Open Hillel, an organization dedicated to welcoming anti-Israel discourse into Jewish life on campus, has issued a new manifesto with signatures from a long list of professors. Edward Alexander explains what’s at stake:

Although Open Hillel has several chapters of its own on campuses as adversarial counterparts to Hillel, it has now decided that the cause of “inclusivity” and “diversity” requires Hillel itself to extend a hand of welcome (and cash) to BDSers and other Jewish Israel-haters to subvert a central pillar of Hillel’s own raison d’être. [Open Hillel’s latest] manifesto demands that Hillel aspire to the standards of free expression, of “diversity of experience and opinion,” that prevail in universities generally, and especially in “our classrooms.” . . .

In “The Sermon,” a famous Hebrew short story of 1942 by Ḥayyim Hazaz, a character named Yudka declares that, “When a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist”; nowadays, it would be truer to say that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.”

[A] word or two about this ideal of “inclusivity” or, as it is more commonly called, “inclusiveness”: is it possible that nobody, in the course of their academic careers, ever told these . . . occupants of endowed chairs [lending their support to Open Hillel] that exclusion is as much a function of intellect as inclusion?

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.