Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Sheikh Naim Qassem leads prayers during funeral of Hezbollah senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and Hezbollah member Mahmoud Hamad, who were killed in Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, in Beirut, Lebanon, Sept. 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

There were reasons for Israel to have accepted an American-authored “ceasefire” agreement with Hezbollah.

First, Iran is Israel’s chief security priority, not Hezbollah. In addition, Israel has been fighting the longest war of its modern existence, and its forces are being stretched. During that war, Hezbollah has been helping Hamas by diverting Israel’s military capability and attention; this ceasefire will allow Israel to put the focus of its deployment back on Gaza.

And not to be underestimated is the US “soft embargo” on weapons to Israel. There are rumors that the Biden administration has said that it will ensure deliveries on time if Israel agrees to the Lebanon plan. It would not be in Israel’s interest to further aggravate the outgoing administration.

There were also reasons for Israel to reject the current incarnation of a “ceasefire,” beginning with the way the signatories are positioned. Israel and the US have an agreement; the US and Lebanon have a separate one, although the language is the same; and there is an “authorized” non-Hezbollah representative as a third party.

The US tried the same fiction during the “Maritime Border Agreement” talks — separate US-Israel and US-Lebanon agreements, and a nod from Hezbollah. It failed when Hezbollah decided to break it.

Hezbollah had control not only of territory in the south, in which it had buried its arsenal, but also of the government in Beirut. Its control of territory is — happily — diminished, but it retains its place in Beirut. There is no assurance that Hezbollah will do other than what it chooses to do, and no assurance that the “Government of Lebanon” can operate independently.

According to the agreement, “both nations” — meaning Lebanon and Israel — retain their “inherent right of self-defense.” The kindest way to look at Lebanon is to say that it is occupied by Hezbollah, in which case, it has no ability to defend itself and requires rescue from its occupier. Neither the UN nor the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have that capability. Israel might, but only if the international community agrees that Hezbollah has to go. No such policy has been articulated.

Moving through the terms, they are precisely those of the failed UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of 2006. Reports say that both Israel and Lebanon simply “reaffirmed” their commitment to the resolution. Hezbollah, it seems, simply reaffirmed its commitment to a “ceasefire.” Under the terms of 1701, the LAF was charged with enforcing conditions including, “Any other armed groups will be disarmed, and unauthorized military facilities or weapons caches will be dismantled.”

The LAF failed to do this in 2006, and there is no reason to believe it will succeed in 2024. Although it has received millions of US dollars, the US has had no influence on the political leaning of LAF commanders and troops.

Next, Israel has 60 days in which to operate in southern Lebanon and then gradually withdraw to the Blue Line (the UN-demarcated Lebanon-Israel border). Hezbollah has been tunneling and accumulating weapons inside civilian infrastructure — houses, mosques, schools — for 28 years. What if the job isn’t done in 60 days?

Hezbollah can wait 60 days, regroup its commanders and forces in Beirut, and then plan for its future. There is no international penalty on Hezbollah for its terrorist behavior or its violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) for abusing the civilian population and infrastructure of Lebanon.

An “Oversight Committee” will “oversee” compliance. That was, in fact, the job of UNIFIL — which not only failed, but operated in conjunction with Hezbollah to protect it and enhance its capabilities. Now the Oversight Committee will report violations of the new agreement to — wait for it — UNIFIL.

And finally, the US will facilitate indirect talks between Israel and Lebanon to finalize a “mutually agreed-upon land border.”  This is obscurantism.

There is already a UN-demarcated land border between Israel and Lebanon, but there is also an unmentioned maritime border — encompassing vast natural gas reserves. This has been a separate but related bone of contention (see Maritime Border Agreement, above).

That covers the main points in the agreement, but what about the fundamental points that are NOT in the agreement?

There is no mention of eliminating, or even extracting a price from Hezbollah — an Iranian-funded proxy organization that has wrecked the once-prosperous nation of Lebanon, and threatens Israel as well as the broader region.

Speaking of the broader region, there is no mention of controlling the Iranian military supply lines that run through Syria and into Lebanon. Is that the responsibility of the LAF? UNIFIL?

The IDF, in conjunction with a deconfliction agreement with Russia, has worked to keep Iranian weapons out of Lebanon. Will that continue? Who says?

There is no mention of a peace agreement, or Lebanese recognition of the State of Israel, as required by UN Security Council Resolution 242 passed in 1967.

Without those, everything agreed to is temporary and lives at the convenience of organizations and countries uninterested in peace — but very much interested in the elimination of the State of Israel.

A ceasefire is not peace.
Survival is not victory.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.

The post Israel-Hezbollah War: To Cease or Not to Cease first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect

As a young girl growing up, my parents recognized the limited opportunities for women in a post-revolutionary Iran.

My father, a physician for the Shah, wanted my sister and I to get a good education — so we escaped the oppressive regime and came to America. My parents put me into the top schools, and I eventually landed at my dream school, Columbia University, where I graduated with a degree in economics with a pre-medical concentration.

I was always proud to be a Columbia grad — but not anymore. There were antisemitic incidents at the school over the years, but since October 7, 2023, when Hamas carried out the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, the school has seen an explosion of Jew-hatred.

And shockingly, Columbia has bowed to the antisemitic mob.

My disgraceful alma mater allowed students to set up pro-Palestinian encampments, and more than 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who supported what they called “Hamas’ military action” on October 7. Senior Columbia administrators were caught sending hateful messages about Jews to one another, including tropes about the “Jews” having money. The antisemitism task force at Columbia found that the school failed to stop the hate perpetrated on campus; they said students were on the receiving end of “ethnic slurs, stereotypes about supposedly dangerous Israeli veterans, antisemitic tropes about Jewish wealth and hidden power, threats and physical assaults, [and] exclusion of Zionists from student groups.”

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s clear that Columbia is a lost cause. Now, will two other Ivy League universities, Princeton and Yale, also collapse under pressure from antisemites?

We will see, as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) referenda are now on the table at both.

On November 10, Princeton’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG) approved a divestment referendum that’s “calling on the trustees and PRINCO to ‘uphold human rights’ by disclosing and divesting holds in weapon manufacturing companies connected to Gaza,” according to The Daily Princetonian. From November 25 through 27, students will be able to vote on whether they believe Princeton should divest from Israel.

And over at Yale, a new anti-Israel group called the Sumud Coalition is pushing for Yale to hold a student referendum to disclose and divest its holdings from military manufacturers, as well as invest in Palestinian students and scholars. At least 25 other student groups have already endorsed the Sumud Coalition’s “Books, Not Bombs” petition.

Given the horrendous track record that Ivy League schools have when it comes to antisemitism, I’m not very hopeful that these referendums will fail.

After all, Princeton hosted poet Mohammed El-Kurd, who expressed support for Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7 and previously said, “Zionism is apartheid, it’s genocide, it’s murder, it’s a racist ideology rooted in settler expansion and racial domination, and we must root it out of the world.” At the same time, a Zionist and Israeli professor, Ronen Shoval, had to shut his speech down early after anti-Israel protestors kept disrupting him. The police had to then escort him to his car out of concern for his safety. And this past April, the US Department of Education opened a Title VI investigation into antisemitism allegations against the school.

Yale is also under Federal investigation. In January, the United States Department of Education opened a Title VI Shared Ancestry investigation related to a November 6, 2023, panel called “Gaza under siege,” where several Jewish students claimed they were excluded from the event simply because they’re Jewish. Gabriel Diamond, a senior at Yale, wrote in The Hill that her school has let antisemitic and pro-Hamas propaganda proliferate on campus, citing a conference that peddled “Hamas propaganda to dozens of students for hours.”

Though Princeton and Yale have failed their Jewish students in the past, they can refrain from making another disastrous decision by rejecting divestment referenda. It’s clear that outright ignoring antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments on campus is not a winning tactic for these schools — the Federal investigations prove that.

The Ivy League universities putting their stamp of approval on antisemitism claim that they’re all for free speech and student expression, but divestment is not a matter of free speech. It’s a targeted campaign against the only Jewish state in the world. Over this past year, anti-Zionists have proven that it’s not about freeing Palestinians, it’s also about wiping Israel off the map completely, which would include eliminating the Jewish population there.

It’s no surprise that BDS has ties to terrorist groups. Why any university would want to team up with a pro-terror group like this is mind-boggling, to say the least.

It’s time for Princeton and Yale to grow a backbone. I urge them to stand up to the antisemitic mob and shut down the divestment referendums before they come to a vote. They’ve made many mistakes over the past year, that’s for sure. But it’s not too late to rectify them.

Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a Los Angeles physician and star of the Emmy-nominated Netflix series “Skin Decision: Before and After.” Her family escaped to the United States from Iran.

The post Columbia, My Alma Mater, Fell to the Antisemitic Mob. Will Princeton and Yale Do the Same? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

An Iranian flag hangs as smoke rises after what the Iranian media said was an Israeli strike on a building close to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, April 1, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Firas Makdesi

Given the BBC’s long documented habit of basing news reports on unverified claims made by a news agency controlled by the Assad regime in Syria, it was not surprising to find that some four hours after unclaimed airstrikes in Syria on November 21, the BBC News website was already promoting a headline stating “Israeli strikes on Syria’s Palmyra kills 36, state media say.”

The original version of that report quoted an announcement put out by the Sana news agency, and a claim from an unnamed “UK-based monitoring group” that, in a version published around an hour later and credited to David Gritten, turned out to be the one-man show called ‘The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ (SOHR).

Gritten’s report was again updated on November 21 – some 21 hours after its original publication; the version currently available online opens by telling readers that:

At least 36 people have been killed and 50 others injured in Israeli air strikes on residential buildings and an industrial area in the central Syrian town of Palmyra, Syrian state media report.

The Sana news agency cited a military source as saying that Israeli jets attacked from the direction of the Jordanian border to the south at around 13:30 (10:30 GMT) and that the strikes causes [sic] significant material damage.

A UK-based monitoring group reported that the strikes hit a weapons depot and other locations in and around an area where families of Iran-backed militia fighters were, killing 68 Syrian and foreign fighters.

The Israeli military said it did not comment on foreign reports.

Later in the article, readers find a link to a Tweet put out by the SOHR and quotes from a report it put out:

Videos and photos posted on social media following Wednesday’s strikes appear to show three large columns of black smoke rising from the Palmyra area.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, cited its sources on the ground as saying that Israeli fighter jets struck three locations in the town.

Two were in the al-Jamiya neighbourhood, including a weapons depot near the industrial zone inhabited by families of Iran-backed fighters of Iraqi and other foreign nationalities, it said.

The third location was nearby and targeted a meeting attended by leaders of Iran-backed militias based in Palmyra and the surrounding desert as well as leaders of the Iraqi group Nujaba and Hezbollah, it added.

The SOHR initially reported that 41 people were killed, but later said the death toll had risen to 68.

It identified them as 42 Syrian members of Iran-backed militias, and 22 foreign members, mostly from Nujaba, and four Lebanese members of Hezbollah.

As noted by the Times of Israel in a report on the same topic:

SOHR, run by a single person, has regularly been accused by Syrian war analysts of false reporting and inflating casualty numbers as well as inventing them wholesale.

Remarkably, Gritten had nothing whatsoever to tell his readers about “the Iraqi group Nujaba” — despite the fact that in January 2024 he contributed to an article which includes the following:

Iran has built a wide network of allied armed groups and proxies operating in countries across the Middle East. They are all opposed to Israel and the US, and sometimes refer to themselves as the “Axis of Resistance”, though the extent of Iran’s influence over them is not clear.

The US says co-ordination is overseen by the IRGC and its overseas operations arm, the Quds Force. Both are designated by the US as terrorist organisations, as are a number of the regional armed groups, including Kataib Hezbollah.

The groups have dramatically stepped up their attacks against Israel, US forces and other linked targets since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip in October, in what they say is a demonstration of their solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the at least 165 drone, rocket and missile attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, or facilities hosting US troops, since 17 October have been claimed by an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

In response, the US says it has struck targets belonging to the IRGC and militias believed to have strong links with the force, including Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

The organization to which Gritten refers in this report as “Nujaba” is known as Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba (HaN) (Movement of the Party of God’s Noble Ones) or Harakat al-Nujaba. As reported by the ITIC:

The Nujaba Movement (Harakat al-Nujaba), or the Movement of the Noble Ones, is an Iraqi Shiite pro-Iranian militia established in 2013 by Sheikh Akram Abbas al-Kaabi, its secretary-general, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC’s) Qods Force. It is one of the largest militias in the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). It is operated by the Iranian Qods Force, which provides the funding, weapons, and training of its members. The Nujaba Movement is also supported by the Lebanese Hezbollah, with which Al-Kaabi has maintained close ties for many years. The militia adopts the ideology of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and regards Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as its supreme leader.

In 2020, the ITIC documented Nujaba’s activities in the Gaza Strip, where it maintains an office.

A WINEP profile of that US designated organization describes its chain of command as follows:

Iran. There is clear and convincing evidence that HaN is subordinate to and partly financed by the IRGC-QF. The preponderance of the evidence shows that Iran provides the group with financial assistance, military assistance, and intelligence sharing, as well as help in selecting, supporting, and supervising its leadership. HaN units in Syria are under the direct operational and administrative control of the IRGC-QF.

Partly financed by the Iraqi state. HaN operates the state-funded 12th Brigade of the PMF. Chain of command nominally runs through the Popular Mobilization Commission of the Prime Minister’s Office and up to the prime minister. In practice, HaN PMF units frequently disobey the Iraqi government chain of command while legally remaining organs of the Iraqi state.

In other words, a BBC report based entirely on unverified accounts from the Syrian regime-controlled news agency and a UK based project fails to clarify that among the “36 people” reportedly killed in a strike it attributes to Israel were operatives of an Iranian financed and operated Iraqi militia with bases in Syria and links to Hezbollah, which has threatened Israel since long before the current war.

BBC audiences would surely have found that context useful for full understanding of Gritten’s story about “Israeli air strikes.”

Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK — an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.

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