In 2006, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) took a firm stance against academic boycotts. The organization, which publishes a journal called Academic Freedom, has now reversed this decision and declared that “faculty members and students should be free” to boycott whomever they wish. Of course, then and now, it is boycotts of Israel that the AAUP has in mind. Cary Nelson writes:

Individual students and faculty have always had the right to advocate for academic boycotts, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise. But an unqualified right “to make their own choices regarding their participation in them” and not face discipline for doing so validates “rights” that have not previously existed. That will include the right to refuse to write letters of recommendation for highly qualified students who wish to study at Israeli universities, an action that will be defended as only boycotting Israeli institutions. Not that any affected student will accept the distinction.

I predict that hundreds of those and other individual micro-boycotts of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty will be initiated during the 2024–25 academic year as a consequence of the AAUP policy change. There will also be dedicated group efforts to criminalize collaborative research projects between faculty in America and Israel, projects that often entail institutional endorsement and support.

[Previously], the AAUP understood that, unless the opposition to academic boycotts was honored as a universal principle, innumerable debates about boycotting universities in various countries would ensue, and academic boycotts would become routine. The AAUP is now willing to pay that price in the service of its growing anti-Zionism.

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.