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Israel Cannot Protect Its People if Hamas Survives the Gaza War
Partygoers at the Supernova Psy-Trance Festival who filmed the events that unfolded on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Yes Studios
By killing Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran within a 24-hour span, Israel demonstrated a commitment to total victory over its enemies. But the rest of the world, from the least free nations (China) to the freest nations (the US), seems committed to saving Hamas. Jerusalem must resist these efforts.
Chinese support for Hamas is no surprise. In December, the IDF discovered massive caches of Chinese weapons in Gaza.
In 2014, the IDF disclosed that an enormous Chinese-made tunneling machine with 40 inch blades was used to dig Hamas’s underground city.
China has been hosting “unity talks” between Hamas and Fatah since April. In June, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Webin announced that China supports “all Palestinian factions in achieving reconciliation and increasing solidarity through dialogue and consultation.” On July 23 came the announcement that Chinese diplomacy had culminated in the Beijing Declaration, an agreement to form an “interim national reconciliation government” allowing Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations to survive in the light of day as partners in a government.
The Biden administration’s plan for Hamas’s survival, on the other hand, is more subtle.
Three days after October 7, President Biden gave perhaps the best speech of his presidency, condemning Hamas and guaranteeing that his administration would provide military assistance to Israel. “The United States has Israel’s back,” he said.
Just one week later, President Biden wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post that acknowledged, “as long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace.” It soberly pointed out that “every cease-fire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again.” However, it also claimed that, “Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution.”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan took it a step further on December 14, 2023, when he said that, “Ultimately, governance of the West Bank and Gaza needs to be connected. And it needs to be connected under a revamped and revitalized Palestinian Authority.”
The administration has since backed away from its October recognition that “a cease-fire is not peace,” and in fact has proposed a ceasefire-peace plan that allows for the survival of Hamas by laying the groundwork for a Hamas-infused PA taking over the Gaza Strip and potentially a sovereign State of Palestine.
In the first State Department briefing after Haniyeh was killed, Vedant Patel, Principal Deputy Spokesman, asserted that the administration was “promoting diplomatic solutions” to the Gaza War. As reporters badgered him about whether Haniyeh’s death made a ceasefire more or less likely, Patel stuck to his script and repeatedly said the State Department was trying to “narrow and close the gaps” between Israel and Hamas in order to “get the deal done.”
If this plan seems familiar, it should. The Oslo Accords allowed Yasser Arafat to pose as a politician while remaining a terrorist as he lied about the “transformation” of the terroristic Fatah and PLO into a peace-seeking Palestinian Authority (PA).
Rebranding the Fatah/PLO opened doors to money and legitimacy, but everyone knew that neither had truly changed. Arafat often spoke about peace in English and jihad against Israel in Arabic.
At the height the Second Intifada, he wore the PA mantle to disguise his terrorist operations, always slyly insisting that the PA was separate from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Tanzim, Force 17, and the other terrorist organizations he controlled. He gave orders for attacks, including suicide bombings, just as Hamas leaders did, but he did so while pretending to be opposed to terrorism. Most of the world, including Israel, went along with his charade.
As Arafat took over the Palestinian educational system and inculcated future generations into terrorists, Israelis experienced violence worse than anything that came before Oslo. As Kenneth Levin wrote in The Oslo Syndrome, Delusions of a People Under Siege (2005), many Israelis took “refuge in delusions of Israeli culpability, the subtext of which is that the proper self-reforms and concessions by Israel can and would suffice to win peace, despite all evidence to the contrary.”
But Israel seems to have learned from the past and seems committed not to repeat past mistakes, such as trusting “the promises of its friends and not the threats of its enemies,” as Elie Weisel put it.
Among Palestinians, if not the rest of the world, today’s PA is indeed viewed as a moribund organization, limping towards oblivion under an unpopular octogenarian in the 20th year of his four-year presidential term. Gone is the sheen of the Arafat days. Many critics attribute the PA’s tarnished reputation to rampant corruption, but Hamas is just as corrupt. Its leaders are billionaires living far from danger, and its operational commanders steal food and use Gazans as human shields.
The PA’s lost vitality and popularity have been transferred to Hamas because of Hamas’ militancy, its commitment to “resistance,” and its rejection of any kind of cooperation with Israel. Every poll shows that Hamas enjoys popular support among Palestinians, with majorities in both Gaza and the West Bank approving of the October 7 assault.
The PA understands that it can only regain its lost popularity and credibility among Palestinians by becoming more like Hamas. As the Palestinian Media Watch points out, the PA has been bragging since October 7 that it has more terrorists than Hamas, more prisoners in Israeli jails than Hamas, and that most Palestinian “martyrs” are from Fatah or the PA security forces (i.e., the Palestinian police).
Even though Biden’s latest ceasefire plan doesn’t specifically call for a unified Hamas/Fatah/PLO Palestinian Authority governing a contiguous Palestinian State, that is the goal of the people running his foreign policy and the people they respect.
A unity government is the policy advocated by Thomas Friedman who wants the US and Israel to “rebuild Fatah, merge it with Hamas, [and] elect an Israeli government that can freeze settlements” in the West Bank.”
It is the policy advocated by Jimmy Carter, who fretted after the 2006 Gaza elections that providing aid to the Palestinians would become more difficult and argued that, “there’s a good chance” that Hamas would renounce violence. In 2008, Carter claimed that Hamas had accepted a “Two-State Solution.” In 2015, he said that Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, “Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau,” was committed to peace while Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, was not.
The Biden plan allows Hamas to adopts what Matthew Levitt calls the Hezbollah strategy. Just as Hezbollah participates in the Lebanese government but retains its war-fighting and terrorism capabilities separately, so too “Hamas hopes to exert the same influence and independence with its own movement and militia, neither beholden to nor controlled by a government,” Levitt explains.
The Netanyahu government’s resolve to follow through with the total destruction of Hamas will be tested in the remaining months of the Biden administration.
Israel has already rejected the Beijing Declaration, but it has also signaled willingness to go along with the a “revitalized” or “reformed” PA governing Gaza.
The European Union has sent millions of euros to Ramallah since October 7. It will go to great lengths to save the PA but will exercise minimal scrutiny over Hamas’ involvement in a “revitalized” PA, just as it defends and continues to fund the corrupt UNRWA in spite of Hamas’s involvement.
Any ceasefire agreement that allows Hamas members of any “wing” to participate in either a China-approved interim government or a US-approved “revitalized” PA will lead to more October 7-style assaults.
Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published by IPT.
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UCLA Allowing Pro-Hamas Protesters to Exclude Jews from ‘Gaza Encampment’ Area ‘Abhorrent,’ Federal Judge Says
Law enforcement officers detain a demonstrator, as they clear out a pro-Hamas protest encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Los Angeles, California, US, May 2, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/David Swanson
A US federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) must stop allowing pro-Hamas demonstrators to secure an encampment from which Jewish students were barred entry, calling the situation permitted on campus “so unimaginable and so abhorrent.”
Last semester, pro-Hamas groups at UCLA waged for three weeks a campaign aimed at pressuring school officials into adopting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The action culminated in their erecting on the Royce Quad section of campus a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and refusing to vacate the area until their demands were met.
Enabled by UCLA chancellor Gene D. Block, who had the encampment protected by physical barriers and campus police, the area became the site of violent clashes between pro-Hamas and pro-Israel protesters and a zone of nullification in which federal civil rights laws prohibiting the exclusion of individuals based on their racial or religious identity were, according to the judge, flagrantly flouted. Throughout the encampment’s existence, Jewish students were barred from walking near or through the area on their way to class unless they denounced the Zionist component of their Jewish identities, a policy which UCLA police upheld without compunction.
Granting a request for injunctive relief filed by Jewish students who sued the university, US Judge Mark Scarsi of the District Court for the Central District of California grated UCLA’s defense of its role in supporting the encampment — which argued, in his words, that it “has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters” — and described what took place there as “so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.”
He continued, “The injunction does not mandate any specific policies and procedures UCLA must put in place, nor does it dictate any specific acts UCLA must take in response to campus protests. Rather, the injunction requires only that, if any part of UCLA’s ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas become unavailable to certain Jewish students, UCLA must stop providing those ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas to any students.”
Scarsi, who formally assumed office in 2020 after being nominated in 2018 by former President Donald Trump, also affirmed the plaintiffs’ contention that Zionism is an integral part of their Jewish faith. The ruling is the first to address directly how university administrators handled pro-Hamas encampments on their campuses, which, across the country, descended into proclaiming support for terrorism, threatening a genocide of Jews, and unobstructed vandalizing of school property and assault.
“Shame on UCLA for letting antisemitic thugs terrorize Jews on campus,” Mark Rienzi — president of the public interest law firm Becket, which represented the plaintiffs — said on Tuesday, praising the decision’s defense of religious liberty. “Today’s ruling says that UCLA’s policy of helping antisemitic activists target Jews is not just morally wrong but a gross constitutional violation. UCLA should stop fighting the Constitution and start protecting Jews on campus.”
A slew of lawsuits filed by Jewish students and against their universities over their handling of antisemitism after Oct. 7, when Hamas invaded Israel and launched the ongoing war in Gaza, have been decided this summer or remain in the courts.
Earlier this month, a Massachusetts federal judge “in part” denied Harvard University a motion to dismiss a suit which accuses it of failing to respond to numerous antisemitic incidents during the 2023-2024 academic year, clearing the case to proceed to trial. Throughout the summer, Columbia University and New York University (NYU) settled two lawsuits, with NYU paying an undisclosed sum of money to avoid further discovery and litigation.
Most recently, North Carolina State University (NCSU) settled a civil rights complaint which accused school officials of declining to discipline anyone involved in a series of antisemitic incidents in which a Jewish student was allegedly bullied, doxxed, and threatened with physical violence.
As part of the settlement, an outcome achieved during an “early” mediation process arbitrated by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the university agreed to update its anti-discrimination policies to adhere to a 2019 Trump administration executive order which recognized anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, include antisemitism in its programming on racial and ethnic hatred, and hold regular meetings with Jewish organizations on campus. The university will also base its handling of future antisemitic incidents on North Carolina’s Shalom Act (House Bill 942), which explicitly refers to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Anti-Israel Media Bias Flares in Martha’s Vineyard Paper Newly Led by Charles Sennott
Charles Sennott. Photo: Screenshot
News coverage in the Martha’s Vineyard Times tends to stick to local concerns — labor negotiations between the Steamship Authority and the union that operates the ferry between the island and Cape Cod, the perennial shortage of “affordable” housing for year-round and seasonal workers, shark sightings.
For the past few weeks, though, the Times has been on a campaign against the Martha’s Vineyard Chabad after it hosted a Jewish cultural festival event featuring the singer Matisyahu.
Instead of writing about the festival, the newspaper highlighted a small anti-Israel protest against it. Then it ran another story focusing on a protester-participant, and a third story attacking the festival’s organizer.
One Times news article referred to Israel’s “brutal military campaign” and quoted a protester who said, “We are here to reject the presence of someone who performs and fundraises for the Israeli Occupation Forces and the AIPAC lobbying group, condones violence against the Palestinian people and land in the name of Jewish safety, and denies ongoing genocide.”
The onslaught of hostile coverage has generated a disappointed response from readers.
One of them, Jackie Mendez, took to the newspaper’s comments section. “What is Jewish culture? The MVTimes doesn’t care to explain. Instead, it chooses to give yet more time and space to the ignorance and hatred of Israel,” Mendez wrote. “This newspaper gave editorial space to this kind of rabid Jew-hatred.”
Another reader, Judith Hannan, a former columnist for the Times, wrote in a letter to the editor, “The main issue I think so many of us have is that an event to celebrate a rich and diverse culture, under a literal and metaphorical broad tent, was covered with such bias so the reader walks away with no more understanding of Jewish heritage and culture than they had already.”
The rabbi of Chabad on the Vineyard, Tzvi Alperowitz, wrote in an email to his community that he was disappointed by the coverage. “The Jewish Culture Festival was a tremendous and remarkable community celebration. Close to one thousand people gathered in absolute harmony and unity to proudly celebrate Jewish culture and identity,” Alperowitz wrote. “But instead of a beautiful story about Jewish resilience and celebration in spite of the most tragic year for Jews since the Holocaust, the MV Times cynically chose to paint their coverage of the event through the lens of the few protesters who stood outside.”
Alperowitz continued: “That’s a choice that reflects poorly on the MV Times and its editorial team. Every rational individual can see straight through the piece and understands that it was a cynical use of clickbait to turn a proudly Jewish event into an opinion article bashing Israel.”
Who is in charge at the Martha’s Vineyard Times? The paper was purchased in January of this year by Stephen Bernier, who installed as publisher Charles Sennott. Sennott is a former Middle East bureau chief of the Boston Globe, where he was notorious for the anti-Israel tilt of his coverage. The watchdog organization Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) called Sennott “a virtual spokesman for the Palestinian side,” warning that “under Charles Sennott, the Boston Globe is in danger of reviving its former tradition of blaming Israel first, no matter what the facts.”
Since leaving the Globe, Sennott has been pursuing nonprofit journalism ventures, the latest of which is The GroundTruth Project, where he is listed as the founder and editor-in-chief. The GroundTruth website also lists former New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet as one of its directors, and the Ford Foundation as among its funders.
CAMERA has also been sharply critical of Sennott’s work with the GroundTruth Project. A CAMERA report on a three-part Sennott series attacking Christian Zionism called the work “outrageous” and said it featured “bigoted and sloppy reporting.”
“Sennott indoctrinates young journalists with his long-standing anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-Evangelical biases,” Dexter Van Zile, then with CAMERA, wrote in a 2019 blog post for the Times of Israel. Van Zile then quoted David Parsons, vice president and senior international spokesperson for the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. “There are only two journalists I will never work with again and one of them is Charles Sennott,” Parsons said.
In a Dec. 15, 2023, LinkedIn posting, just weeks before assuming the Martha’s Vineyard Times role, Sennott faulted Israel for deliberately and “with impunity” killing scores of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists. Israel has disclosed evidence that some of the “journalists” were members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations. Sennott’s article, while faulting Israel, also omitted that Hamas restricts the activities of journalists in Gaza, with threats of violence.
I wrote to Sennott asking him whether he is trying to turn the weekly island newspaper into a vehicle for pushing an anti-Israel agenda, or whether there is a conflict in his dual roles at the Martha’s Vineyard Times and at the Ground Truth Project.
So far, I haven’t gotten a reply from him.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
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Ben Gvir’s Temple Mount Visit Raises a Larger Question
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visits Al-Aqsa compound also known to Jews as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City May 21, 2023. Minhelet Har-Habait, Temple Mount Administration/Handout via REUTERS.
Jews can pray where they choose in London, New York, Buenos Aires, or Sydney — but not in Jerusalem. The world is in an uproar after Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir visited the Temple Mount to mark the solemn Jewish fast day of Tisha B’Av. Critics say that Ben Gvir disrupted the carefully-crafted status quo in Jerusalem — and even broke with the policy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ben Gvir says that he has the authority to assert his own guidelines.
The Temple Mount, which was the site of the first and second temples, should be a place where every Jew is permitted to visit without controversy. It seems that the only reason Jews are not allowed to pray there is the threat of a violent reaction from non-Jews, but how can this be allowed in a Jewish state? Surely some accommodation can be reached if both sides would be open to it. But sadly that’s not the case.
How can we have a Jewish state where Jews cannot visit one of the holiest places in their history because of threats of violence from others? If the answer is that this situation is just temporary, we need to seriously look at if that’s true — and ask how there can be a credible partner for peace when Jews are not allowed to visit this site due to threats of violence.
Jews can pray at Jewish holy sites anywhere in the world — just not in Jerusalem.
Critics took issue with Ben Gvir because they believe his move will disrupt ceasefire negotiations with Hamas.
US State Department Deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said, “we certainly are paying close attention to actions and activities that we find to be a detraction from Israel’s security, a contributor to greater insecurity and instability in the region, and that would certainly be the actions that we saw today that Mr. Ben-Gvir participated in. Even the prime minister’s office itself made clear that the events of this morning are a deviation from what is Israeli policy and a deviation from the status quo.”
He went on: “any unilateral action like this that jeopardizes such status quo is unacceptable. And not only is it unacceptable, it detracts from what we think is a vital time as we are working to get this ceasefire deal across the finish line. It detracts from what our stated goal is for the region, which is a two-state solution, a Palestinian state and an Israeli state that’s side-by-side, living in — with dignity and harmony.”
If this two-state solution that will see people live “with dignity and harmony” is shaken up by a few Jews praying, then what is the plan for changing that in the future? The reality today is that Jews are only allowed to ascend the Temple Mount during very limited hours, and it is closed to Jews on Shabbat. Yet Arabs can mostly pray freely.
One also wonders why international critics bother so often and so much with the tiny Jewish State, instead of paying attention to crises close to their own homes, such as violent and deadly protests — or actual human rights violations occurring throughout the globe.
In the long term, if Jews wanting to pray peacefully causes an uproar, then we don’t have a true partner for peace. Ben Gvir’s actions may have inflamed the situation — but the larger issue is one that needs to be addressed.
Ronn Torossian is an entrepreneur and philanthropist.
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