The State of California Puts Anti-Semitism and Critical Race Theory on the Public-School Curriculum

In 2016, California passed a law mandating that ethnic studies become part of the high-school curriculum, and set a task force to work on developing such a course of study. Three years later, the task force came back with a 600-page document, that helpfully defined ethnic studies as the examination of “people whose cultures, histories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving,” as well as “mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations.”

The document also lists the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement alongside domestic America movements like Black Lives Matter and refers to the creation of a Jewish state as the nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). Moreover, Emily Benedek notes, it neglects to mention Martin Luther King, Jr. or Thurgood Marshall as influential “people of color,” but does find room to praise Pol Pot. Nor does it mention anti-Semitism in its laundry list of other forms of bigotry. But, Benedek explains, all this is to be expected from a document shaped by the fashionable academic ideology known as critical race theory, the roots of which she traces to the backlash against the firing of George Murray by a California university in 1968:

In a speech a week before his firing, George Murray, who also served as the “minister of education” for the Black Panther Party, declared the U.S. Constitution a “lie” and the American flag a “piece of toilet paper” deserving to be flushed. He also attacked Jewish people as “exploiters of the Negroes in America and South Africa” and called for “victory to the Arab people” over Israel.

This approach saturates the model curriculum, which received ample criticism, as did a second version. Now the state government is evaluating third draft, which, writes Benedek, is little better:

For example, a historical resource was added with the following description of prewar Zionism: “the Jews have filled the air with their cries and lamentations in an effort to raise funds and American Jews, as is well known, are the richest in the world.”

To placate critics, the third version [also] has added lessons about Korean Americans, Armenian Americans, and Sikhs. Two lessons have been offered about Jews. One . . . teaches that Mizraḥi Jews coming to the United States from Arab lands were mistreated by “white” Ashkenazim. The other suggests that Jews of European descent benefit from “white privilege.”

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, California, Idiocy

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