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.

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.