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.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.