Because of the Sukkot holiday, the death of Yahya Sinwar, the attack on Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence (see below), and other developments, it’s easy to forget some of last week’s events. One that certainly deserves further attention is a leaked October 13 letter to Israel from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense of Lloyd Austin, accusing it (based on highly dubious evidence) of having “contributed to starvation and widespread suffering” in Gaza, and “particularly in the enclave’s north,” where the IDF has renewed intensive activity. The letter threatens the cutting off of the resupply of munitions if Jerusalem doesn’t take appropriate steps within 30 days. Noah Rothman argues that the Biden administration is presenting Israel with “an impossible conundrum.”

If Israel has just 30 days to wrap up new counterinsurgency operations in the Gaza Strip’s northern territories, it would have to do so with unnecessary disregard for the lives of both the IDF and Gaza’s civilians. Speedy military operations in densely populated urban areas are also bloody operations, and the Biden administration would surely react with just as much horror to that outcome as it has to the tactics Israel is presently employing. But a more methodical approach designed to preserve as much life as possible may extend beyond Washington’s arbitrary timeline.

What’s more, the circumstances that are contributing to Washington’s apprehension may be yet another product of an imperfect information environment and the selective interpretation of facts on the ground by Israel’s monomaniacal critics in the UN.

[But] the impression that the threat of a humanitarian catastrophe looms forever just over the horizon appears to be an impression the administration wants to cultivate.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.