Today’s American Jews Have Much to Learn from Their British Coreligionists about Fighting Anti-Semitism

In just over a year, the U.S. has witnessed three mass-shootings of Jews, among many other signs of rising and more visible anti-Semitism. Yossi Klein Halevy holds up the success of Anglo-Jewry in presenting a united front against Jeremy Corbyn, and in joining forces with sympathetic non-Jews, as a useful model for American Jews. A similar approach, he notes, characterized American-Jewish efforts on behalf of Soviet Jewry:

The Jewish pushback against Corbynism united British Jewry and isolated its far-left extremists, created alliances with prominent non-Jews, and helped to convince many non-Jewish voters that a Prime Minister Corbyn would be toxic for England precisely because he would be toxic for its Jews.

Prominent Labor leaders, along with cultural figures like J.K. Rowling and John Le Carré, broke with Corbyn and stood with the Jews. When the British chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis took the unprecedented step of warning about the danger of Corbyn-led Britain, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, publicly affirmed the legitimacy of his anxiety. This, too, was a result of decades of Jewish-Christian dialogue efforts.

Whether consciously or not, British Jewry adopted the playbook developed a generation ago by the international protest movement to free Soviet Jewry. . . . One of the challenges facing the Soviet Jewry movement in its early years was how to overcome the notion, widespread among many on the left around the world, that the Soviet Union, for all its “mistakes” under Stalin, still represented a humane alternative to the capitalist West. . . . British Jews today [similarly] understood that the great threat to their wellbeing now came from precisely the camp that had for generations largely defined British Jewish political identity.

In their campaign against Corbynism, Britain’s Jewish leaders kept the dividing line within the Jewish community to a bare minimum. The line didn’t run between left and right, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, but between the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community and Corbyn’s Jewish apologists. . . . Once Jews summon the courage to define threat and publicly resist it, non-Jewish allies appear.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Anti-Semitism, British Jewry, Jeremy Corbyn, Soviet Jewry

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