The Dangers of American Anti-Racists’ Embrace of Anti-Semitism

Since the killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been reinvigorated. And more than ever, much of its institutional leadership has made common cause with anti-Israel activists. Dan Diker writes:

Groups acting under the BLM umbrella, such as the “Movement for Black Lives,” championed by activists like [the Temple University professor and television commentator Marc Lamont] Hill, have accused Israel of genocide and apartheid. The Movement for Black Lives subsequently watered down these charges in its official documents, [which now merely claim] that Israel contributes to the “shackling of our community.” In the same brief, the Movement for Black Lives lists the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS) as one of its partners. [The group’s] leaders have not disguised their neo-Marxist ideological positions that prescribe the necessary dismantling of American institutions and the dissolution of the state of Israel.

BDS’s appropriation of BLM protests has also revealed the backing of Palestinian Marxist-Leninist terror organizations. For example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a member organization of the PLO and a terror group so designated by the United States and the EU, issued a public statement of support.

BDS-BLM intersectionality, as the face of the current [intensification of] identity politics in the United States, . . . deepens the challenge to Israel and to American Jewry. . . . The rebranding of Israel as a white-supremacist entity categorizes Diaspora Jews as “white supremacists” by extension, unless they disavow Israel as a centerpiece of their American Jewish identity.

Read more at Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Black Lives Matter, PFLP, U.S. Politics

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