At a California University, a Textbook Case of Blindness to Left-Wing Anti-Semitism

After anti-Semitic flyers were posted on the University of California, Davis campus last fall, administrators invited the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to lead workshops on anti-Semitism. But the ADL happens to be in the sights of the rabidly anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which sent an angry letter to administrators urging them not to cooperate with the organization. Here SJP follows in the footsteps of a related, and equally vicious organization, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has been pursuing the ADL for helping U.S. police officers visit Israel. Jonathan Marks explains:

[JVP’s] “Deadly Exchange” campaign cynically seeks to exploit the relative popularity of Black Lives Matter by pinning anti-black discrimination on Israel and American Jewish organizations opposed to the demonization of the Jewish state. JVP specifically targets educational trips to Israel by U.S. law enforcement. . . . Review the logic: U.S. law enforcement, the argument goes, systematically discriminates against black people. To do that, they must travel to Israel, since that is where you go shopping for evil. But to make such shopping trips happen, you need Jewish organizations.

As one promotional video put it, “Who is making this deadly exchange possible? The main groups are actually U.S.-based Jewish organizations” Get it? Scratch American race prejudice and you reveal the Jewish state, working with American Jews who care more about it than they care about their vulnerable fellow citizens. . . .

[A]ccording to UC Davis’s student newspaper, the Aggie, [SJP’s] charges against the ADL were compelling enough to move UC Davis to put its plans on hold. So frightened was UC Davis’s chancellor Gary May by 149 signatures that he denied any involvement in one ADL workshop. . . .

[E]ven when it tries to focus on anti-Semitism, Davis’s administration is blind to it when it comes from the left.

Read more at Commentary

More about: ADL, Anti-Semitism, Israel & Zionism, Israel on campus, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, University

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