Whatever Israel does, it will no doubt be greeted with more libels, demonstrations, and the harassment of Jews. Into this situation comes the Nexus Project, a group led primarily by Jewish academics and rabbis, whose stated goal is to advocate “for full implementation of President Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism and against the use of false accusations of anti-Semitism as political weapons.” In 2012, Nexus issued a set of guidelines for identifying when anti-Israel speech and activity should be considered anti-Semitic, which Ben Cohen described in Mosaic as “a wholly dissatisfying compromise” between two rival definitions of anti-Semitism.

Last month, Nexus produced a nine-page “Campus Guide to Identifying Anti-Semitism in a Time of Perplexity.” Cary Nelson comments:

Are you perplexed? I’m not. I’m horrified and very worried. But I’m not confused, puzzled, uncertain, or perplexed. Neither, really, is the Nexus group. It wants to be certain that the permissive spaces it made available to anti-Zionism with its February 2021 “Nexus Document” have not been curtailed or disqualified by the flood of anti-Semitism that engulfed the world following the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel.

Nexus promises “a nuanced and contextualized approach to thinking about anti-Semitism in this current moment.” Indeed, they call for a “judicious review” of meaning “in different contexts,” but then they abandon context in a futile search for intrinsic meaning. That may be the crux of the problem with what the Nexus group has done. . . . By asking for definitive proof of hateful intentions, Nexus inoculates much anti-Zionist agitation from the conclusion it is anti-Semitic. And that is exactly what the Nexus group has always wanted.

This new Nexus project is necessary because anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist statements and actions flooded the campuses and major cities of the West in the wake of the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023.

Part of the problem with Nexus’s approach is that it creates endless conversation about what is and isn’t anti-Semitic. Perhaps some people accusing Israel of heinous crimes it never committed and calling for its destruction in a sea of bloodshed aren’t motivated by hatred of Jews. Does that make them any less evil?

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.