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1973 vs. 2023: Could Aftermath of Gaza War Lead to Diplomatic Breakthrough?
Prime Minister Golda Meir (R) accompanied by her Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, meets with Israeli soldiers at a base on the Golan Heights after intense fighting during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Photo: Reuters
Many have highlighted the similarities between the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the brutal Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, in terms of the scale of the intelligence failure and the enormity of the costs to Israel. It is possible that the postwar political process will be similar as well. And the end of the Hamas-Israel conflict will offer the US a great opportunity to replicate a historic diplomatic achievement.
Following the Yom Kippur War, the US led a diplomatic process between Egypt and Israel that brought about two interim agreements. Those agreements culminated in the historic peace treaty signed by Israel and Egypt in 1979, which was the product of effective American mediation at Camp David a year earlier. A key question is whether there are similarities between the factors that made a diplomatic process possible after the 1973 war and the circumstances that might emerge from the current war.
There are, of course, major differences between the wars. But there are sufficient similarities to create a foundation, however imperfect, for a productive political process when the current war ends. Of course, we don’t know how or when this war will end, but it is never too soon to think about the “day after,” even with the limitations on our current knowledge.
To evaluate the potential for diplomatic arrangements, we must first examine the capacity and motivation of the three major parties: the Arab-Palestinian party, the Israeli party, and the Americans. We will focus here on the capacity and interests of the US to advance a diplomatic process.
Why did the US, first under the leadership of Henry Kissinger and then President Jimmy Carter, begin to focus on the peace process in the Middle East, mainly between Egypt and Israel, after the 1973 War? There are two main reasons. The first concerns the superpower crisis with the Soviet Union toward the end of the war, which entailed a Soviet threat of intervention and a response to the American nuclear alert. The danger of escalation of the regional conflict into a third world war focused attention on that conflict. The second reason for rising American diplomatic engagement following the 1973 war was the oil embargo imposed by the Arab states in response to American support for Israel. The embargo quadrupled oil prices, which had devastating economic effects in the US and beyond.
These two factors reinforced American interest in Middle Eastern peacemaking in the aftermath of the 1973 War. But what about the American capacity to advance peace following that war?
The Yom Kippur War demonstrated the depth of Israel’s security dependence on the US, as exemplified by the American airlift during the war. Israel’s need for this arms delivery showed that it required a source from which to resupply weapons and ammunition during high-intensity fighting. The only source that could — and potentially would — do this was America.
The American capacity to promote a settlement also grew in relation to Egypt. Despite the strategic surprise Egypt and Syria achieved at the beginning of the war, which gave them a major military advantage, and despite major arms supplies from their Soviet patron, they were unable to defeat Israel. In fact, by the end of the war the IDF was deployed around 100 kilometers from Cairo. This state of affairs proved that the Soviet patron was unable to deliver the goods. On top of that, the rise in Israel’s security dependence on the US following the war showed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that only the US could exert pressure on Israel to make major territorial concessions in the Sinai Peninsula. The restoration of Egyptian control over the Sinai was Sadat’s key objective in resorting to war.
The combined effect of such postwar conditions sent a clear message to both parties that the US, and only the US, could promote a political settlement restoring the Sinai to Egypt while protecting Israel’s security. Israel could be confident that as an “honest broker,” the US would ensure that any political settlement seriously considered the security arrangements it requested.
Both American interest in advancing a political settlement and its capacity to do so have increased considerably since the onset of the ongoing Hamas-Israel war. It is noteworthy that interest in advancing a Mideast political process was quite low on the priorities list of the Biden administration when it took office in January 2021. Previous efforts to promote such a process had failed, including that of the Obama administration. Biden served as Obama’s vice president, so he had direct experience with that failure. Moreover, the Biden administration came into office not only with a full-blown socioeconomic agenda but with a highly loaded foreign policy agenda as well, most of which concerned areas outside the Middle East. The key foreign policy issue was (and remains) the growing competition with China, so the administration’s focus was on the Indo-Pacific region.
Also, the US has become energy-independent in recent years. This has led to a decline in the importance to the US of the oil-rich Middle Eastern states — though the region has not lost all relevance, as key US allies remain dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
A third reason for the decline in American interest in the Middle East was the disillusionment of the American public over the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. In those military interventions, the US paid a very heavy price in both blood and treasure — but at the end of the day, its efforts at regime change and democracy promotion failed. The great winners from the American interventions were terrorist entities, especially the brutal Islamic State and most notably Iran, which became a dominant actor in Iraq through its Shiite militias there. In addition to Iraq, Iran exerts major influence in the region through its coalition of Shiite militias in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
The 2022 outbreak of the Ukraine war had complex effects on American engagement in the Middle East. On the one hand, it created a new area of interest outside the Middle East and thus potentially further marginalized that region. On the other hand, the war reinforced the importance of Middle Eastern energy resources because of the termination of Russian energy supplies to Europe. The latter development increased the centrality of Saudi Arabia in global politics as a leading actor in what has come to be called the “Global South.” This is the large group of states that are aligned, at least formally, with neither the West nor the anti-American revisionist camp. Following these developments, President Biden changed his attitude toward Saudi Arabia — specifically toward its de facto leader, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman. After the 2018 brutal murder of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Biden called Saudi Arabia under bin Salman a “pariah” state. In the aftermath of the outbreak of the Ukraine war and the energy crisis, Biden went to Saudi Arabia and fist-bumped with bin Salman, even though the CIA had alleged that the Saudi leader was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder.
The next stage in Saudi Arabia’s rising centrality was when the US became concerned that it is “losing” the Saudis following the Chinese mediation that restored diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran in early 2023. The challenge to American hegemony in the Middle East grew further with the rising alignment between Iran and Russia over the war in Ukraine. Iran became a major arms supplier to Russia, and as China and Russia also strengthened their relations after the war broke out, it appeared that the anti-American axis was deepening its involvement in the region. Moreover, it seemed that this axis was tightening its relations with Saudi Arabia, which was considered not so long ago to be a key American ally.
The Biden administration’s response took the form of talks on normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In exchange for American security guarantees, the Saudis had to commit to establishing relations with Israel, while the latter was supposed to make concessions to the Palestinians. Normalization with a key Arab and Muslim state was intended to deepen Israel’s integration into the region.
This development was received as very bad news by Hamas and probably affected its decision to proceed with the violent invasion of southern Israel on October 7. While the anti-American axis might not have directly initiated the brutal Hamas attack, there is no doubt that it served the interests of this axis by undermining the American peace plans in the region and the renewed relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia.
Every weakening of American influence is an accomplishment for the revisionist bloc. Russia gains from declining American attention on Ukraine, which translates into less military aid. China benefits from a reduced American focus on Sino-US competition in the Indo-Pacific and on support for its allies in that region. China also believes that support for the Palestinians will reinforce its position in the Global South. And Iran, of course, enjoys Israel’s suffering at the hands of its Hamas client and benefits from the demonstration of its arch enemy’s vulnerability.
All that said, the war between Israel and Hamas has produced an exceptional opportunity for the US to initiate a comprehensive political process in the region. Despite the differences, the 1973 analogy offers a glimpse of hope. As in the post-1973 situation, the US has a rising interest in a diplomatic engagement in the region and also a growing capability, if limited, to promote a diplomatic process.
As was the case in 1973, this interest originates primarily from great power competition, which has been rising throughout this year in the Middle East as well as elsewhere in the world. In a parallel with the Soviet-American struggle over Egypt in the early 1970s, the most keen competition today is for the “great prize” — oil-rich Saudi Arabia. In the 1970s, Egypt was the leading Arab state and thus the main target of superpower competition in the Middle East. Many upheavals have taken place in the Arab world since then, and today we see the rise of Saudi Arabia. Bin Salman has great ambitions to use his country’s vast wealth and resources to modernize and empower his nation. Saudi Arabia has thus become the leading state in the Arab world and one of the most important countries in the Muslim world, particularly as it hosts Islam’s holy places on its territory.
If Washington’s postwar diplomatic process is designed to lead to a two-state solution, Saudi Arabia would have a much easier time leading a pro-American camp of pragmatic states in the region. These states, which are interested first and foremost in economic modernization, include the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan. Facing this group is the violent Iran-led coalition, which has proxies spread across the region.
Each US administration has shown an interest in advancing Arab-Israeli peace, but the current confrontation makes clear what the cost of an endless Israeli-Palestinian stalemate might be. The stalemate can be readily exploited by extremists, which can lead to a dangerous escalation in the region and beyond because of the involvement of external powers. The US must do its utmost to reduce the burden of its attention and resources being spread across three arenas that involve (or could involve) violent conflict: Ukraine, Taiwan, and the Middle East.
Will the American capacity to promote a settlement rise in the aftermath of the Hamas-Israel war? There is a parallel with the rising Israeli dependence that followed the 1973 airlift. In the current conflict, the US provided Israel with major military and financial aid, including the deployment of two groups of aircraft carriers. Jerusalem’s security dependence on the US gives Washington significant leverage over Israel. The Arab and Palestinian parties, for their part, know full well — as did President Sadat 50 years ago — that only the US holds such leverage.
After destroying Hamas, Israel will need security and political arrangements that drastically reduce its security vulnerability. Only the US can lead a pragmatic Arab coalition that will take upon itself the responsibility for civilian administration in Gaza and strengthen the capacity of a revitalized Palestinian Authority to govern the West Bank, and possibly Gaza as well in time. The US might also be able to lead or at least build a combined Western-Arab international force to take care of security issues inside Gaza, while the IDF would be in charge of defending — forcefully and with a powerful deployment — Israel’s borders with Gaza. At any rate, in order to mobilize international and regional engagement in the new civilian, financial and security arrangements in Gaza, there need to be political horizons of some kind of diplomatic process for addressing the Palestinian issue even if this process takes quite a bit of time.
American interest in, and capacity to advance, such a diplomatic process after the war is the key element that will make Israeli-Palestinian-Arab peace possible. This process will have to address the major shortcoming of the Abraham Accords: the marginalization of the Palestinian issue. The two-state vision seems completely unrealistic today, but rising American interest in advancing a diplomatic process can make the fulfillment of this vision more likely in the long run.
Benjamin Miller is a professor of international relations and Director of the National Security Center at the University of Haifa. His most recent book, Grand Strategy from Truman to Trump (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020) focuses on explaining changes in US grand strategy. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’
Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living on April 24, 2025. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Oswiecim, Poland — Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz, the infamous former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, for the first time on Thursday, joining Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the annual March of the Living.
The march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II — took place on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and included 80 Holocaust survivors, many of whom were also death march survivors, to mark 80 years since the liberation of the camps.
March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman addressed the survivors, who were seated next to the gate bearing the notorious inscription, “Work sets you free.”
“It’s a strange thing to say, but we welcome you to Auschwitz,” she said. “You are the true heroes. We will treasure your legacy forever.”
Almog Meir Jan and his mother Orit. Almog was rescued by the IDF on June 5 during the Arnon Mission. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Standing outside the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz I, recently released hostage Eli Sharabi said, “The Holocaust was unlike anything else — we will never forget and never forgive.”
“But our presence here is the triumph of the Jewish spirit. The Jewish people sanctify life, not death. I endured horrors in enemy captivity, but I chose life. That gives me hope to get up each morning and begin rebuilding,” he added.
Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity. His emaciated appearance as he was paraded through Gaza on his release led to comparisons with concentration camp survivors.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran broke down after seeing Sharabi. The two embraced for several minutes. “Seeing him in real life, in this place, just made it all suddenly seem very close. This is no longer something that happened 80 years ago; it’s continuing until this day,” Shukran told The Algemeiner.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran embracing former hostage Eli Sharabi. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In remarks to reporters prior to the march, Herzog called the return of the hostages a “universal human imperative.”
“With a broken heart, I remind us all that although after the Holocaust we vowed, ‘Never again,’ today, even as we stand here, the souls of dozens of Jews again ‘yearn within a cage,’ ‘thirsting for water and for freedom,’ as 59 of our brothers and sisters are held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity,” Herzog said, referring to the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion who remain in captivity.
His Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, said the march was “a dramatic call of ‘never again.’ No more hatred, no more discrimination, no more antisemitism.”
He called for “all wars in the Middle East to end,” and for a two-state solution, which he said was the “most rational solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] that gives hope for achieving stable and lasting peace.”
The two leaders signed the visitors’ book and laid a wreath at Auschwitz’s Black Wall, where the Nazis executed prisoners.
At the march’s opening ceremony, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, lit one of six candles — representing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis — and addressed rising antisemitism in the world.
“Jews all over the world fear walking streets with a kippah and it’s unacceptable. College students are being attacked verbally and physically,” he told The Algemeiner.
He praised US President Donald Trump for “combating this scourge.”
“There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s my hope the rest of the world can look to him to see how to support and defend the Jewish community against these vile attacks,” he said.
Matt Brooks, chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Coalition, with Malcolm Hoenlein, vice chairman emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In Block 5, where thousands of victims’ eyeglasses are displayed behind glass, Laly Dery told a delegation of Israeli teenagers from the national civil service about her son, Sgt. First Class (res.) Saadia, who fell in battle in Gaza in June.
“Just like my son, who served the country with every fiber of his being, you have earned the enormous privilege of serving the state of Israel,” Dery said.
Derai’s words resonated with Sara Bisan, the only member of the national service delegation not wearing an Israeli flag. Instead, Bisan wore the distinctive multi-colored flag of the Druze community to which she belongs.
“I feel her pain, and it hurts,” Bisan said, reflecting on the death of her own friend from the northern Druze village of Kfar Yarka, who was also killed in Gaza.
“But our people, the Druze and the Jews, share a lot, including a love of Israel. I also feel that serving the state of Israel is a privilege,” she added.
Sara Bisan. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
Twelve thousand participants marched the 1.7 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau for the main ceremony, which was cut short this year due to heavy rain.
As thunder echoed overhead, released hostage Agam Berger played the theme from “Schindler’s List” on a 150-year-old violin rescued during the Holocaust. Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri whose father was murdered on Oct. 7 and whose mother was abducted and later killed in Gaza, performed a musical rendition of the psalm Shir Lamaalot alongside her.
“The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul,” Weiss sang, his voice quavering.
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French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert
Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot
France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”
“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”
“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.
According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”
LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.
In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”
“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.
In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”
“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.
“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”
Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.
The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.
Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”
In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”
Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.
“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”
France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.
“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
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Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education
US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.
US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.
“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”
The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”
The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.
“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”
Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.
For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”
At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.
NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.
“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”
He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”
NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.
Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”
The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”
From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.
Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.
“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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