Beginning in the 1960s with Soviet efforts to brand Zionism as racism, and with the embrace of anti-Semitism by some radical black activists, Gil Troy tells the story of how the Palestinian cause became accepted by a large segment of the American progressive left as part and parcel of the fight against racism and discrimination at home:

The equation of Zionism and racism, no matter how obviously ahistorical and unfair—no other form of nationalism is accused of being inherently racist—resonates and contaminates, inasmuch as race continues to have a hold on American emotions. The purpose of the slur is obvious and toxic: it aims to place American Jews, the vast majority of whom identify as some form of Zionist, outside the bounds of normal American morality, while stigmatizing Israel with America’s own historical guilt over race relations.

Time and again, the Palestinian cause gets a free pass other movements somehow don’t merit. When the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, its activists policed any attempts to broaden their slogan to include other identity groups. Yet pro-Palestinian activists were allowed to appropriate the slogan “Palestinian Lives Matter” and to embed themselves in an internationalized framework against “oppression” that extends “from Ferguson to Gaza.”

In what was dubbed the “deadly exchange,” intersectional propagandists for Palestine charged that the “Israeli military trains U.S. police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically target Black and Brown bodies.” This lie transformed some police junkets into nonexistent IDF boot camps where innocent American cops were systematically reeducated into specialized Israeli techniques of racial brutality.

The point of this bizarre accusation was not just that the Jews are oppressors. It was that “the Jews” are guilty of the most heinous crime in the American cosmos. Eerily echoing traditional blood libels, Jews became racist oppressors, complicit in, even responsible for, America’s original sin: racist oppression. After all, it was the IDF that “perfected” the chokehold “used to murder George Floyd,” hundreds of academics and students in the University of California system declared. In other words, it was “the Jews” who had actually killed the 21st century’s leading American Black martyr.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.