Jewish Organizations Shouldn’t Be Defending Anti-Semites

On December 12, a group of progressive Jewish groups issued an open letter opposing now-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s pledge to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee due to, in the letter’s words, “false accusations that she is anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.” The signatories include radical organizations like Americans for Peace Now, but also the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby J Street, the Zionist youth group Habonim-Dror, and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism—the last being the activist wing of America’s largest Jewish denomination. Benjamin Kerstein responds:

The . . . assertion that the accusations against Omar are “false” is a lie. With the best will in the world, Omar’s claims that American Jews buy control of Congress via their “Benjamins” and that support for Israel constitutes loyalty to a foreign country cannot be viewed as anything other than explicitly anti-Semitic.

Omar has never repudiated or apologized for these statements. She clearly believes that she is merely speaking truth to power—which in this context can only be viewed as “Jewish” power. This is how all anti-Semites—of whatever political stripe—view themselves, and to claim that Omar has been falsely accused is, in effect, to endorse such attitudes as legitimate and defensible. The profession of Omar’s innocence, in other words, is anti-Semitic in and of itself.

[Omar’s career] is the first step towards the legitimization and institutionalization of systemic anti-Semitism in the American political establishment. The battle against her is therefore an existential struggle for American Jews. The Reform leadership has now made it clear that not only will it refrain from this struggle, it will actively impede it. It has become, in other words, part of the problem.

The Reform leadership has a right to fight for progressive values. It has a right to criticize Israeli policies should it so desire. It does not have the right to enable those who would.

Read more at JNS

More about: American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Ilhan Omar, Reform Judaism, U.S. Politics

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