South African BDS Supporters Want to Expel Jews from Their University

At the Durban University of Technology, a resolution passed by the student council stated “that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should deregister.” The administration promptly rejected the resolution, but the episode is symptomatic of the extent to which South Africans who hate Israel admit that they hate Jews in general. More troubling still, the country’s ruling party has proved willing to condone or even support such behavior. Yair Rosenberg writes:

[T]o anyone who has followed [South Africa’s] Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, the [resolution] should come as no surprise. In fact, it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the illiberal and frequently anti-Semitic actions of the anti-Israel activist community in South Africa.

Conflating all Jews with Israel and its policies—and attacking them for it—is textbook anti-Semitism. It is also increasingly common in South Africa. This past September, a senior official from the country’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party pulled out of a conference celebrating the Jewish role in the fight against apartheid that had been organized by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. The move was praised by the ANC Youth League, which had organized a pro-Palestinian protest against the event. These actions came just after the ANC and several other organizations released a statement declaring, “We are now heightening our campaign aimed at boycotting and isolating Israel as a state founded on the basis of apartheid, which according to international law and several UN conventions is a crime against humanity.”

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Israel & Zionism, South Africa, South African Jewry, University

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF