Cole Aronson tells a dramatic and entertaining story from what might have been the golden age of American Zionist summer camps:

In 1950, Moses Feinstein, director of New York’s Herzliah Hebrew Teachers’ Institute, was on a tour of Pennsylvania’s Jewish summer camps. Camp Ramah had for a while flown the Star of David over its grounds, but the blue-and-white flag was now the official symbol of the nascent Jewish state. Ramah’s director, Solomon Feffer, was apparently worried about accusations of dual loyalties, so he switched out the flag for a homemade standard bearing the Ten Commandments. Feinstein, a Hebrew poet and committed Zionist, was outraged.

Feinstein reported the Ramah flag exchange to a group of counselors at his next stop, Camp Massad, and the news sent the zealous youths into orbit. The group included [Ray] Arzt (whose father, Max, was then the vice-chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary) and a boy whose brother had fought the British with Avraham Stern’s Lehi. They wrote up an indictment in florid Hebrew, printed 500 copies, and hired a local pilot and his puddle jumper to fly them over Camp Ramah. Arzt, who knew the Ramah grounds from his previous summers there (and would later serve as the director of Camp Ramah New England) pointed out the target. At his signal, his friend Abie Krausher tossed stacks of leaflets out of the plane while an anxious Louis Bernstein said [Psalms in Hebrew] to secure their safe return.

In 2015, Mosaic published another delightful story about Camp Massad that provides some background about its radical Hebraism.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.