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A New Book Shows the Path Forward for the US-Israel Alliance

An Israeli flag and an American flag fly at Abu Dhabi International Airport before the arrival of Israeli and U.S. officials, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates August 31, 2020. REUTERS/Christoper Pike
Eight days before Hamas’ barbaric invasion of Israel, President Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, declared, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
That single statement epitomized an administration that never understood that Israel’s national security is directly related to that of the United States, and that US foreign policy can directly – and negatively – impact Israel’s security as it did on October 7, 2023.
This is one of the premises of former Deputy National Security Council Advisor Victoria Coates’ The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel – and America – Can Win. Senator Ted Cruz penned the forward for the book noting, “[Hamas’] war is not just being waged against the United States, our citizens, and our national security interests. The objective of Israel’s enemies is not just the elimination of the Jewish state, but also Western civilization, led by America writ large.”
The Battle for the Jewish State serves as a reminder of why a strong US-Israel alliance is not only critically important to both countries’ national security interests, but also stability in the region more generally. When a strong alliance is the basis for US policy, as was the case under Donald Trump, relative quiet is accompanied by new alliances among Israel and her neighbors. When US policy is based on daylight between the two nations, as implemented by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who sought to realign the region by elevating, enriching, and empowering the Islamic Republic of Iran, war results.
Coates sets out to address how we got to October 7th, where we are now, and what our policy options are going forward, understanding that the values of both countries are at stake in this existential war.
As to how we got here, she says that Obama/Biden foreign policy is the main culprit. Post-10/7, US policy has consisted of equivocation and suggestions of moral equivalence between Israelis and Palestinian terror groups and terror-supporting leaders, calls for a ceasefire, unprecedented demands that Israel provide humanitarian aid to its enemies, absurd talk of creating a Palestinian state despite the attack, and a partial arms embargo — on Israel.
The media regurgitates Hamas talking points on civilian death tolls and starving civilians, and legitimizes terrorism as a tactic of resistance. Hamas-support networks, international non-governmental organizations, and the flagrantly antisemitic United Nations have all played active roles in delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist while bolstering Palestinian propaganda and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
But throughout the book, Coates weaves in the role of cultural Marxism which begins with the 30-year march of Critical Race Theory (CRT) through higher education. She recognizes that the indoctrination from childhood into the cultural-Marxist construct of the “oppressors” versus the “oppressed” has reflexively supported the Palestinians as the oppressed party in the conflict with Israel, consigning the Jewish State, but also Jews around the world, to the category of “oppressors.”
Thus, do we see generations of brainwashed extremists infiltrating American institutions that begin in academia but permeate the media, corporate board rooms, and local, state, and federal governments. As Coates points out, it’s not surprising that Hamas invents propaganda to demonize Israel; what is shocking, however, is that senior members of the Biden administration including the president himself amplify and legitimize the lies. Coates compares the perpetuation of this warped narrative by campus radicals to the “Vietnam playbook of counterculture resistance” which is being used today to destroy the US-Israel alliance.
CRT proponents may repudiate history as they wrap themselves in Keffiyeh-adorned anti-Zionism, but Coates’ book makes a strong case for an incoming Trump administration to cease the indoctrination destroying the hearts and minds of American students. Recognizing that the “progressive rejection of ‘Judeo-Christian values’ in recent years…threatens both the legacy of our greatest American leaders and our alliance with the state of Israel,” she writes, “The great lesson of the Holocaust should be that antisemitism is a noxious cancer that can corrupt and consume a great culture. It is tolerated and justified at our peril.”
The second chapter of The Battle for the Jewish State tells the story of a long-standing tradition of American sympathy for Judaism and support for the Jewish State. The understanding that the US and Israel, the “Start-Up Nation” with scientific geniuses like Chaim Weizmann, face common enemies has led to a strong alliance that includes intelligence sharing, military collaboration, and economic partnerships.
If only the Palestinians realized the reality that alliance presents. Referring to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” which recognized that until the Palestinians accept that the Jewish state is not going away, their “Plan A” will always be the eradication of Israel, Coates concludes, “If a president of the United States ever decides to acknowledge the actual truth and unequivocally declare Israel’s victory, the sad history of US engagement in Vietnam may not need to play out again in the Middle East.”
And yet US administrations continue the futility of failed attempts at a two-state solution which ultimately led to the disastrous Oslo Accords and other misguided mistakes under both Republican and Democrat administrations. But it’s Obama’s legacy that brought us to where we are today, with his pivot to Iran and claims in a speech in 2013 that “the only way to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.” With Biden’s foreign policy team comprised of Obama alumni, the Palestinians’ Plan A seemingly became US foreign policy. October 7th was the result.
What’s next? In the final chapter, Coates sets forth policy recommendations the basis of which can best be summarized in a quote from a 2016 Trump’s speech: “[W]hen the United States stands with Israel, the chances of peace really rise and rises exponentially…we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel. The Palestinians must come to the table knowing that the bond between the United States and Israel is absolutely, totally unbreakable.”
One can only imagine what would have transpired over the past four years if Trump had won a second term: peace with expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia and others, the fall of the Islamic Republic through continued maximum pressure, weakened Houthis and freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, 1200 Israeli civilian lives saved, and the Palestinians moving on to “Plan B.”
Notably, the antisemitism genie would still be locked inside its bottle, and on this front, Coates has much to recommend understanding how this corrosive ideology harms both Israel and the United States. Understanding that “American antisemitism isn’t just hatred of Jews, it is hatred of the very essence of the United States as well,” Coates lays out several prescriptions to address the scourge.
The Battle for the Jewish State provides a roadmap for Israeli victory but also for a stronger US that returns to its Judeo-Christian values and that once again leads the West in navigating these dangerous and tumultuous times. That begins by abandoning generations of failed policies that emboldened Palestinians while once again recognizing that Israel is a vital ally helping to project American power throughout the region and bringing peace in its wake.
Lauri B. Regan is the Vice Chair of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, Vice President and Treasurer of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and board member of Polaris National Security.
The post A New Book Shows the Path Forward for the US-Israel Alliance first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows

Pro-Hamas protesters led by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) demonstrate outside the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 14, 2024. Photo: Derek French via Reuters Connect
A new poll released on Wednesday underscores how far removed Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other anti-Zionist organizations that claim to represent Jews are from mainstream Jewish views on Israel, Zionism, and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
Commissioned by The Jewish Majority, a nonprofit founded by a researcher whose aim is to monitor and accurately report Jewish opinion on the most consequential issues affecting the community, the poll found that the vast majority of American Jews believe that anti-Zionist movements and anti-Israel university protests are antisemitic.
The findings also showed that Jews across the US overwhelmingly oppose the views and tactics of JVP, a prominent anti-Israel group which has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza.
Founded in 1996 at the University of California, Berkeley, JVP describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.” It was infamously one of the first organizations to blame Israel following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
“Israeli apartheid and occupation — and the United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence,” JVP said as Israelis were still counting their dead and missing.
American Jews who responded to The Jewish Majority’s poll overwhelmingly reject this line of thinking. Seventy percent said they believe that anti-Zionism of any stripe is antisemitic; 85 percent believe that Hamas, whom JVP described as “the oppressed,” is a genocidal group; and 79 percent support vocally pro-Israel groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization JVP has defamed as “not a credible source on antisemitism and racism.”
Additionally, JVP’s methods of protest are unpopular among American Jews, The Jewish Majority added, noting that 75 percent disapprove of “blocking traffic” and only 18 percent approve of protesters’ wearing masks to conceal their identities. Sixty percent also disagree with staging protests outside the homes of public officials, a common JVP tactic.
“Plain and simple, Jewish Voice for Peace is an extremist group that does not represent the views of the overwhelming majority of American Jews,” Jonathan Schulman, The Jewish Majority’s executive director, said in a statement accompanying the poll results. “American Jews share a strong and consistent stance against anti-Zionists as well as a deep concern over rising antisemitism and the tactics used by organizations like JVP.”
He continued, “It is high time people see through the charade: JVP is not representative of anyone but a marginal fringe, even if a few radical Jews are involved in their movement.”
The Jewish Majority’s poll was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s inner workings, messaging, and political activities were recently documented in a groundbreaking report on the group published last month by StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights group based in Los Angeles, California.
Titled, “A Shield for Hate, Not a Voice for Peace,” the report noted that JVP has promoted a distorted history of Zionism and Israel, accusing the movement for Jewish self-determination of everything from training US police officers to violate the rights of African Americans to abusing “Jewish history.” In doing so, it has allied with extremist groups such as WithinOurLifetime — whose founder has threatened to set Jews on fire and led a movement to harass Jews on New York City’s public transportation — and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), which celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and has proclaimed that “the Zionist entity has no right to exist.”
The report also stated that JVP has collaborated with anti-Israel entities such as Samidoun, which identifies itself as a “Palestinian prisoner solidarity network,” to hold rallies. Samidoun described Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel as “a brave and heroic operation.” The United States and Canada each imposed sanctions on Samidoun in October, labeling the organization a “sham charity” and accusing it of fundraising for designated terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
JVP has also compared Zionism to Nazism.
“This is Holocaust inversion — an antisemitic tactic in which the genocide Jews faced in the past is used to promote baseless hatred against Jews today,” the StandWithUs report said. “The only group benefiting from JVP’s Holocaust inversion is Hamas — a truly genocidal terrorist group. JVP has helped shield them from accountability for launching the war, ruthlessly militarizing civilian areas across Gaza, stealing humanitarian aid, and rejecting nearly every proposed ceasefire and hostage release deal.”
In June 2024, the Anti-Defamation League filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) accusing the political fundraising arm of JVP of transgressing federal election law by misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.
The complaint lodged a slew of charges against Jewish Voice for Peace’s political action committee (JVP PAC), including spending almost no money on candidates running for office — a political action committee’s main purpose. From 2020-2023, JVP PAC reported spending $82,956, but just a small fraction of that sum — $1,775, just over 2 percent — was spent on candidates, according to the complaint. The money went elsewhere, being paid out in one case for “legal services” provided by a company which “doesn’t appear to practice law” and other expenses.
JVP continues to have the support of powerful friends in the world of progressive philanthropy, a formidable subset of the American elite, amid these scandals and controversies.
Since 2017 it has — according to a 2023 report by the National Association of Scholars — received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants from various foundations, including the Open Society Policy Center — founded by billionaire George Soros — the Kaphan Foundation, and others.
According to the recent StandWithUs report, JVP has received substantial financial assistance from organizations tied to Lebanon and Iran.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Vast Majority of US Jews Reject Jewish Voice for Peace, Other Anti-Zionist Groups, Polling Data Shows first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint statement to the media in Baghdad, Iraq, April 22, 2024. Photo: AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/Pool via REUTERS
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday demanded Israel pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza” and urged the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state.
During a press conference with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in West Java, as part of his Asian tour to Malaysia and Pakistan, Erdogan rejected US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild the war-torn enclave while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Like many other Middle Eastern leaders who rejected Trump’s proposal, Erdogan also advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The creation of a sovereign, territorially united State of Palestine within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital cannot be delayed any further,” he said during the press conference, as aired by the Turkish TRT Haber TV channel.
“Any step, proposal, or project that undermines this matter is illegitimate in our view, and it means more conflicts, bloodshed, and instability,” he continued.
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House last week, Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
“Until there is peace in Gaza, until the Palestinians achieve peace, peace in the region is impossible,” the Turkish president said.
With talks underway to extend the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire, Erdogan also demanded that Israel must pay reparations “for the harm it inflicted through its aggressive actions in Gaza.”
“The cost of Israel’s 15-month attacks in Gaza is about $100 billion,” he said. “The law dictates that the perpetrator must compensate for the damage.”
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Last month, both sides reached a ceasefire and hostage-release deal brokered by the US, Egypt, and Qatar.
Under phase one, Hamas agreed to release 33 Israeli hostages, eight of whom are deceased, in exchange for Israel freeing over 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are serving multiple life sentences for terrorism-related offenses.
So far, 16 of the 33 hostages have been released during the first phase, which is set to last six weeks.
During the press conference, Erdogan also announced that Turkey and Indonesia will join forces in the reconstruction of Gaza.
Last month, Erdogan met with Hamas leader Muhammad Ismail Darwish in Ankara.
Turkey has been one of the most outspoken critics of Israel during the Gaza war, even threatening to invade the Jewish state and calling on the United Nations to use force if it cannot stop Israel’s military campaign against Hamas.
Last year, Ankara also ceased all exports and imports to and from Israel, citing the “humanitarian tragedy” in the Palestinian territories as the reason.
Erdogan has frequently defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he described as an Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. He and other Turkish leaders have repeatedly compared Israel with Nazi Germany and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler.
The post Turkey’s Erdogan Demands Israel Pay Reparations for Gaza, Says Palestinian State ‘Must Not Be Delayed’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel

College students in the Boston, Massachusetts area hold dueling demonstrations amid Israel’s war with Hamas in April 2024. Photo: Vincent Ricci via Reuters Connect
Boston University has rejected the group Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) call for its endowment to be divested of holdings in companies which sell armaments to the Israeli military, becoming the latest higher education institution to refuse this key tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East,” university president Melissa Gilliam said on Tuesday in a statement which reported the will of the board of trustees. “Our traditions of free speech and academic freedom are critical to who we are as an institution, and so is our tradition of finding common ground to engage difficult topics while respecting the dignity of every individual.”
Gilliam’s announcement comes amid SJP’s push to hold a student government administered referendum on divestment, a policy goal the group has pursued since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its hopes were dashed on Tuesday when what SJP described as “technical difficulties” caused the referendum to be postponed indefinitely. However, SJP hinted that the delay may have been caused by its failing to draw a “representative sample of BU’s undergraduate population” to the polls.
SJP’s relationship with the university is poor, according to The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s official campus newspaper. In November, the Student and Activities Office issued the group a “formal warning” following multiple violations of policies on peaceful assembly. SJP, the Free Press said, occupied an area of the Center for Computing and Data Sciences for two days and tacked anti-Zionist propaganda — which included accusations that Boston University profits from “death” — on school property inside the building despite being forewarned that doing so is verboten. Following the disciplinary action, SJP accused the university of being “discriminatory towards SJP and our events.”
American universities have largely rejected demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering a succession of blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement that students and faculty have pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations aimed at coercing officials into enacting the policy.
Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”
The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.
Colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.
The losses estimated by JLens are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.
“This groundbreaking report approached the morally problematic BDS movement from an entirely new direction — its negative impact on portfolio returns,” New York University adjunct professor Michael Lustig said in a statement extolling the report. “JLens has done a great job in quantifying the financial effects of implementing the suggestions of this pernicious movement, and importantly, they ‘show their work’ by providing full transparency into their methodology, and properly caveat the points where assumptions must necessarily be made. This report will prove to be an important tool in helping to fight noxious BDS advocacy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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