Considering the way the anti-Israel left combines its peculiar ideas of morality with its peculiar brand of anti-Semitism, Yehoshua Pfeffer explains the challenge it poses:

In a world that cares only about power inequality, the Jew loses all status. Abraham was chosen by God for his dedication to justice; he cannot live in a justice-free space. Moreover, when seen through the binary progressive lens of oppressor and oppressed, the Jew represents the quintessential evil: he becomes the epitome of whiteness, colonialism, imperialism, and patriarchism; he is oppression incarnate, and the oppressed Arab (or Palestinian) is goodness personified. . . .

Right-wing anti-Semitism drove us, decades ago, to physical independence in the Jewish state. Today, left-wing anti-Semitism inspires us to build on our spatial freedom and achieve a type of independence we have yet to develop and cultivate: intellectual independence.

To achieve such independence, writes Pfeffer, Jews must be willing to reject the recent trends of the world of ideas, and try to recover modes of thought and moral ideals rooted in their own tradition:

Notwithstanding its political independence, Israel has not made concerted efforts to cultivate a parallel [intellectual] space free from the shackles of academic uniformity. On the contrary, core institutions have copied the liberal ideas that 20th-century Jews had become so enamored with. In its early years, socialism was a dominant force in Israel’s economy and social models. Though socialism has declined and the kibbutzim mainly privatized, Israel’s universities, popular media, state institutions, and significant elements within branches of government (in particular the legal system) continue to reflect the same left-progressive principles that are breeding anti-Semitism worldwide.

Today, in an age of Jewish sovereignty and a period of unprecedented crisis, we must ensure that these study halls, haredi and otherwise, devote significant energies to the great questions of human life that contemporary academia [seeks to answer]. Israel must become the countercultural reaction against the anti-Semitism-breeding academic orthodoxy.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.