On April 29, the Harvard Crimson published an editorial endorsing boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning Israel (BDS). Then, on June 9—in response to a dissenting opinion piece by a student—it published an indignant letter from Omar Barghouti, the founder of the BDS movement. Gemma Schneider, a member of the Crimson editorial board who objected to the initial editorial, reacts:

Barghouti . . . repeats a host of deceptive anti-Zionist talking points, recycling references to what others have dubbed “Jewish supremacy” while highlighting reports that characterize the Israel-Palestinian relationship as a racial dispute. These declarations aren’t just wildly distorted; they’re dangerous. They paint a reductive portrait of the Jewish state, demonizing the nation and delegitimizing its very existence. But they are also provocative, evoking emotion, and are cloaked with a blanket of resonant humanitarian claims. For unknowing onlookers with a taste for justice, that seems to be all that matters.

This slick dynamic, I’ve come to realize, captures the essence—and the dangerous “artistry”—of the broader BDS movement. It is my intuition that Zionism is not what the Editorial Board—or most people backing an anti-Zionist agenda in the name of justice—believes it is rejecting, or likening to racism and cruelty. Instead, they are rejecting a false projection of Zionism—one that has been carefully constructed by movements like BDS.

Jewish people are also systematically shut down by the BDS movement’s followers when they try to speak up. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a central goal of [Students for Justice in Palestine], a leading source of BDS activism on college campuses, is to protest pro-Israel campus events by heckling speakers to the point of [silence]. As dialogue is stifled by anti-Zionist and pro-BDS students, vilifying slurs and monikers, new and old, also tend to make their way into the air—from [repeating] the trope of a “smelly Jew,” to chanting “Zionists are terrorists,” to spewing the words “f—ing Zionist.”

BDS’s strategy of ideological warfare is all the more frightening because of how well it works—after all, it has led some of the most decent, kind, and thoughtful people that I know at Harvard to become patrons and propagators of anti-Semitism.

Ron Ben-Yishai, reporting from a visit to IDF forces in the Gaza Strip, analyzes the state of the fighting, and “the persistent challenge of eradicating an entrenched enemy in a complex urban terrain.”

Hamas, sensing the war’s end, is mounting a final effort to inflict casualties. The IDF now controls 65 percent of Gaza’s territory operationally, with observation, fire dominance, and relative freedom of movement, alongside systematic tunnel destruction. . . . Major P, a reserve company commander, says, “It’s frustrating to hear at home that we’re stagnating. The public doesn’t get that if we stop, Hamas will recover.”

Senior IDF officers cite two reasons for the slow progress: meticulous care to protect hostages, requiring cautious movement and constant intelligence gathering, and avoiding heavy losses, with 22 soldiers killed since June.

Two-and-a-half of Hamas’s five brigades have been dismantled, yet a new hostage deal and IDF withdrawal could allow Hamas to regroup. . . . Hamas is at its lowest military and governing point since its founding, reduced to a fragmented guerrilla force. Yet, without complete disarmament and infrastructure destruction, it could resurge as a threat in years.

At the same time, Ben-Yishai observes, not everything hangs on the IDF:

According to the Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman, the IDF is close to completing its objectives. In classical military terms, “defeat” means the enemy surrenders—but with a jihadist organization, the benchmark is its ability to operate against Israel.

Despite [the IDF’s] battlefield successes, the broader strategic outcome—especially regarding the hostages—now hinges on decisions from the political leadership. “We’ve done our part,” said a senior officer. “We’ve reached a crossroads where the government must decide where it wants to go—both on the hostage issue and on Gaza’s future.”