Anti-Semitism Infects Bangladeshi Politics

Last month, Aslam Chowdhury, a high-ranking member of the Bangladeshi Nationalist party (BNP), the country’s largest opposition party, made an official visit to India where he met a Likud-affiliated Israeli Druze political consultant named Mendi Safadi. Photographs of the two shaking hands soon made their way into a Bangladeshi newspaper, leading to Chowdhurry’s arrest for sedition. Sebastian Bustle explains:

Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Israel. It is a country where Jews and the Israeli people are cursed in every Friday sermon, at more than 250,000 mosques. Imams across the country shout [in their sermons] that Jewish people are infidels. . . .

On May 15, police detectives arrested Chowdhury for alleged “involvement in a plot to oust the Bangladesh government with the support of Israeli intelligence Mossad [sic].” Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikha Hasina, accused two [major opposition] parties, BNP and Jamaat-e Islami Bangladesh, of being “so desperate that they are now conspiring with Israel to oust me. . . . They have joined hands with those who are frequently killing children and women in Palestine.”

The Bangladesh Nationalist party heavily depends on religious Muslim supporters, and Jamaat-e Islami Bangladesh is an Islamist political party that believes in Islamic revolution.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Anti-Semitism, Bangladesh, Druze, Islamism, Israel, Politics & Current Affairs

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