Benny Avni examines the terms of the Israel-Hizballah cease-fire proposal:

In essence, the pact is a return to an arrangement dictated by a UN Security Council resolution, 1701, reached in the aftermath of the 2006 Hizballah war on Israel. An earlier council resolution, 1559, also ordered all Lebanese militias to disarm. Now, America and France are guaranteeing implementation.

Over the years Hizballah became a stronger military force than Lebanon’s national army. Its Radwan Force became entrenched in the south, dug tunnels into Israel, and planned to capture the Galilee. For months, the IDF has been decimating the Hizballah leadership and arsenal. It also captured a five-mile belt inside Lebanon, destroying Hizballah’s tunnels and observation towers, and disbanding Radwan.

Prime Minister Netanyahu will lobby his cabinet partners to vote for the deal. The more complex task he faces, though, will be to convince residents of northern Israel that the pact would guarantee they could return home safely. More than 60,000 Galilee residents have been dislocated and have been living in hotels further south since October 8, 2023. Creating conditions for their return has been the government’s declared goal.

“Anyone saying that the war’s aims were achieved is mistaken,” Mayor David Azulay of Israel’s northernmost town, Metula, told [Israel’s] Channel 12 News. “I’ll advise Metula residents not to return. Let them stay in Tel Aviv, or wherever.”

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.