Situational Update

• According the multiple sources, Israeli naval commandos captured a Hezbollah official in a raid in northern Lebanon late Friday, the military confirmed on Saturday night, marking an unusual operation both in its nature and location deep inside the country. The Navy’s Shayetet 13 commando unit had carried out the operation. The Hezbollah operative, named in media reports as Imad Amhaz who was a senior member of Hezbollah’s naval force in an operation in Northern Lebanon, was considered by the IDF to be a “significant source of knowledge” in the terror group’s naval force. He was described as an expert in weaponry crucial to Hezbollah’s capabilities. Israeli sources hailed the operation as a show of “bold operational capability,” with one official remarking, “They just reached in and extracted someone from deep within Lebanon.”

• According to Raz Zimmt, Senior Researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS): All members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council have agreed on a military response against Israel. The response—its date and manner yet to be determined—will be executed in cooperation and coordination with the ‘resistance forces’ in the region and will be more severe than the Iranian attack on Israel on October 1. It is expected that the attack may originate in Iraq.
  • Axios’s Barak Ravid reports: The Biden administration warned Iran in recent days against launching another attack on Israel and stressed it won’t be able to restrain the Israelis.
  • The US Central Command announced that B-52 bombers have arrived in its area of responsibility, which mainly consists of the Middle East.

The Numbers

Casualties

• 1,766 Israelis have been killed including 782 IDF soldiers since October 7th (+10 since Sunday)

  

  • Staff Sgt. Itay Parizat, 20 and Staff Sgt. Yair Hananya, 22 were killed during fighting in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday

    

  • Cpt. Yarden Zakay, 21, who was seriously wounded on September 17 in the southern Gaza Strip, sadly succumbed to his wounds
• 370 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed
• 107 Israelis (66 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel (+7 since Wednesday)
  • The Times of Israel reports that Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel killed seven people in agricultural fields near Metula and Haifa Thursday, marking what appeared to be the deadliest day in months for civilians inside Israel. The victims were all agricultural laborers who had been working in the orchard at the time of the strike. One was an Israeli citizen, while the others were Thai citizens.
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,384 (+11 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 453 (+1 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
  • 5,242 (+46 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 771 (+3 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.

• According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 43,205 (+280 since Wednesday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 101,510 (+677 since Wednesday) 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 (no change)

• 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.

Listen

[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: Israel, Iran, Trump, Harris – with Dr. Micah Goodman

• Micah Goodman is on the speed-dial of a number of Israeli political leaders – from Right to Left, but especially on the Center-Left and the Center-Right. And Micah has been synthesizing how Israelis view the war with Iran and the U.S.-Israel relationship.

[PODCAST] Matthew Levitt on Israel’s War with Hizballah: Mosiac, produced in partnership with the Tikvah Fund

• On October 25 of this year, Israel carried out a series of retaliatory strikes on military targets in Iran. The Iranian supreme leader has made public pronouncements ordering his military to prepare a series of counterstrikes, though, as of this recording, those counterstrikes have not yet commenced. The prospect of a continued exchange of aerial attacks between Israel and Iran has captured the world’s attention, and for good reason: Iran is a nuclear-threshold state operating in close coordination with Russia.
• This shift in attention has taken media coverage away from Lebanon, but in fact, the Israeli military’s operational successes in that country over the last month raise some very important questions. Hizballah has been degraded significantly—its arsenal diminished, its leadership eliminated, its command structure disrupted, its lines of communication fractured, its decision-making process broken, its finances destroyed.
• How, in light of this, does Hizballah continue to operate? And how does Israel leverage these impressive tactical successes into a strategic victory that will allow the citizens of the Galilee and the Golan to return to their homes? Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury Department senior official and the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, discusses these questions and others with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.

Watch

Former President Bill Clinton spoke in Michigan this week. His comments are worth listening to.

• “I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died since… I get that. But if you lived in one of those kibbutzim and in Israel right next to Gaza where the people there were the most pro friendship with Palestine most pro two-state solution of any of the Israeli communities were the ones right next to Gaza and Hamas butchered them…”

• “I worked on this hard and the only time Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth was when he promised me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel.”
• “…Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians they wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable. Well, I got news for them they were there first, before there was their faith existed they were there in the time of King David in the southernmost tribes had Judea and Samaria…”

Rocket Alerts

Yesterday, there were 94 red alerts, and a total of 1,498 in the past week

• +546 rocket alerts since Wednesday
• +286 UAV alerts since Wednesday

Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel

What We Are Reading

Bombing Hezbollah’s Drug Empire is the Key to Weakening its Power by Former Ambassador Michael Oren

• Hezbollah’s focus is now on fenethylline, a synthetic amphetamine and psychostimulant best known by its brand name, Captagon.
• Illegal in most countries, Captagon is produced in Syria, which is responsible for 80% of the global market, and is distributed by Hezbollah.
• Controlling Captagon’s supply routes across the Middle East into Jordan and Iraq and its exports abroad via the Port of Beirut has enriched Hezbollah.
• The drug’s annual sales of $5.7 billion – representing a quarter of Syria’s GDP—account for 40% of Hezbollah’s budget.
• Hezbollah’s drug enterprise encompasses much more than the Middle East, though. In cooperation with South and Central American cartels, it plays a prominent role in smuggling drugs into the United States.
• On October 21, Israeli warplanes bombed the Hezbollah-linked Al-Qard Al-Hassan financial association in Beirut along with several of its Bekaa Valley branches. While highly critical of Israel’s airstrikes in the Lebanese capital, the US was hard-pressed to denounce the destruction of a sanctioned bank that, according to the Treasury Department, “illicitly moves funds through shell accounts and facilitators, exposing Lebanese financial institutions to possible sanctions.”
• From Israel’s perspective, the objective was clear, as a senior Israeli military source told the Wall Street Journal. “The purpose of the strike is to target the ability of Hezbollah to function both during the war but also afterward, to rebuild and rearm.”
• That same goal can be achieved, perhaps with even greater efficacy, by bombing Hezbollah’s narcotics industry. Former Mossad terrorism division head Oded Ailam agreed, saying, “targeting the organization’s drug labs in the Bekaa Valley could hurt its operations.”
• Link: Bombing Hezbollah’s Drug Empire is the Key to Weakening its Power

Israel’s Mistake Was Viewing Hamas as a Minor Nuisance, a diagnosis of Israeli-Palestinian politics with solutions, by Amnon Lord in Mosaic Magazine

• It was not Benjamin Netanyahu who created the threat on the Gaza border. No, these terrorist enclaves were established by three previous prime ministers: Yitzhak Rabin brought the PLO to Gaza and the West Bank, where it built up security forces much larger than those allowed to it by the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak presided over the withdrawal from the security zone in southern Lebanon, bringing Hizballah to the doorsteps of the residents of northern Israel; Ariel Sharon carried out the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, restoring the pre-1967 border. I don’t know if Mor believes these leaders shared what he calls Netanyahu’s “cognitive vices,” but they certainly absorbed another mode of thinking he condemns: that of the peace-processors.
• Experience has shown that every area Israel hands over to the Palestinians, whether to the PLO or to Hamas, becomes a base for terrorists. Regarding Lebanon, there was a belief that withdrawing the IDF to the internationally recognized border would remove Hizballah’s motivation for attacking Israel, while granting Israel international legitimacy. Instead, Hizballah transformed from a force harassing Israeli soldiers to a tool with which Iran could deter Israel. It’s no exaggeration to say that the shambolic withdrawal from Lebanon—seen by Israel’s neighbors as a demonstration of weakness and an Islamist victory—encouraged Yasir Arafat and his comrades to launch the second intifada. It was Netanyahu who got Israel to reverse course.
• Netanyahu was the first leader of the Israeli right to pursue policies based on the Revisionist tradition of Vladimir Jabotinsky while still remaining pragmatic and flexible. When he first became prime minister in 1996, he accepted the reality of the Oslo Accords, signed by his predecessors, and tried to work within their framework. His achievement at this stage was territorial: the Oslo Accords had as their goal the extension of Palestinian sovereignty over the entire West Bank up to the 1949 armistice lines; he effectively stopped this rush to trade away the land that Israel had won in the Six-Day War. Yet he was willing to make some territorial concessions to the Palestinians and furthered the peace process by signing the 1997 Hebron protocol and the 1998 Wye River memorandum. He succeeded in dragging the Likud along with him, despite its opposition to Oslo, while winning the support of the political center. But this wasn’t enough for the left, and still cost him the support of the religious right, leading to the collapse of his government in 1999.
• From that three-year stint in office onward, Netanyahu found himself at loggerheads with the security establishment, and in particular with the senior officers of the IDF. These highly placed opponents dismissed his objections to giving more power to the PLO and were committed to additional territorial withdrawals with the aim of eventually establishing a Palestinian state.
• The primary reason for Netanyahu’s success is straightforward. It came on the heels of the colossal failures of three prime ministers: Ehud Barak, who carried out the withdrawal from Lebanon and was prime minister during the outbreak of second intifada; Ariel Sharon, whose disengagement from Gaza left the residents of southwest Israel exposed to rocket fire, and, as we now know, to much worse; and the ineffectual Ehud Olmert, who could not form a coherent response to the Hamas takeover of Gaza and was seen as performing dismally in the Second Lebanon War.
• Netanyahu’s approach to Gaza reflected a consensus among the political and military leadership about the effectiveness of the underground barrier, which prevented Hamas from tunneling into Israel, and the high-tech “smart” fence meant to prevent aboveground assault. The confidence in these defensive measures stemmed from a widespread belief that the 2021 Gaza war had left Hamas without options. Netanyahu did not want to be drawn into a protracted military conflict in the Strip and, from 2012 on, accepted that there would be successive, brief rounds of fighting with Hamas that would fall short of all-out war. Indeed, after Operation Protective Edge in 2014—one of the most intense of these rounds of fighting—the Western Negev experienced an economic boom and demographic growth, demonstrating that the broader populace also felt that Hamas was contained. Sderot, a frequent target of Hamas’s rockets, over the course of a decade went from a town of 16,000 residents to one 36,000.
• Thirty years ago, Netanyahu warned that the Oslo Accords would turn Gaza into a launching pad for rockets, and Yitzhak Rabin accused him of abetting Hamas. That was the first articulation of the now common—and slanderous—claim that “Netanyahu has supported Hamas.” The truth was that Netanyahu was proved right in the summer of 2007, shortly after the terrorist group seized control of Gaza, when its first rocket barrages fell on Sderot. The late military analyst for Haaretz, Ze’ev Schiff, at the time wrote a biting column titled “Israeli Defeat in Sderot,” in which he called what had happened a national disgrace. And it was: Israel had no response to a heavily armed organization at its doorstep that went on to build a vast subterranean fortress beneath its territory and to amass missiles that could reach Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion airport. In an article for Israel Hayom, I described Gaza as a “mini-North Korea” and argued that Israel couldn’t live with this sort of hostile statelet on its southern border.
• To identify the flawed concept behind the intelligence failures of October 7, we should look at the inability of technocratic military leaders to understand the psychology of the enemy. A large section of the media, the intelligence services, and the IDF saw Gaza as a hostile territory only in a technical sense, instead of realizing that it was governed by bloodthirsty Islamist fanatics. And the problem goes further still: if you are alienated from your identity as a Jew, it becomes harder to understand an enemy that wants to murder you merely because you are Jewish.
• October 7 saw a complete breakdown from the IDF top brass on down. In seeking to identify modes of thinking that led to disaster, we should begin with the conceptual error that caused a heavily armed and fanatical enemy to be perceived as a minor nuisance.
• Link: Israel’s Mistake Was Viewing Hamas as a Minor Nuisance

Cry Me a River, UNRWA, by Seth Mandel in Commentary Magazine

• When 84-year-old Ditza Heiman was released from Hamas captivity and ready to tell her story, she revealed that she was held in Gaza for 53 days under the watchful eye of a teacher from the United Nations agency in Gaza, UNRWA.
• In August, UNRWA director Philippe Lazzarini was confronted by Ayelet Samerano, whose son was killed on Oct. 7: “As you can see in the video that is online, on Oct. 7 an UNRWA employee entered Israel and actively participated in the massacre, brutally murdering and kidnapping my boy’s body, with a United Nations car, into Gaza.”
• It gets tiring to rehearse the many such stories—the nine staffers fired by the agency for participating in the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, the hundreds of agency employees who Israel claims were moonlighting with one of Gaza’s terrorist groups, the discovery that the head of the UNRWA teachers union was also Hamas’s top official in Lebanon, the agency’s sharing of facilities with Hamas command centers, the rockets stored in UNRWA schools and the Hamas tunnels underneath them.
• The UN, of course, is furious. But honestly, who cares? For posterity, here’s the crux of the world body’s complaint: “The vote by the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) against UNRWA this evening is unprecedented and sets a dangerous precedent. It opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law.”
• An unprecedented precedent-setter! The legislation, we’re told, “will deprive over 650,000 girls and boys there from education.” An education from literal Hamas political leaders? Or accused hostage-takers? Anyway, the “education” provided by UNRWA schools teaches children to venerate terrorists and to hate Jews, which is really no education at all.
• UNRWA then sneaks in that the descendants of refugees are “eligible” for refugee benefits as well. The common claim that there are millions of Palestinian refugees from 1948 is very obviously false. There were perhaps as many as 750,000 refugees. Palestinians are the only refugee class with their own UN agency. It is no coincidence at all that that agency has inflated the number of refugees even though its own definition of a refugee makes that number impossible.
• UNRWA could, that is, service Palestinian refugees. But it isn’t designed to do that. It is designed by a Palestinian agency. Which is why it has been subsumed by Hamas in Gaza (and Lebanon). UNRWA counts nearly 6 million Palestinians among its refugee population—which is higher than the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
• Link: Cry Me a River, UNRWA

How Israel Could Be Changing Iran’s Nuclear Calculus by Uri Friedman in The Atlantic

• The latest salvo in the decades-long conflict between Iran and Israel lit up the predawn sky over Tehran on Saturday. Israeli aircraft encountered little resistance as they struck military targets in retaliation for an Iranian attack earlier this month. Although Iran appeared to downplay its impact, the strike was Israel’s largest ever against the Islamic Republic. It raised not only the specter of full-scale war but also a prospect that experts told me has become much more conceivable in recent weeks: the emergence of Iran as a nuclear-armed state.
• Think of Iran’s defenses as a stool with three legs. Two of them have suddenly gone wobbly. The first is Iran’s regional proxy network. This includes, most notably, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which Israel has dismantled through air strikes, incursions, and high-profile assassinations. Israel has even gone after Iran’s top military commanders. The second is an arsenal of missiles and drones, which Iran used to directly attack Israel for the first time in April, and then again this month. Not only did the strikes prove ineffective—Israeli and U.S. defenses largely thwarted them—but they also failed to deter Israel from continuing to hack away at the first leg and strike back as it did over the weekend.
• That leaves the third leg: the Iranian nuclear program. Now that Israel has demonstrated its superiority over Iran’s proxies and conventional weapons—and degraded both in the process—Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may decide to pursue a bomb in a risky attempt to salvage some measure of national security. He won’t have far to go. The program has made major advances since 2018, when the U.S. withdrew from its multilateral nuclear agreement with the regime, which now has enough near-weapons-grade uranium to produce several bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This already gives the country considerable leverage, but “there is a risk Khamenei decides that in this environment, a nuclear threshold won’t cut it, and Iran needs nuclear weapons,” Eric Brewer, a nonproliferation expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told me.
• In recent years, current and former Iranian officials have insisted that the country is either already able to build a nuclear bomb or very close to that point. In the past month, as Iran awaited the retaliation that came on Saturday, its pronouncements got more pointed. Although the regime still denies that it’s seeking a weapon, a senior adviser to Khamenei warned that any Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites—which were spared over the weekend—could alter the nation’s “nuclear strategic policies.” That same week, a group of 39 Iranian lawmakers urged the Supreme National Security Council to eliminate its formal ban on the production of nuclear weapons.
• Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a Texas A&M professor who studies nuclear statecraft and Iranian politics, has also observed this shift in Iranian public and elite sentiment. But he traces it back further, to America’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal and then, two years later, its assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. When the [Iran] deal took effect in 2015, Tabaar told me, the regime was responsive to public pressure to limit its nuclear program and improve relations with the United States. Discussing the nuclear-weapons option was, as he put it, “taboo.” But in recent weeks, he said, he’s seen “a lively debate” on social media about whether or not to pursue a bomb, even among critics of the regime outside the country.
• Brewer posited one other wild-card scenario: The supreme leader might proceed with weapons-grade enrichment at declared facilities if he assumes that he can achieve it before Israel or the U.S. has a chance to destroy those facilities, thereby establishing some measure of deterrence. “That would be a very, very risky gamble,” Brewer said—particularly if Israel learns of Tehran’s decision in time to unleash preemptive strikes. Additional enrichment might not ward off an Israeli or American attack anyway. Although 90 percent enrichment is typically considered the level required for weaponization, experts believe that Iran might already be able to use its current stock of 60-percent-enriched uranium to make a bomb. Anything higher wouldn’t necessarily establish greater deterrence.
• To my surprise, the scenario he deemed most likely—at 60 percent—was Iran pursuing negotiations on a new nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers. Citrinowicz could envision Kamala Harris and even Donald Trump—perhaps reprising the openness to nuclear diplomacy that he displayed with North Korea, despite his typically hard-line stance on Iran—being amenable to such talks after the U.S. presidential election. A diplomatic agreement would probably inhibit Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it could also provide the country with economic relief. As an added benefit, a deal with Washington might serve as a wedge between the United States and Israel, the latter of which would likely oppose the agreement. Israel would be less inclined to strike Iranian nuclear facilities if it couldn’t count on U.S. support, or at least it would be less capable of penetrating their heavy fortifications without help from America’s arsenal.
• In some ways, Iran has already passed the point of no return. By enriching uranium to 60 percent, Tehran has demonstrated that it probably possesses the technical expertise to further enrich that material to weapons-grade, which requires minimal additional effort. Destroying Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure would be exceedingly difficult. Wiping out Iran’s nuclear knowledge base is not possible. Even if Israel or the U.S. takes military action, the threat of a nuclear Iran will almost certainly persist, at least as long as the current regime remains in power.
• After the advent of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, at least one new country acquired the world’s most destructive arms every decade until the 2010s, when the streak ended. Nearly halfway through the 2020s, it seems like we may revert to the historical pattern before this decade is done.
• Link: How Israel Could Be Changing Iran’s Nuclear Calculus

Antisemitism

[MUST READ] The Kindergarten Intifada: There is a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel. A Free Press investigation by Abigal Shrier

• In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.
• But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion?
• “A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”
• Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.” The crowd burst into approving laughter.

• Four years ago, I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools. Once-fringe beliefs about gender swiftly took over large swaths of society partly thanks to their inclusion in school curricula and lessons.
• Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations that monitor the radicalism and indoctrination in schools convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families. As one Catholic parent who exposes radicalism in schools nationwide on the Substack Undercover Mother said to me: “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.”
• Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it.
• Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies. In 2021, California became the first state to adopt it as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Legislatures of more than a dozen states have already followed suit, incorporating ethnic studies into K–12 curricula.

• In principle, these laws require schools to teach the histories and cultures of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Native Americans. In practice, they grant teachers license to incorporate lessons that often divide civilization into “oppressed” and “oppressor.” A primary fixation of ethnic studies is demonizing Israel.
• Activist-led organizations readily supply instructional materials. Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA; creators of the Teach Palestine Project), Teaching While Muslim, Jewish Voice for Peace, Unión del Barrio, and the Zinn Education Project regularly furnish distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel.
• Especially in the year since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, the anti-Israel materials have become pervasive. It’s not surprising that they are found in world history and current events lessons. But demonization of Israel is now taught in art, English, math, physics, and social-emotional learning classes.
• Anti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight. It is pushed by teachers unions, furnished by activist organizations, and communicated to children through deception. (“We just happen to be at the same place at the same time.”) Anti-Israel radicals willingly stake their jobs for their cause.
• Teachers regularly pushed the idea to students—in class and on social media, where they were followed by their students—that “Zionists” were committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. A large majority of American Jews, 85 percent, support the State of Israel.  Zionism refers to the movement that established a modern Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Given the quantity of anti-Israel propaganda flooding American K–12 schools, it’s perhaps unsurprising that children would turn against their Jewish classmates.
• This past year saw a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in K–12 schools. Students verbally attacked Jewish classmates in terms that echoed the very charges laid by their teachers against the State of Israel. “Baby killer” and “Violent Zionist” became popular epithets.
• Since October 7 of last year, hundreds of incidents involving the harassment of Jewish K–12 students have been reported to Act Now K12, a grassroots effort to catalog and combat antisemitism in Northern California schools. Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley, Viviane Safrin of San Francisco, and Maya Bronicki of Santa Clara County—all mothers of Jewish children in public schools—helped spearhead the effort to track the escalating antisemitism tearing through school districts in Northern California. Bronicki says two hundred incidents were reported last school year in Santa Clara County alone.
• Los Angeles Unified School District is failing its students. In the 2023–24 school year, fewer than half the students met reading proficiency standards, and less than 33 percent were proficient in math. But instead of a laser focus on how to educate kids, teachers are coming up with ever more ways to attack the existence of Israel. It’s hard to imagine what U.S. arms sales to Israel has to do with the district’s core educational goals, but recently, the L.A. teachers union voted in opposition to it. They spend considerable union time and resources on organizing opposition to Israel.
• The First Amendment protects teachers’ political advocacy in union meetings. But public school teachers have no First Amendment right to express their political viewpoints in the classroom. “When it comes to K–12 education, the precedents are pretty clear that the school district or legislature or the principal or whoever the political process leaves in charge can set the curriculum and can require the teachers to go along with it,” Eugene Volokh, First Amendment scholar and distinguished professor of law at UCLA, told me.
• But while the school board or legislature sets the agenda for what must be taught in schools, it can also choose not to police teachers who skirt those rules or even brazenly violate them.
  • In Brooklyn, teachers led third graders at PS 705 in Prospect Heights in a chorus of “The Wheels on the Tank,” which encouraged them to despise Israel and the Israel Defense Forces
  • In Portland, pre-K lesson plans included the story of Handala, a fictional Palestinian cartoon character who symbolizes the resistance.
  • At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, high school, world history teachers confiscated students’ cell phones before giving a lesson that presented Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than an internationally designated terrorist organization. Teachers also showed a map of Israel that falsely presented Palestinians as the sole indigenous natives of Israel.
• Last spring, millions of Americans watched in disbelief as university students, particularly at our most elite schools, vandalized buildings, set up illegal encampments, and cheered for Hamas. But there was far less attention paid to the parallel dramas unfolding at K–12 schools across the country.
• Aware of their ability to shape young minds, teachers encouraged schoolchildren to join “Walkouts” for Palestine, don keffiyehs, chant the eliminationist slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and tell their Jewish classmates, “It is excellent what Hamas did to Israel,” according to a complaint filed to the U.S. Department of Education by the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League on behalf of Jewish students.
• Federal law gives parents the right to inspect their children’s educational materials. But schools routinely decline to turn over lessons on the grounds of copyright law.
• At schools where anti-Israel propaganda is promulgated, schoolchildren are turning against their Jewish classmates. Dozens of interviews with parents, teachers, and people at nonprofits revealed that discussions of Israel quickly become personal, and American Jews—even children—are the inevitable targets.
• Link: Abigail Shrier: The Kindergarten Intifada

Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed: Education and the Workforce Committee Releases Report

• Based on a year-long investigation, the Committee on Education and the Workforce majority, under Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC), has released findings on how antisemitism engulfed college campuses while administrators put the wants of terrorist sympathizers over the safety of Jewish students, faculty, and staff.
• The report’s findings clearly support four conclusions:
  • University administrators made astounding concessions to the organizers of illegal encampments. For example, in the case of Northwestern University (Northwestern), administrators entertained demands to hire an “anti-Zionist” rabbi and divest from and remove Sabra Hummus from campus cafeterias.
  • University administrators deliberately chose to withhold support from Jewish students. Harvard University’s (Harvard) decision making was particularly egregious, as demonstrated by choices to intentionally omit condemnation of Hamas and acknowledgment   of hostages in its widely-criticized equivocal statement  on the October 7 attacks, and then-President Claudine Gay asking Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow not to call the phrase “From the River to the Sea” antisemitic hate speech.
  • University administrators overwhelmingly failed to impose meaningful discipline for those who engaged in antisemitic conduct. Across the board, enforcement of campus rules was wildly uneven, from Harvard and Columbia faculty playing key roles in derailing discipline toward antisemitic conduct violations and Rutgers University (Rutgers) actually disciplining Jewish students who spoke out against the harassment, to the overall lack of consequences for those involved in encampments at schools including the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), Yale University (Yale), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
  • University administrators considered Congressional oversight a nuisance at best and with open hostility at worst. Administrators at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), for instance, attempted to orchestrate negative media coverage of Members of Congress who scrutinized the university while Harvard president Claudine Gay disparaged U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) character to the university’s Board of Overseers.
• Link to Full Report

Algorithms of the Big Tech Reich: The Evolution of Online Antisemitism Since October 7 by Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, the founder and executive director of CyberWell, an independent tech nonprofit working with social media platforms to monitor and catalog antisemitic rhetoric while improving enforcement and enhancement efforts through community standards and hate speech policies. Written in The Algemeiner

• In the year following the October 7 Hamas massacre, data from the major social media platforms revealed a troubling escalation in online antisemitism.
• Trending anti-Jewish narratives online have moved beyond classic tropes like disdainful jokes or conspiracy theories about Jewish control, and have morphed into overt hostility, calls for violence, and a dehumanization of Jews as inherently evil. This is not merely an extension of past trends; it represents a perilous escalation in anti-Jewish rhetoric.

• In the year since these attacks, CyberWell’s monitoring technology detected a 36.6 percent rise in content likely to be antisemitic across social media platforms. Most notably, there was an 86 percent spike in anti-Jewish content within the first three weeks after October 7. This flood of antisemitic content contributed to a significant increase in calls for violence against Jews — rising from 5 percent in the 11 months before the attacks to 13 percent of verified anti-Jewish content post-attack. Alarmingly, 61 percent of verified antisemitic content in Arabic in the weeks following October 7 justified or supported violence against Jews.

• Our October 7 deep dive report found that a mere 300 verified examples of denial content reached 25 million accounts within just over a month, with X (formerly Twitter) showing the highest engagement rates for such narratives. It is no wonder, then, that even Susan Sarandon denies that women were raped on October 7.
• CyberWell’s data indicates a significant shift in trending antisemitic narratives. Before October 7, the most popular antisemitic theme was the trope of Jews controlling the world or seeking world domination. Post-attack, narratives predominantly cast Jews as the enemy (29.2 percent of verified content) or as inherently evil (21.5 percent).
• The platforms showcase brutal acts against Jews while simultaneously facilitating a denial campaign aimed at dehumanizing them and shifting the blame onto their first line of defense

• Link to the CyberWell report: The Evolution of Online Antisemitism

Time for a Reckoning With Antisemitism in the U.S., by Aviva Klompas in Newsweek

• The Israel-Hamas war and the accompanying rise in global antisemitism will not top the list of priorities for American voters this November. New polling from Harvard CAPS/Harris shows that issues like inflation, immigration, and the economy remain top of mind.
• But the surge of hate targeting Jewish communities across the country is not a peripheral issue—it’s a wake-up call for all Americans.
• This past year has shaken the foundation of our collective security. The shockingly barbaric Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, wasn’t just an assault on Israelis; it laid bare the terrifying depth of antisemitism metastasizing in American society. The ADL tracked more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the United States in the past year, the highest it has ever recorded.
• The truth is undeniable: Jew-hatred is a growth industry in America.
• Police cars now line the streets outside synagogues. Jewish-owned businesses are prone to vandalism and targeted by protesters. On college campuses, Jewish students are singled out and accused of complicity in genocide and apartheid. The word “Zionist” has become a barely concealed substitute for “Jew,” providing a cover for antisemitism to masquerade as political critique.
• What was once limited to fringe discourse has entered the mainstream, fueled by radical groups whose ideologies now find platforms on social media, in academia, and even in the halls of Congress.
• History offers no shortage of examples of the dire outcomes when societies fail to confront hate. When antisemitism flourished in Europe in the 1930s, it wasn’t just Jewish lives that were shattered—it led to the collapse of democratic institutions, the erosion of truth, and the rise of totalitarianism. The lesson is clear: tolerating antisemitism invites the broader decay of a society’s moral and political fabric.
• Hate, once it is unleashed and legitimized, will spread and mutate, targeting other minorities and vulnerable groups and, eventually, anyone who dares to question the mob mentality. Antisemitism in America isn’t just a Jewish struggle; it’s a fight for America’s future.
• How do we change course? One piece of encouraging news is that Americans are actually paying attention to the Middle East. Recent polls show that 62 percent are closely following the Israel-Hamas war, and 81 percent express greater sympathy for Israel than Hamas.
• So even as Americans recognize the high stakes in Israel, there remains a troubling disconnect to what they recognize at home. Only six percent of voters consider the Israel-Hamas war a top priority for the country, and a mere two percent list antisemitism as a pressing issue. These figures highlight a dangerous gap between perception and reality.
• American Jews are under attack. If antisemitism continues to fester unchecked, it won’t be long before other groups face the same threats.
• Link: Time for a Reckoning With Antisemitism in the U.S.

BHL Boycott Backfires by Steven McGuire and Michael B. Poliakoff with Tablet Magazine

• Censorship is ugly behavior, whether it comes from the right or the left. Fortunately, it is most often self-defeating, but it is a warning sign of deeper pathology. So we see in the matter of philosopher, filmmaker, and humanitarian Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book, Israel Alone.
• Earlier this month, Shelf Awareness, a major trade publication with a reach of 600,000 readers, including booksellers and librarians, canceled a previously accepted advertisement for Mr. Lévy’s book. The well-understood intention of such cancellation, of course, given the nature of the industry, is to keep the volume on the margins, to consign it to obscurity.
• This episode is the latest in a series of events illustrating how the literary world has turned so decisively against Zionism as to become broadly antisemitic. Referencing a spreadsheet titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?” that was published on social media early this year, James Kirchick reported in May that “a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.” Blacklists like this one, as well as cancellations and denunciations, await those who refuse to comply.
• PEN America was compelled to cancel its annual awards ceremony after numerous nominees withdrew and the organization faced mounting criticism for not siding more strongly with Palestinians against Israel.
• [Steven McGuire & Michael B. Poliakoff] are pleased to add that their organization, in partnership with B’nai B’rith International, has raised funds from generous private donors to purchase and distribute for free thousands of copies of the book to college students around the country. Mr. Lévy will also be speaking in November at select American and Canadian universities. As he explained, “curbing this hate begins by going to the source.” It is abundantly clear that far too many universities and far too many journalists have failed to provide what Americans need to understand about Israel and the Middle East.
• Censors can cause a lot of short-term damage, but history tells us that they ultimately lose and their disgrace follows… The ironic good news is that despite the efforts of Shelf Awareness, many more people are now aware of Israel Alone. They can make up their own minds about its message.
• Link: BHL Boycott Backfires

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, and the Times of Israel