How a Palestinian Terrorist Group Gets Money from European Governments and Put a Member on the Bernie Sanders Campaign

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—responsible for a series of high-profile hijackings in 1968 and 1970, the 2014 Har Nof synagogue massacre, and countless other acts of terror—received some attention last week when major videoconferencing platforms refused to host a talk given by one of its leaders. Besides its active involvement in terrorism, the PFLP runs a sophisticated political operation that garners support from various private and public institutions in the West. Yossi Kuperwasser explains:

For many left-wing organizations in the West, cooperation with the PFLP comes naturally. It is a reminder of the “glorious” era when the Soviet Union was a superpower competing for global dominance against “the corrupt capitalist West” (the PFLP still uses this kind of vocabulary). When the Soviet bloc collapsed, these groups had to find a new cause célèbre around which to unite. The PFLP was among the first groups to understand the potential of recruiting softer anti-Israel elements into its networks and to leverage those elements to gain financial support from naïve international donors.

It does so often by creating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that can work as front groups, such as Addameer: a self-described “civil institution” devoted to “human rights” and led by such men as Salah Hamouri, who orchestrated a plot to murder Israel’s former chief rabbi Ovadiah Yosef in 2005. And this strategy has achieved success:

The grotesque terror-NGO hybrid that the PFLP has perfected is especially notable for its success in gaining funding from the EU and from individual European countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden. These entities are entirely aware of these organizations’ affiliation with the PFLP and the roles that terror activists play in the PFLP’s network of “human-rights” NGOs.

“Dream Defenders,” a relatively small Florida-based radical organization that operates within the Black Lives Matter coalition and has on its board well-known figures like Angela Davis and Linda Sarsour, cooperates with the PFLP directly. For them, no fig leaves are needed; the PFLP itself is a symbol of struggle, apparently including its commitment to stabbing, shooting, and blowing up innocent people. . . . Earlier this year, Dream Defenders co-founder Umi Selah, also known as Phillip Agnew, was hired by the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, NGO, Palestinian terror, PFLP

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