Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a bill banning the popular video app TikTok if the Chinese media company ByteDance doesn’t divest its shares. The app allows for the easy sharing of short videos and, thanks especially to its algorithms, wastes countless hours of time. But the more serious problem is that companies like ByteDance are de-facto organs of the Chinese government, and TikTok is already being used to surveil and collect tremendous amounts of data about Americans. Moreover, because the app works by offering up a stream of suggested videos to users, its programmers can amplify content with the political and ideological messages it favors. And that’s why Jews, and friends of the Jewish state, should hope the Senate approves the bill. Cole Aronson explains:

One month after the October 7 Hamas attack, TikTok videos with hashtags like #freepalestine were watched by Americans about 50 times more than pro-Israel ones. Although the app’s users skew young and hence leftward, their politics probably don’t account for the ratio. . . . Moreover, the company apparently rejected ads from the families of Israeli hostages as too political while accepting ones from pro-Palestinian groups.

In fact, a 2023 study suggested that spending at least 30 minutes per day on TikTok increases a person’s chance of holding anti-Semitic or anti-Israel beliefs by 17 percent. Aronson looks into why this is so:

One way to approach China’s strategic interest in American opposition to Israel is through the works of Wang Huning, the fourth-highest ranking member of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee and China’s most powerful intellectual. . . . In 1988, Wang spent several months in the United States. The final section of his remarkable philosophical travel memoir, America against America, notes America’s difficulty cultivating faithful heirs of its traditions.

Wang’s early tract and his seniority in the CCP suggest . . . a hostile bid for the management of what young Americans believe and feel, to impede older Americans from passing on their way of life.

The U.S.-Israel alliance is especially vulnerable to such a strategy. In Congress, and among older voters, support for Israel remains a point of unusual bipartisan agreement. But a Quinnipiac poll from October 17, 2023, found a 30-percentage-point gap between voters older than 50 and voters younger than 35 on whether America should arm Israel against Hamas. It is difficult to think of another political topic with that degree of intergenerational fracture.

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.