Hillel Can’t Be a Soapbox for Jewish Students’ Anti-Israel Crusade

June 14 2016

Founded by Jewish students at Harvard in 2012, Open Hillel seeks to persuade campus Hillel houses and the organization that coordinates them to change their rules regarding Israel-related programming. These forbid cooperation with groups and speakers advocating actual boycott of the Jewish state or calling for its destruction, but allow events sponsored by left-wing groups like Breaking the Silence, which excoriates the IDF. Jared Samilow explains that Open Hillel is not the tolerant defender of free speech it claims to be:

Open Hillel troopers no doubt fancy themselves brave martyrs struggling to speak truth to power, but this is a comical inversion of reality—at least on a college campus. Unicorns aren’t as rare as pro-Israel humanities professors. Hardly a month passes by without some student government or faculty association condemning Israel.

And guess what? If upholding [Hillel’s] guidelines really does alienate some Jewish students, that’s unfortunately the cost of doing business. If you stand for a real and meaningful principle, then it’s inevitable that somebody will feel unrepresented. The only way to appease everyone is to stand for nothing. If there are Jews who cannot feel comfortable in Hillel unless they are granted a soapbox for their anti-Israel crusade, then that’s just a “loss” we’ll have to absorb.

Besides, we shouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. In perhaps the greatest irony, it turns out that the “open” in Open Hillel is about as accurate as the “democratic” in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Holly Bicerano, who served as a campus outreach coordinator for Open Hillel, recently wrote a blog post about why she quit, explaining that “many Open Hillel leaders have no problem with advocating exclusion and alienation within Open Hillel; . . . many [are also] intolerant of pro-Israel voices that they dislike.” The ringleaders behind Open Hillel aren’t perturbed by the concept of non-inclusiveness; they’re just miffed that they’re the ones being excluded, when they’d prefer to be the ones doing the excluding.

Read more at Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

More about: American Jewry, BDS, Breaking the Silence, Israel & Zionism, Israel on campus

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023