syrian army, Salman Nimer Jumaa, in the Damascus area. YNet reports that the IDF described Jumaa as a key player in smuggling weapons into Lebanon. In recent years, he acted as Hezbollah’s liaison with the Syrian military, coordinating weapons transfers critical to the organization’s operations. The IDF says that Jumaa was a significant and active figure in Syria, and his elimination represents a blow to Hezbollah’s ties and entrenchment in Syria, as well as a step in preventing the organization’s buildup.

The Numbers

Casualties

• 1,802 Israelis have been killed including 808 IDF soldiers since October 7th (+1 since Sunday)
  • The death of Cpt. Omer Neutra is the reason for the addition this week
• The South: 380 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed (no change since Sunday)
• The North: 127 Israelis (80 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel (no change since Sunday)
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,463 (no change since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 468 (no change since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
  • 5,444 (+1 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 797 (no change since Sunday) who have been severely injured.

• According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 44,502 (+73 since Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 105,454 (+204 since Sunday) have been injured during the war.
  • On October 7th, Ohad Hemo with Channel 12 Israel News – the country’s largest news network, a leading expert on Palestinian and Arab affairs, mentioned an estimate from Hamas: around 80% of those killed in Gaza are members of the organization and their families.”
    • The article goes on to say: “In an N12 article that came out this morning, Hemo also pointed out that since the elimination of key leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top echelon has gone underground and fled Iran and Lebanon, with some relocating to Turkey and Qatar – with the hope that Israel will not strike them there.
  • 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.”
• The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.

Hostages

President-Elect Donald Trump posted on Tuesday a strong statement in support following the news that dual US citizen and hostage, Cpt. Omer Neutra, was confirmed to have been killed on 10/7:

Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East – But it’s all talk, and no action! Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!

• There are currently 97 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza
• 7 hostages are Americans: Meet the Seven American Hostages Still Held By Hamas
• On October 7^th, 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
  • The bodies of 37 hostages have been recovered, including 3 mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
• 8 hostages have been rescued by troops alive
• This leaves 101 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
  • 30-50 hostages are assumed to be dead and held in captivity
  • Thus, at most, 50-70 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
• Hamas is also holding 2 Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of 2 IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.

Watch

Douglas Murray at the Nova Festival site. “The people who claim Israel is committing genocide are the people who want to commit genocide”.

Matti Friedman writes: A rare look at how Gaza terrorists shape and spread their message with the help of “humanitarian” content and cooperation from Western reporters. Speaking from experience, this has been the rule since 2008, and helps explain how we reached the current tragedy.

The video above was posted on X by Jake Wallis Simmons with the commentary below

• “The international media differs from the Arab ones, they focus on humanitarian issues, we don’t speak to them in the language of violence, destruction and revenge.”
• Captured Islamic jihad spokesman reveals how he plays the media. Watch it. This is how the world’s journalists are being manipulated — willingly in many cases — to spread jihadi propaganda to the world.
• The fact that Hamas censorship is not mentioned in *every* report from Gaza shames our profession. It’s no surprise that so many people now hate Israel. Even in international courts, prosecutors mention “footage on TV” as “evidence” of Israeli “crimes” in Gaza. Shameful. Every journalist must watch this and ask themselves some hard questions.

Rocket Alerts

Today in Israel, there were 3 rocket alerts. Today I’m posting a chart of all alerts (rockets and UAV’s) since the start of the war.

Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel

Humanitarian Aid

Source: Israel Humanitarian efforts – Swords of Iron

Listen

[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: Is Israel Winning? – with Haviv Rettig Gur

[PODCAST] Honestly with Bari Weiss: From Aleppo to Tehran: A Middle East on Edge

• This week marked a dramatic escalation in Syria’s 13-year civil war. Rebel factions launched their most audacious offensive in years, capturing Aleppo, the focal point of the war for over a decade. This marked the most serious challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s government and its Russian- and Iranian-backed allies in nearly a decade.
• Syrian and Russian forces are currently unleashing joint air strikes in a desperate attempt to reclaim the city. Iran has thrown its weight behind al-Assad, promising increased support to shore up his faltering grip on power.
• But Syria is just one piece of a much larger—and far more dangerous—puzzle.
• The Middle East is on a knife’s edge. Just last week, Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire along the Lebanon border, but tensions remain high. In Gaza, Israel has continued its operations against Hamas, who still hold 63 hostages. And then there’s Iran—the architect of much of the region’s instability—whose escalating provocations make it seem like a direct war with Israel is no longer a question of if, but when.
• These conflicts are deeply interconnected, and the fall of one domino could set off far-reaching consequences. The potential power vacuum left by a weakened al-Assad regime could reshape alliances and alter the balance of power in ways that reverberate from Tehran to Tel Aviv, and from Moscow to Washington.

What We Are Reading

Israel’s New Approach to Tunnels: A Paradigm Shift in Underground Warfare by John Spencer with the Modern War Institute

• Before the war against Hamas in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces were one of the most prepared militaries in the world for underground warfare. The IDF were the only army to have a full brigade-sized unit dedicated to training, manning, equipping, researching, developing new technologies and tactics, learning, and adapting solely for underground warfare. Still, the challenges they faced early in their campaign in Gaza, many of which they struggled initially to overcome, speaks to the incredible complexity of subterranean warfare.
• One of the main reasons the IDF were unprepared for Gaza’s underground spaces was simply that no military had faced anything like it in the past—not even Israeli ground forces. The IDF faced a Hamas military organization that had spent over fifteen years engineering the infrastructure of an entire region—to include over twenty major cities—for war, with the group’s political-military strategy resting on a vast and expensively constructed subterranean network under Gaza’s population centers.
• IDF investigations and captured Hamas documents produced reports that it took Hamas a year to dig one kilometer of standard tunnel at a per-kilometer cost of $275,000.
• On October 7, 2023, the IDF had a brigade of special operations forces engineers, the Yahalom unit, fully equipped with technologies and tactics to accomplish the full range of underground warfare tasks, from detecting, securing, and mapping tunnels and bunkers to exploiting, clearing, neutralizing, and destroying them.
• The IDF also has a robust military working dog program, the Oketz unit, that includes dogs trained for operating in subterranean spaces.
• The IDF also developed advanced tunnel-striking capabilities with a wide variety of bunker-busting munitions. In the 2021 Operation Guardian of the Walls, the IDF believed they had destroyed sixty miles of Hamas tunnels in Gaza. Captured documents show that after this 2021 operation, the Hamas leadership authorized $225,000 to install more blast doors in tunnel segments to protect against IDF bunker-busting munitions collapsing more of the tunnel beyond the point where the bomb directly strikes. Hamas also increased production of handbooks showing their fighters how to survive and fight in tunnels.
• The more the IDF engaged with the Hamas tunnel network, the more they adapted. Stopping for every suspected tunnel shaft and waiting for Yahalom to investigate severely slowed the momentum of maneuvering forces. Many of the suspected shafts were simply wells, civilian infrastructure, or other types of tunnels. The IDF quickly realized they had to push some of the specialized knowledge of Yahalom lower and to general-purpose soldiers. The regular IDF soldiers began to become proficient at dealing at least with shaft identification, site securing, and initial investigations.
• The IDF also developed a typology of Hamas tunnels. Some Hamas tunnels were tactical, such as small-unit tunnels that ran from building to building giving Hamas fighters the ability to hold specific terrain. Some were more operational as they connected different battalions or brigades to each other or provided operational mobility—like the mile-long tunnels running underneath the river basin of central Gaza to connect the region’s northern and southern portions.
• Contrary to some reporting, removing Hamas’s ability to plan and conduct military operations does not require destroying all of Hamas’s tunnels. Not every tunnel is as important as others.
• The IDF have already taken their new understanding, culture, and approach to tunnels to another theater in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah also built a vast tunnel network of hundreds of miles and which is referred to as the “Land of Tunnels.” The 98th Paratroopers Division, with its pioneering and advanced underground warfare skills, was one of the first units to conduct raids into the Hezbollah tunnels found along Israel’s northern border.
• It is unlikely that any military will face a tunnel system like that in Gaza, where an enemy’s political-military strategy rests on the tunnels and they are deliberately placed under civilian areas.
• The lessons learned by the IDF will save the lives of other soldiers in other battlefields. The IDF have also shown others that subterranean environments can be used for more than only defensive tactics. With the right culture, understanding, intelligence, technologies, and tactics, they can be used for simultaneous maneuvers on the surface and subsurface. That changes everything.
• Link: Israel’s New Approach to Tunnels: A Paradigm Shift in Underground Warfare

The IDF is in Jabalia again, but this time there is nowhere for Hamas to run, by Enia Krivine and Aaron Goren with Jewish National Syndicate

• The Israel Defense Forces are fighting in Jabalia for the third time, confronting yet another Hamas resurgence in the northern Gazan terror stronghold and taking losses in the battle. But this time around, Israel is leveraging new strategic advantages to seal off the neighborhood so terrorists cannot escape to other parts of Gaza. With the IDF’s new playbook of sealing the battlefield and systematically evacuating civilians, the terrorists barricaded in Jabalia will be apprehended or eliminated.
• However, Jerusalem cannot guarantee security to the Israeli border communities—many of which remain within easy artillery range and in some cases sniper range from northern Gaza neighborhoods—until the threats in northern Gaza are dealt with conclusively.
• During the two previous campaigns in Jabalia, one in December of 2023 and another in May of 2024, Hamas operatives could flood southward when the water got too hot—to hide in humanitarian zones like Mawasi, take cover in cities without an IDF presence like Rafah or make a run for the extensive Hamas tunnel network that crisscrossed underneath Gaza’s border with Egypt along a strip of territory known as the Philadelphi Corridor.
• Another critical geographic corridor that has become a strategic asset in the battle against Hamas is the Netzarim Corridor. Established in the first weeks of the ground invasion as a logistic axis and humanitarian route the corridor effectively bisects Gaza. In the early days of the war, terrorists could traverse the corridor without encountering the IDF. That is no longer the case.
• During the first month of the newest, ongoing Jabalia operation, the IDF evacuated 55,000 civilians. Using advanced technology, the IDF made sure that Hamas terrorists exiting the city among the swaths of civilians were identified and more than 1,000 were promptly arrested. These detainees have provided crucial intelligence, often quick to give up information on their employer.
• While the new strategy of essentially creating micro-battlefields is not popular in Turtle Bay and may not conclusively win the war (if such a thing is possible), it may allow Israelis from southern Israel to finally return home. Washington should continue to support Israel’s right to return security to its southern communities and refrain from pressuring Jerusalem to cede the important strategic corridors in a ceasefire agreement. The corridors are pivotal to the IDF’s effective maneuvering in Gaza and are key to preventing Hamas from reconstituting and once again threatening Israel’s southern communities.
• Link: The IDF is in Jabalia again, but this time there is nowhere for Hamas to run

Rebels in Syria take advantage of Israel’s successes against a weakened Iran axis by Lazar Berman with The Times of Israel

• Syrian rebels, led by the jihadist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, surprised the Bashar Assad regime as well as observers when they launched an offensive last week that saw them capture the city of Aleppo — second only to the capital Damascus in population — within 72 hours, after years of strategic stalemate.
• There has been a recent uptick in confrontations between Syrian forces and opposition groups in the country’s northwest, which left civilians dead and were seen by rebels as a violation of the 2019 ceasefire agreement between Russia, which backs the Assad regime, and Turkey, which backs some of the rebel groups in the north.
• Some Hezbollah and Iran-backed Shiite militia fighters were moved from Syria to contend with the Israeli ground invasion in Lebanon in October. Thousands more were killed and wounded by Israeli air raids, ground forces, and special operations like the stunning attacks in September in which thousands of Hezbollah pagers exploded on their owners..
• To make matters worse for Assad’s government, while Hezbollah is diminished, so is Russia. Its focus has been on the long Ukraine fight for almost 3 years, with fewer troops and assets in Syria.
• What’s more, with the Donald Trump administration set to take office in a matter of weeks, Iran will likely face increased sanctions and stepped-up pressure on its battered economy.
• Still, it’s unlikely that this offensive will be enough in and of itself to bring Assad down. HTS will need other groups to attack as well, especially from southern Syria. And they will have to learn to cooperate, something they were unable to do at the height of the civil war almost a decade ago.
• Seeing the Assad regime fade into history would be a massive and unexpected boon for Israel, the next pillar holding up the Iranian facade across the region to crumble. It would come as Israel shifts its focus in the north to preventing Hezbollah from replenishing its supply of arms, the bulk of which comes through Syria to Lebanon.
• “The fall of the regime could create chaos, and it’s not clear who would rule there,” said Valensi. “There won’t be an address that Israel likes, whom you can hold a conversation with through military force or other methods.”
• Israel, it is assessed, would likely only get involved directly if it sees Syrian chemical weapons falling into the wrong hands, or if the Golan Heights were threatened.
• Link: Rebels in Syria take advantage of Israel’s successes against a weakened Iran axis

The Syrian Rebels’ Lessons for Washington by Walter Russell Mead in the WSJ

• The collapse of Mr. Assad’s poorly trained army of sullen conscripts humiliated the regime. The loss of Aleppo has wounded it. Before civil war wrecked the Syrian economy, Aleppo was the country’s commercial capital. It’s where Mr. Assad kicked the rebels to the curb in four years of bitter warfare starting in 2012. The regime’s 2016 victory in Aleppo signaled to the world that Mr. Assad was here to stay.
• Now a loose coalition of rebel groups has retaken the city as Mr. Assad’s demoralized forces flee in disorder. Russian and Syrian war planes are strafing rebel-held territory and supply lines, but the rebels continue to advance. While nobody knows how this ends, there are important lessons here for policymakers around the world.
• One lesson concerns the uses and limits of military power. The rebel victory in Aleppo is a direct consequence of the wars in Ukraine and the Levant. Ukraine’s gallant resistance to Russian aggression has degraded Russia’s global capabilities and reduced Vladimir Putin’s power to aid his pals in Damascus. More vitally, Israel’s victories in Gaza and Lebanon have weakened its enemies in Damascus and beyond.
• But Mr. Assad’s defeats aren’t all good news for Jerusalem. In the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy isn’t necessarily my friend. The strongest of the rebel groups around Aleppo are forces formerly linked to al Qaeda and separate factions supported by Turkey’s Islamist-leaning President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. An Islamist Syria under Turkish protection could be an even more dangerous neighbor for Israel than Mr. Assad’s Syria has been. As has been the case since its 1948-49 War of Independence, Israel can defeat its enemies, but it can’t conquer its way to peace.
• There are two other lessons that Washington needs to take in. The first is that Israel is an excellent ally, and the U.S. benefits when we support it. Overall, the Biden administration has given Israel the weapons it needed to prevail in Gaza and Lebanon. As a result, a weakened Iran is ready to offer more concessions to both Israel and the U.S. than it was a year ago. The superiority of American weaponry over Russian gear has been convincingly demonstrated.
• All this was accomplished without the loss of American lives and without American boots on the ground. Even greater support would likely have brought more good results, as a genuinely coordinated Israeli-American diplomatic strategy for the region could have done more to solidify the Middle East security structure both Washington and Jerusalem want.
• As the fall of Aleppo reminds us, Russia’s far-flung network of bases and relationships is vulnerable. A strategically alert and forward-thinking American war strategy would activate local allies against Russian interests worldwide, forcing Mr. Putin either to divert resources from Ukraine to defend his global network or to accept the loss of Russian influence and the revenues it brings.
• Link: The Syrian Rebels’ Lessons for Washington

Antisemitism

Misogyny and Antisemitism Are a Toxic Brew, by By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Rachel Schreiber in The NYT

• “Zio bitch!” a young man in a kaffiyeh and Black Lives Matter T-shirt barked at one of us, his ire apparently provoked by a yellow ribbon pin, a symbol of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The exchange was unsettling but not surprising. Even in New York, where we both live, we have often seen an extraordinary lack of empathy for the Israeli victims of Oct. 7 and outright hostility toward those who advocate for them. The epithet “Zio bitch” highlights multilayered animosities, pointing to an insidious, specific prejudice we have seen bloom this year: the melding of misogyny and antisemitism.
• Though cartoonish tropes of Jewish women are ubiquitous (think of the materialistic Jewish American princess, gossipy yenta and overbearing, often overweight Jewish mother), they often barely register as bias in a progressive culture otherwise attuned to identity-based offense. Mocking American Jewish women, many of whom appear white, can be seen as punching up, a variation on calling out a so-called Karen — that is, an entitled, whiny white woman seen often in a racially charged situation. To be a Jewish American woman is to experience a paradox: We are a minority vulnerable to exclusion yet simultaneously perceived as sufficiently inside the dominant culture that we are often expected to endure, or even deserve, any opprobrium that comes our way.
• This prejudice was further complicated by the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Early reports of sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women were initially met with silence from many global feminist organizations. As evidence of this violence grew among Israelis and Jewish Americans, our horror about the reactions to this violence intensified: a graphic photograph of the ravaged body of Shani Louk, a young German Israeli woman, surrounded by armed terrorists was part of a group of photos that won a prestigious photography award. Online trolls mocked Amit Soussana, who described the violations she suffered while held captive by Hamas.
• Disparaging Jewish women is not new. A century ago, Progressive-era reformers fighting sex trafficking — then called white slavery — often painted the (white) women involved as innocent victims. Jewish women, however, were an exception. One reformer described a Jewish woman driven to prostitution as a “sinful Jewess” and a man who exploited women like her as “a young Jew parasite.” In the 1920s some European films depicted Jewish women as vampires or man-murdering monsters. In the 1940s, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued in “Anti-Semite and Jew” that the very expression “a beautiful Jewess” bore “an aura of rape and massacre. The ‘beautiful Jewess’ is she whom the Cossacks under the czars dragged by her hair through the streets of her burning village.” In 1979 the feminist Andrea Dworkin quoted Sartre to argue that such antisemitic misogyny was paradigmatic of the objectification at the heart of pornography.
• These dynamics endure. In June a 12-year-old Jewish girl in France was allegedly raped by boys who used antisemitic slurs while they violated her.
• Jewish women are a soft target in this world, in which white supremacy increasingly appears intractable: We are white enough to be worthy of scorn but not enough to be reliably protected against racist and sexist structures we should be dismantling rather than perpetuating in insidious new forms.
• Link: Misogyny and Antisemitism Are a Toxic Brew

How the Incoming Administration Can Restore Jewish Civil Rights, by Tal Fortgang in Mosaic Magazine

• As the fall semester comes to an end, there has been only modest relief for Jewish college students in America. A series of congressional hearings throughout 2023 and 2024 led some university administrators to prevent demonstrators from taking over public spaces and the like, but institutions of higher learning remain rife with obsessive hatred of Israel. Jewish students feel threatened or targeted; many fear wearing outwardly Jewish symbols or mentioning trips to Israel lest they be ostracized as “Zionists.” Israeli students and faculty are especially likely to be harassed. The state of the campus has led many to despair.
• Of course, there are several fronts on which American Jews need to fight: we ought to engage in the battle of ideas in the academy, in the media, and in the public square; we must expose and stop foreign funding of campus protest movements (often by Iran or U.S.-designated terrorist groups), not to mention the vast social and political battle to support Israel beyond the campus. But most of this essay will focus on how to use America’s robust system of civil-rights law to make colleges and universities safe for all Jews once again.

I. Avoiding the Anti-Zionism-vs.-Anti-Semitism Trap

• Pro-Israel Jews, according to this logic, seek to ban legitimate political protest and restrict legitimate speech by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. And campus activists have been willing to take this argument quite far. When students at Columbia and Harvard staged demonstrations in front of campus Hillels—seemingly clear instances of targeting Jewish institutions—the apologists were ready. Their argument, paraphrased, went like this: we have no issue with Jews having a place to congregate and pray, but Hillel has an Israeli flag flying in front of it, sponsors trips to Israel, and hosts Israeli speakers. It has made itself complicit in the Israel’s crimes, and we have a right to protest its explicit political stance. With this justification, the anti-Semites have even gone a step further, calling on their schools to sever all official relations with Hillel houses or the umbrella group that maintains them. It is often said that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism because nearly all Jews support Israel. But this makes clear is that that sword is double-edged. Anti-Israel extremists feel comfortable intimidating Jews because, it is true, nearly all Jews and the institutions that serve them support Israel.
• No matter. Anti-Israel groups know that the pro-Israel community is reluctant to push for sweeping expulsions or, where appropriate, prosecutions, of offending students. We hesitate to condemn our adversaries wholesale, and continue to seek out nuanced discussion with, and tailored consequences for, those who call for Israel to be wiped off the map. The anti-Zionists, meanwhile, have no such compunction. When caught explicitly championing Hamas or slandering or harassing Jews, they often blame “Zionist saboteurs,” suggesting that interlopers seek to undermine the anti-Zionist cause by using especially inflammatory language or tactics. They then continue doing much the same thing as they were doing all along: seek to anathematize the idea that Jews should be sovereign in their ancestral homeland, and to create the illusion that supporting Israel is a fringe position. Those are the goals; the strategy involves intimidating Jews in the hope that they will stay away from the public square.
• The language of “anti-Zionism”—which transmogrifies prohibited discrimination into protected political speech—along with the treacherous Jews (or, sometimes, pretend Jews) who whitewash it, have thus far provided enough plausible deniability to stave off the conclusion that the discriminatory behavior exhibited by anti-Israel demonstrators is exactly that. Jews being singled out for mistreatment, at school or at work or on the subway, consequently face the challenge of articulating why this is no ordinary dispute. This is why we must clarify our terms.
• We know that the defining element of contemporary anti-Zionism is the rejection of the idea that Jews, rather than some other group, may rule the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. To borrow a legal term, the Jewishness of Israel is the “but-for cause” of anti-Zionism: but for Jewish sovereignty over the land, anti-Zionists would not exist. “From water to water, Palestine is Arab,” goes the Arabic version of the river-to-the-sea chant. And when they say “Arab,” they mean to exclude Jews.

II. Moving Past “Tropes” and “Safety”

• In developing this theory, we must first reject the strategies that have so far failed to protect Jewish students on campus. American Jews have developed a vocabulary and set of concepts regarding anti-Israel activity that is meant to make the victimization of Jews more apparent, and to ostracize the victimizers. According to this argument, anti-Israel agitators should be cast out of American public life, just as other bigots are. This approach is fatally flawed.
• Moreover, after years of abusing the language of “safety,” college administrators tend to believe they can ignore group-based complaints rooted in fear, because they have good evidence that those claims tend to be fake. During the first Black Lives Matter moment, around 2015, radical student groups—most prominently at Yale, Princeton, and University of Missouri—appealed to their sense of feeling “unsafe” on campuses where administrators didn’t police Halloween costumes, that featured buildings named for racists, or that lacked sufficient grievance-studies majors or DEI programming. These claims were transparently absurd. Yet these activists often got what they wanted. The problem is that the administrators didn’t cave because they were sincerely worried about the students’ well-being, but because they feared the repercussions of seeming insensitive to the demands of certain groups.
• The other failed strategy from which we can learn is the reflexive reliance on arguments about “tropes” to prove that anti-Zionists are actually anti-Semites. This was especially apparent during campus conflagrations in the spring 2024 semester. For instance, Harvard came under fire when multiple student and faculty groups shared a 1960s-era poster, showing a hand tattooed with a dollar sign inside a Star of David, holding nooses around the necks of what appear to be Muhammad Ali and the former Egyptian president Gamal Nasser. Then, at Harvard, Northwestern, and California-Berkeley, student demonstrators distributed images of their Jewish presidents or deans as demonic lizard creatures with horns and/or drinking Palestinian blood for their insufficient support of anti-Israel radicals.
• It can also backfire. Trying to shoehorn contemporary expressions of Jew-hatred into “modern-day blood libels” similarly conditions Jews and non-Jews alike to conclude that if current controversies do not conform to historical paradigms for Jew-hatred they are not expressions of Jew-hatred at all. Even when these traditional forms are recognized and condemned, the accusation is too easy for anti-Israel groups to slip out of. All they need to do is adjust their word choice a bit and remove some imagery from their posters. Relying on pointing out anti-Israel demonstrators’ tendency to slip into traditional anti-Semitic imagery simply will not compute if the offenders are progressives, much less if they are progressive Jews.

III. Defining Jewish Civil Rights

• Even though the discrimination was speculative, in other words, Title VI still provided a remedy. In this case, the school district and DOE came to a resolution before the Department of Justice could sue. Title VI law is quite broad, and the threat of revoked federal assistance can be considerably effective.
• A comprehensive cultural and legal strategy that brings the power of civil-rights law to bear, then, begins by cataloging the ways in which anti-Zionism is shot through with objective examples of differential treatment. These must be emphasized in the public square until they are common knowledge, too pervasive and obvious to ignore—no matter how much demonstrators may obfuscate or how many Jews participate in anti-Jewish canards. These examples must then form the basis of government investigations and, eventually, lawsuits.
• It is undeniable, for example, that anti-Zionist demonstrators harass Israelis and Israeli-Americans on the basis of their national origin—which is prohibited by the plain language of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The fact that, as Norman Podhoretz put it, Israel has become the Jew among nations only makes this national-level form of discrimination easier to spot and root out. And suing universities on that basis has a simple but underappreciated benefit: it invokes Title VI to fight “anti-Zionism” by compelling universities to deal with it—without inviting any debate over whether it is truly anti-Semitic. Israelis are part of a national-origin group, after all, just like Chinese, Iraqis, and Ghanaians.
• Jews are reluctant to go along with even the most humane version of anti-Zionism because they know from repeated experience that it will result in mass slaughter. The underlying claim, that Israel must be eliminated, reflects a serious and long-operative principle embedded in the anti-Zionist movement: that Jewish blood is cheap. Only Jews are expected to accept unimaginable risks to their own security, to let their sworn enemies—with a track record of, and avowed commitment to, the most grotesque violence—rule over them. Out of one side of the anti-Zionist’s mouth the value of one civilian life in Gaza is infinitely precious; out of the other, reckless indifference to the fate of 7 million Jews, and certainly toward the hostages held in Gaza. There is no version of contemporary anti-Zionism, no matter how sanitized or how many Jews participate in advancing it, that avoids this. It is a feature, not a bug.
• Jewish students are under no obligation to endure hearing their classmates tell them repeatedly that they are frauds and criminals. Israeli-American high schoolers are under no obligation to avoid applying to certain colleges, including the nation’s most prestigious, because they know they will be demeaned and harassed by students and faculty. Indeed, a key purpose of civil-rights law is to ensure that universities put an end to such mistreatment immediately and without reservation. But getting the legal vindication we are due requires some changes to the way we think about and express what we are going through. Whether we are willing to commit to a language and theory of Zionist civil rights that may be unfamiliar but are nonetheless true and, crucially, designed to work, will depend on just how serious we are about defeating those who torment us, rather than simply pandering for sympathy.
• Link: How the Incoming Administration Can Restore Jewish Civil Rights

Islamist Terror Incidents Targeting U.S. Increase in 2024, a comprehensive list of incidents against American citizens by the ADL

• While Islamist terror incidents were common in the United States—and sometimes quite deadly—in the 2010s, due in large part to the rise of the terrorist organization ISIS (the Islamic State or IS) and its efforts to recruit fighters to its ranks in Syria and Iraq and spread violence in other countries, they decreased considerably by the end of the decade. This was due to successful military action by the U.S. and other countries that greatly degraded ISIS. Between 2021 and 2023, the ADL Center on Extremism (COE) tracked only six Islamist-related terror incidents in the U.S., compared to 30 incidents with far-right perpetrators and five incidents with far-left or other perpetrators within that same timeframe.
• Arrests continue today; in November 2024, for example, Anas Said, a Houston man, was indicted for providing material support and resources to ISIS because of his alleged involvement in the creation of numerous ISIS propaganda videos and images. According to authorities, Said also unsuccessfully tried several times to travel abroad to join Islamist terror groups and even considered the possibility of conducting a violent act in the U.S., going so far at one point as to research local military recruiting facilities and Jewish targets, though he did not actually plot an attack.
• Other people were also purportedly motivated by Islamist extremism to plot or commit violence in 2024. So far this year, COE has tracked seven different terror incidents seemingly connected to Islamist extremism, compared to only six incidents tied to far-right extremism and four incidents related to far-left or other extremism. These incidents seemingly stemmed from a variety of motivations, from a desire to support ISIS or its offshoots (such as ISIS-K in Pakistan and Afghanistan) to anger over the war in Gaza that began following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks against Israel. Several of the terror incidents involved relatively unsophisticated perpetrators whose desire to conduct some sort of operation outpaced their resources or ability to carry one out.

All Reported Incidents

• Chicago, Illinois, October 26, 2024. Authorities arrested a 22-year-old Chicago resident, Sidi Mohammed Abdullahi, on 14 felony counts following a shooting attack against a Jewish man on his way to synagogue services. Abdullahi reportedly shot the victim—who survived the attack—then lingered at the scene for a half-hour to open fire on law enforcement and first responders coming to the scene of the shooting.
• Peoria, Arizona, October 18, 2024. Police in Arizona arrested a teenager on state charges of terrorism and conspiracy to commit terrorism, alleging that he had been inspired by ISIS to plot an attack on a Phoenix Pride parade, using a remote-controlled drone with explosives. The juvenile—who was charged as an adult—had allegedly purchased the chemicals needed to make an explosive.
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, October 7, 2024. Federal authorities arrested an Afghan national, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, on charges of conspiring and attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and receiving a firearm to be used to commit a felony or federal crime of terrorism. Tawhedi had allegedly affiliated himself with ISIS-K, the branch of ISIS based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and sought to commit a mass casualty attack in the U.S. on Election Day. Tawhedi and a juvenile accomplice were arrested while allegedly trying to purchase assault-style weapons and ammo for their attack from undercover FBI agents. French authorities arrested two of Tawhedi’s brothers on similar charges in that country.
• New York, New York, September 6, 2024. As part of a two-country investigation, Canadian authorities arrested a Pakistani citizen, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, who was trying to cross the border into the U.S., allegedly as part of a planned mass shooting against a Jewish target in Brooklyn, in support of ISIS. According to authorities, Khan boasted that his attack would be the “largest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.” A federal indictment in the Southern District of New York charged Khan with one count of attempting to provide material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
• Orlando, Florida, July 11, 2024. Federal authorities arrested Hashem Younis Hashem Hnaihen, a Jordanian living in Orlando, Florida, charging him with destruction of an energy facility and four counts of threatening to use explosives. According to prosecutors, Hnaihen targeted businesses he believed were supportive of Israel. Beginning in June 2024, he allegedly vandalized several Orlando-area businesses and facilities, including a propane gas distribution depot, leaving “warning letters” at the premises that included threats and demands. Hnaihen also allegedly attacked a solar power facility, causing more than $700,000 in damage.
• New York, New York, August 6, 2024. In an international terrorist incident, federal authorities arrested a Pakistani citizen, Asif Merchant, in connection with an alleged plot to conduct political assassinations in the U.S. Merchant allegedly traveled to New York in April 2024 to hire hitmen to carry out the killings but ended up paying a $5,000 advance to undercover law enforcement officers posing as potential assassins. Federal authorities say Merchant had ties to Iran. He was charged with one count of murder for hire, but in September 2024 federal prosecutors filed a new indictment that also charged him with attempting to carry out an act of terrorism.
• Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, April 6, 2024. Federal authorities arrested Alexander Scott Mercurio on charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization. Mercurio allegedly plotted to attack local churches on behalf of ISIS, in a bid to kill as many people as possible before being killed by law enforcement or dying by suicide. The 18-year-old Mercurio allegedly told law enforcement that he had previously had white supremacist views but later switched to supporting ISIS.
• Link: Islamist Terror Incidents Targeting U.S. Increase in 2024

Complaint Alleges That UCLA Student Gov’t Cultural Affairs Commissioner Discriminated Against Jewish Students by Aaron Bandler with Jewish Journal

• A Petition of Consideration was filed to UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC) Judicial Board on Nov. 25 alleging that USAC Cultural Affairs Commissioner (CAC) Alicia Verdugo discriminated against Jewish students when hiring staff members in the fall.
• Ha’Am, a student-run newsmagazine at UCLA, first reported on the petition; the publication’s editor-in-chief, Bella Brannon, filed the petition, which was obtained by the Journal.
• “Text messages and documents sent by Verdugo detail the vetting of applicants suspected of being associated with ‘Zionism’ and a hiring sheet revealing the rejection of Jewish students substantiate these claims,” Brannon’s petition states. Her complaint included documentation from the commission purportedly stating that “we reserve the right to remove any staff member who dispels [sic] anti[-]Blackness, colorism, racism, white supremacy, zionism [sic], xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, and any/all other hateful/bigoted ideologies.” Additionally, her petition highlighted an alleged message from Verdugo to series heads stating that “lots of zionists are applying — please do your research when you look at applicants and I will share a doc of no hire list during retreat.”
• “No student applicants for the Senate mentioned Zionism or any reference to Israel in their applications,” Brannon’s petition continued. “Even if they had, it should not be a basis for their disqualification. Instead, a policy was created that targeted and excluded Jewish applicants.”
• Brannon also alleged in the petition that Verdugo, from the official CAC account on X, blocked her, which Brannon contended “not only discriminatory but also raises serious legal concerns” since the X account is UCLA-affiliated. Further, Brannon highlighted screenshots from the CAC’s social media accounts that she argued promulgated “blood libel” as well as called for the destruction of Israel and celebrated the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre against Israel. One screenshot purportedly showed an Instagram story from the CAC sharing an image of paragliders with Palestinian flags and the words: “Oct. 7 was natives breaking free. What followed was settlers unleashing genocide so the natives would never try to break free again.” Another screenshot highlighted in Brannon’s complaint showed the CAC X account reposting a graphic that called Israel a “genociding Holocausting pedophilic rapist sex trafficking organ & land stealing child murdering terrorist apartheid ethno-state.”
• “As demonstrated by her hiring practices, she seems to conflate the two very naturally,” Katz told the Journal about Verdugo’s views on Zionism and Judaism. “And it’s not coincidental in the slightest.”
• Brannon told the Journal: “Alicia Verdugo has repeatedly and unabashedly discriminated against Jews in their tenure as Cultural Affairs Commissioner: From social media posts on UCLA-affiliated accounts calling for violence against Zionists to barring students wearing a Magen David at the door from an event. I applied to staff as someone who can rock on the bass, has a family background in Hip-Hop, and knows that music is an amazing art form that brings people together. I believe that their directive to exclude Zionists was a thin veil to discriminate against Jews, as evinced by the fact that every student who identified as Jewish in their applications was denied.”
• UCLA Hillel Executive Director Dan Gold said in a statement to the Journal, “Hillel at UCLA leadership is currently reviewing the evidence and the details outlined in this petition, but we are appalled that UCLA student leaders would once again openly discriminate against Jewish students. We have been sounding the alarm for months about the hate spewed on social media and in their activism, but these text messages, if validated as real, illustrate just how brazenly anti-Jewish hate is expressed unchecked at UCLA. We can see clearly how it can discriminate against Jewish students. This must end – students and faculty must be held accountable for their hateful and discriminatory actions against Jewish Bruins.”
• Link: Complaint Alleges That UCLA Student Gov’t Cultural Affairs Commissioner Discriminated Against Jewish Students

Sources: JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, IDF Casualty Count, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, and the Times of Israel