This year, Washington has urged Jerusalem to limit or forbid construction beyond the 1949 armistice lines and to refrain from attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. Yoram Ettinger looks to previous instances when the Jewish state has stood up to American demands without compromising its security or causing lasting damage to its most important alliance:

Defiance of U.S. and global pressure was a critical attribute of Israel’s pro-American founding fathers—from David Ben-Gurion in 1948 through Yitzḥak Shamir in 1992. This defiance triggered [some] short-term friction between the two countries, but earned long-term respect for Israel, while providing the United States with a unique force-multiplier in the Middle East. On a rainy day, the United States prefers a principle-driven ally, one that does not retreat in the face of pressure and refuses to sacrifice its own independent national security on the altar of diplomatic and economic convenience.

In 1948/49, the United States, United Nations, and Britain threatened Israel with economic and diplomatic sanctions unless the newly born Jewish state ended its “occupation” of areas in the Galilee, coastal plain, Negev, and western Jerusalem, and absorbed Palestinian refugees. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion rejected each of these demands, stating that “much as Israel desired friendship with the United States and full cooperation with it and the UN, there were limits beyond which it could not go.”

Israel’s destruction of Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear reactors in 1981 and 2007—in defiance of U.S. pressure—spared the United States, and the world, a potential nuclear confrontation in 1991 and a potential nuclearized civil war in Syria.

As evidenced by these and additional examples, Israel’s defiance of U.S. pressure has advanced U.S. national-security interests, bolstered Israel’s posture of deterrence, enhanced its role as a force-multiplier, constrained the capabilities of anti-U.S. Sunni and Shiite Islamic terrorists, and therefore reduced the scope of war and terrorism in the stormy Middle East.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.