What the Proposed Senate Resolution on Anti-Semitism Gets Right

Rather than issuing a resolution censuring Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for her noxious comments about American support for Israel, or even one denouncing anti-Semitism in general, the House of Representatives instead passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism as but one in a long laundry list of other bigotries—to the frustration of some representatives of both parties. To remedy the situation, Ted Cruz has introduced a far less equivocal resolution of his own in the Senate. Liel Leibovitz explains what the new resolution gets right:

[T]he resolution . . . shows an understanding, rare for the generally vapid genre of official declarations read from the Senate floor, of the lived experience of actual American Jews. It acknowledges that anti-Semitism isn’t some opaque and abstract construct best understood by theorizing about hegemony, intersectionality, or other concepts beloved by the grievance-peddlers in college classrooms, but an all too real prejudice that continues to afflict real Jews in unique and nonreplicable ways.

This is not only an ontological distinction, but a political one as well. If you view the world exclusively through the lens of big, broad categories—race, sexual orientation, religious belief—you are likely to prefer the sort of legislation that sees people as not much more than extras in an epic drama of clashing identities.

That’s why reparations, for example, long opposed by the majority of Americans—including about half of all African-Americans—and considered a nonstarter by nearly all mainstream politicians, has become a cause célèbre for several of the Democrats running for president in 2020. Benefiting not those who had suffered but their distant descendants, the policy proposal is the perfect embodiment of how progressives think about politics: a contest between warring groups that can be decided only by sweeping and symbolic gestures.

Cruz’s resolution, on the other hand, shows a dramatically different way of thinking. Rather than treating Jews as a metaphor—an amorphous group whose suffering can be distilled into some politically valuable and intoxicating elixir—it is careful to enumerate the ways in which individuals have suffered.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, Congress, Politics & Current Affairs, Ted Cruz

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF