Last week, the American journalist Peter Beinart—a relentless left-wing critic of the Jewish state and a supporter of boycotts of the settlements—wrote a story for the Forward recounting his extensive questioning by Israeli police upon his arrival at Ben-Gurion airport. He asserted that, based on the questions he was asked, he was being harassed because of his political beliefs. While no admirer of Beinart’s politics, Ben-Dror Yemini believes something is amiss with the Shin Bet, the Israeli agency that oversees internal security matters:

[It] is a state’s right to deny entry to those who reject its right to exist. Any civilized nation has a list of undesirables, and Israel’s lists are not much different from those of Britain or the U.S. But something has changed. Someone has [become] trigger-happy. Now it’s the “questioning” of Peter Beinart, which follows other unnecessary questioning of “suspects” whom there was no reason to suspect of anything. Not everyone who wrote an article against Israel or against one policy or another of the Israeli government needs to be questioned. And if that were the case, then 80 percent of academics, NGO members, and journalists . . . would have to be detained and questioned.

[It would therefore seem] that in recent months, someone at the Shin Bet has decided to act in the service of Israel’s vilifiers and provide proof to those who claim Israel has stopped being a democracy. . . .

These detainments, [however], don’t point to an Israel deteriorating and turning into a police state, or to the end of democracy. They point to the loss of discretion and to a severe level of stupidity, and that is no less grave. . . . [E]verything Beinart and his ilk have to say, they say in writing. They don’t belong to any underground movement. . . . We don’t have to wait for it to happen to know that every detainment like this is on the one hand a propaganda gift to Israel’s haters, and on the other hand useless. . . .

The Shin Bet needs a political [director] who understands the global left-wing map. Someone who could differentiate between activists of the campaign to eliminate Israel—who should be denied entry—and journalists or [run-of-the-mill] left-wing activists who have a right to criticize Israel, call for a boycott on settlement products, and even curse the Israeli government without being detained as they enter or leave the country.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.