In the past, the Brooklyn-based public-relations firm Big Duck has worked extensively with several Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. But it recently informed the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI)—an educational and research center with a decidedly liberal bent—that it would not do business with it for unclear reasons related to Israel. Daniel Gordis, in a wide-ranging reflection on contemporary anti-Semitism, observes:

It would be hard to think of an outfit that is more intellectually acute, moderate, open to a plethora of voices, [and] openly critical of Israel’s policies on numerous issues, that works with Jews and Muslims together, religious and secular—you get the picture. (For the record, I have no affiliation with the Hartman Institute.) Big Duck later claimed that it did not to know about that dimension of Hartman, but to believe that, you’d have to believe that it turned down working with SHI without so much as reading the SHI website.

Realizing that they’d stepped in it, big time, Big Duck tried to make the best of things. . . . “Big Duck does not decline work with organizations solely due to their position on BDS or presence in Israel,” Farra Trompeter, Big Duck’s co-director said. Ouch. The “sin” here wasn’t being situated over the Green Line, or being pro-annexation, or pro-settlement expansion. Or whatever. The sin was having a “presence in Israel.”

The problem isn’t Israel’s policies. The problem is Israel.

And that isn’t so different from what Gordis observed in a podcast conversation between the Anglo-American journalist Andrew Sullivan and the Israeli thinker (and Hartman Institute senior fellow) Yossi Klein Halevi:

Sullivan said on several occasions things like “it’s hard for me not to want Israel to succeed, and it’s hard for me not to see Israel as an astonishing story,” adding that he admires “what has been positively built there, which is stunning.” But it couldn’t end there, could it? . . . That quote about Israel being an “astonishing story” came just seconds before the conversation ended. Still, just as the curtain was dropping, Sullivan wished Klein Halevi well, and closed by noting that he prayed “for you, and for your country, and for those who find your country such an intolerable source of oppression and misery.”

It was a stunning about face. It sounded like Sullivan had been quite taken with Klein Halevi, but then, at the very last minute, remembered his audience. So in what may have been an act of survival, . . . he preserved his bona fides with the world of his listeners, adding the entirely gratuitous comment about “oppression and misery.”

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”