Israel Update: July 7

by | | Israel Updates

Jay Zeidman – Today marks 9 months since the horrific terror attacks in Israel. We have shared so many stories of the heroes of that terrible day in previous updates. Below is one more. Am Israel Chai.

Arsen Ostrovsky posts on X: This photo was taken on the morning of October 7th on Route 232 at the Nova Party area. Six security personnel are standing behind a car, while surrounding them are two vans loaded with Hamas terrorists, with more on the side of the road. The person in the back of the picture is the security guard of the party, Bar Kupershtein. Bar and the five policemen stood firm, defending thousands of young people behind them from terrorists with machine guns, grenades and RPG missiles. Four of these officers fell at the same spot on this day. They fought to the end and saved many lives during this time. Bar Kupershtein was kidnapped alive and taken to Gaza. This picture symbolizes the courage, the Israeli spirit, and the sacrifice that was made that day.

Credit: Bring Them Home Now

Situational Update

 

  • Hostage/Cease Fire Agreement Update: According to multiple sources, including the Times of Israel and Ynet, ahead of the Israeli negotiating team’s departure for further hostage deal talks in Cairo and Doha later this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a list on Sunday evening of what he said were non-negotiable Israeli demands:
    • Any potential deal must “allow Israel to return and fight until all the goals of the war are achieved.”
    • The smuggling of weapons for Hamas across the Gaza-Egypt border will be prohibited.
    • The return of thousands of armed militants to the northern Gaza Strip will not be permitted. Per Marc Schulman, this is a new request, was not included in the original deal, and is opposed by the military, who believe that Hamas will not accept this condition.
    • Israel will [do its best to] maximize the number of living hostages returned from Hamas captivity.
    • The plan that has been agreed to by Israel and which has been welcomed by U.S. President Joe Biden will allow Israel to return hostages without infringing on the other objectives of the war.
    • The condition that “There will be no return of thousands of armed terrorists to the northern Gaza Strip” is a clause that did not exist in the original wording of the agreement. This means, in practice, that the IDF will be the one to oversee the return of Gazans to the northern Gaza Strip, through control of the Netzarim Corridor that separates this area from the rest of the Gaza Strip.
    • The deal includes three stages; During the first stage all the women, the sick and the elderly hostages who remained in captivity will be released. These include 33 living and dead hostages, according to the reports, who will be released over six weeks. In the second phase, the rest of the living hostages, mainly the young men and the soldiers, are supposed to be released. This phase involves the most acute dispute in the agreement, since Hamas conditions it taking place on a permanent cease-fire – while Israel currently refuses this. In the third stage, the rest of the bodies of dead hostages are supposed to be released. At each stage of the deal, Israel is required to release hundreds of terrorists from Israeli prisons.
    • Prior to the Prime Ministers statement, Mossad Director David Barnea, who held cease-fire talks in Qatar over the weekend, conveyed to mediators in Doha that for progress on a hostage release deal, Hamas must agree to the proposed framework without any changes…The cease-fire outline has been endorsed by the UN Security Council and U.S. President Joe Biden.
  • Two days ago, Hezbollah launched its largest attack on Israel since October 8, firing more than 200 rockets and 20 explosive-laden drones at communities throughout northern Israel. Today, Hezbollah launched more than 40 rockets. According to AIPAC, 43 Israeli communities in the north remain evacuated as a result of Hezbollah’s attacks. 80,000 Israelis are internally displaced across the country.
  • The IDF said Sunday fighter jets struck a compound within a school in Gaza City where terror group operatives were gathered. A separate site in the school used by Hamas to manufacture weapons was also hit, it added.

The Numbers

 

Casualties

 

  • 1,624 Israelis dead, including 680 IDF soldiers (326 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza) – an increase of 3 from our last update
    • Major Jalaa Ibrahim (25), a Druze soldier, fell in southern Gaza
    • First Sergeant Eyal Mimran, (20), fell in battle when a terrorist emerged from a tunnel in a building he was clearing.
    • On July 4th, Hezbollah fired between 150-200 rockets and missiles across broad areas of Northern Israel, along with 20 suicide drones. Tragically, one of the rockets directly hit an army base on the Golan Heights, killing Major (res.) Itay Galea, (37)

    Additional Information (according to the IDF):

    • 2,084 IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 397 who have been severely injured.
    • 4,096 IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 608 who have been severely injured.
  • Note: we have always included the number of casualties in Gaza, as reported by the Gaza Health Ministry. We feel it is important to include this information with the caveat that this reporting ministry is not a trusted source of data by many. Most recently, The United Nations has begun citing a much lower death toll for women and children in Gaza, acknowledging that it has incomplete information about many of the people killed during Israel’s military offensive in the territory.
    • According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 38,011 people have been killed in Gaza, and 87,445 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 from Wednesday)

 

  • On October 7th, a total of 261 Israelis were taken hostage.
  • During the ceasefire deal in November, 112 hostages were released.
  • A total of 7 hostages have been rescued and the remains of 19 others have been recovered. Tragically, 3 have been mistakenly killed by the IDF, and 1 was killed during an IDF attempt to rescue him.
  • This leaves an estimated 116 hostages still theoretically in Gaza, with somewhere between (assumed) 35-43 deceased. Thus, at most, 85 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
    • According to an article published in the WSJ, “Of the approximately 250 hostages taken in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, 116 continue to be held captive, including many believed to be dead. Mediators in the hostage talks and a U.S. official familiar with the latest U.S. intelligence said the number of those hostages still alive could be as low as 50.”
    • That assessment, based in part on Israeli intelligence, would mean 66 of those still held hostage could be dead, 25 more than Israel has publicly acknowledged.
    • Link: Families of Hostages in Gaza Are Desperate for News but Dread a Phone Call | WSJ

Humanitarian Aid

 

For more detail, please visit COGAT’s website: Israel Humanitarian efforts – Swords of Iron (govextra.gov.il)

(Sources: JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, and the Times of Israel)

Listen

 

[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: The IDF advocates for an end to the war – with Nadav Eyal

  • In recent days, while we have all been consumed with the U.S. presidential debate, less international attention has been on Israel. But during this time, Israel’s security apparatus has proposed and advocated for a formal end to the war in Gaza. This is in part because the IDF is closer to achieving its military objectives in Gaza by having dismantled Hamas’s capabilities – and in part because they believe it’s the only way to get some calm on Israel’s northern border, at least for now. The security establishment argues that there is a connection between the two fronts. Whether or not the Government will accept and implement this proposal, is not yet clear.
  • To help us understand what’s going on here, our guest today is NADAV EYAL, who returns to the podcast. He is a columnist for Yediot. Eyal has been covering Middle-Eastern and international politics for the last two decades for Israeli radio, print and television news.
  • Link: The IDF advocates for an end to the war

[PODCAST] Making Sense with Sam Harris: Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

  • Sam Harris speaks with Michal Cotler-Wunsh (Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism for Israel) about the global rise of antisemitism. They discuss the bias against Israel at the United Nations, the nature of double standards, the precedent set by Israel in its conduct in the war in Gaza, the shapeshifting quality of antisemitism, anti-Zionism as the newest strain of Jew hatred, the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the U.N., the lie that Israel is an apartheid state, the notion that Israel is perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, the Marxist oppressed-oppressor narrative, the false moral equivalence between the atrocities committed by Hamas and the deaths of noncombatants in Gaza, the failure of the social justice movement to respond appropriately to events in Israel, what universities should have done after October 7th, reclaiming the meanings of words, extremism vs civilization, and other topics.
  • Link: Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

Watch

 

So Many Wars, So Little Time: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies

  • As the Israel Defense Forces appear to have almost completed their mission to defeat Hamas terrorists in Rafah, a Gazan city along the Egyptian border, the Islamic Republic of Iran is utilizing Hezbollah, its proxy in Lebanon, to attack – even more aggressively – Israel’s northern territories. Behind Hezbollah, behind Hamas, behind Islamic Jihad, behind the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and multiple Shia militias in Syria and Iraq is an expanding jihadist empire whose metropole is in Tehran.
  • Seth Cropsey, former naval officer and deputy undersecretary of the Navy, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Israel faces a tough choice: to go to war directly against the Tehran regime now, or to go war against the Tehran regime later.
  • Link: So Many Wars, So Little Time

[WARNING: GRAPHIC FOOTAGE]: The IDF releases footage of soldiers of the Paratroopers Brigade’s reconnaissance unit battling Hamas gunmen in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood. You can see by watching this video the intensity of the close-quarter combat, and the risk that Israeli soldiers are taking on a daily basis

What We Are Reading

 

We have included another article from Sapir’s quarterly publication, appropriately focused on Resilience. We are only sharing one for this update, as it is worth the full read.

Democracy’s Pessimism Paradox: Our self-doubt is a secret source of democratic strength by Bret Stephens

  • What the data show, everyday life corroborates. Whether it’s in the United States, Israel, Poland, France, or other advanced democracies, people increasingly view their political choices as zero-sum struggles between democrats and authoritarians — the authoritarians being whoever is on the other side. They’re also prepared to use antidemocratic means to maintain their grip on power, whether it’s in the form of denying the results of an election, or employing mob tactics to obstruct legislative processes, or using sketchy legal claims to try to jail a political opponent.
  • Underlying these antidemocratic behaviors is an antidemocratic mentality: Our side alone is in possession of the truth. Our political opponents are mortal enemies. Disagreement is heresy. Where you stand politically is who you are morally.
  • The domestic challenge to democracy is compounded by foreign threats. George W. Bush probably spoke too soon when, in 2002, he named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the world’s “axis of evil.” Its current, much more powerful membership includes Russia, which retains the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and China, with the world’s second-largest economy. Their partnerships with Pyongyang and Tehran, along with their burgeoning influence in the Global South, makes our period reminiscent of the 1930s — another time when willful dictators, intent on conquest and genocide, confronted a diffident and enfeebled West. The only difference is that, back then, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were in office or waiting in the wings. Their astonishing achievement was to ready their people successfully for the challenge. There are no similar figures available to us today.
  • Why is pessimism so regular and even so frequent a condition of democratic politics? Part of the answer is objective reality: Certain problems, such as slavery and disunion, depression and war, illiberalism at home and the threat of totalitarian regimes abroad, induce entirely legitimate fears for the future. Part of the answer is psychological: People are prone to depression, phobias, and catastrophizing. Humanity has always nursed apocalyptic fears.
  • But some of the pessimism has its roots in the nature of democratic life itself. A few of the more obvious factors:
    • Information abundance and asymmetry
    • Controversy and political hyperbole.
    • Dynamism and amnesia.
    • Dissatisfaction and naïveté.
    • Choice and responsibility.
  • But there’s a deeper reason: What has saved democracy in the past, and what will likely save us again, is not what we think we know. It’s what we know we don’t.
  • Think again about our 21st-century pessimism. While the United States was failing to win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, electing bad presidents, allowing our universities to collapse into wokeness, struggling with an opioid epidemic, and failing to maintain control at our borders (to name some of the more common indictments of modern America), we also:
    • Became the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas
    • Invented, commercialized, and dominated the four most important digital innovations of our time: smartphones, mobile apps, social media, and generative AI.
    • Landed a satellite on an asteroid, collected a dirt sample and returned the sample to Earth. Flew a satellite to Pluto and beyond. Landed multiple rovers on Mars and flew the first helicopter drone on the red planet.
    • Attracted tens of millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, inflaming populist sentiment and causing undoubted strains but also relieving our long-term demographic decline, which would otherwise produce labor shortages, economic stagnation, and long-term national decline.
    • Increased our gross domestic product, in inflation-adjusted terms, by 64 percent. Our share of global GDP, at 25 percent, is effectively unchanged from 30 years ago. It is nearly double that of the European Union, even though the EU has 100 million more citizens.
    • Won 136 — 46 percent — of the 294 Nobel Prizes awarded since 2000.
    • Gave birth to 61 of the world’s 100 largest public companies, including eight of the top 10.
    • Continued to be the most charitable people in the world, giving away far more of our money (in both absolute and proportional terms) and volunteering more of our time than people in any other developed nation.
  • None of this is secret. But it’s obscured to us by our own pessimism, our trouble in seeing more than only what ails us. Optimism breeds complacency; it’s an invitation to carry on as before. Paradoxically, pessimism — at least when it doesn’t descend to fatalism — is a motivator, a spur to change, an invitation to personal or communal reinvention.
  • I wrote above that we shouldn’t panic about the state of democracy, yet. What gives me pause is antisemitism.
    • …antisemitism isn’t a problem for Jews to solve because it isn’t, fundamentally, our problem, at least as Jews. It is, however, a grave problem for democracy, because antisemitism isn’t mere bigotry. It’s always a bigotry wedded to a conspiracy theory — a uniquely toxic form of irrationality that strikes at the root of the rational and empirical frame of mind that made the Enlightenment possible, and with it the enormous success of democracy. The antisemite isn’t merely at war with the Jews. He’s at war with reality, with the fact that no dark, secret power controls the course of events in an open society. The antisemite embraces a politics of envy that is also an assault on the idea of excellence, without which democracy cannot flourish.
  • American history should give us hope that those forces are not fighting a hopeless battle; that the ugliness we see on college campuses and editorial pages will remain on the fringes; that the vast majority of Americans will not lose their faith in their core ideals and their good sense about the world at large. But success in the fight against antisemitism and for democracy is not guaranteed. American history reminds us that retaining our best democratic ideals requires constant work in every generation.
  • Link: Democracy’s Pessimism Paradox – SAPIR Journal

Draw a red line: Jenin at risk of ‘Gazafication’, by Meir Ben Shabbat in Israel Hayom

  • The “Gazafication” process in this area began well before Oct. 7, but inspired by the war in Gaza and after adapting to IDF operational patterns, it could accelerate and amplify the challenges of multi-arena warfare if not swiftly addressed.
  • Since the outbreak of the war, IDF forces have arrested more than 4,200 terrorist operatives from the West Bank, averaging about 16 operatives per day. Of those arrested, 1,750 are Hamas operatives. These figures not only demonstrate the scale of the security forces’ preventive efforts but also reveal the terrorist potential in the West Bank that’s reaching a boiling point.
  • This situation requires the security forces to adopt a firm and uncompromising approach towards terrorism in the West Bank. The “Gazafication” process should also be applied by Israel towards terrorist centers, increasing pressure on them. If Jenin chooses to behave like Gaza, it will face consequences similar to Gaza.
  • The West Bank is currently defined as a secondary arena in Israel’s multi-arena campaign. Successfully addressing these challenges will help maintain this definition and prevent the area from deteriorating into a situation that Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas would like to see.
  • In a gradual process, akin to the “boiling frog” metaphor, Israel may find itself returning to the pre-Oct. 7 reality in Gaza if clear red lines are not drawn for Israeli policy on Gaza-related issues and the many dilemmas they present.
  • Examples include special security measures in the security perimeter (including the size of the buffer zone), policy on using force against Hamas’s governance efforts, policy towards participants in the Oct. 7 attack who are not officially affiliated with terrorist organizations, removing potential threats from Gaza to targets in Israel (instead of fortifying the southern railway infrastructure or worrying about the tall buildings in the city of Sderot), humanitarian aid entry policy (quantity, sources, coordination, and inspection methods), policy on introducing dual-use items into Gaza (including for humanitarian facilities), and approach to infrastructure work in Gaza (such as connecting the desalination plant to electricity).
  • Link: Draw a red line: Jenin at risk of ‘Gazafication’| Israel Hayom

Why Can’t the U.S. Navy and Its Allies Stop the Houthis? by Keith Johnson in Foreign Policy

  • More than six months after the Houthi insurgent group in Yemen started seriously disrupting maritime traffic in the Red Sea, global shipping has had to come to terms with a new normal where delays, derangements, and higher costs are only getting worse.
  • That the world’s premier navies appear to be struggling to subdue a band of insurgents raises painful questions about both the utility of sea power and the proficiency of the Western navies that are meant to carry the burden in any future showdown with a major rival such as China. The U.S. Navy admits that it has been in the sharpest fight it has faced since World War II.
  • From its deadly perch on the shipping chokepoint of the Bab el-Mandeb, the gateway to the Suez Canal, the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group, now Yemen’s nominal ruler, has been attacking civilian and naval ships since late last year, ostensibly as part of a campaign to pressure Israel over its war with Hamas.
  • But those disruptions were not expected to last long, especially after the arrival on the scene of Western navies to restore security; insurance premiums for shippers actually fell slightly when the joint U.S.-British deployment was announced. And costs for shipping settled down in the spring, despite the ongoing campaign. Yet eight months on, the disruption to shipping has suddenly gotten a lot worse.
  • Not all the impacts are quite so visible as the explosions that damaged the Transworld Navigator late last month, but they are painful all the same. Transits of the Suez Canal, an important source of earnings for Egypt, are down by at least half, with tonnage down even more. Ships going the long way around add time and money and end up costing everybody by tying up hulls in the meantime.
  • As a result, the costs for a shipping container have soared from around $1,600 or so on average to well over $5,000, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. Rates are now higher than they were at the peak of the Red Sea panic earlier this year.
  • The navies—the U.S., the British, and a rotating group of European ships—have been trying to restore normal shipping since almost the start of the Houthi campaign with little success, as evidenced by the fact that war-cover insurance rates for vessels risking the dangerous passage are apparently still up nearly 1,000 percent on preconflict levels.
  • Part of the problem is that the two naval forces—the U.S. and British “Prosperity Guardian” on the one hand and the European Union’s “Aspides” on the other—have two different missions. The Anglo-American force aims to intercept threats and strike at their origin on land; the Europeans have stuck closer to a straight escort mission to protect merchant shipping without taking the fight to the Houthis. Neither is working.
  • The U.S.-U.K. effort to “degrade” the Houthi ability to target shipping has ended up an expensive game of whack-a-mole. The Houthis have proved to be more mobile, and better supplied by Iran, than initially hoped, making incidental wins by the U.S. Navy—such as the destruction of a Houthi radar site last week—a drop in the bucket.
  • To judge by results—ships keep diverting, and insurance premiums remain high—the U.S. approach has not achieved what it set out to do.
  • “There is a real-time problem of not enough ships for the Europeans to deploy on a truly rotational basis, so you have these gaps” in the escort mission, Bruns said.
  • But the whole affair reinforces the degree to which Europe and much of the world have taken for granted the security of the seas that made globalization possible but which did not appear out of thin air. “Collectively, we take maritime security for granted. But maritime insecurity is the norm, and security is only underwritten by Western navies patrolling the seas,” Bruns said. “We always think things will work out, and it is a unique kind of sea blindness.”
  • To wrest back that kind of security at sea, as the Europeans have found, requires a sustained investment in naval capacity that simply hasn’t been made in recent decades and can’t be made good anytime soon.
  • Link: Why Can’t the U.S. Navy and Its Allies Stop the Houthis | ForeignPolicy

When Should Israel Fight Hezbollah? Elliot Kaufman writes for the WSJ

  • “The north.” The term hangs over Israel like a black cloud. It conveys danger and hardship with no hope on the horizon. War with Hezbollah, Israelis agree, is inevitable. The question isn’t if but when, and the answer from political and military leaders is always “not yet.” But timing a war risks becoming a fool’s errand when the enemy has already opened fire.
  • As the Gaza war winds down, domestic pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to defeat Hezbollah is mounting. Israelis want their homes and country back, but the stakes are high: “Buildings will fall in Tel Aviv” is a line I hear over and over. This war would be like nothing Israelis have seen before.
  • Mr. Netanyahu, far from his caricature in the foreign press, has earned a reputation in Israel for being cautious with military force. He stresses to me, “The way to prevent war in the north is to prepare for it.”
  • A source close to the prime minister spoke on the condition of anonymity to elaborate on security matters: “We’re building up our arms industry, stockpiling so the U.S. can’t blackmail us.” This will take some time.
  • An Israeli negotiator adds that it would be foolish to attempt the war on the eve of U.S. elections. “Serious Israelis don’t want war in Lebanon right now,” he says. “But the public does.”
  • Israel’s military establishment knows a war with Hezbollah would likely end with an agreement short of total victory. So, a senior military official suggests, “Why not make a deal now and skip the war?”
  • There are reasons for Israel to strike sooner rather than later. “The Hamas threat is handled. The north is already evacuated,” says Mr. Stein of the Upper Galilee. “The army is already mobilized.” Mr. Avivi adds, “We have been degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities in southern Lebanon for eight months, destroying their posts, pushing them north. When will we have a better moment to go for it, if not now?”
  • Israel’s assessment is that Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah doesn’t want a larger war. Some say he cares to prevent Lebanon’s destruction. Others say he needs to preserve his arsenal to protect the Iranian nuclear program. So why risk everything by continuing to shoot? “He knows us too well,” Mr. Stein says. “He knows exactly where the line is for us.”
  • Link: When Should Israel Fight Hezbollah | Wall Street Journal

How Israelis Probe Their Failings, by Scott Abramson, a historian of the modern Middle East and the senior research officer for Israel and the region at the Center for Israel Education, in Mosaic Magazine

  • Ever since Israelis first learned on October 7 that disaster was upon them, their minds have been awhirl with questions. Why was the government so slow to respond? How was the border breached with such ease? How did Israel’s all-knowing intelligence apparatus—whose “contribution to U.S. military intelligence,” as the late senator Daniel Inouye once put it, “is greater than all NATO countries combined”—fail to see this coming?
  • In the nine months since, enough revelations have come to light to allow a partial response to such questions: border security was left to technology rather than to manpower; a recklessly thin military force was fielded in the Gaza envelope; the warnings of intelligence analysts and the suspicions of field observers were chronically disregarded.
  • A comprehensive answer, however, is likely to come by way of the peculiarly Israeli institution known as the commission of inquiry. Though government inquests are not uncommon in the states that make up the international liberal order, Israeli democracy reserves a special place for them, so much so that Zev Chafets, the director of Israel’s Government Press Office under Menachem Begin, once described commissions of inquiry as Israel’s “fourth branch of government.”
  • What’s more, the significance of these investigations, far from being limited to the separation of powers, has transcended politics. Commissions of inquiry have often been the occasions of Israeli national reckoning, opportunities for a stricken country to try to come to terms with its own failures.
  • To understand the looming clash over the October 7 commission, then, it is necessary to understand Israel’s commissions of inquiry as an institution. With this objective in view, let us survey the history, function, and significance of an Israeli idiosyncrasy.
    • Where Israel’s Commissions Come From and How They Work: One of Israel’s many legal inheritances from British rule, commissions of inquiry trace their origins to a 1921 ordinance in the Mandate for Palestine, the British regime that administered the territory for nearly three decades. In other democracies, commissions of inquiry are often strictly investigative, their commissioners having no other care than to establish the facts of the matter. Israel’s state commissions of inquiry, by contrast, are not just investigative but also prescriptive, recommending corrective and preventive measures too. Israel’s commissions, on the other hand, make no promise of being non-judgmental. They name names and apportion personal and not just institutional blame, recommending the resignation or removal of high officials. They neither administer justice nor render verdicts; they are task forces that conduct investigations and issue reports. Their reports, moreover, are non-binding and carry no legal standing. If their recommendations are put into effect, it is the pressure of the public, not the apparatus of the state, that enforces them.
    • The Public View of Commissions: That these commissions should influence Israeli policymaking and state institutions is to be expected, but the impact of commissions of inquiry extends well beyond the corridors of power. Officially, the commissioners might be ad-hoc government auditors, but Israeli society has often assigned them additional, unintended roles, designating them narrators of official history, soothers of collective trauma, and bringers of closure, however limited. With a commission of inquiry, the judgment is a fait accompli. The commission publishes its report and then washes its hands of the affair. As soon as its work is done, it ceases to exist and no recourse is possible.” Ben-Ami, for his part, raged that commissions are an unjust Israeli anomaly: “There is no such institution in other places. . . . The same body cannot act simultaneously as investigator, prosecutor, judge, and ultimate authority.”
    • A Survey of Commissions: Since the 1968 statute, there have been twenty state commissions of inquiry, their eclectic subjects ranging from the weirdly inconsequential—game fixing in Israel soccer—to the deadly serious—assassinations, wars, massacres. The direct causes of the commissions have been similarly varied.
    • The October 7 Commission in a Divided Nation: Exactly how these and other safeguards broke down and why so many red flags went unseen and alarm bells unheard, the postwar commission of inquiry ought to clarify. In the meantime, the central question concerns not what the commission will find but what kind of commission it will be. It should also be noted that Netanyahu’s commission anxieties likely come from a concern more about his legacy than about his immediate political survival. It would be several years before a state commission of inquiry even releases its interim report. Even if there are no early Knesset elections and fortune smiles on Netanyahu and he manages to serve a full four-year term, the latest possible date for the next elections—October 2026—would probably still precede the publication of the commission’s interim report.
    • Accountability: Many Israelis who have knowledge of English and little faith in their governments are in the habit of saying that there is no word in Hebrew for “accountability,” by which they mean that it is no coincidence that there is a lack of accountability in Israeli political culture. The claim is wrong. There is a term for “accountability” in Hebrew, albeit an old talmudic one: din v’heshbon (literally “judgment and accounting”). And Israeli officials are frequently held accountable, perhaps not as often or as fully as they might be, but it bears remembering that in the past twenty years, a prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and a president, Moshe Katsav, have both served sentences in Israel’s Maasiyahu Prison. Ultimately, of course, it falls to the Israeli electorate to hold its leaders accountable; inquests do Israeli voters the valuable service of assisting them to that end.
  • Link: How Israelis Probe Their Failings | Mosaic Magazine

Antisemitism

 

The Return of the Gentleman’s Agreement, by Michael Oren in Clarity

  • Imagine a blockbuster produced by Hollywood’s leading screenwriter and director, starring the world’s most celebrated actors, a movie nominated for eight Oscars and winning three. And imagine the subject of that movie is… antisemitism.
  • Impossible, you’d think, because you’re living in 2024. But seventy-seven years ago, famed director Elia Kazan collaborated with Broadway genius Moss Hart to produce “Gentleman’s Agreement.” With the immortal Gregory Peck in the lead role, and the likes of John Garfield and Jane Wyatt lending support, the plot centers on a debate between two friends, one Jewish, one (Peck) not, over antisemitism. Peck’s character denies that a “gentleman’s agreement” exists between non-Jews in America to deny Jews entry in many seemingly public places. To prove his point, he agrees to adopt a Jewish name—note, not a kippa, not even a Star of David, just a name—for one week. The stately WASP suddenly finds himself barred from hotels, clubs, and rarefied circles. Two years after the murder of six million Jews, the movie informs us, the hatred that killed them is alive and seething in the United States.
  • “Gentleman’s Agreement,” together with the revelation of the Holocaust’s horrors, rendered antisemitism socially unacceptable in America. Publicly, at least, Jew hatred was déclassé. What followed were seven of the freest, most secure, and prosperous decades for any Jewish community in history. American Jews, many of them first generation, rose to the pinnacle of virtually every cultural, academic, financial, and journalistic field. Jewish humor became American humor and bagels as American as peach cobbler. On the doorposts of houses in once-restricted neighborhoods, mezuzahs proliferated. Jewish identity was shouted, not whispered, and last names remained Goldstein and not de-judaized, as in the case of my mother’s family, to Gould.
  • Then, it ended. Not suddenly, as it often feels now, but cumulatively over the twenty years. One by one, the barriers against antisemitism in America—breaking that gentleman’s agreement—broke down. Nearly twenty years have passed since former President Jimmy Carter published a book that branded Israel an apartheid state and professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer accused the Jews of blackmailing Congress. Charges of genocide and Jewish supremacy moved from the counterculture fringes to the academic center. Claims of Jewish control of the film industry and the media, once publicly condemned, went unremarked. Mel Gibson, a serial anti-Semite, continued to land starring roles.
  • Antisemitism is back. In fact, it never went away, and we can no longer rely on films such as “Gentlemen’s Agreement” to suppress it. Jewish existence is once again precarious. Nevertheless, as demonstrated throughout our history, the Jews will survive. Rather than denying this resurgent reality, we will acknowledge it and battle it with a fortified Jewish identity, a commitment to unity, and a refusal to die. We will fight—with tanks and jets as with legislation and lawsuits—and fight in the Churchillian sense in Gaza and the Galilee, in newsrooms and courtrooms and capitals.
  • Am Yisrael chai, the people of Israel live, is more than just an empirical observation. Yes, we live, but Am Yisrael chai is also a moral imperative. We must live. Living is our legacy, our privilege, and our duty. Hatred can neither deny that nor deter us. Am Yisrael chai—imagine what movie that would make.
  • Link: The Return of the Gentleman’s Agreement | Clarity