Israel Update: June 19 (Day 258)

by | | Israel Updates, Uncategorized

Jay Zeidman-

 

Situational Update
  • The IDF has been making steady progress in Gaza. According to the Army Spokesman, the IDF has gained control of 60-70% of Rafah, accomplished with the absolute minimum civilian casualties. Most of the Rafah residents had already left.
  • Hezbollah published a new video demonstrating its intent to target critical infrastructure throughout Israel, including shots of Haifa bay and sensitive military locations, as US envoy urges de-escalation in Beirut.
  • Top Israeli generals approve Lebanon offensive battle plans. IDF says commanders also made decisions on ‘accelerating the readiness of the forces on the ground,’ as fighter jets strike Hezbollah targets.
  • IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari on Wednesday cast Israel’s war aim of eradicating the Hamas terror group as currently unattainable, saying “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people — whoever thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong,” he continued.
Report from IDF Southern Command: The Commander of the Southern Front General Yaron Finkelman had an in-depth meeting to summarize the current state of the war and conditions at present in Gaza. According to Israeli journalist Marc Schulman, The Enemy Readiness Assessment is a status report composed of several components, each measuring the impact on Hamas based on specific parameters. The aggregate of all these components provides a comprehensive picture of Hamas’s current situation after eight months of war.
  • Command and Control
    • The IDF believes that Hamas has lost its unified command capability across the entire Gaza Strip. In other words, each local commander controls their own area without coordination or communication between them. 12 out of 24 Hamas battalion commanders have been eliminated and replaced. According to the IDF, their replacements are of lesser quality.
    • Sinwar and Deif, the two most important figures, have not yet been eliminated. According to sources in the Southern Command, Sinwar and Deif are making every effort to ensure their survival, understanding that their survival has broader implications for the entire organization in many ways. The IDF asserts that at no point during the war have they known the precise locations of Sinwar or Deif at any given time.
  • Rocket Launching Capabilities
    • The IDF estimates that Hamas has a few hundred long-range rockets left. Their firing capabilities allow for salvos of up to about ten rockets. The long-range rockets are located in the central camps, Khan Younis and Rafah. In the northern part of the Gaza Strip, only short-range rocket capabilities remain. A senior IDF officer stated: “We won’t reach zero rockets, but we’ll get close to zero.”
  • Hamas Tunnel Network
    • Many numbers have been thrown around regarding Hamas’s extensive tunnel system. Currently, the IDF estimates that the total length of this underground system is about 500 kilometers. So far, the IDF has discovered 25 smuggling tunnels between Rafah and Egypt. Security officials estimate there are up to 40 such tunnels, meaning not all have been located.
  • Personnel
    • So far, the IDF has eliminated about 14,000 Hamas terrorists out of approximately 30,000 military wing operatives. This means that approximately 15,000 operatives remain alive. Intelligence estimates suggest that about 5,000 terrorists have fled from fighting the IDF. They are labeled “deserters,” most of whom have fled from maneuvering areas to displaced areas (likely without weapons).
    • The “deserters” are still considered Hamas terrorists but are inactive, though the IDF still categorizes them as part of Hamas’s fighting force because they can pick up weapons and resume fighting against our forces at any moment or exploit random opportunities. Thus, the active force left in Gaza now numbers about 10,000 terrorists.
  • Governance Capabilities
    • This might be the most interesting part of the enemy readiness assessment. In the northern Gaza Strip, the IDF estimates that about 2,000 terrorists remain. According to security officials, this is not a “sufficient mass” to maintain full control over the entire northern Gaza Strip. However, it’s still a significant number that currently prevents the introduction of an alternative governing force.
  • Read More: Times of Israel publishes a detailed report –in Rafah, the IDF focuses on tunnels with aim of destroying Hamas brigade within a month.
Numbers
Casualties
  • 1,605 Israelis dead, including 662 IDF soldiers (311 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza) – no change since Sunday’s update
  • Additional Information (according to the IDF):
    • 1,947 IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 378 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, 36,731 people have been killed in Gaza, and 83,530 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 Sunday’s update)
  • 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 120 hostages still theoretically in Gaza, with somewhere between (assumed) 35-43 deceased. Thus, at most, 85 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
Humanitarian Aid
For more detail, please visit COGAT’s website: Israel Humanitarian efforts – Swords of Iron (govextra.gov.il)
  • Since the start of the war, more than 24,195 tons of medical supplies have entered the Gaza Strip to support the medical response for Gaza civilians.
    • So far, 3,204 sick and wounded along with 725 escorts have exited the Gaza Strip for treatment in Egypt, the UAE, Turkey, Qatar and Jordan.
 
According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 1,000 truckloads of aid were piled up at the Gazan side of an Israeli border crossing on Monday, a day after Israel implemented a humanitarian pause in fighting to help increase the flow of aid into the war-torn enclave.
  • The number of aid trucks entering southern Gaza fell by nearly 71% to 1,656 trucks in May from the prior month after Israel went into Rafah, according to UNRWA. By mid-June, just 460 aid trucks entered Gaza, the U.N. said.
  • Officials from the United Nations, the largest distributor of aid in Gaza, say that people are looting trucks when they reach Gaza, making it unsafe for their employees to deliver aid. By midafternoon on Monday, no U.N. trucks arrived to pick up aid from the Kerem Shalom crossing, where on Sunday Israel began a daily pause to fighting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. along a key north-south road used to deliver aid throughout much of Gaza. The Israeli military said 21 other trucks picked up supplies on Sunday.
Watch
Eden Golan on Facing the Mob at Eurovision: Interview with Suzy Weiss in The Free Press
  • The 20-year-old Israeli singer sits down for her first in-depth interview since performing amid death threats and jeers: “I turned it into my power.”
  • In her first in-depth interview since the competition, to talk about how she handled the pressure of being the most-hated performer in Eurovision history before ever singing a note, how it feels to represent Israel since October 7, and what comes next.
  • Link: Eden Golan on Facing the Mob at Eurovision | The Free Press (thefp.com)
What We Are Reading
To the outside world, they were a physician, a journalist. No one suspected their apartment had become a prison for Jews. And they call Zionists Nazis. The Hostages Next Door: Inside a Notable Gaza Family’s Dark Secret, by Abeer Ayyoub with WSJ
  • The 73-year-old general practitioner Ahmad Al-Jamal was a fixture of his community.
  • He worked mornings at a public clinic in the Gaza Strip refugee camp of Nuseirat and afternoons at his own small private clinic, where residents turned to him for procedures such as circumcisions. He also was an imam at a local mosque, where he was known for his beautiful voice when reciting the Quran.
  • But for the past several months, when he finished his duties each day, he would return home to the apartment he shared with his son, his daughter-in-law and their children—and the three Israeli hostages they were hiding there for Hamas.
  • The June 8 rescue operation was accompanied by heavy airstrikes and turned into a fierce battle with Hamas in the streets, leaving behind death and destruction. In the days since, local residents have discussed the folly of Hamas keeping Israeli hostages above ground in a residential area near a bustling market.
  • “Praise be to God…Oh God, guide us…Oh God, guide us…Oh God, guide us…Oh God, grant us the victory you promised,” Abdullah posted on Facebook on Oct. 7.
  • The Palestine Chronicle said it was saddened by his death and denied he was involved in holding the Israeli hostages.
  • The hostages’ return home caused jubilation in Israel. It was a rare day of joy amid a grim war that is still far from achieving its declared goals of destroying Hamas and bringing home the 116 remaining Israelis and others seized on Oct. 7.
  • The Nuseirat area, swollen with civilians displaced from other parts of Gaza, suffered the heaviest bombardment by Israeli air and ground forces that it has seen in the eight-month war.
  • Palestinian health authorities said 274 people were killed and nearly 700 injured. Israel’s military said around 100 people were killed or wounded, including militants and civilians caught in the crossfire. The numbers couldn’t be independently verified.
  • Link: The Hostages Next Door: Inside a Notable Gaza Family’s Dark Secret – Wall Street Journal
Politicizing the victims of sexual assault means they suffer twice, by Rachel Moiselle in the Jewish Chronicle. She exposes a piece in the Times that has been criticised for questioning evidence of systematic Hamas rapes
  • There are a number of reasons why people decide to subvert, ignore, or twist the truth: fear, pride, cowardice, the list of such human frailties goes on. I have noted a particularly cynical reason for this phenomenon in recent years amongst many in mainstream media: a sacrificing of truth at the altar of specific ideological narratives and agendas.
  • The article, labelled as investigative, reads like an opinion piece. The weight of evidence that has come out since October was not mentioned.
  • Some of the sources for the article have disowned the publication. A statement from the interviewees was released on Sunday that accused the authors of politicising sexual violence and aiming to discredit victims. It included the following:
  • “Much of what we said was omitted, and only selective excerpts were used, taken out of context to serve the article’s agenda.”
  • Link: Politicizing the victims of sexual assault means they suffer twice – Jewish Chronicle
An emotional essay in Sapir’s quarterly journal: Returning to Kibbutz Be’eri: Devastation and healing on the farms desecrated on 10/7 by Moti Barak and Nicole Hazan
  • It’s hard for people to hear these terrible truths, harder for me to tell them. The loss is staggering: My best friend, Yuval, and his wife Ma’ayan; my dear friend, Roni, with whom I had planned to go on a bike ride that morning, fought Hamas without a weapon but didn’t stand a chance. We ate breakfast together every day for 10 years. Avida saw his son killed instantly by a grenade but held his wife for hours as she bled to death. His daughter’s body was riddled with shrapnel after three grenades were thrown into their shelter. He himself was shot in the leg, which was later amputated above the knee. When their shelter was set on fire, he and his daughter survived by breathing into cushions so they wouldn’t choke on the smoke. Women were raped before they were killed, others tortured in ways that I can’t bring myself to describe. Thirty of us from Be’eri were taken hostage to Gaza. As survivors, we will live with this trauma our entire lives.
  • I’m lucky. My wife is lucky. Many of Be’eri’s 1,200 residents are lucky. We survived, hiding for 15 or 20 hours in our shelters until we were rescued, emerging to the burning of our homes and cars. But 99 of my friends and family were very unlucky. And nothing can change that.
  • These thoughts destroy me. I can’t eat or sleep. Thinking of her last moments, how she must have suffered, being burned alive, makes me weep. In Judaism, we bury bodies 24 hours after a death, but without a body, we haven’t had a burial. How stupid we’ve been, praying she was alive. In those moments, it’s too much. I feel old. Angry. I lose hope. I don’t have the strength to go on.
  • But Israel does. It won’t let me give up. It knows what it wants, and that’s to heal. For months, the nation has been by my side. They come from all over: professors, doctors, and teachers, traveling hours to pick the fruit and vegetables that need to be harvested. So many of the agricultural workers have been injured or killed that without outside help, the food would rot and the agricultural produce would be lost. But the volunteers are relentless. They come in the heat and in the rain, from Canada and the United States. Someone flies in from Louisiana, staying a whole month. They are religious and secular, forgoing days of work. There is so much to be done. And they keep coming, no matter what.
  • Link: Returning to Kibbutz Be’eri – SAPIR Journal
The Collectivist Core of Israel’s Social Fabric: Threats to the Israeli national spirit may be the most dangerous of all by Saul Singer and Dan Senor in Sapir’s quarterly journal.
  • Israelis know they are all in the same boat, a fact that the slaughter of October 7 demonstrated vividly. They also have a visceral desire to be united, especially after tasting the heights of solidarity while fighting shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield and supporting one another so effectively on the home front.
  • The silver lining of the tragic and dangerous period since early 2023 is that a broad swathe of centrist Israelis came to realize how much they were willing to fight for two things they had previously taken for granted: first, the pillars of their democracy, and then the physical existence of the country.
  • The massive pogrom that took place on Israeli territory has created a rhyming moment in history. It is not 1948, far from it. But this generation suddenly feels as if it is not the fourth, but the first — a new founding generation. Political change is the first step to restoring trust in the governing and security establishment, but that is just a beginning. As Tal Becker, the lawyer who recently spearheaded Israel’s defense at the International Court of Justice, remarked on the Call Me Back podcast, “We have to remember that we have the state we need in order to build the society that we want.”
  • Link: The Collectivist Core of Israel’s Social Fabric – SAPIR Journal
A detailed look at what the group has been telling other Palestinians as it maneuvers to retake a role in the wider national movement and rebuild its forces: How Hamas Is Trying to Shape the “Day After” in Gaza, by Ehud Yaari in Washington Institute
  • Hamas has held countless rounds of discussions with delegates from the rival Fatah movement over the past decade and a half, and none of them produced a viable compromise. The same is true for talks held during the current war by such disparate hosts as Algeria, China, Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, and Russia. The conditions that Hamas has laid out for “national reconciliation” are clearly aimed at removing Fatah’s grip over the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization—namely, by establishing “unified leadership” over the PLO, forming a “consensus government” in the PA, and holding new presidential and general elections.
  • PA president Mahmoud Abbas has rejected these demands so long as Hamas refuses to abide by the PLO’s commitment to the Oslo Accords with Israel. (Hamas’s charter does not recognize Israel and has explicitly called for its destruction.) Yet Jibril Rajoub and certain other influential members of the Fatah Central Committee have advocated for cooperating with Hamas on some issues while deferring controversial matters to a later phase. In turn, Hamas is trying to widen the fissures within Fatah and find more officials who may be willing to go along with its vision for postwar Gaza.
  • Hamas has already convinced certain smaller PLO factions to get on board with its postwar model. Under the Damascus-based Jamil Mazhar, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has turned into a de facto junior partner of Hamas in recent years despite its secular left-wing doctrines. Other minor factions—such as the communist Palestinian People’s Party, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and al-Saeqah—have expressed support for a broad Gaza government with Hamas as its primary backer. Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other armed groups that fight alongside Hamas have accepted this objective as well.
  • With generous help from Qatar, Hamas also started a campaign in March asking unaffiliated Palestinian activists from Arab countries and the diaspora to press for a collaborative Hamas role in postwar Gaza. Their main idea for promoting this plan is to convene a “Palestinian National Congress” with hundreds of delegates. Preparatory meetings have already been held in Britain, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Qatar, and more are planned for the United States, Spain, Belgium, Australia, and France. This month’s meeting in Doha was chaired by Azmi Bishara, a former Israeli parliamentarian who fled the country in 2007 due to fears that he would be prosecuted for providing information to Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war. Now employed by a Qatari government research center, he oversaw the meeting’s adoption of resolutions that called for replacing the current PLO leadership with a new unified command—or creating a separate rival body to undermine the Fatah-dominated PLO.
  • Link: How Hamas Is Trying to Shape the “Day After” in Gaza – Washington Institute
It’s Time to Start Using the Term ‘Palestinian Civilian’ Correctly, an Opinion piece in Newsweek by Arsen Ostrovsky and John Spencer
  • Even if you accept Hamas’s figure of 30,000 reported deaths in Gaza during Israel’s war, the ratio of Palestinian non-combatants to terrorists killed has been estimated to be one to one, a level unprecedented in modern warfare. Meanwhile, the actual number of civilian casualties was recently significantly altered when the U.N. acknowledged that over 10,000 of the reported casualties were missing, not verified deaths; they also halved their demographic estimates of men versus women and children. With these updates, the already questionable figures become much lower. It would be lower still if those who have been reported as “civilians” were in fact combatants or, as we saw this week, holding hostages captive.
  • For Hamas, civilian death is their strategy; Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has called civilian deaths “necessary sacrifices.”
  • As long as the press and world leaders fail to ask these questions, continuing to push false narratives and unsubstantiated casualty figures, they are only enabling and empowering Hamas and perpetuating the violence and suffering they claim to seek to end.
  • Link: It’s Time to Start Using the Term ‘Palestinian Civilian’ Correctly – Newsweek
Targeted killings will not remove Hezbollah’s massive firepower threat, by Yaakov Lappin in Jewish News Syndicate: The Lebanese organization’s structure, Iranian funding and recruitment capabilities ensure a continuous flow of personnel to replace losses
  • Hezbollah’s response to Abu Taleb’s assassination—firing over 300 rockets, and UAVs, at northern Israel within 48 hours, including targeting the Plasan Sasa defense company that manufactures armored vehicle parts, underscores its capacity to mobilize and implement large-scale, precise attacks rapidly, and how this ability is not dependent on any single commander.
  • Hezbollah’s military-terrorist apparatus is unprecedented. Its firepower arsenal can only be matched by a handful of military powers. Its extensive, well-organized and deeply embedded army nestles within Lebanese-Shi’ite civilian society. Hezbollah’s arsenal of more than 200,000 warheads includes tens of thousands of rockets and missiles, 140,000 mortar shells, precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles. This arsenal allows Hezbollah to sustain prolonged conflicts and execute precision strikes against Israeli targets.
  • Hezbollah’s increasingly effective use of UAVs in recent days is another reminder of this persistent threat. Hezbollah is using the current conflict to rapidly learn how to launch UAVs at sensitive military facilities in Israel.
  • With 50,000 active members and an equal number of reservists, Hezbollah maintains substantial manpower, allowing the group to absorb losses from targeted strikes and continue its operations with minimal disruption.
  • Hezbollah’s organizational structure, Iranian funding flow (estimated at around $700 million per year) and recruitment capabilities ensure a continuous flow of personnel to replace losses. Hence, even significant casualties among high-ranking members can be mitigated, allowing the group to sustain its operations over the long term.
  • Link: Targeted killings will not remove Hezbollah’s massive firepower threat – Jewish National Syndicate
As War Drags On, Gazans More Willing to Speak Out Against Hamas, a huge development shared by Jerusalem and Istanbul based reporters Raja Abdulrahim and Iyad Abuheweila with The New York Times. Ordinary Gazans are bearing the brunt of the 8-month Israeli military onslaught on the territory and many blame the Palestinian armed faction for starting the war.
  • One Gazan, Raed al-Kelani, 47, said Hamas always acts in its own interests.
  • “It started Oct. 7, and it wants to end it on its own terms”… “But time is ticking with no potential hope of ending this,” he added. Mr. al-Kelani now makes meals and distributes food aid in shelters for displaced Gazans. “Hamas is still seeking its slice of power,” he said. “Hamas does not know how to get down from the tree it climbed.”
  • In March, the well-known Gaza photojournalist Motaz Azaiza caused a brief social media firestorm when he obliquely criticized Hamas after he left the territory. He was one of a handful of young local journalists who rose to international prominence early in the war for documenting the death and destruction on social media.
  • “If the death and hunger of their people do not make any difference to them,” he wrote in an apparent reference to Hamas, “they do not need to make any difference to us. Cursed be everyone who trafficked in our blood, burned our hearts and homes, and ruined our lives.”
  • Gauging public opinion in Gaza was difficult even before the war began. For one, Hamas, which long controlled territory, perpetuated a culture of fear with its oppressive system of governance and exacted retribution against those who criticized it.
  • Now, polling has become even more difficult, with most of the 2.2 million Gazans displaced multiple times by the war, constant breakdowns in communications and constant Israeli military offensives.
  • Still, some recent surveys reflect the weak or mixed support in Gaza for Hamas and its leaders. In some cases, contradictory results underline the complications in surveying a transient population during the fog of war.
  • Link: As War Drags On, Gazans More Willing to Speak Out Against Hamas – New York Times
Houthi Summer Camp for Kids Is All About Exporting Terror, exposed by Felice Friedson with Newsweek
  • The UN has identified 14 countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, where children are widely used as soldiers. Last July, as in many summers prior, Hamas also trained children and teens in weapon use and tunnel warfare.
  • In January of this year, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog unveiled an internal document detailing Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades’ plan to host summer training camps to “advance the resistance culture and values of jihad, standing strong, and sacrifice within the children… to contribute to the militarization of society.” Some of these children have been recruited as suicide bombers.
  • This summer, Gaza is in ruins, and one positive outcome is that children won’t be participating in these camps anytime soon.
  • These free camps are either forced on families or families are lured through incentives offered in primarily poor communities.
  • The Media Line exposed a story about the seven years this has been happening in Yemen. The article reveals that parents who refuse to enroll their children in the camps could be labeled disloyal to the state and denied basic humanitarian aid, such as purchasing cooking gas at a subsidized rate.
  • It is time to listen to what the leaders of these terrorist groups are saying. They mean what they say, and they need to be stopped.
  • Wake up, America and the world. Use your intelligence services, houses of government, and influence to stop the terrorists in their tracks, or these indoctrinated child suicide bombers could blow up themselves, and many innocents, in our backyards
  • Link: Houthi Summer Camp for Kids Is All About Exporting Terror – Newsweek
Antisemitism
The Anti-Semitism Money and Power Network—and How to Smash It by Danielle Pletka in Commentary
  • What is needed now is a systematic survey of the problem, backed by the federal investigative power of agencies like the FBI, followed by a careful legislative response.
  • While student participation is shocking, it’s the involvement of their professors that represents a break from every academic norm.
  • For many professors, the seedlings of their anti-Semitic activism had been cultivated since choosing their academic discipline. A 2017 AMCHA Initiative study of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PCACBI), a pro-BDS network of college professors, found that a majority of faculty BDS advocates are affiliated with ethnic, gender, or Middle East studies departments. The more BDS advocates on campus there were, the more external BDS agitators were invited to campus. And the more such speakers were invited to campus, the more anti-Semitic agitation and incidents took place.
  • After George Washington University’s encampment in Washington, D.C., was finally taken down in early May, there were 33 arrests—29 for unlawful entry and four for assault. Only six of the arrested were GW students, with six more reportedly from nearby Georgetown University. After arrests at encampments at the University of Texas at Austin and the City University of New York, it turned out that only half the protesters were students. Who were the others?
  • Between 2015 and 2020—pre–October 7—universities that received donations from Middle Eastern sources had, “on average, 300% more anti-Semitic incidents than those institutions that did not.”
  • So what to do? The answer is the law. In America, discrimination and bigotry—and support for terrorism in aid of discrimination and bigotry—are in their extremes circumscribed by law. Such legislation, at all levels, include hate crimes laws; laws barring discrimination based on gender, race, and religion; anti-boycott laws; and anti-terrorism legislation that precludes funding, supporting, or participating in terrorist acts or terrorist groups.
  • Absent an understanding of what anti-Semitism is, there will be confusion about enforcement. Difficulty answering the question of whether “from the river to the sea” is a call to the genocide of the Jewish people is, at least in part, a result. Absent formal federal legal adoption of the IRHA definition, several states are now using it to inform their own enforcement. Thirty-four states have now enshrined it, either legislatively, by proclamation, or via executive order.
  • Over millennia, anti-Semitism has clothed itself in the veneer of justice against the nominal guises of the Jew—Christ killer, usurer, sexual predator, Communist, capitalist, colonialist. In Nazi Germany, the Papal States, the Roman Empire, you name it, the law was crafted to validate these tropes. But democracy affords equal protection to Jew and non-Jew alike. It is high time that Jews availed themselves of the privileges of American democracy to protect themselves, their beliefs, and their children from the evil of anti-Semitism. That is their—our—privilege in a nation of laws.
  • Link: The Anti-Semitism Money and Power Network—and How to Smash It – Commentary Magazine
The campus protests’ K-12 origins, by Melissa Langsam Braunstein with Washington Examiner
  • This disturbing trend of anti-Jewish attitudes, sometimes but not always masked as anti-Zionism, makes it clear that campus indoctrination isn’t the whole story. Rabbi Daniel Levitt, who spent 15 years as a campus Hillel professional, posted, “They’re radicalized before they get to campus.”
  • A litigator and strategic consultant whose national practice specializes in representing private school parents argued that campus activists “show up having already tested the waters with their K-12 administrators.” These students “know they can make false statements, be threatening, aggressive, and vocally vicious all without penalty, so long as they are taking a stand that fits within the administration’s progressive narrative around race and oppression.” And antisemitic campus protests certainly do.
  • Moderately MOCO, a local news outlet, analyzed “hate and bias incidents” for July 2022 to October 2023. Eighty-one incidents, or 61% of reports from all schools, targeted Jews.
  • Some interviewees would be content if their schools’ DEI staff started including Jewish children and content. However, save for the rare exception, DEI staff hasn’t reciprocated that interest.
  • DEI creates problems for both the included and excluded. Dr. Staci Weiner, clinical psychologist and owner of Apple Psychological, a group private practice in New York and Florida, observed, “If you’re saying you’re born ‘oppressed,’ then you might believe you have no chance to be successful. In other words, ‘You might as well give up now, because you were born into this life and your actions cannot help you define who you are as a person.’” Meanwhile, “if you’re ‘the oppressor,’ and you’re convinced of that, you might feel you have to apologize or feel ashamed for something you haven’t done. We are creating roles, oppressed [and] oppressor, and pigeonholing people before kids are even figuring out who they are or want to be.”
  • Link: The campus protests’ K-12 origins – Washington Examiner