From Pause Back to Fighting: Report from the Gaza Front
Israel used the pause in fighting from November 24 to December 1 to prepare for a new round of operations in Gaza. This became clear as Israeli units began on December 3 to assault Khan Yunis, the major city in southern Gaza. >> Reports from the Gaza Front: Read more from Seth J. Frantzman On […]
An Exchange of Views on Progressives and the Link between Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism
Dear Nadav, We first met when you were President Shimon Peres’s foreign policy advisor and I have long admired you as one of Israel’s most skilled diplomats. J Street also recognized this in appointing you to be its Executive Director in Israel. I believe you are a particularly good role model at this time – a […]
The Hostages Held in Gaza – <br>And Israel’s Contradictory Impulses
There is nothing rational, let alone normative, about a situation where a terror group and its affiliates took 240 people hostage – toddlers and elderly people, children and women, young revelers abused and then abducted from a desert rave, as well as soldiers (both women and men) surprised in their bases. The numbers keep changing […]
Why is It So Difficult for Israel to Decipher Hamas?
As they were marching towards Jerusalem, the knights of the First Crusade lay siege to the city of Antioch in southern Anatolia from October 1097 to June 1098. They were approached there by envoys of the Fatimid dynasty ruling Egypt, who offered the Crusaders a plan to cooperate against the Seljuk state then in possession […]
Anti-Israel Activism in American Universities II <br>Middle Eastern Studies and Israel Studies
>> Read part I: The Advent of Anti-Israel Sentiment on Campus In Part I, I described the rise of anti-Israel activism on college campuses, which paralleled the political discourse in American society. Here I delve into the roles of Middle Eastern Studies and Israel Studies. For half a century, one-sided Arab views of Middle Eastern Studies […]
Anti-Israel Activism in American Universities I <br>The Advent of Anti-Israel Sentiment on Campus
Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh.[ “All Israel is bound one to the other,” Jewish legal principle of the Talmud.] Introduction What hit Israelis with such ferocity and sudden force in the villages and kibbutzim on the Gaza border on October 7 was unprecedented, a disastrous tsunami of indiscriminate violence in which Hamas took 1300 lives and […]
The US College Campus as a Long-term Strategic Threat to Israel, the US and Global Stability
By now it’s clear to anyone paying attention that many American college campuses have since October 7 become hotbeds of anti-Zionism and antisemitic fervor. One Jewish professor at a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest, an institution you’re not hearing about in the news, recently told me that “From the River to the […]
The Intelligence Failure of October 7 – Roots and Lessons
Hamas’ sudden attack on the kibbutzim and the towns neighboring the Gaza Strip caught the IDF and the country by total surprise. During the first 24 hours, beginning at 6:30 in the morning of October 7, the Hamas Nukhba (name of the commando troops, means “elite”) and those who came in with them conquered and […]
The Hamas-Iran Relationship
In the weeks since the Hamas massacre on October 7, pundits have debated whether or not Iran helped Hamas develop the plan for the terrorist assault and if Iran had foreknowledge of the attack. Citing a Hamas source, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran helped plot the attack and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard […]
Iran’s “Controlled Insurgency” against the US in Syria and Iraq
In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th and during Israel’s counter-offensive into Gaza, Iranian proxy militias in Iraq and Syria have escalated attacks on US positions in both countries. Fully 60 such attacks have taken place against US forces since October 7. 56 American personnel have suffered injuries in these attacks […]
