Nov 06, 2024

Today is certainly a new day in America. While I will leave the analysis of the election to the real pundits and experts, I am optimistic that a Trump administration will truly stand side-by-side with Israel and work with urgency to combat the surge of antisemitism we are experiencing in this country. Already this morning the President-elect held a 20-minute conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The Times of Israel reports: “The prime minister congratulated Trump on his election victory, and the two agreed to work together for Israel’s security,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “The two also discussed the Iranian threat.”

The Numbers

Casualties

1,766 Israelis have been killed including 782 IDF soldiers since October 7th (no change since Sunday)
370 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed
108 Israelis (66 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel (+1 since Sunday)
- The Times of Israel reports: An Israeli teenager was killed by a Hezbollah rocket in the north on Wednesday, after the terror group also fired rockets twice throughout the day at central Israel, demonstrating it maintains the capability to launch long-range attacks even as the Israeli military pursues its ground operation in southern Lebanon.
Additional Information (according to the IDF):
- 2,402 (+18 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 456 (+3 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
- 5,282 (+40 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 776 (+5 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.

According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 43,391 (+186 since Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 102,347 (+837 since Sunday) have been injured during the war.
- On October 7th, Ohad Hemo with Channel 12 Israel News – the country’s largest news network, a leading expert on Palestinian and Arab affairs, mentioned an estimate from Hamas: around 80% of those killed in Gaza are members of the organization and their families.”
  - The article goes on to say: “In an N12 article that came out this morning, Hemo also pointed out that since the elimination of key leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top echelon has gone underground and fled Iran and Lebanon, with some relocating to Turkey and Qatar – with the hope that Israel will not strike them there.
- Read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
- The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry.” The analysis found that “9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data” and that “an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates.”
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.

Hostages (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.

Watch

Hezbollah’s Hostages Season Finale: A World Without the Terror Group: History proves that tyranny can be overthrown. With Hezbollah now weakened, the brave dissidents of our series ask: How can we push for real political change? Hezbollah’s Hostages is a production of The Center for Peace Communications, presented by The Free Press.

The eighth and final episode of our series brings you words of hope from a young woman in Lebanon called Nadia, who has freed herself from the oppression of Hezbollah and wishes to do the same for her people.
If there is one thing Iran and its militias fear more than the Israeli Air Force, it is ordinary citizens like Nadia, who yearn for change and rise up to oppose their brutal rule. In Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Gaza, and Iran itself, millions of civilians know firsthand that Tehran’s brand of Islamist domination brings only war, poverty, and misery. They want a different future—but they need the world to help them forge it.

Rocket Alerts

Yesterday, there were 58 red alerts, and a total of 1,225 in the past week

+572 rocket alerts since Sunday
+86 UAV alerts since Sunday

Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel

What We Are Reading

Israel unbound: the campaign to reshape the Middle East by Andrew England and Neri Zilber in the Financial Times

Battlefield gains have buoyed Israel’s confidence, reinforcing its sense of military superiority as the initial war aims of eliminating Hamas and freeing hostages held in Gaza morphed into a multifront conflict against Iran and its proxies.
After a year of tit-for-tat cross-border fire, Israel dramatically expanded its offensive against Hizbollah, pounding targets across Lebanon and launching the first land invasion of its northern neighbour in almost two decades. Israeli forces also in recent weeks mounted a ferocious new offensive in northern Gaza, launched air strikes in Syria and bombed Houthi targets in Yemen.
The thinking in Israel is that by severely degrading Hamas and Hizbollah, it has weakened the Islamic republic’s frontline defences against the Jewish state.
One critical question is whether Israel will attempt to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, with Netanyahu saying last week that the Israeli security services’ “supreme objective” was to prevent Iran attaining a nuclear weapon.
Experts have long said Israel would require US assistance to seriously damage the republic’s atomic facilities, but the October 26 direct strikes on Iran, consisting of about 100 Israeli warplanes and airborne refuellers, may have demonstrated greater capabilities than previously believed.
The sense of military ascendancy is also shaping Israel’s approach to US-led diplomatic efforts to end the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon.
There are also signs that Syria, where Iranian forces and Hizbollah fighters have been deployed to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime during Syria’s civil war, is in Israel’s sights. Israel, which has long launched sporadic strikes on Iranian- and Hizbollah-linked targets, has expanded its attacks over the past year.
Michael Wahid Hanna, US programme director at the Crisis Group think-tank, said the Middle East appeared to be in a “new, open-ended phase of regionalised conflict” as Israel “senses an opportunity” to reshape the region to its liking.
“Those efforts could accelerate even more if [former US president Donald] Trump is elected,” he said. “This will entail increased displacement and settlement, reoccupation and annexation.”
One question that remains mostly unaddressed by Israel’s leaders, though, is what will come next, and when. Amidror, who is close to Netanyahu, said he expected Israel to continue fighting in Gaza throughout next year to “clean” the strip “of all the [Hamas] remnants”.
Netanyahu insists Israel will maintain overall security control over Gaza, with or without a ceasefire.
Amidror said the dynamic would be akin to areas of the West Bank nominally under Palestinian administration, where Israeli forces strike suspected militants at will. In Lebanon too, he predicted, Israel would continue to hit Hizbollah targets.
Asked about the risks of perennial conflict, Amidror said: “We don’t buy these stories any more. It’s the same story we were told inside and outside Israel before October 7.”
Yet other Israelis worry their country is on the path of endless war, with no clear strategy on how to translate battlefield successes into lasting political gains, fighting ideological enemies that will keep going even in their weakened state.
Link: Israel unbound: the campaign to reshape the Middle East

Hamas after Sinwar: what is left? by Mehul Srivastava, Andrew England and Neri Zilber in Financial Times

Israeli officials say its offensive has destroyed 23 of the group’s 24 battalions, reducing it from a militarily structured group that could fire thousands of rockets all the way to Tel Aviv to small, guerrilla-style cells. They appear to operate independently and try to regroup in surprising ways, including most recently in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
What remains now is a severely weakened but still resilient rump of that state. After ejecting its Palestinian rival Fatah from Gaza in a bloody 2007 coup, many of the jobs in the ministries involved in providing social services went to people with political — not military — ties to Hamas, allowing the group to become deeply enmeshed in governance.
Today, despite the fact that their offices have been bombed and their staff scattered, those that survive run a depleted, ineffective but still discernible form of government while the shattered military arm transforms into a guerrilla movement.
And they wait. In interviews, Gazans such as Yusuf, Israeli military officials and analysts described what is left of Hamas as a significantly potent player in the ruins of Gaza, poised to bounce back as soon as Israel withdraws.
“They have lost their military capability, they have lost their chain of command, but they are still in Gaza, they still have administrative capabilities,” acknowledged an Israeli military official. “Dismantling the military power is more simple than dismantling the administrative capability.
Though support appears to wane as the war drags on, an overwhelming majority of Palestinians believes that the October 7 attack brought them closer to a Palestinian state by returning their suffering to the global stage, Ramallah-based pollster the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research said.
“Even after they suffered unprecedented damage, they are still the dominant player in Gaza, and they still have basic military capacity.”
Hamas’s ability to fight a rearguard guerrilla action is increasingly apparent: an Israeli colonel was recently killed by a Hamas explosion on the outskirts of Jabalia during the IDF’s fourth offensive into the refugee camp since the war began.
Link: Hamas after Sinwar: what is left?

What the United States Should and Should Not Do in the Middle East, by Michael Mandelbaum in The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune

Americans can be forgiven for feeling the same way about the Middle East. In response to the costly failures throughout the wider region – the war in Afghanistan (not geographically part of the Middle East but close to it and similar in cultural and political terms), the war in Iraq, and the unsuccessful campaign to spread democracy to the undemocratically-governed countries there – the last three American presidents have attempted to reduce US involvement. Yet none of them succeeded. The unexpected capture of territory by Islamic fundamentalists, the sudden rise of oil prices in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the attacks on Israel by terrorist organizations to its north and south beginning on October 7, 2023 have pulled America back into the turmoil of the region’s affairs.
Can the United States steer a middle course between these two patterns – between costly over-engagement and dangerous aloofness? In The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East, Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, makes the case that it can. The better approach, he says, is one that the United States has followed, with good results, in the past.
The United States, Cook argues persuasively, should therefore return to the approach of the first period. Then, the United States had three goals: ensuring the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world: preventing a single hostile power – be it the Soviet Union, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein – from dominating the region (and therefore its oil); and ensuring the survival of the state of Israel. It achieved all three.
These measures thwarted Iran and assured supplies of oil to the West, but at the cost of compromising American political values by siding with the murderous Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In the first period, the United States subordinated its values to its interests. In the second, the principal purpose of American Middle East policy became the promotion of precisely those values. In this second era, beginning in the mid-1990s, the efforts to install decent, competent, democratic governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well outside the Middle East in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo, claimed the attention and the resources of the foreign policy of the United States. (This is the theme of my 2016 book Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era.) These efforts failed because all of the societies involved lacked the social, political, economic and cultural foundations on which the kind of government the United States sought to foster must rest: they lacked, that is, the appropriate experiences, institutions, skills, and values.
Two lessons for American Middle East policy emerge from this history: blocking dangers to American interests is desirable and feasible; installing institutions that embody American values, while no doubt desirable, is seldom if ever feasible – at least not at a price the American public is willing to pay.
If, however, the Islamic Republic should acquire nuclear weapons, as it is actively seeking to do, its capacity to harm America’s friends and American interests would expand dramatically. The most important task for American Middle East policy is, therefore, to prevent that from happening. This is especially the case insofar as the American government actively discouraged Israel from hitting Iran’s nuclear installations in its recent retaliatory air strikes on Iran. Blocking an Iranian bomb will require, at the least, mounting a credible threat to use force if Iran takes the final steps in building working nuclear weapons, and attacking the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities if that threat does not achieve its aim. Crippling the Iranian nuclear weapons program would not require repeating the unhappy experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq because American ground troops would not be needed; naval and air power would suffice.
Past American Middle Eastern policy has another implication for the future. For decades, successive American administrations pursued a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians living in Gaza and on the West Bank of the Jordan River. These efforts all failed, and for the same reasons that American democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East came to nothing: the political, cultural, and institutional bases for a Palestinian state willing to live peacefully beside Israel have never existed, and the United States cannot create them.
Link: What the United States Should and Should Not Do in the Middle East

What American Jews Gave After October 7: An Accounting by Jack Wertheimer in Mosaic Magazine

Testifying before a U.S. Senate committee last November, the historian Jonathan Sarna described how American Jews have reacted to the explosion of hatred directed against them and Israel since October 7, 2023: “We thought all that history was in the past. . . . Nothing prepared us for the anti-Semitic onslaught.” The novelist Ruby Namdar lamented, “We have been forced back into Jewish history, into the bloody raw part of Jewish history.” Even employees of major Jewish organizations that monitor anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activities admitted to me that they “could not have imagined the tidal wave that came upon us.” So great has been their shock over the explosion of anti-Semitism in different sectors of American society that some have begun to speak of themselves as “October 8 Jews,” signifying their transition from slumbering complacency to vigilant activism.
Likewise, it’s not too early to begin a similar reckoning for American Jewry. Why were most American Jews so unprepared for the surge of domestic anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activities? How did rank-and-file Jews and their communal organizations respond to the dual crises in Israel and the U.S.? What were some of the most and least successful responses? And are assumptions guiding communal strategies in need of rethinking? If American Jews are to prepare for unpleasant surprises in the future, they will need answers to these and other pressing questions.
We begin with a brief overview of what American Jews have faced over the past year. For some, the challenges did not impinge directly on their lives but registered only via news reports. They watched in bafflement as university presidents could not bring themselves to condemn calls for genocide, let alone enforce existing campus policies designed to protect life and property; they viewed with astonishment videos of pro-Hamas demonstrators marching across cities, burning American flags, denouncing Israel as genocidal, and cursing Zionists. To add to the horror, gangs of demonstrators who destroyed property, blocked bridges and highways, and bullied anyone who challenged their beliefs were treated with kid gloves not only by campus authorities, but by police and prosecutors.
For many American Jews, though, unfolding events became highly personal. Institutions they long had regarded as their own proved viciously hostile to Israel and indifferent to the concerns of American Jews. Their beloved New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and many other media outlets presented Hamas’s claims as factual; and when reports about the intentional Israeli bombing of Gaza hospitals and mass graves of victims turned out to be false, the media, at best, soft-pedaled their corrections and failed again and again to treat claims about Israeli atrocities for what they were—lies.
“Jews feel betrayed on every level,” was how one federation professional from a highly progressive area put it to me, adding that “they may feel disillusioned but haven’t stopped fighting.” And they have ample reason to feel this way.
Surveys conducted over the past year vividly illustrate these personal attacks. When teens belonging to BBYO, the largest Jewish youth organization, were asked about their lives since October 7, over 70 percent reported having experienced anti-Semitic harassment or discrimination. A survey of Jewish students on college campuses found that 61 percent said they had witnessed anti-Semitic, threatening, or derogatory language directed toward Jewish people during protests at their school. One-quarter reported anti-Israel comments by their professors, while 57 percent “lost friends or [had] been cut off by people due to disagreements over the fighting in the Middle East.” Based on surveys he conducted with Jewish and non-Jewish students on American campuses—from 2022!—the social scientist Eitan Hersh concluded: “A Jewish student who affirms that a Jewish state should exist faces social penalties on campus.”
Surveys of Jewish adults found considerably lower percentages (between 15 and 20 percent) personally encountered anti-Semitism, though over three-quarters were exposed to anti-Semitic content online. With over two-thirds of adult respondents to a national survey admitting they do not publicly share their views about the Israel-Hamas war for fear “of being targeted by anti-Semitism,” it is evident that many American Jews came to feel unmoored over the past year. The security they had long felt in America has been replaced with anxiety—and anger. Many American Jews would resonate with the words of Andres Spokoiny, CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, when he noted how events since October 7 profoundly altered “our sense of belonging and existential safety.”
With this money, the federation system funded over 500 Israeli institutions. This was possible because of the additional funds many American Jews donated above and beyond their normal support for annual campaigns. Giving to the special Israel emergency fund equaled 30-40 percent of annual campaign dollars in some communities; other federations saw their total grants double, as donors gave equal amounts for Israeli relief and the annual campaign. In Boston and MetroWest New Jersey, Israel emergency giving exceeded annual campaign dollars by 30 percent, in Miami by 12 percent, and New York by 10 percent. Even in smaller communities such as Greenwich, Connecticut, contributions to the Israel emergency fund were over 60-percent higher than annual campaign giving.
Additional donations channeled directly to “friends of” Israeli organizations brought the total to at least $1.4 billion within the first five months after the outbreak of the Gaza war. Administrators of Jewish community foundations, which hold billions of dollars in donor-advised funds, have reported sharp increases in sums donated to Israeli organizations, such as the Friends of the IDF, Magen David Adom, the Jewish National Fund and United Hatzalah of Israel. In addition, Israel Bonds sold in record amounts, totaling three billion dollars roughly during the same period (about $1.3 billion of that sum was purchased by state and local governments throughout the United States). Bonds, of course, are not philanthropic instruments but are nonetheless a means for supporting the Jewish state.
Across the country, large numbers of donors seemingly came out of the woodwork to contribute. Some federations received checks from hundreds of new or lapsed donors; and in the larger communities those numbers rose into the thousands. The UJA-Federation of Greater New York and its counterparts in Washington, DC and San Diego saw their donor rolls nearly double. In San Francisco one-third of donors to the Israel emergency campaign had never given before. And then there was the spike in sums donated. It was not unusual for donors who previously gave $10,000 to increase their gifts to $100,000 or for a $35,000 donor to write a check for one-million dollars. Givers of smaller sums also increased their gifts five- or ten-fold. The same story was replicated all around the country, in large Jewish population centers and smaller ones.
In general, organizations capable of linking their work either to Israeli needs or to combatting anti-Semitism have fared best financially. Immediately after October 7, several leaders in the field of philanthropy appealed to donors not to cut back on their support of domestic organizations but to engage in “plus giving”—that is, to continue funding the myriad of local institutions while simultaneously supporting emergency efforts. Institutions offering Jewish social and learning opportunities, particularly programs directed toward engaging younger people, tended to attract generous funding. Donors gave as an act of identification and defiance; they wanted to support Jewish life in the face of grievous hostility.
It’s hard to know what proportion of the American Jewish population identifies as anti-Zionist, but some surveys offer preliminary figures. The political scientist Eitan Hersh has been surveying college students in recent years and concluded in 2022: “the percentage of Jewish students who believe there should not be a Jewish state in Israel-Palestine [is] fairly constant, at around 10-15 percent.” A survey he conducted after October 7 showed no change in those numbers, though some of the undecided students had become more supportive of Israel. Significantly, nearly 25 percent of Jewish students were uncertain “whether Israel as a Jewish state should continue to exist.” This means that roughly one-third of Jewish college students cannot bring themselves to say they support the only state Jews have. As for the adult population, a survey conducted by JFNA found that 90 percent supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, while 17 percent identified as non-Zionists, 5 percent as anti-Zionists, and 36 percent claimed they did not know.
As long as life was good for American Jews, the priority given to non-sectarian over parochial Jewish needs could be justified, even if it required a willed blindness to the costs it exacted: for decades now, much larger sums of Jewish philanthropic dollars have gone to support non-sectarian, rather than Jewish causes; Jewish observances fell by the wayside as many Jews convinced themselves that helping out in soup kitchens or volunteering for political causes was primarily what Judaism demanded of them; and younger Jews imbibed the notion that to be a good Jew they first should be concerned about non-Jews in need. Not surprisingly, many learned their lessons well and realized that participation in Jewish life was unnecessary if they supported the correct left-wing causes.
Now that American Jewish life is challenged more severely than at any time since the Second World War, multiple Jewish needs beg for their attention. Perhaps after this year of travail, American Jews of all ages will focus more energy on rebuilding domestic Jewish life by attending to Jewish human-service needs, Jewish victims of anti-Semitism, and Jews who lack a proper Jewish education, along with their efforts on behalf of Israel. If that shift in priorities occurs, October 7, indeed, will have been an inflection point of great significance for American Jewish life.
Link: What American Jews Gave After October 7: An Accounting

Israel’s strike has Iran facing a stark nuclear option, by Behnam Ben Taleblu in The Hill

Israel’s long-awaited retaliation against Iran has highlighted the clerical regime’s conventional military weakness and sense of strategic vulnerability. Designed to make Iran “pay” for its Oct. 1 missile barrage — which marked the largest single-day ballistic missile operation in history — Israel struck more than 20 military targets in three essentially uncontested waves of attack. It remains unclear, however, if these strikes will be sufficient to elicit a change in the right direction from Tehran.
In the wee hours of Oct. 26, Iranian authorities watched as Israel gutted two of their traditional pillars of deterrence — the ability to “deny” an adversary the chance to land a blow, and their ability to “punish” an aggressor.
Iranian radars, as well as air and missile defenses such as Russian-provided S-300 platforms, were reportedly taken offline or destroyed. So too, were several ballistic missile facilities tied to solid-propellant missile production, such as those at Parchin, Khojir, and Shahroud, as well as other sites believed to support Iran’s domestic missile supply chain.
Back in April, Iran responded to Israel’s bombing of what it alleged was a diplomatic facility in Damascus, which had killed several high-ranking Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders. The response involved the launch of Iran’s first-ever direct and overt attack against Israel. In addition to intercepting most of that barrage — which featured ballistic missiles as well as low and slow flying drones and land-attack cruise missiles — Israel responded by targeting a radar platform tied to the S-300. Despite witnessing Israel’s ability to cripple one battery of the regime’s most prized defenses, Tehran was not deterred.
On Oct. 1, the Islamic Republic responded to a string of more recent Israeli attacks killing Hamas and Hezbollah leaders by doubling the number of high and fast-flying ballistic missiles it fired in April. In so doing, it disproved the assessment of American generals that its April attack was a “maximum effort” and that the regime did not have more munitions to strike Israel directly. Despite also being largely intercepted, 30 missiles reportedly hit an Israeli airbase.
In the aftermath of Israel’s retaliation, Iran’s choices of how to respond grow starker.
Importantly, Khamenei’s comments do not come in isolation. There have been numerous official statements in Iran brandishing the country’s threshold status and calling for a revision of its nuclear policy. Such statements have been an increasingly important element of Iranian deterrence in the face of Israeli military successes against the “Axis of Resistance.”
Indeed, on the same day as Khamenei’s address, an Iranian parliamentarian called for altering the Islamic Republic’s nuclear doctrine. That followed calls in hardline newspapers tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and even from members of the organization to change Iranian nuclear doctrine. Some politicians have even overtly declared that Tehran would have been able to safeguard the leadership of its Axis had it possessed a nuclear weapon already.
Link: Israel’s strike has Iran facing a stark nuclear option

Antisemitism

The UN’s Kosher Stamp for Terror, by Tony Badran in Tablet Magazine

Earlier this week, the Israeli Knesset took a first step toward banning the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from the country, following a series of revelations over the past year of its intimate, decadelong partnership with Hamas. Predictably, the United States joined the U.N. Security Council in “strongly” warning against any attempts to “dismantle or diminish UNRWA’s operations and mandate,” urging Israel to “respect the privileges and immunities of UNRWA.” Although the agency was shown, among other things, to have paid salaries to leading perpetrators of the Oct. 7 atrocities and allowed the terror organization to locate its combat headquarters and data centers under its schools, there is supposedly “no alternative” to UNRWA, or so the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. insisted.
UNIFIL, in its current iteration, was given a mandate in 2006 via U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 to help ensure that the area south of the Litani River would remain free of any armed presence save its own and that of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Resolution 1701 was ostensibly meant to end the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war on terms that would prevent the Lebanese-based terror army from launching more attacks against Israel by giving the Israelis a demilitarized zone on their northern border enforced by international troops. The catch was that UNIFIL would implement its mandate in support of and in coordination with the Lebanese government and the LAF—which are both controlled by Hezbollah. Rather than decrease Hezbollah’s strength on Israel’s border, the group’s armed presence south of the Litani grew exponentially under UNIFIL’s oversight.
To be sure, the existence of a large network of Hezbollah attack tunnels near Israel’s border was hardly a secret, even if the scale of the network would surprise the Israeli military. In December 2018-January 2019, the IDF first uncovered cross-border tunnels all in UNIFIL’s area of operation. The tunnels were cut into the rocky terrain of south Lebanon, and would have required the movement of a tremendous amount of earth. Yet the U.N. force in the area somehow heard nothing, saw nothing, and until Israel uncovered the tunnels, said nothing. UNIFIL only bestirred itself to comment when the IDF moved in to dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure—not to denounce the terror organization for blatantly abusing its hospitality and violating its mandate, but by refusing to withdraw from its positions adjacent to the terror group’s fortifications in order to keep Israel from blowing them up.
UNIFIL was not the only partner to this comedy of providing cover for terrorists under the guise of peacekeeping. UNIFIL could also blame its Lebanese partner, the LAF, for denying it access to Hezbollah’s tunnel openings. In fact, it was convenient for UNIFIL to do so. Every year since 2018, the U.N. secretary-general reported the LAF’s collusion with Hezbollah as an excuse for UNIFIL’s inaction, and every year, the U.S. renewed UNIFIL’s mandate, and then continued to fund both the U.N.’s terror support force and its LAF partner. Both pillars of UNSCR 1701 were meanwhile serving as shields for Hezbollah.
Besides acting as human shields, providing intelligence, and employing Hezbollah members, UNIFIL also boosts Hezbollah’s local economy and serves as its support base in south Lebanon. In fact, this was the revamped UNIFIL’s calling card right from the get-go in 2006. A couple of months after UNSCR 1701 was passed, the U.N. mission explained how the peacekeepers stimulate the local economy in the Hezbollah-controlled region by purchasing commodities, renting apartments, enrolling their children in schools, and hosting visitors who help fuel the local tourist industry. “The soldiers spend a lot of money here,” the mission’s then-acting chief administrative officer said at the time. In addition, UNIFIL procures from local companies.
While the Biden administration has been particularly eager to fund terror organizations through U.N. cutouts, the first Trump administration was hardly immune to the charms of this deadly dance with Hezbollah under the guise of “competing with Iran in Lebanon.” After the implosion of the Lebanese financial system in 2019, Washington was moved to find ways to send cash and other aid to the LAF. UNIFIL was enlisted through 2022 as a vehicle to provide, as “temporary and special measures,” food, fuel, medicine, and logistical support to the LAF—despite, or perhaps because of, UNIFIL’s and the LAF’s subservience to Hezbollah.
By its nature, this dance with a terror army is obscene. Letting that army entrench itself on Israel’s northern border for the past two decades under U.N. protection is a joint act of madness by American policymakers of both parties and especially by Israel’s leaders, who can only thank some form of divine protection for the fact that the attack tunnels that UNIFIL helped shelter were never used to massacre Israeli civilians in the north, on a scale much larger than the attacks that UNRWA helped to support and perpetrate in the south.
Yet it’s no surprise, on the eve of the election, that the Biden administration is tripping over itself to resuscitate the UNIFIL-LAF arrangement in Lebanon and impose it again on Israel—which is what the U.S. peace proposal for Lebanon, leaked by an Israeli TV channel this week, is all about. In addition to beefing up UNIFIL, the administration wants to enlarge the LAF, and underwrite legions of new recruits—many of whom will no doubt come from Hezbollah’s support base, if not Hezbollah itself.
In the event Donald Trump wins Tuesday’s election, Israel will likely have a wider margin vis-à-vis Iran and its proxies. However, Jerusalem should not underestimate how similar Republican impulses toward Lebanon are to those of Team Obama, even if their ostensible motives are different. On the right, the growing, poisonous sectarianism that’s been infused into Lebanon policy in Washington—a toxicity that the Lebanese (and Lebanese American) lobbyists have consciously encouraged and exploited—fantastically views Lebanon as an arena for “empowering Middle Eastern Christians.” Another, related variant draws on cliches about Lebanon as the “Paris” or “Switzerland” of the Middle East—a naturally pro-Western society that’s just waiting for the proper amount of U.S. political and financial investment, the same way Iraq was a natural democracy waiting for U.S. liberation in order to fulfill the reality-free fantasies of Freedom Agenda ideologues. In reality, Lebanon is a bankrupt terror haven controlled by Iran whose fake “state institutions” are run by sectarian jackals who are unable to supply basic services like electricity to their supporters. Yet that hardly stops Republican lawmakers in Congress from being among the most ardent supporters of the disastrous Obama policy of underwriting the LAF.
Link: The UN’s Kosher Stamp for Terror

Chicago Plays Down an Antisemitic Hate Crime by Richard Goldberg in The Wall Street Journal

A Mauritanian man who illegally entered the U.S. went to West Rogers Park, Chicago’s largest Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, on Oct. 26 and allegedly shot a man on his way to synagogue. City officials quickly began playing down what had happened. The deputy police chief, asked at a news conference if the victim was Jewish, said only that he was “from the community.” For two days after the attack, they released only the suspect’s age, 22, with no other identifying information.
When the Chicago Police Department announced felony charges on Oct. 28, the public was told only the defendant’s name—Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi—and a registered address. Police wouldn’t say if they were investigating the matter as either a hate crime or an act of terrorism. Authorities also refused to comment on doorbell-camera footage that showed the shooter yelling “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” which Islamic extremists often utter while committing terrorist acts. Police suggested to Jewish leaders that labeling the event a hate crime could lead to accusations of “hate toward the Muslim faith.”
There is a reason why Democrats in Chicago played down the shooting and restricted information about it. On Oct. 30, Fox News reported that in 2023 the suspect entered the U.S. illegally and was released into the country pursuant to the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies.
At some point, Mr. Abdallahi went to Chicago, a sanctuary city, and obtained a driver’s license from Illinois, a sanctuary state. Law enforcement would have known the man’s immigration status by running his identification, but instead the public was kept in the dark. No wonder: An antisemitic terrorist attack in one of America’s largest cities was made possible by Ms. Harris’s immigration policies. Talk about an October surprise.
Who is Mr. Abdallahi? Authorities say he acted alone, but how did he radicalize, where did he get the gun, and who is in his social network? How many others like him are roaming freely in sanctuary cities like Chicago? Is the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Joint Terrorism Task Force actively investigating? Has the president or vice president been briefed?
The U.S. needs this information to fend off future terrorist attacks. It is a reasonable surmise that the authorities have withheld it from the public before the election because it would further harm Ms. Harris’s reputation on immigration policy.
Link: Chicago Plays Down an Antisemitic Hate Crime

A Writers’ Boycott of Israel Betrays the Values of Literature by Adam Kirsch with the WSJ

This week the Palestine Festival of Literature, known as Palfest, announced that over 1,000 writers have signed on to a literary boycott of Israel. In a public letter, these writers declared that they will not allow their books to be translated into Hebrew, contribute to Israeli magazines and newspapers, attend conferences or give readings in Israel, or work with Israeli publishers and literary agents. The signatories include some of the leading writers in America—Pulitzer Prize-winners Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz, MacArthur Fellows Jonathan Lethem and Ben Lerner—and around the world, including Nobel Prize-winners Annie Ernaux and Abdulrazak Gurnah.
The reason for its popularity is the Israeli war in Gaza, which has killed more than 42,000 people, according to Gazan health authorities, whose figures don’t say how many were combatants. But it is noteworthy that the letter to which so many writers put their names doesn’t call for an end to the war, or the resignation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or even an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory in the West Bank. Rather, the letter commits its signers to avoid working with any Israeli who engages in “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide,” or who fails to “publicly recognize the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.”
These aren’t the kinds of demands typically found in a boycott. The boycotted institutions aren’t just being accused of, or asked to refrain from, actions that harm or insult Palestinians, such as refusing to publish Palestinian authors or staging events in contested territory. Instead, the demands are entirely about statements and opinions: Israelis can get off the blacklist only by publicly saying what the boycotters want them to say about Israel.
The phrase “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” is similarly unclear. Does it mean that the Palestinian people have a right to a state of their own on part of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea? Or does it mean that the descendants of refugees who left or were driven out of Israel in 1948 have a right to return and take back their ancestors’ land? In that scenario, Jews would become a minority in the world’s 23rd Arab country. Respecting the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” in this view, means that the Jewish state must disappear.
It is hard to think of another boycott with demands so far-reaching: not that a country change its policies or leadership, but that it cease to exist altogether. So it makes sense that, according to a press release issued alongside the letter, of the 92 Israeli publishers contacted by Palfest, 91 refused to accede to its demands. The only exception was a small publisher called November Books, which declared, “We are committed to the idea, in line with Palestinian and democratic voices in Israel, that Israel should not be a Jewish state.”
Why frame a demand in such extreme terms that it is guaranteed to be rejected? This strategy wouldn’t make sense if the goal of the literary boycott were to energize Israeli opposition to the war in Gaza. Like the earlier academic boycotts, this one will punish exactly the kinds of people who, in Israel as in America and Europe, are most likely to be progressive themselves: professors and artists and writers.
The Palfest letter targets Israelis, not Jews per se. But over the past year, there have been a number of incidents in which writers and literary institutions have refused to associate with Jewish writers, on the presumption that they are “Zionists” and therefore complicit in genocide. In July, for instance, a Chicago bookstore announced that its book club wouldn’t feature the popular novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” because, a manager of the store wrote, “It was brought to my attention that the author Gabrielle Zevin is a Zionist.” In fact, Zevin, who is of Jewish and Korean descent, had never spoken publicly about Israel. Apparently the reason for the boycott was that Hadassah, a women’s Zionist organization, had chosen “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” for its own book club.
There are Jewish writers who will be happy to comply—a number have already signed on to the boycott. But surveys consistently find that 80% of American Jews say caring about Israel is an important part of their Jewish identity. The literary boycott of Israel won’t change the way Israel fights in Gaza, or convince Israelis to dissolve their country, but it will encourage literary people and institutions to ostracize American Jews who refuse to deny a central part of their identity.
Link: A Writers’ Boycott of Israel Betrays the Values of Literature

CNN Anchor’s Name Games by Seth Mandel in Commentary

Back in September, as I was writing about an anti-Israel hoax spread by a medical professional in Gaza, a particular term she used caught my attention. The story arose from an interview that the journalists Ryan Grim and his co-host Emily Jashinsky conducted with a Canadian nurse in the war zone. In the recorded interview, the nurse, with Grim’s and Jashinsky’s encouragement, spread a debunked claim that Israel was planting exploding tuna cans so that hungry Gazan children would be maimed or killed while foraging for food.
The IOF is an abbreviation for “Israeli occupation forces.” It’s a derogatory term used by anti-Israel partisans to refer to the Israeli military. Generally, people who use it see Israel as an illegitimate state—as you can see from the context, the term is used to describe Israeli troops of any kind.
The term is rarely used by mainstream journalists, for obvious reasons, unless they’re directly quoting parties to the conflict and NGOs. It has been used to describe Israeli forces in Lebanon over the years, though in those cases it was referring to an actual military occupation, not IDF forces conducting antiterror raids in places in which they are not stationed and certainly not in Gaza.
I thought of that nurse’s interview again this afternoon when I watched CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interview a Palestinian and Israeli filmmaking team who oppose the demolition of unauthorized Palestinian structures built on an IDF training plot. (Israel’s Supreme Court approved the demolitions after it was proved that the structures were built well after the site was designated for the IDF.) A clip making the rounds showed Amanpour saying to the Arab member of the duo: “I understand why you would want to film what’s happening to your own villages from the settlers and the Israeli occupation forces.”
Her behavior throughout the war has raised ethical concerns. Amanpour has reportedly complained about CNN’s strict use of its fact-checking team for war-related reporting. Her confrontation with CNN brass seemed to work, as she then aired a segment on a “mass grave” in Khan Younis that was blamed on the Israelis but turned out to have been dug by Palestinians. In October, she ran a segment that appeared to use staged footage and fabricated scenes in Gaza.
Her use of “Israeli occupation forces” is revealing, just as it was in the case of the nurse. When someone uses made-up names in their reporting, it’s not shocking to find other inaccuracies in their work. But the obligations of Amanpour and the nurse differ. The nurse isn’t pretending to be a journalist. Is Amanpour?
Link: CNN Anchor’s Name Games

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, FDD, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, and the Times of Israel

Israel Update: November 6 (day 397)