I hope everyone who observed Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement, had an easy fast and as we say in Hebrew, “G’mar chatima tova” (May you be sealed in the Book of Life). Today’s lengthy Sunday update mostly focuses on reflections of October 7th and the multi-front, year-long year that Israel is engaged in. Thank you again to all of you for subscribing and sharing. I hope you find these updates resourceful. Am Israel Chai.

The Numbers

Casualties

• 1,708 Israelis dead including 735 IDF soldiers
  • Staff Sgt. Ittai Fogel, 22 was killed during an operation in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city
  • Warrant officer (res.) Aviv Magen (43) and Master Sergeant (res.) Etay Azulay (24) were hit by a mortar on the Lebanese border
  • Sgt. Maj. (res.) Ronny Ganizate was killed fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon
  • 1st Sgt. Noam Israel Abdu, 20 fell in combat in the northern Gaza Strip.
  • Master Sgt. (res.) Ori Moshe Borenstein, 32, Maj. (res.) Netanel Hershkovitz, 37, and Master Sgt. (res.) Tzvi Matityahu Marantz, 32 were killed in northern Gaza

• 352 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed
• 67 Israelis have been killed during the war in Northern Israel
  • Two civilians, Revital Yehud, 45, and Dvir Sharvit, 43, were killed in a rocket attack on Kiryat Shmona Wednesday, as Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel and military forces aimed heavy air and ground fire at the Lebanese terror group.
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,335 (+36 since last Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 447 (+5 since last Sunday) who have been severely injured.
  • 4,733 (+143 since last Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 709 (+14 since last Sunday) who have been severely injured.
• According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 42,065 (+240 since last Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 97,886 (+976 since last 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.
  • We also encourage you to read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
  • The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry.” The analysis found that “9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data” and that “an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates.”
• The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.

Hostages (1 additional hostage confirmed deceased)

• There are currently 97 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza
  • On October 7, 2024, the IDF confirmed the death of Idan Shtivi, 28, who was killed at the Supernova rave near Kibbutz Re’im and his body was taken hostage to Gaza where he is still being held. According the Jerusalem Post: Shtivi arrived at the site of the Nova festival to take photos of his friends who were conducting workshops there.  When the attacks began, Shtivi helped two people escape before he was kidnapped.

• 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: Memorializing a war while still fighting – with Matti Friedman

• This past Monday marked the grim one-year anniversary of October 7th. Around the world, Jewish communities gathered to memorialize a war still being fought.
• How did Israeli society experience this grief, and how did Diaspora communities memorialize? What are Israelis going through that we might not be able to see from a distance? And what are Diaspora communities going through that Israelis may not see?
• Link: Call Me Back – with Dan Senor

*Dan and Matti also address Ta-Neishi Coates, his interview on CBS and the subsequent fallout from being called out for who he truly is: an antisemite. I highly recommend listening to this in its entirety.

[PODCAST] Honestly: A Year of Revelations: We expected Hamas to kill Jews. by Bari Weiss

• We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it. Bari Weiss’s reflections on the anniversary of October 7.
• Link: A Year of Revelations

[RADIO INTERVIEW] How did Hezbollah get its start? Breaking down the history of Hezbollah with Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on NPR

• Link: Matthew Levitt on NPR (4 minutes)

Watch

Yonit Levi with Israel’s Channel 12 news in an exclusive interview on 10/7 with Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin, Hersh’s parents: “We have tried very hard talking – in a world where the only way people communicate is screaming.”

• Watch Here: Interview with Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin

The Fighting Front Lines: Lessons From the Most Consequential Year in Modern Jewish History from The Tikvah Fund

• A few days before the anniversary of October 7, Tikvah convened Ruth Wisse, Dara Horn, Liel Leibovitz, and Elliot Kaufman to join Jonathan Silver for a discussion about some of the essential questions the Jewish people confront in the wake of the past year.
• What civilizational lessons must Jews take from this war and the global reaction to Israel’s active self-defense? How do the Jewish people stand tall for our interests, reject the self-identification of victimhood, and claim our rightful place in the world? What responsibility do the Jewish people have to defend American ideals in the face of enemies who hate not only Israel but the animating principles of Western civilization?

‘Hezbollah’s Hostages’: Lebanese Man Taught to Hate Israel Becomes an Advocate for Peace: Making friends with young Israelis inspired Hussein to challenge Hezbollah’s propaganda. Then the terror group tried to kill him. From The Free Press and The Center for Peace Communications.

• Hezbollah’s Hostages, the weekly animated video series in which brave opponents of the terror group challenge its tyranny by speaking out. The last three episodes exposed Hezbollah’s brutal occupation of Syria—by airing testimony from one of its former fighters, and Syrian victims of its trades in sex slaves and drugs.
• In today’s video we hear the voice of Hussein, a young Shi’ite in Lebanon whose education was dominated by Hezbollah’s propaganda machinery. He was taught to hate Israel and to see its people as “zombies. . . spreading and growing, who aim to conquer the entire Arab region from the Nile to the Euphrates.”
• Then, as a college student, Hussein participated in exchange programs in the West. There he met Israeli students, and the deep friendships he formed with them changed his understanding of the world. When he returned to Lebanon, he began advocating—at great risk—among his fellow Shi’ites for peace with Israel.
• Hussein is not alone in his convictions. Lebanese of all sects fault Hezbollah for dragging the country into ruinous wars, and yearn to reclaim their country’s historical role as the “Switzerland of the Middle East”—a cosmopolitan capital, open to all its neighbors.

Rocket Alerts

• Yesterday, there were 252 red alerts, and a total of 1,602 in the past week
• Over 26,200+ rockets have been fired into Israel since October 7th
  • Over 13,000 from Gaza and 12,500 from Hezbollah

Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel

The North

Source: Swords of Iron: an Overview | INSS

X Posts of the Week

Steve McGuire posts: UMich, UNC, Penn, NYU, Columbia, DePaul, the New School, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford, Virginia Commonwealth, Texas…just a few of the schools where SJP chapters are planning events for October 7 (some will be off-campus).

What We Are Reading

We Should Want Israel to Win by Bret Stephens in the NYT

• By “wins,” I mean that Israel inflicts such costs on its enemies’ capacity to wage war that they accept that their interests, irrespective of their desires, are no longer served by fighting.
• Those who hope for an independent, free and peaceful Palestinian state had better hope Israel wins.
  • An Israel that allows Hamas to remain in power in Gaza is never going to give up the West Bank for the sake of Palestinian sovereignty, lest Hamas take over there, too, and replicate its strategy of rockets and tunnels on a grander scale.
• Those who hope for an independent, free and peaceful Lebanese state had better hope Israel wins.
  • Hezbollah likes to present itself as a Lebanese resistance force. In reality, it’s an Iranian occupation force. It has repeatedly, and often violently, imposed its will on the country’s elected leadership. It has been implicated in the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has dragged the country into ruinous wars with Israel. It has turned Lebanese civilians into human shields by emplacing itself in dense Beirut neighborhoods.
• American policymakers had better hope Israel wins.
  • A peace deal between Jerusalem and Riyadh — among the grand geopolitical ambitions of the Biden administration — is not going to happen if the Jewish state emerges from the war looking like a loser to Saudi Arabia’s cold-eyed rulers. Worse, the Mideast coalition of moderates and modernizers that was coalescing in the wake of the 2020 Abraham Accords — and which offered the best regional counterweight to the Axis of Aggression led from Tehran — will fall apart in the wake of an Israeli loss, as nervous Arab states recalibrate their approach toward an ascendant Iran.
• The American people had better hope Israel wins.
  • Since it came to power in 1979, Iran’s Islamist regime has declared itself at war with two Satans: the little one, Israel; the big one, us.
  • The war Israelis are fighting now — the one the news media often mislabels the “Gaza war” but is really between Israel and Iran — is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it.
• Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins.
  • We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies. Today’s dictatorships also know how to smell weakness. We would all be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.
• Link: We Should Want Israel to Win

The Mistakes Israel Can’t Afford to Repeat by Ambassador Michael Oren in The Atlantic

• Though Israel succeeded in freeing Lebanon of Syrian troops and evicting many Palestinian terrorists, and a peaceful Christian government emerged, that progress proved fragile. The new president was soon assassinated, and the country gradually came to be dominated by Hezbollah. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah terrorists ambushed an IDF patrol, killing eight soldiers and capturing two. Israel responded with the Second Lebanon War.
• Although Israel managed to inflict a toll on Hezbollah—its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly regretted ambushing that patrol—it gained little in the long term. In defiance of Resolution 1701, Hezbollah deployed along Israel’s northern border and burrowed multiple attack tunnels beneath it. Directly opposite the frontier fort where I served after 2006, Hezbollah erected a huge billboard on which a laughing terrorist hoisted an Israeli soldier’s severed head.
• Israelis deluded ourselves by thinking that the war had deterred Hezbollah when, in fact, the war had deterred us. We remained largely passive while, over the next 17 years, Hezbollah expanded its rocket arsenal tenfold and grew to become one of the region’s most formidable military forces.
• Historically, Israel has never done well with wars of attrition, yet Hezbollah was waging one that steadily crept south, toward the Sea of Galilee in the east and toward Haifa in the west. Israel’s return fire failed to deter Hezbollah and, by its very ineffectiveness, may have egged it on. Throughout, Hezbollah declared its readiness to agree to a cease-fire if Hamas did, but Hamas wanted a war in the north that would relieve the pressure it faced in Gaza. It was only a matter of time before Israel, assured that Hamas was sufficiently degraded, would turn its attention to Hezbollah. On September 19 of this year, after the pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives simultaneously exploded, seriously wounding thousands of people and killing at least 37, the Third Lebanon War began.
• …the Third Lebanon War differs from its predecessors in several crucial ways. For Israel, Lebanon is now just one front in a year-long, multifaceted struggle with Iranian proxies throughout the region, as well as with Iran itself. Unlike the previous two wars, both of which were perceived by many Israelis as wars of choice, the current conflict is seen by almost all Israelis as fully justified. We know that Israel cannot lose the north and survive.
• Success will depend principally on setting clear and realistic objectives. Israel cannot, as it did in 1982, seek to remake Lebanon into a Middle Eastern Belgium or, as in 2006, merely retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression. Rather, Israel’s limited goals must be to drive Hezbollah beyond the Litani and to end the rocket fire on the north. Israel must deny any intention of permanently occupying southern Lebanon and declare its openness to any diplomatic means of implementing and reliably enforcing Resolution 1701.
• The United States must also avoid its former mistakes, committing instead to supporting Israel and allowing it to complete its military mission.
• For the young Israeli soldiers engaged in close combat, I can only offer one older veteran’s advice: You are fighting to restore security to your people, not to refashion Lebanon or to remain indefinitely on its soil. Your job is not to punish Hezbollah for any specific act of aggression, but to deter it and its Iranian sponsors from further attempts to destroy us. Your job is to fight with all the skills you’ve been taught, the superior gear you’ve been issued, and the values you learned at home, in order to complete your mission—and then to return to help lead Israel into the future.
• The Third Lebanon War can yield positive and perhaps transformative results. Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons can be defeated, Israel can reinforce its security and revive its deterrence, and the United States can reaffirm its superpower status. But all of that will require a consistent effort to study the mistakes of Israel’s first two wars in Lebanon, and to avoid repeating them.
• Link: The Mistakes Israel Can’t Afford to Repeat

The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7, by Shany Mor in Mosaic Magazine

• This essay will not look at either intelligence or combat failures. Lesson-learning in both of those domains should be straightforward enough. Beyond those limited tactical failures, however, are larger conceptual frameworks that were vigorously held onto in the years leading up to October 7 and that have not yet been entirely abandoned. These mental models weren’t just products of ignorance or applications of prejudice. They were comprehensive conceptual toolkits for assimilating new information and processing policy dilemmas. On October 7, they failed completely. An honest appraisal of them is crucial for any postwar policymaking.

The Man 

• Whatever it is, Netanyahu isn’t just stricken by decisional paralysis or lazy procrastination. He came into power believing the time wasn’t right, and at each decision node since, he has discovered new reasons why the time just isn’t right. He keeps poking his head out and seeing no parking ticket on the state’s windshield, so he goes back in and promises to keep checking. True on the West Bank, and true on the issue he rode back into power on in 2009: the need to confront the Iranian nuclear program. For years he was mocked for his indecision by experts in Israel and abroad whose prognostications often invoked the image of a “tsunami” of one kind or another that was about to wash over Israel due to Bibi’s negligence.
• This basic skepticism buttressed the constant deferral. The status quo, with two diplomatically impotent Palestinian governments at odds with each other, was convenient. It froze any realistic prospect of a two-state solution. It did not, however, freeze any prospect of bilateral negotiations, including diplomatic pressure for Israeli concessions. Twice Netanyahu folded under Obama administration prodding to make concessions, first in 2009 by declaring that he accepted Palestinian statehood, and later in 2014 in the final-status talks presided over by John Kerry. Both times what “saved” Netanyahu from having to go any further was, predictably, Palestinian rejectionism.
• First, it was a complete miscalculation of where Palestinian politics were headed and of what Hamas’s intentions and goals were. Qatari dollars didn’t entangle Hamas in a fragile web of governance and dependance; they allowed it to prepare for war under international sponsorship. Second, it was a miscalculation of the regional political dynamics. Gulf monarchies certainly have tired of the veto that Palestinian rejectionism has placed on their own diplomatic needs, and two, Bahrain and UAE, have even signed peace treaties with Israel. Qatar might open its doors to Israeli soccer fans if that is the price for hosting the World Cup, but ultimately it has its own agenda, advanced globally by an openly anti-Semitic media network and a soft-power arsenal of sports clubs, media acquisitions, endowed chairs, and contributions to NGOs and policy think tanks left and right.
• Third, and relatedly, it was a miscalculation of U.S. regional policy commitments. The U.S. had no problem moving military assets around to deter adventurism from Hizballah in the week the war broke out. But there was no real capacity for any kind of American action against two of its allies, Turkey and Qatar, that were harboring the Hamas terrorist leadership on their soil. In the case of Qatar, a “major non-NATO ally” where the U.S. keeps an enormous military base, there was no pretense of threats even as the war dragged on because there was no American will to carry them out if the Qataris ignored them.
• Fourth and last, it was a miscalculation of domestic politics too. In a polarized society where people discover what their opinions on daylight saving are based on the social and political camp they belong to, Qatari cash was something Bibi couldn’t sell to the public or even to his own most loyal constituency. The stench of shadiness and corruption about it played into the worst beliefs about him among his domestic political opponents while not playing up a single positive image of him among his supporters. It was a decision taken with embarrassment in real time that became an enduring symbol after October 7 not just of Israel’s fail

The Ideology

• A discussion of failed “conceptions” that focused only on the Prime Minister would end up being inadequate, because the policy failure didn’t just emerge from his personality or even his worldview. If it had, its deficiencies would have been easy to spot and correct. But the failed concept wasn’t his alone and the cognitive vices weren’t just overreliance on skepticism, deferral, and messaging. There was a distinct ideological component to the failed conception that brought Israel to the catastrophe of October 7. And that ideology is right-wing religious settler Zionism.
• Roughly half a million Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank (not including annexed areas of Jerusalem), but the majority are not ideological adherents of the movement I speak of here. Israeli governments have allowed and even encouraged Israeli civilians to settle in the West Bank since almost immediately after it was conquered from Jordan in 1967. Sometimes this was a priority and sometimes it was the result of political inertia. The motives were mixed and often self-contradictory. Settling Israelis near the old armistice line was supposed to bring about a situation where a future negotiation on withdrawing from the West Bank (and Gaza for that matter) would leave Israel with a more favorable border. Settling Israelis farther away along the new border with Jordan (and Egypt) was supposed to ensure some kind of security perimeter, though how this fit with the first motive was never clearly established. Settling Israelis in the middle, around but almost never inside historic cities in the West Bank with deep religious and symbolic meaning for Jews—and where large concentrations of Arab population meant that no amount of settlement could ever realistically achieve any sort of demographic dominance—didn’t really have a security concept in its favor (except preventing future withdrawals entirely), but it did ignite the passions of a newly awakened religious national fervor, particularly in the doldrums of Israel’s stupor following the shock of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

The Process

• A policy failure so closely linked to the personality of the prime minister and so obviously a product of a coherent and comprehensive ideological preference should yield an easy victory for the political opposition arrayed against that ideological preference. But somehow, it just hasn’t. Are Israel’s center and leftist parties missing a golden opportunity to make their case? Or is something else going on? Israel’s political opposition is very clear about identifying the first set of failures, those connected to the person and personality of Prime Minister Netanyahu, but rather reticent about the second set, those connected to the right-wing settler ideology.
• Among the liberal “critics of Israel” who fill the op-ed pages of major American newspapers that reticence is even odder. There is no shortage of personal attacks on Netanyahu from the podcast stars of the Obama administration, who often sound as though they believe Netanyahu and not Hamas is holding Israelis hostage in dark tunnels. But the open goal of the bigger ideological and conceptual failures remains mostly unremarked upon.

The Constitution

• Any primer on the Gaza Strip from the last half-century or so will normally mention that is one of the most densely populated places on earth, that its population consists mostly of people registered as refugees, and that its people are poor and need massive provisions of international aid to survive. These descriptions are all mostly true, but normally unmentioned is that they are all the direct outcome, intended or not, of the work of a web of international institutions and organizations.
• None of Gaza’s population would qualify as refugees under the UN’s official definition: “A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.” Those who fled one part of Palestine during the 1947–9 war for another are considered internally displaced persons (“someone who has been forced to flee their home but never crossed an international border”). This definition, notably, applies both to Arabs who fled from Isdud to Gaza (40 kilometers) when the Egyptian army retreated south and to Jews who fled Kalya to Shefayim (about 80 kilometers) when the Jordanian Legion advanced. Arabs who fled from Palestine into Lebanon would certainly count as refugees under the standard UN definitions, but not their descendants. Many others fled to Jordan or to places that Jordan would occupy, but as they quickly became Jordanian citizens, they would, by standard legal definitions, be considered “rehabilitated” and no longer refugees.
• Gaza, though, has no refugees. Not the tiny handful of people still alive who lived in what is now Israel before 1948, and certainly not their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The idea that a Palestinian living in Palestinian territory under a Palestinian government is somehow a refugee from Palestine is a deadly contrivance, the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
• Avocado deterrence was the rule with Hezbollah in Lebanon after 2006 just as it was the rule with Arafat and Hamas in the West Bank in the 1990s and 2000s. And nowhere was the avocado principle more dearly held than in Gaza. Hamas rockets were something Israel needed to learn to tolerate or even accept that it deserved. The incendiary bombs, sent over by balloons which burned so much productive Israeli farmland over the five years before, were far too small a provocation to warrant an Israeli response. Attempts by Hamas militants to breach the fence in 2018 were best understood as a protest against the Palestinians’ righteous victimhood and not a security threat (as October 7 clearly showed them to be) to the Israeli communities just outside the Strip. Any Israeli preventive action against the growing arsenal of rockets and tunnels was, as it was always asserted, an overreaction to an exaggerated threat.
• When wars did break out in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, the consensus suddenly shifted. Now any action Israel might take to eliminate the threat was too costly and impractical. Hamas was too embedded in the territory, its rockets too numerous, and any invasion would result in too many casualties.
• The entire discussion would be merely academic if the failed conceptions that led to the catastrophe of October 7 stopped being relevant. But all four of them are still with us. Netanyahu continues to defer formulating a clear position and continues to subordinate national security policy to the need for political messaging and the lack of faith in both his domestic rivals and potential international partners. His government won’t make a strategic decision about Gaza’s future because such a decision will necessarily involve a strategic decision about the West Bank, and any such decision risks alienating the settler ideology on which his fragile coalition relies on to survive.
• Diplomatic efforts of Israel’s closest allies settled on the empty slogan of Israel’s “right to defend itself” rather than on Israel’s duty to win this war. The negotiations over cease-fires ended up reprising all the same mistakes of negotiations over Palestinian autonomy and final status. Demands were made of Israel by its allies before the negotiations even began (not entering Rafah, ensuring supplies and logistics for the Hamas regime) which radically disincentivized any concessions from Hamas itself. Failures in talks were always treated as Israeli failures, further incentivizing Hamas never to reach an agreement. At no point in the past year has there been any indication that Hamas is actually interested in a deal, however generous, for the release of all hostages. The November cease-fire gave Hamas the opportunity to unload the hostages who were a moral and logistical burden. It has never shown even the slightest willingness to go further.
• Link: The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7

The end of the post-Holocaust era, by Yossi Klein Halevi in The Times of Israel

• The post-Holocaust era of the last eight decades was defined by optimism about the Jewish future. However improbable, we had emerged, stronger than ever, from the event intended to destroy us. For all its fluctuations, the post-Holocaust trajectory pointed forward.
• Through two thousand years of exile, the Jewish people were sustained by two dreams. The first – considered so fantastic that it was relegated to messianic times – was that a dispersed and powerless people would somehow reclaim its ancient homeland. The second was that, in the long interim before the coming of the Messiah, Jews would find a welcoming haven in the diaspora.
• After the Holocaust, both dreams were fulfilled. Two great centers of Jewish life emerged – a sovereign Israel and a self-confident North American Jewry, the most successful diaspora in history. Together, Israel and North America contain close to 90 percent of the world’s Jews. These two centers presided over the post-Holocaust renewal of the Jewish people – which moved from its historic nadir to the peak of its military, economic and political power.
• Nothing like this had ever happened to the Jews – or perhaps to any other people. The transition from brokenness to power was so rapid and decisive that some Jews concluded this must be the messianic era.
• For Israelis, the post-Holocaust era was defined by confidence in our ability to defend ourselves, no matter the circumstance. That confidence was based on our ability to project a credible military deterrence against genocidal enemies – what the pre-state Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky called “the iron wall.”
• On October 7, the iron wall was breached. The most devastating blow in our history was delivered by our weakest enemy; our high-tech, state-of-the-art border was overrun by terrorists on tractors.
• October 7 was a pre-enactment in microcosm of the destruction of Israel: the IDF in disarray, the government AWOL, civilians left to fend for themselves with pistols.
• Finally, October 7 shattered the notion that the state will protect us and Israelis will protect each other.
• October 7 challenged our faith in the Zionist promise of ending Jewish homelessness. For the first time in Israel’s history, a “security zone” – emptied of civilians in the north – has been created on our side of the border. The inability of the state to ensure that Israelis can live in their homes undermines the credibility of our national home.
• But on October 7, Israel became the most dangerous place in the world to be a Jew. And now the Holocaust is back. Israelis describe October 7 as the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – though a more apt description would be: the greatest number of Israelis (they included Arab citizens) killed on any day in a century of Arab-Israeli conflict.
• Our inability to free the hostages being held in suffocating spaces in Gaza is a constant taunt, reminding us of the failure of October 7. In 1976, the IDF rescued a hundred Israeli hostages whose plane had been hijacked to Entebbe airport in Uganda. The Entebbe rescue became the symbol of the post-Holocaust era of Jewish resilience. (That the hostages were being held by far-left German terrorists made the symbolism of Entebbe even more potent.)
• Now, though, the IDF, which is operating within shouting distance of our hostages, has managed to free only eight out of the dozens estimated to still be alive. This is Israel’s anti-Entebbe moment.
• Speaking at a demonstration for the hostages, Meirav Cohen, an opposition member of the Knesset, said: “The state of Israel was founded so that there would not be another Holocaust. [When Israeli] citizens are being held in tunnels, starved and abused and then executed by Nazis, this government has totally failed.”
• For the Diaspora, the promise of the post-Holocaust era was that humanity, shamed into contrition, would finally be cured of its Jewish obsession. Jews would no longer be turned into a symbol for whatever a given civilization regarded as the ultimate evil – Christ-killer for Christianity, money-grubbing capitalist for Marxism, race polluter for Nazism.
• In recent travels through North American Jewish communities, I encountered a level of fear I’d never experienced before. Some wondered whether there was a future in the diaspora for Jewish life. Some even evoked Germany of the 1920s. “Now I know what my grandparents were trying to warn me about,” a friend said to me. I suspect that North American Jews who compare their situation to pre-Holocaust Europe know the analogy is absurd, but reaching into our darkest experience is a way of signaling the shock of their new reality.
• The mainstreaming of anti-Zionism in universities and other progressive spaces has restored the era of conditional acceptance. Anti-Zionists insist on a fundamental flaw in Jewish identity that must be corrected as the admission price into the progressive equivalent of “polite society.” We will accept you among us, anti-Zionists tell young Jews on campus, and you may even hold Shabbat prayers and Passover seders at our tent encampments, on one condition: that you expunge Israel from your identity – a commitment that binds the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews.
• Anti-Zionism is a threat to Jewish well-being – ironically, far more in the diaspora than in Israel, where we are largely immune to its impact. One immediate consequence of the anti-Zionist mood is to instill in Jews a profound sense of insecurity.
• Turning Israel’s war against Hamas into genocide depends on erasing the conditions in which the IDF fights – against terrorists without uniforms who operate from within a civilian population, in hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and in thousands of booby-trapped apartments. Erasing the Israeli narrative of the war extends to how most of the media cite Gaza casualty rates – without noting how many of the dead are Hamas fighters.
• The deepest source of anti-Israel animus is the symbolization of the Jew as embodiment of evil. The satanic Jew has been replaced by the satanic Jewish state.
• Yet on October 8, rather than disintegrate from within, we instantly pivoted to one of the peak moments of Israeli solidarity. No less impressive, we didn’t wait to be mobilized and inspired by our leaders. Even as the government effectively collapsed, we mobilized ourselves. That was the moment of our maturation.
• We are heirs, then, to two opposing models of Israel. The first is an old Jewish story: We devour ourselves, and then our enemies do the rest. The second story is new: From the depths of our divisiveness, we reclaim the instincts of peoplehood.
• Link: The end of the post-Holocaust era

Israel is fighting on the frontline of the free world. Thank us later, by Eylon Levy in The Telegraph

• “We want you to win.” That is what then British prime minister Rishi Sunak told Israelis just days after the October 7 massacre. He was not alone. Shocked by Hamas’ atrocities, world leaders lined up to support Israel’s goal of bringing Hamas down and the hostages home. They understood what was at stake: an Iranian-backed jihadi regime could not be left free to repeat those attacks “again and again,” as it vowed.
• One year later, Israelis want to know: does the free world still want us to win, or has it changed its mind? Because a year after Hamas burned Israeli families alive, the stakes are even higher. Israel is not only fighting Hamas; it is fighting for its life against the Iranian regime and its proxy armies on seven fronts. And as we fight for our survival, we know that we are fighting on the frontlines of the free world, against the enemies of the free world, and making the world safer for you.
• We don’t need your thanks. We do need you to hold your nerve.
• The October 7 War is existential for Israel – and for the free world. To secure our survival, we need to remove the threat of the terrorist armies on our borders, hellbent on our destruction. Israel cannot accept a ceasefire that leaves these terrorist armies free and emboldened to intensify their religious war to annihilate us. But it is also existential for the free world, whose future depends on the fate of three democracies, at risk of extinction by aggressive neighbors: Ukraine at the hands of Russia, Taiwan at the hands of China, and Israel at the hands of Iran.
• This is not a war Israel started, wanted, or even expected. But it is a war that we must win, because we want to live. Much of the West wants this war to go away, but the war cannot go away until the threats go away. And we cannot wish them away.
• We cannot accept a return to October 6 2023, with Iran’s terrorist armies waiting for a moment of weakness on our borders. Obviously we want a diplomatic resolution, but what is the diplomatic off-ramp from a seven-front war against us, by terrorist armies threatening more October 7 massacres until Israel is destroyed? Right now, “deescalation” is simply another word for appeasement, a policy to give Tehran’s terrorist proxies a chance to catch their breath when Israel has them on their knees.
• Israel is doing the world’s dirty work. It does not want your sympathy; it demands your respect. It is single-handedly taking out the world’s most wanted terrorists with bounties on their heads. It is dismantling the Iranian regime’s proxy armies and disrupting their supply routes. It is conducting espionage operations far beyond Q’s wildest ambitions. It is showing the world what it means to have a spine and stand up for yourself, your survival, and your country. To withstand unimaginable pressure to do what you’ve got to do to keep your family safe.
• The Iranian regime and its proxy armies are counting on Western states to abandon a major ally and leave themselves exposed. They want you to bottle it. Don’t.
• Link: Israel is fighting on the frontline of the free world. Thank us later

Iran’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Year by Raphael S. Cohen in Foreign Policy

• Consider where Iran was strategically on Oct. 6, 2023. The United States, torn between competing demands for its military forces, was looking to reduce its military presence in the Middle East. That brought Iran closer than ever to achieving one of its long-term goals: ridding the region of U.S. influence.
• Now consider where Iran is just a year later. Hamas, an Iranian proxy, has been decimated. Israel has shown that it can reach into a VIP guest house in Tehran to kill Hamas’s leaders. Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s proxy network, has been mauled to the point where Iran needs to strike Israel on the group’s behalf, rather than vice versa. Israel’s fractured political spectrum doesn’t agree on much, but it is united when it comes to making Iran pay for its missile attacks on the country. The Abraham Accords—which normalized Israel’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—are strained but remain intact, and Saudi-Israeli normalization remains possible in the longer term, even if it is not in the cards right now.
• Iran’s tolerance for risk is growing. Firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at a militarily superior adversary is a dangerous game. Firing them while repeatedly calling for the annihilation of a likely nuclear-armed, militarily superior, superpower-backed state with a right-wing government inclined to hit back hard is a potentially suicidal gamble.
• Of course, from the Iranian perspective, its actions—or at least its missile strikes—were driven by strategic necessities to reestablish deterrence after a series of Israeli and U.S. affronts to its sovereignty, such as striking Iranian diplomatic facilities in Syria and killing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders. But there is little evidence that Iranian actions are having any deterrent effect whatsoever. If anything, Israeli leaders are talking even more openly than before about regime change in Tehran and even more adamantly about destroying the Iranian nuclear program.
• Strategically, the wisest option for Iran right now would be to retreat to the shadows, rebuild its proxy network, and fight another day. After all, it will take time to rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah into the formidable fighting forces they once were. At the same time, Israel’s ties to its Arab neighbors and the West are already frayed, thanks to the bloodshed of the Gaza campaign and the Netanyahu administration’s unwillingness to commit to any sort of Palestinian state—a win, if a Pyrrhic one, for Iran. Pulling back also leaves open the prospect of some sort of future deal with the West over the medium term—which Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says he wants and even Trump says he’s open to supporting.
• Link: Iran’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Year

Why Israel Is Worried About Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions by Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh in the NYT

• Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, learned the limits of his foreign policy strategy this week: Even well-armed and well-trained surrogate forces can prove unreliable if a determined modern army disables them.
• But as the Israeli offensives in Gaza and Lebanon have revealed, an aspiring regional hegemon with limited conventional capacity needs more firepower and deterrence than proxies alone can deliver. Israel may have already destroyed much of Hezbollah’s most dangerous missiles, launchers and missile crews. And given the two-time failure of Iran to overwhelm the Jewish state’s air defenses, the regime’s huge investment in ballistic and cruise missiles has also proved suddenly wanting.
• Where, then, might Ayatollah Khamenei turn next?
• With its proxy fighters under siege and its conventional weapons proving insufficient, Tehran may be closer than ever to crossing the threshold and building a nuclear weapon.
• For decades, the Iranian leadership has wanted to project power at arm’s length, seeing that its legitimacy rested on exporting the Islamic revolution abroad.
• This was essentially the status quo shattered by Oct. 7 — Iranian power rising in the Levant, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, while America and Israel focused on expanding the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia.
• …the strong response by Israel to the Oct. 7 attacks is a significant propaganda victory for Tehran, given how it produced a global eruption of pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist sentiments.
• Once Israel intensified its assault on Hezbollah, that calculus changed. For Iran, the battle on Israel’s northern frontier is altogether different. The Islamic Republic has backed Hezbollah since its founding in the 1980s and has used it as an instrument of its terrorism from the Levant to South America.
• While camps in Jerusalem and Washington may disagree on the best path forward, their close alliance may be the only remaining brake on Iran’s atomic ambitions.
• The post-Oct. 7 Middle East still offers the Iranian theocracy reasons to hope. Israel has badly battered its proxies, but Hamas and Hezbollah will almost certainly survive. The conflagration has derailed Saudi-Israeli normalization, and, for now, a U.S.-Saudi defense alliance that would have posed a major threat to Tehran. The Saudi and Emirati royals who once vehemently denounced Iranians’ machinations and fed Israeli hopes for a grand entente against the Shiite foe have taken a softer line, given the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
• If in the not-too-distant future the clerical regime can test a nuclear weapon, then it will overnight diminish any power that Israel and America have in the region. The United States has never attacked a nuclear-armed state. It’s a good guess that Israel, which is widely believed to have nuclear weapons though it has not declared them, will not attack a nuclear-armed state.
• Becoming a nuclear state could offer a new way for Ayatollah Khamenei to promote Iran’s power at home and abroad, while neutralizing the possibility that his decision to attack Israel again this week would lead to a conventional escalation in which Iran can’t compete. Authoritarian states are acutely dependent on the awe they project.
• Link: Why Israel Is Worried About Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions

Antisemitism

October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism, by Dara Horn with The Atlantic

• I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about a story I published in these pages in the spring of 2023 on Holocaust education in America. I’d noticed how Holocaust education, initially promoted in the United States by Jewish survivors hoping to inoculate the American public against anti-Semitism, had long since been recast to portray the murder of 6 million Jews as a universal story. The Holocaust is taught to American students as a case study in morality; well-meaning educators frequently compare it to the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the treatment of Black Americans and Native Americans, and other acts of persecution and intolerance. This approach has undeniable resonance and value.
• But few of these educators think to connect the Holocaust to other assaults against and persecutions of Jews: for example, the Russian Civil War massacres in Ukraine in 1918–21, during which more than 100,000 Jews were murdered. Or the massacres, property seizures, and ethnic cleansing that drove nearly 1 million Jews from almost the entire Arab world in the mid-20th century. Or the ongoing genocidal rhetoric and periodic butchery of Jewish civilians undertaken by a slew of Islamist fundamentalist groups in the past 40 years. No—the Holocaust is mainly of interest when it’s extracted from Jewish history, used to teach a lesson about the humanity we all share. Instead of teaching students to understand anti-Semitism as a specific pattern in society, or to understand who Jews are, these curricula suggest that what happened to Europe’s Jews—who were just like everyone else—actually happened to all of us.
• What I observed in my deep dive into American Holocaust education, I now realize, was a massive appropriation of the Jewish experience that obscured, behind a screen of happy universalism, an intellectual tradition that has been used to justify the demonization of Jews for millennia. This appropriation was entirely consistent with what non-Jewish societies have routinely done with the Jewish experience: claim that that experience happened to “everyone,” and then use it to demonstrate how wrong Jews are for rejecting the “universalism” of their own experience—for refusing to be just like everyone else.
• Christianity engaged in this appropriation for hundreds of years, claiming that Christians were the “new Israel” and then excoriating Jews who failed to accept the Church’s universal salvation. Islam did this too, insisting that the Quran was the true universal message, and that the Torah, which shares many of the Quran’s stories and precedes it by many centuries, was somehow “corrupted.” Of course, both Christianity and Islam developed their own rich traditions over time. Yet, for centuries, both Christian and Islamic societies also used the Jews’ failure to accept their “universal” values as permission to ostracize, discriminate against, and periodically slaughter them.
• This pattern continued to evolve in the more secular modern era, as some societies graduated from appropriating Jewish holy sites and texts to appropriating Jewish experiences—including experiences of persecution. In the 1870s, German Jews were only a couple of generations out of the ghettos and had only recently been granted equal rights when their fellow Germans decided that they were the ones experiencing subjugation—by Jews. Sophisticated 19th-century Germans would never have dreamt of hating Jews for being Christ killers. But racial “science” had recently declared Jews a predatory, inferior race hell-bent on oppressing others. In 1879, the German author of a best-selling book explaining how Jews were discriminating against Germans introduced a handy new term for this fresh justification of Jew hatred: anti-Semitism. The supposed grounding in science gave enlightened Germans a new form of permission to persecute Jews based on “universal” values.
• In the years after World War II, when racial anti-Semitism lost its luster, the Soviet Union popularized a new form of universalism rooted in appropriation. Announcing on the official memorial for the 100,000 people, mostly Jews, massacred at Babyn Yar that Nazis had simply murdered “citizens of Kiev,” the Soviets declared themselves—not the Jews, who went unmentioned—to be Nazism’s chief victims. (Starting in the the 1960s, Jews attempted to gather at the site annually to commemorate the massacre; many were arrested.) The regime positioned the Jews, in fact, as perpetrators of evils like those of the Nazis. By the late 1960s, the KGB was pumping out enormous amounts of propaganda trumpeting a new value: anti-Zionism. Around the world, endless Soviet-sponsored publications and broadcasts proclaimed, without evidence, that Zionism is Nazism, Zionism is racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is colonialism, and Zionism is genocide—all while the Soviet Union armed its Arab client states for their repeated invasions of Israel. And even as they endlessly repeated that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, the Soviets continued to mercilessly persecute Soviet Jews.
• This is the permission structure for anti-Semitism: claim whatever has happened to the Jews as one’s own experience, announce a “universal” ideal that all good people must accept, and then redefine Jewish collective identity as lying beyond it. Hating Jews thus becomes a demonstration of righteousness. The key is to define, and redefine, and redefine again, the shiny new moral reasoning for why the Jews have failed the universal test of humanity.
• The current calls for banishing “Zionists” from American public life follow the same ancient pattern… The consequences for Jews of this hatred are obvious. Indeed, many American Jews have changed their behavior, hiding outward signs of Jewish identity and thinking twice before sharing their identity with colleagues and acquaintances. But its consequences for non-Jews are incalculable—not because of the often inaccurate Holocaust-education claim that Jews are the canary-in-the-coal-mine whose persecution indicates that other groups will later be persecuted, but because this permission structure devours human potential.
• Palestinian Arabs have borne the brunt of their leaders’ and manipulators’ anti-Jewish obsession, winding up subjected to autocratic rule, used as human pawns, and deprived of multiple opportunities for statehood, collaboration, prosperity, and peace. Like Israeli Jews, they aren’t going anywhere; they, too, deserve freedom and dignity, and must build a future with their neighbors. For people in all of these societies, the costs of this fixation are high.
• American institutions that cave to this hatred will also face these costs. Schools and universities lose their credibility and their ability to teach when educators let lies undermine learning. The same is true for other sectors of American life. A literary world where conformity is the price of entry is unworthy of the name. A prejudiced therapist is a contradiction in terms, rendering therapy itself impossible. Patients suffer when ideology derails doctors’ training. When swaths of colleagues are blacklisted and ostracized, untold possibilities for research and innovation are blithely destroyed.
• American Holocaust educators often ask me what they should be teaching as the “lessons of the Holocaust.” The question itself is absurd. As one of my readers once put it, Auschwitz was not a university, and most Jews who arrived there were immediately gassed and incinerated, making it difficult for them to produce coursework in ethics for the rest of the world to enjoy.
• But there is indeed something we can learn from the long history of anti-Semitism and the societies it has destroyed: We’ve fallen for this before. After this terrifying year, I hope we can find the courage to say, Never again.
• Link: October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism

Over 10,000 Antisemitic Incidents Recorded in the U.S. since Oct. 7, 2023, According to ADL Preliminary Data

• There have been more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in the year since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, according to ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) preliminary data. This is the highest number of incidents ever recorded in any single year period since ADL started tracking in 1979.
• These newly released figures, from Oct. 7, 2023 to Sept. 24, 2024, represent an over 200-percent increase compared to the incidents reported to us during the same period a year before, which saw 3,325 incidents.
• These more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents break down into the following categories:
  • Over 8,015 incidents of verbal or written harassment.
  • Over 1,840 incidents of vandalism.
  • Over 150 incidents of physical assault.
• Moreover, at least 1,200 of these antisemitic incidents happened on college campuses. In the same period a year before, ADL recorded about 200 incidents, representing a 500-percent increase.
• Of these incidents, over 2,000 occurred at Jewish institutions such as synagogues and Jewish centers.
• ADL’s preliminary data also found that over 3,000 of all incidents took place during anti-Israel rallies
• Link to the Full Report

A Year of Campus Conflict and Growth: An Over-Time Study of the Impact of the Israel-Hamas War on U.S. College Students, by the Jim Joseph Foundation.

• A new report from Dr. Eitan Hersh and College Pulse provides an unprecedented look spanning three years of the experiences and views of Jewish and non-Jewish students on college campuses both before and after October 7th, 2023. This research is unique because it includes and compares survey responses and interviews from Jewish college students who participated in the study in April 2022, in November and December of 2023, and in March and April of 2024.

Key Findings Include the Following:

• Jewish students also self-assessed their mental health much lower in the immediate aftermath of the war, but their assessment reverted to a healthier state by the end of the school year.
• Most Jewish students did not attend any programs directly related to the Israel-Hamas war during the 23/24 school year.
• Jewish students who attended Jewish programming on campus primarily participated in Shabbat/holiday or social events.
• In the 2023-2024 school year, 1 in 4 Jewish students said they felt the need to hide their Jewish identity to fit in on campus, 1 in 3 students said they were judged negatively for participating in Jewish activities, and more than half said that Jewish students pay a social penalty for supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. These were all increases from 2022.
• One in five non-Jewish students deliberately aim to socially ostracize Jewish peers who support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. They see students who support Israel as endorsing a hateful position, and they do not want to be friends with people who have bad values. Jewish students recognize this social isolation and largely blame a toxic culture of social media and polarization.
• In 2024, one in five non-Jewish students say they wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Forty-five percent said they were not sure.
• Jewish students blame Hamas for the war more than they blame Israel. Conversely, non-Jewish students blame Israel for the war more than Hamas.
• Fifty-five percent Jewish students who said they had no opinion on Israel’s existence in 2022 formed an opinion in support of a Jewish state in 2023 and 2024.
  • Over all three years, 10-15% of Jewish students said they believe there should not be a Jewish state in Israel-Palestine.
  • Twenty-seven percent of Jewish students aren’t sure whether Israel as a Jewish state should continue to exist.
• While Jewish students are equally likely to follow news about the war, regardless of whether they support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, this is not the case for non-Jewish students.
• Several demographic characteristics correlate with Jewish students’ views on Israel, including their political ideology, their sexuality, and their family’s Jewish background.
  • Student’s socioeconomic class also is a major predictor – students from wealthier families are much more supportive of a Jewish state. This pattern is especially strong among students without robust Jewish backgrounds.
  • The same relationship is visible in non-Jewish students too. Jewish and non-Jewish students from upper class homes are twice as likely to believe a Jewish state should exist in general and twice as likely to blame Hamas rather than Israel for the current war, compared to students from lower- or working-class homes.
• Of “activists” who attended campus advocacy events, Jewish activists who oppose a Jewish state and attended pro-Palestine events during the school year have different backgrounds and demographics than Jewish activists who support a Jewish state and attended pro-Israel events during the school year.
  • The former group mostly grew up with less robust Jewish backgrounds. The majority identify as LGBT and as very liberal. They are also mostly lower/working and middle class.
  • Conversely, the latter group of activists overwhelmingly come from families affiliated with denominations and had many Jewish experiences growing up. They are mostly heterosexual, upper-middle or upper class, and do not identify as very liberal.
• Link: A Year of Campus Conflict and Growth: An Over-Time Study of the Impact of the Israel-Hamas War on U.S. College Students

Grief Kidnapped: How Anti-Israel Hate Groups Stole Oct. 7th from Jews to Press Their Disinformation Against Israel by Asra Q. Nomani for the Pearl Project

• Anti-Israel groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Students for Justice in Palestine, launched a deceptive campaign on October 7, hijacking Jewish grief over the massacre by Hamas to push their disinformation against Israel. They held “interfaith vigils” on campuses, intentionally using the anniversary to distort facts and fuel anti-Israel sentiment. Their rhetoric falsely portrayed Israel as the aggressor on Oct. 7, 2023, masking their deeper goals of undermining Israel’s existence and radicalizing young activists. This manipulation of public perception, rooted in lies, disrupts the mourning process and stokes division, while potentially inciting further violence.
• Read the full report here: Grief Kidnapped

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