Last month, while Hamas was launching thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians, the City University of New York’s Jewish Law Students’ Association decided it needed to do something. So it put out a statement affirming “a Palestinian right to return, a free and just Palestine from the river to the sea, and an end to the ongoing nakba”—in other words, calling for the annihilation of the state of Israel. Such Jewish animosity toward the Jewish state is of course not limited to this particular student group. Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy observe:

The anti-Zionists know exactly what they are doing, and what they are undoing. They are trying to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish peoplehood. . . . In repudiating Israel and Zionism, hundreds of Jewish Google employees rejected what they call “the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people.” The voices of inflamed Jewish opponents of Israel and Zionism are in turn amplified by a militant progressive superstructure that now has an ideological lock on the discourse in American academia, publishing, media, and the professions that formerly respected American Jewry’s Zionism-accented, peoplehood-centered constructions of Jewish identity.

We call these critics “un-Jews” because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews [relate to] Jewishness. . . . In launching this attempt, these anti-Zionists join a long history of such un-Jews.

One of the Roman generals who helped raze Jerusalem and destroy the Second Temple may have been the first un-Jew. Tiberius Julius Alexander, the nephew of the leading Jewish philosopher Philo, “did not remain in his ancestral customs,” in the words of the ancient historian Josephus, a Jewish general who himself joined the Roman cause. Then, as now, those annoying Jews insisted on keeping their ghetto, their ethnonationalist state, if you will, and rejected the symbols of Rome’s more worldly multicultural empire.

Historians ultimately don’t know that much about Tiberius. What we do know is that despite his Jewish roots, he was anxious to help the world become civilized like Rome—and he unleashed the Roman legions against Alexandria’s Jews when he was prefect of Egypt from 66 to 69 CE. All this was warming up for his greatest crime against his people, serving as Titus’ second in command in 70 CE when the siege of Jerusalem plunged his own people into exile for nearly 2,000 years.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.