I thought Israeli journalist Marc Schulman summed up the past few days quite well:

The significance of the successes in Lebanon cannot be overstated. The two days of explosions created chaos within Hezbollah and dismantled what they believed to be a secure communication network. This destruction led to a decision that, in hindsight, was one of Hezbollah’s worst: gathering all their top commanders for a physical meeting. It’s unclear why they ignored the fact that Israel has significantly infiltrated their organization, particularly after the beeper explosions and the successful assassination of Fuad Shukr in July. Nevertheless, they went ahead with a large meeting. Given the number of participants, the meeting was discovered by Israeli intelligence. Remarkably, the Israeli Air Force quickly developed a plan to strike the meeting. Because it was held underground, the attack required a large bomb to destroy the building and its subterranean facilities. The strike killed the primary target, Ibrahim Aqil, Hezbollah’s military commander, along with 16 other top commanders.

Situational Update

• Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah conceded on Thursday that the terror group had suffered a “major and unprecedented” blow this week when thousands of its communications devices suddenly exploded, but vowed that the Lebanon-based terror organization would recover and not lay off its attacks on Israel after months of cross-border fire.
• The entire senior command of Hezbollah’s Radwan force (around 20 commanders) were killed in an airstrike this week in Beirut. Axios reports that Hezbollah confirmed its head of military operations, Ibrahim Aqil, was killed on Friday in an Israeli airstrike on a southern Beirut neighborhood. Radwan is Hezbollah’s elite force.
  • He is wanted by the U.S. for his involvement in the bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in October 1983, which killed 241 U.S. personnel.
• AIPAC writes: In an interview this morning, Israeli President Isaac Herzog confirmed that the senior Hezbollah leaders eliminated by Israel in Beirut on Friday were meeting to discuss plans to invade Israel and carry out another October 7-style attack.
• Prime Minister Netanyahu said today that half of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza are alive. His statements would indicate that around 50 hostages could be dead. The IDF has only confirmed the deaths of 33 of those still in Gaza.

The Numbers

Casualties

• 1,677 Israelis dead including 715 IDF soldiers (+2 since Wednesday)
• 346 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza: no change from Wednesday)
• 52 Israelis have been killed during the war in Northern Israel
  • Major (res.) Nael Fwarsy (43) was killed and another soldier was lightly wounded after an explosive-laden drone launched by Hezbollah struck an area outside Ya’ara in the Western Galilee.
  • Sergeant Tomer Keren (20) was killed and eight other soldiers were wounded, including one seriously, after two anti-tank missiles launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon struck a position in the Ramim Ridge area on the border in the Galilee Panhandle.
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,287 (+5 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 441 (+5 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
  • 4,466 (+18 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 678 (+9 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
• According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 41,391 (+139 since Wednesday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 95,760 (+263 since Wednesday) have been injured during the war.
  • We also encourage you to read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
  • The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry.” The analysis found that “9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data” and that “an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates.”
• The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.

Hostages (no change since Wednesday)

• 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
  • 31-50 hostages are assumed to be dead and held in captivity (based on reports from today, 9/22)
  • 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.

The North

Source: Swords of Iron: an Overview | INSS

Listen

Honestly with Bari Weiss: Hezbollah’s Pagers and Walkie-Talkies Explode. Now What?

• On Tuesday, hundreds of encrypted pagers in Lebanon and Syria began exploding at the same time. Lebanon’s health minister said Tuesday that at least nine people were killed and 2,800 were injured. The tiny country’s hospitals were overwhelmed with patients suffering from burn wounds, blown-up hands, and groin injuries. The pagers belonged to members of the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.
• Then, just 24 hours later, a second wave of thousands more explosions again went off simultaneously in Lebanon: This time not only pagers, but also walkie-talkies all belonging to Hezbollah terrorists.
• It was the stuff of spy movies—an incredibly sophisticated and precise operation unlike anything we’ve seen before. And while Israel has not officially taken responsibility, this kind of imaginative sabotage has Mossad written all over it. Hezbollah has vowed retaliation against Israel.
• Today, I sat down with journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dexter Filkins to talk about all of it. Dexter has been covering wars in the Middle East for decades for The New York Times and The New Yorker, and has been called “the premier combat journalist of his generation.”
• In our conversation, we discussed the state of the war, political divisions within Lebanon, Iran’s nuclear program, the viability of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, and the difficulties for the United States of disengaging from Middle East conflicts.
• Link: Hezbollah’s Pagers and Walkie
• Link to Transcript: Hezbollah’s Pagers and Walkie-Talkies Explode. Now What?

Watch

Hezbollah’s Hostages: A Special Series Presented by The Free Press

• Hezbollah—meaning “Party of God”—is an Islamist party, a terrorist group, an organized crime syndicate, and a proxy of Iran that for over four decades has spread destruction and death across the Middle East. Born out of the turmoil of the Lebanese civil war, it aims to eliminate Israel and undermine the West, in particular the United States.
• But the grip of Hezbollah, though far-reaching, is not absolute. Hezbollah’s brutality is also its chief weakness. It provokes seething resentment everywhere it operates, a feeling shared by millions of Arabs who yearn to break free.
• Hezbollah maintains control by wielding lethal force to silence dissenting voices, especially among the Lebanese Shi’ites it claims to represent. Yet these voices want to be heard—and the world needs to hear them, for the sake of a new conversation about how to end the harm Hezbollah does to Arabs and Israelis alike.
• Hezbollah’s Hostages, a Center for Peace Communications production, which The Free Press is presenting every week. The first episode is “The Combatant.” It tells the story of a Lebanese Shi’ite boy transfixed by American action movies who is lured into combat by Hezbollah during its entry into the Syrian civil war. The fables he was told about the thrill of combat turn into bitter reality on the battlefield. He undergoes a profound change of heart and mind that leads him to an improbable new life.

• Link: Hezbollah’s Hostages

Rocket Alerts

• Yesterday, there were 370 red alerts, and a total of 650 in the past week

Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel

What We Are Reading

Israel’s Strategic Win by Eliot A. Cohen in The Atlantic

• From a purely technical view, the rippling blasts of thousands of exploding pagers in the hands of Hezbollah represented an extraordinary piece of sabotage—one of the most remarkable in the history of the dark arts. For Israel—if that’s who was behind the attacks—to have so penetrated the Iranian and Hezbollah supply chain, on such a large scale, and with such violent effect, is simply astonishing.
• It has long been clear that neither Hezbollah nor Iran are currently spoiling for such an apocalyptic fight—after all, they could have chosen to have it at any time in the past few years. If Hezbollah is battered the way Hamas has been, Iran stands to lose its most effective ally against Israel and, by extension, the United States. And to seek open war, Hezbollah would have to be willing to sacrifice the population of Lebanese Shia from which it has emerged, as well as its own cadres of fighters. Both Iran and Hezbollah have to know that Israel now believes itself to be fighting an existential fight, with a different set of rules.
• Within Israel, it is striking that so many, including on the dovish end of the spectrum, believe that a large war of this kind with Hezbollah is not only inevitable but necessary. Many Israelis view the status quo—tens of thousands of Israeli civilians displaced from the border zone, that zone itself depopulated, and a constant, lethal rain of missiles from the north—as unacceptable. So it is. The war along Israel’s northern border, or at least the phase of war that Hezbollah initiated after October 7, had nothing to do with immediate Israeli behavior, and everything to do with claiming credit for participating, belatedly, in the campaign launched on that day from Gaza. It is part of a strategy, conceived in Tehran but executed from Beirut, of grinding down Israeli morale and the will to fight, with a view to the extirpation of the Jewish state.
• If a much larger war comes now, that is a risk that Israel’s leaders have decided to take, and they will not encounter a great deal of opposition from their population across the spectrum if they fight it without restraint.
• In many other ways, however, this is a strategic win for Israel. Set aside the thousands of Hezbollah operatives disabled or killed by these explosions and consider the psychological effect. Hezbollah members will now be unlikely to trust any form of electronics: car keys, cellphones, computers, television sets. Myth and legend, no doubt reinforced by an information-warfare campaign, will magnify Israel’s success in getting inside black boxes no matter how big or how small. An army skittish about any kind of electronics is one that is paralyzed—an individual leader, like Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar, can communicate without a phone, but an entire organization cannot.
• The Iranians, already reeling from the assassination of the political head of Hamas in a Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse on the day of the inauguration of the new president, now have much to wonder about as well. How, they must ask themselves, did the Israelis penetrate the supply chain? How did they get access to the pagers? How did they know that this batch was going to Hezbollah? How did they manage to foil whatever security precautions had been taken?
• War is an affair of the mind as much as anything else. By showing its extraordinary reach, Israel will breed internal fear and suspicion that can be more paralyzing than fear of an enemy.
• The Middle East is witnessing a war of coalitions. Israel’s silent partners here include Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan. For them, this coup is a confirmation that Israel can be a capable partner.
• Link: Israel’s Strategic Win

Hezbollah’s worst nightmare: Chaos in its ranks – analysis by Seth J. Frantzman in The Jerusalem Post

• Hezbollah is known as a disciplined group. Highly trained, the group invests heavily in its recruits. It is not known to waste them as cannon fodder. It views itself as an elite organization, and within its own structure, there are centers of terrorist excellence, such as the Radwan force.
• Hezbollah is facing chaos because a large number of its alleged members were wounded on September 17 by exploding communications devices. The full details of this incident are not yet known, and they will only be known over time. However, video and images from Lebanon show men, many of them in their forties, wounded in the hands and faces by exploding communications devices.
• Suffering so many casualties to key members of the terrorist group may not be crippling, but it clearly will harm a swatch of the group’s key members. This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hezbollah, but they will not have access to one of their hands.
• These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile. The men will also be marked going forward, so many men with bandages on their hands will be a mark of working for the terrorist group.
• Hezbollah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hezbollah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep batting order. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but it also draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.
• The overall challenge for Hezbollah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to rapidly roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hezbollah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. It issued the pagers, the way a drug gang might do so, and secured the network itself.
• The chaos that will follow the exploding pagers is already evident in Lebanon. Reports say the Iranian-backed terrorist group is scrambling to tell its members not to use communications devices. Hospitals have numerous injured men. The group will have to scramble to put its organization back together.
• Link: Hezbollah’s worst nightmare: Chaos in its ranks

Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers, by Eli Lake with The Free Press

• While Israel has not taken responsibility, who else could it be? This kind of precise, imaginative sabotage has been a calling card of the Mossad for decades. Indeed, Hezbollah’s pagers exploded on the same day Israel’s domestic security organization, the Shin Bet, announced that it had foiled a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior security official using a claymore mine that would have detonated by a cellular device in Lebanon. Talk about being hoisted on one’s petard.
• And yet for all of Israel’s tactical brilliance, its strategic position with regard to Hezbollah remains perilous. After October 7, when the Lebanese militia began firing barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel, some 100,000 Israelis had to flee their homes on Israel’s northern border. Nearly a year later, they still cannot return.
• Consider Israel’s mortal enemy, Iran. Over the last 15 years, the Mossad appears to have Iran’s regime wired for sound. In 2020, a truck fitted with a remote control machine gun shot down Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, while he was on his way to his vacation home on the Caspian Sea. The operation was straight out of the finale of Breaking Bad.
• Before the killing of Fakhrizadeh, Mossad operatives in 2018 broke into a warehouse full of secret plans and schematics that comprised the archives of Iran’s secret nuclear program. Israeli agents made off with the archive and then presented the material to the International Atomic Energy Agency and later, reporters from all over the world. It was an intelligence coup by any measure.
• Earlier, in 2009, Israeli and American intelligence agencies inserted a cyber worm known as Stuxnet into the software that controlled the speed that centrifuges spun to enrich uranium in Iran’s Natanz facility. The operation destroyed the machines, and for a few months Iran’s program was set back.
• All of these operations demonstrated an operational cunning and competence that are the stuff of spy novels. And yet Iran today is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to the U.S. government’s own recent estimates.
• But they will not deter Hezbollah from launching the missiles and rockets into Israel that make it impossible for 100,000 citizens to return home. As Gerecht said, “Israel’s tactical brilliance is no substitute for serious hard power and military interventions.”
• Link: Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers

Egypt’s Self-Made Crisis by Mariam Wahba with National Review

• The Philadelphi Corridor remains a key source of tension in current Israel–Hamas cease-fire negotiations. Israel insists that it must retain control of the territory, a narrow strip of land that runs along the Egypt–Gaza border, to prevent Hamas from smuggling arms into Gaza from the Sinai. Cairo, however, argues that an Israeli presence in the corridor constitutes an unacceptable challenge to its leadership role in the region. But Egyptian leaders have only themselves to blame for Israel’s demand. In fact, it was Cairo that precipitated the war by allowing Hamas to smuggle matériel into Gaza for years.
• Despite significant resistance from Egyptian officials, Israeli forces took control of the Philadelphi Corridor on May 7, aiming to cut off Hamas’s arms-smuggling routes in the tunnels beneath it. The move spurred outrage in Egypt. On May 10, prominent Egyptian talk-show host Amr Adeeb spoke for the government and millions of Egyptians when he publicly condemned the Israeli action. The move was “full of challenge and stupidity,” he said on his show. State-sponsored Egyptian media echoed this refrain.
• In a further blow to Cairo’s self-image, Egypt has had to rely on Israel for intelligence and joint military operations aimed at combating the Islamic State in the Sinai. Cairo has even allowed Israel to strike the terrorist group by air.
• Egypt’s waning authority is apparent within its traditional spheres of influence as well. In the civil war afflicting Sudan, a neighboring country spanning Egypt’s longest border, Cairo has struggled to play a leadership role in stemming the conflict. Notably, Egypt is not even a part of the four-member group of countries overseeing the U.N.‑approved process for a political settlement. Instead, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have taken the lead.
• Despite Cairo’s past commitments to its U.S. and Israeli partners to secure the border, Egypt’s stance on the issue has often been contradictory. On the one hand, it has acknowledged the smuggling operations and described them as a problem. On the other hand, it has failed to stop them. In the most egregious cases, Egyptian border guards and high-ranking officials have allegedly colluded with Hamas by accepting bribes to allow weapons and other goods to pass through the tunnels.
• The problem is not new. As far back as 2006, Yuval Diskin, then director of the Shin Bet, said, “The Egyptians know who the smugglers are and don’t deal with them. . . . They received intelligence on this from us and didn’t use it.” In 2007, the New York Times reported that Israeli officials had sent videotapes to U.S. officials showing Egyptian border guards aiding the smuggling. This history raises questions about whether Egypt’s actions — or lack thereof — reflect incompetence or a deliberate policy.
• Link: Egypt’s Self-Made Crisis

Exaggerations, Obstacles and Opportunities: The Saudi Arabian Position in the Gaza War, by Dr. Aziz Alghashian with famous Israeli Think tank Mitvim (The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies): The paper aims to shed light on the obstacles and opportunities of Saudi involvement in a future Israeli-Palestinian peace process. It first explains the enigmatic nature of Saudi communication towards Israel and explains why Saudi pragmatism has been misunderstood. Then, it explains the rationale behind Saudi Arabia’s willingness to normalize relations with Israel, and that Saudi-Israeli normalization is treated as a gateway to a larger game-changing strategic treaty with the United States, rather than a keenness to cooperate with Israel itself. In addition, the paper argues that while the Saudi ruling elite are willing to play financial and security roles in “reconstructing” Gaza, it is unforeseeable that this will ensue without a credible peace process that can justify these efforts, especially against the backdrop of Saudi Arabia’s restructuring of its own economy.

Key Takeaways:

• There are immense obstacles to Saudi Arabia providing funding and security for the “day after” in Gaza.
• European states should help incentivize Arab Gulf states by clarifying the pathway towards a Palestinian state.
• European states should take a more active role in establishing a credible Palestinian-Israeli political track by facilitating joint Palestinian-Israeli cooperation and ventures.
• European states should work to link joint Palestinian-Israeli initiatives with regional (economic) projects.
• European states should support the development of an Arab-Israeli middle-level focused on pro-peace public diplomacy.
• European states should collaborate with regional actors to establish a paradigm centered on regional security and stability to keep Saudi Arabia and other regional actors invested in the peace process.
• Link to full report: The Saudi Arabian Position in the Gaza War: Aziz Algashian
• Link: Exaggerations, Obstacles and Opportunities: The Saudi Arabian Position in the Gaza War

Israel and Ukraine are defending us too: why don’t Western moralisers recognise this, by Charles Moore in The Telegraph

• When Hamas entered Israel and attacked, raped, tortured, kidnapped and murdered roughly 1,250 people – the great majority unarmed civilians – on October 7 last year, almost as shocking as the barbarity of the deed was the glee of so many in the West.
• This week’s exploding pagers and walkie-talkies were part of Israel’s answer to that terrible day of the Hamas atrocities and, more specifically, to the attacks by Hezbollah that followed and have recently intensified. The latest Israeli responses are legitimate punishment and effective countermeasures.
• There were, as so often in armed conflict, some civilian casualties, but far fewer than there would be in conventional bombing in built-up areas. Contrary to what you often hear said, international law does not prohibit the killing of civilians in war: sad to say, that would be simply impossible. It prohibits the targeting of civilians and their disproportionate killing.
• Read across to Ukraine. Western leaders might be right that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia, in the sense of marching into Moscow. But it does not necessarily follow that Ukraine cannot exact from Russia such a high price for its invasion that it decides to withdraw. This week, a little overshadowed by the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, Ukrainian drones hit a missile dump at Toropets, 300 miles inside Russia, causing an explosion with the Richter measurement of a small earthquake. Like the Israelis, Ukrainians are cleverer, braver and more inventive than their opponents.
• When Israel or Ukraine pull off these coups, our leaders should publicly applaud them, and help them pull off some more. Both countries are extremely rare in being democratic pro-Western nations absolutely determined to protect their sovereignty against external tyranny and/or destruction. In our own interests, one might say, we need all the help they can get.
• Exploding your enemy’s essential communication tools while he is holding them is morally and legally on a par with more conventional acts such as bombing enemy airfields, roads, bridges or trenches.
• The BBC has a small semi-resident group of defeatists – including Tom Fletcher, a retired British diplomat, who opposes the Israeli side 100 per cent of the time, Lord Ricketts, a posher ditto, who – more moderate – opposes Israel 98 per cent of the time, and then there is the BBC’s very own Jeremy Bowen, who manages the unusual feat of sounding simultaneously bored and ideologically driven (against Israel).
• Link: Israel and Ukraine are defending us too: why don’t Western moralisers recognise this: The Telegraph

Sorry, AOC: Israel’s Precision Attack Against Hezbollah Was Humane—and Legal by Arsen Ostrovsky, John Spencer, and Mark Goldfeder in Newsweek

• Lest you be swayed by the false and malicious narratives of those trying to defend Hezbollah or blame the Jewish state, some necessary context is in order.
  • First, Hezbollah is a Lebanese-based jihadist terrorist organization and a standing army that is funded, supplied by, and serves entirely at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
  • Like Hamas, Hezbollah also has genocidal intentions to annihilate Israel and kill all the Jews, intentions which they have made repeatedly clear and have continuously sought to act on. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has said that that the entire Middle East will not rest until the “cancerous gland” that is Israel is removed, and on October 8 last year, a day after the Hamas massacre, Hezbollah formally joined the war in the wistful hope that they might help eradicate the Jewish state.
• By any stretch of the imagination, Israel is fully entitled under international law, including but not limited to Article 51 of the UN Charter, to exercise its right to self-defense.
• Generally speaking, under Article 7 of the Amended Protocol II to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the use of booby traps in communication devices are indeed prohibited in certain situations. There is, of course, an overriding caveat, which is that pursuant to Article 52 of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention I, such acts are permissible in circumstances where the objects in question are no longer used for civilian purposes.
• In this case, the pagers and hand-held devices, which were distributed specifically to Hezbollah operatives, were being used for the purposes of communicating, planning and conducting operations. As such, they immediately ceased to be considered “civilian objects” and became legitimate military targets.
• …the operation was also aimed solely at Hezbollah terrorists. Indeed, only Hezbollah operatives were known to be in possession of these devices, which were not widely or generally available, and were in fact ordered by Hezbollah and distributed by Hezbollah leadership specifically to circumvent Israeli intelligence.
• Of the 4,000 reported Hezbollah operatives injured, only a handful of civilians were reportedly harmed. That is an extraordinary feat in modern warfare and the textbook definition of a precision and proportionate attack.
• Link: Sorry, AOC: Israel’s Precision Attack Against Hezbollah Was Humane—and Legal

Antisemitism

TikTok Banned My New Book Even Before It Was Published: TikTok’s Jew-hating problem predates October 7 by Gil Troy in The Jewish Journal

• Last month, I interviewed my brother Tevi Troy during the Jerusalem book launch of his latest, “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.” Eventually, he turned the tables, asking me about my book, “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream,” published September 17. I summarized the argument: that the spread of aggressive, doctrinaire anti-Zionism in academia “isn’t just a Jewish crisis” and “isn’t just a Zionist crisis,” but is “a crisis of liberalism” and higher education. Somehow, TikTok decided to remove my two minute, eight second riff, declaring: “This video violates our Community Guidelines” by passing on “misinformation.” Apparently, TikTok and its Chinese owners are more bullish about America’s universities than most of us are.
• I tried understanding what triggered the ban. It mocked TikTok executives’ repeated denials that TikTok has an antisemitism problem. The managers were reacting to assessments that in one year, the Jew-hating comments on the popular app rose 912 percent, that Jew-haters use code-words like “juice” for Jews and “H!tl3r” and that the all-powerful algorithm, which pushes videos through TikTok’s FYP For You Page tends to send viewers down conspiracy-oriented “rabbit holes,” spewing Jew-hatred.
• Back in 2020, NBC News interviewed half a dozen teenagers who reported that “they experience antisemitism nearly every time they post content to the platform… whether or not the content is about their Judaism.”
• The TikTok problem reflects this double bind – while transcending the Jewish question too. TikTok’s Chinese ownership worries Americans so much that Congress passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” which President Joe Biden signed. It demands that TikTok be sold, to avoid this nefarious Chinese influence. While the Chinese enjoy access to 170 million users’ private information, they also orchestrate the conversation.
• Clearly, these platforms enjoy outsized power in our democracy. Ironically, the surge in canceled posts reflects an attempt to limit the mainstreaming of hate online.
• TikTok’s “Community Principles” of April, 2024 claim that “To strike the right balance with free expression, we restrict content only when necessary and in a way that seeks to minimize the impact on speech.”  Obviously, once again, when it comes to Jewish content, let alone Zionist content, the impulse to restrict is far greater – as is the chilling “impact on speech,” ultimately depriving us of the robust debate we need.
• Link: TikTok Banned My New Book Even Before It Was Published

Jewish Professors Grapple With Shifting Roles on Campus by Talia Elkin with Tablet Magazine

• On Oct. 10, 2023, Susannah Heschel faced a packed audience in a Dartmouth classroom. Seated alongside Heschel were three other professors from Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies. It was a Tuesday evening, and 80 people were crowded in the seats before her; a dozen were watching the livestream from an adjacent classroom; another 1,600 joined virtually.
• The event, which Heschel organized together with her colleague Tarek El-Ariss, chair of Middle Eastern studies, was a forum for the Dartmouth College community titled “A Discussion on the Horrific Events Unfolding in Israel and Gaza.” Beyond trying to give Dartmouth students the opportunity to learn from experts in the field, Heschel and El-Ariss sought to model the type of thoughtful, respectful dialogue demanded of them as members of an academic institution.
• And it worked: Less than two weeks later, the Forward ran an article proclaiming that, alone among our nation’s elite universities, “Dartmouth got it right.” By November, other universities began inviting Heschel and El-Ariss—billed as “Dartmouth experts” on fostering understanding and dialogue—to speak about their work, including Syracuse University, Trinity College, and the University of Virginia. And in February, Rep. Kathy Manning, co-chair of the House Antisemitism Task Force, stated that the Department of Education has been using Dartmouth as a model for other schools in the “best practices in handling discussions on antisemitism and the Middle East.” Over the past year, Heschel’s successful work has cemented her as the foremost expert in combating campus antisemitism through education.
• Heschel isn’t the only Jewish professor grappling with seemingly new expectations of her as an educator. Over the summer, I spoke with eight Jewish professors from American universities about their professional and personal experiences on campus since Oct. 7.
• Some professors I spoke to said that Oct. 7 affected their work lives significantly as a wake-up call. They were forced to grapple with new personal expectations for their jobs in different ways: in their approaches to teaching, relations with colleagues, or interactions with students. For many, the professional changes they experienced—or initiated—arose out of personal necessity.
•  Soon after Oct. 7, however, Mason began witnessing and experiencing antisemitism that, for the first time, made her reevaluate her approach to teaching and research. “I lost a lot of acquaintances and some friends,” Mason recounted about her colleagues. “I couldn’t be around people who didn’t have my viewpoint.” And she hasn’t yet been able to reconcile her values with her recent experiences. “These people I don’t want to talk to, I have to talk to,” Mason acknowledged readily, when I asked her about the way forward. She looked up at the ceiling, then shook her head. “But I don’t want to teach these people. I don’t want to be colleagues with these people.”
• A second challenge is that Jewish studies professors are just that: professors. They are historians, researchers, and educators—not social workers, consultants, or legal counsel. Rebecca Kobrin, a Columbia professor of American Jewish history, echoed Heschel’s sentiments as she explained the predicament matter-of-factly. Kobrin, who also co-directs Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish studies, is currently a member of Columbia’s antisemitism task force. “What we have been asked to do,” she told me, “we are not trained to do.”
• Part of the problem is that university administrators don’t know how to respond to antisemitism. Yet as I heard from many professors, this is not a new phenomenon. Laurie Zoloth, a professor of religion and ethics at the University of Chicago, told me that she was “disappointed, but not surprised” by the administrative responses she saw this past year, largely because she’s seen similar ones before. Zoloth is my academic adviser; I was seated in her office to discuss my upcoming senior thesis, which she had agreed to supervise. But our conversation drifted as we were distracted by the megaphone-enhanced chants from the quad.
• A compounding factor, another professor told me, is administrative bloat. The professor, who teaches at an Ivy League university, explained anonymously that more recent changes in university makeup play a significant role, as well. “By the early ’90s, it became clear that parents and students are customers at colleges, looking for a pretty transcript,” they told me. And colleges responded to the call. As a result, “the structure of universities has changed immensely,” this professor continued, “and the number of administrators has blossomed.” But despite this increase, none of the administrators knew what to do after Oct. 7. “They let us all down.”
• Link: Jewish Professors Grapple With Shifting Roles on Campus

A New Hope for Saving the Universities, by Yuval Levin in Commentary Magazine

• On the one hand, our country’s elite institutions of higher learning are in exceptionally low repute as a new academic year dawns. Public trust in them is at all-time lows, applications and donations have suffered at top schools, and many trustees and alumni are unhappy. Harvard, Penn, Cornell, UCLA, and an unprecedented number of other elite universities are searching for new presidents at the same time, and not by coincidence.
• On the other hand, the struggle against this tide of madness looks to be gaining some ground at last. The fight to sustain something of the traditional academic ethos, waged with courage and patience by conservatives and some old-fashioned liberals in the university, has felt like a noble yet futile cause for decades. But it has started to make real headway on some important campuses lately, thanks not only to public outrage about the excesses of a politicized academy but also to a novel set of strategies and a willingness to use real political muscle to pursue them.
• Academic traditionalists—the people who had long run things—shared a general sense that the foremost purpose of the university was teaching and learning in pursuit of greater knowledge of the truth and in an effort to form better human beings and citizens in its light. And they thought this work would strengthen and reinforce our society by deepening its comprehension of its own ideals and institutions and equipping it with a more enlightened and responsible elite.
• The radical activists confronting them opposed this understanding. They were academic revolutionaries, rather than academic traditionalists. Such people  have sought to deprioritize the traditional pursuit of knowledge and the shaping of students in its light. Instead, they have wanted to prioritize the pursuit of social transformation of a particular sort—the liberation of the oppressed from their oppressors in every realm of life. And they want to shape the students to be handmaids to that purpose.
• The means toward that end are not limited to teaching and learning. Both political expression and social action outside the classrooms and study halls and libraries are taken to be very much in the university’s purview because they serve the ends of social liberation. This isn’t to say the places of study on campus are left alone to continue in their historical role; no, teaching and learning are also to be directed toward social transformation and not the pursuit of truth. As a result, such teaching and learning begin by begging many fundamental questions—by assuming the answers rather than pursuing them. Large swaths of the humanities and social sciences now work this way and have very little patience for people who insist on treating their closed questions as open.
• The academic revolutionaries understand the university to exist in a fundamentally oppositional or critical relation to the larger society. They see it as operating on society more than in it, and as charged with breaking down the inherited order of our society and liberating people from its illusions and strictures.
• But this difference of emphasis makes an enormous difference in practice, especially in the conduct of university administrations—not just the parts of schools dedicated to teaching and learning, but the departments that manage these heavily staffed and highly regulated institutions and their often-sprawling physical plants. Mid-level administrators have also become increasingly politicized under the influence of the revolutionary academic ethos.
• It was the connection between that liberationist vision of the university’s purpose and progressive politics that gave the campus revolution of the 1960s and afterward its force. Because it was a movement of the left, and of the young, it proved very difficult for the self-consciously liberal mid-20th-century university to resist. But this movement never spoke for the entire academic left, and it still doesn’t. Many people—in some disciplines, surely most people—who choose to devote their lives to academic work are liberals who are still drawn to something more like the traditional academic vision.
• As the left in general has grown less liberal, though—by which I mean less tolerant of dissenting views and less interested in the defense of unpopular opinions—these academics have found it more difficult to articulate the traditional academic ethos. In losing the vocabulary of liberalism to the terminology of radicalism, they have allowed the university’s self-understanding—its own description of its purpose—to be defined in the terms of the academic revolutionaries. So while many professors continue to do the traditional work of pursuing knowledge and forming students in its light, many questions of policy and administration in the university are resolved by, or in the direction of, the academic revolutionaries. Those revolutionaries have therefore gradually become the administrators of the academy. So when questions arise about what the university should be, they decide the answers.
• The university was not destroyed, but rather transformed, by the revolution of the past half-century. It has kept its trappings but replaced its ethos. The titles, the modes of governance, the deans and faculty senates, the tenure, the graduation gowns, and the ivy-covered buildings are still there. But they are now mostly populated by men and women with a very different understanding of the goals of the institution from that of their predecessors a few generations ago.
• The university cannot be understood as just another platform for saying anything you want. We have a lot of those now. What we don’t have enough of are venues for engaging in teaching and learning in pursuit of knowledge of the truth. Not all expression serves that purpose, and so not all expression belongs in the university. There is room for standards and for boundaries. But such standards on campus, just like open inquiry and expression on campus, have to exist in the service of the search for truth. That criterion argues for very broad tolerance of expression and speech. But it also suggests that the question of expression and speech is not the key question before us.
• Link: A New Hope for Saving the Universities

Are U.S. Airlines Effectively Boycotting Israel? by Jay Solomon in The Free Press

• For most of the past year, none of the three major American carriers—United Airlines, American Airlines, or Delta—have flown to Israel, citing the Gaza war and the security threats posed by Tehran and its military allies. And none of these airlines have offered definitive time frames for when their flights might resume. This has left Israel’s national carrier, El Al, as the only direct connection between the country and its closest ally and economic partner on the other side of the world, and has sent airfares between the U.S. and Israel skyrocketing.
• In recent days, the cost of a round trip economy flight to Tel Aviv from New York on El Al is around $2,500, according to Israeli travel agencies, up from around $899 before October 7, 2023. United, American, and Delta previously all had at least one daily flight to Israel from New York or Newark, and together served Israel three times a week from Boston, Dallas, Miami, Chicago, and Washington D.C.
• The suspension of the American flights is feeding into the economic and diplomatic isolation that Iran’s leaders are seeking, according to Israeli political and business leaders. “The American carriers are playing into Iran’s game,” said Eyal Hulata, who served as national security adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, from 2021–2023.
• Jerusalem’s allies in Washington are urgently seeking to establish clearer U.S. government guidelines for when U.S. airlines should halt traffic to Israel, and when it can resume. If not, they warn, American carriers risk bolstering, even unwittingly, the economic coercion that Iran and Israel’s critics in the West are pursuing, often under the banner of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, or BDS.
• The three major U.S. carriers initially halted air travel to Israel last October 7 after Hamas militants crossed the country’s southern border and slaughtered 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The airlines’ decisions weren’t ordered, however, by the U.S.’s airline regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA only cautioned American carriers against flying to Israel at the time.
• The FAA’s position was actually much more restrained than in the summer of 2014. Then, Hamas rocket strikes close to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport—the primary international hub near Tel Aviv—caused the airline authority to briefly suspend all outbound U.S. flights. Israeli officials were incensed, arguing the ban amounted to an assault on the country’s economy. American supporters of Israel, including former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, flew to Tel Aviv on El Al flights to show solidarity.
• The three U.S. airlines have said in public statements that their decisions on Israel are tied solely to the security threats posed to their crews and passengers. United and Delta briefly resumed flights to Tel Aviv in June, but then suspended them in August in the wake of the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran—an attack Tehran blamed on Israel and vowed to avenge.
• This, combined with the reduced air traffic, has prompted self-congratulatory comments from Iranian officials, including Ayatollah Khamenei, that their multifront war against the Jewish state is working. Since becoming Iran’s Supreme Leader in 1989, the 84-year-old cleric has made clear that the path toward liberating Palestine will be achieved as much through making Israel unlivable to its Jewish residents as through open warfare.
• Link: Are U.S. Airlines Effectively Boycotting Israel?

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