For Jewish graduate students taking a clinical psychology course at
George Washington University—the first of three in a required “diversity sequence”—it didn’t take long to realize that the instructor, Lara Sheehi, had no intention of keeping her obsessive hatred of Israel out of the classroom, even though Middle East politics had no bearing on the class’s ostensible subject matter. The students raised their concerns with the university and, when administrators proved unsympathetic, filed a formal Title VI complaint. Cary Nelson provides a detailed analysis:

By mid-November, the Jewish students learned that Sheehi had been disparaging them in faculty groups. . . . This escalated to an allegation that the students were racist. The result was that the students were subjected to disciplinary proceedings. Then matters became Orwellian. As the complaint specifies, “rather than provide the students with a statement of their offense, faculty have instead asked the students to describe to the faculty what they did wrong and what harm they caused.” This amounted to a forced confession, one with a built-in threat that they could be judged unsuitable to become therapists if they did not cooperate.

Sheehi’s antipathy toward the Jewish state permeates not only her teaching but also her academic work and social-media accounts. Turning to the former, and in particular the book Sheehi coauthored with her husband, Nelson demonstrates “the therapeutic perils of combining anti-Zionism with a social-justice agenda.”

There is a fundamental—and likely unresolvable—contradiction built into this agenda. The Sheehis’ political convictions lead them to see all Israelis, whatever their job titles, as undifferentiated, interchangeable agents of the occupation. In [one paper], she properly condemns the belief system that “collapses Islam into a monolithic entity with an essential potentiality for violence,” but she embraces that very prejudice regarding Israelis. The pressures psychoanalysis might exert toward individuation have no impact there. Similarly, both as victims of Israeli oppression and as avatars of “resistance,” Palestinians become interchangeable in [the Sheehis’] eyes.

[As a solution, the Sheehis] offer violence, not so much as a means to an end, even as a way to compel negotiation, but rather as the only valid form of Palestinian self-expression, one that traditional psychoanalysis aims to suppress. It begins with their effort to valorize suicide, a form of Palestinian violence against the self that they endorse. It is an extraordinary stand for clinicians to take.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.