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For US officials, Israeli hostage deal brings joy — and hard questions about how much more war to support
WASHINGTON (JTA) — If the provisions of a likely agreement bear out and Hamas releases dozens of hostages, U.S. officials will celebrate alongside the Israelis.
But then will come the questions about how, and whether, Israel restarts its war to defeat the terror group behind the abductions.
Analysts and scholars with ties to Israel’s government say the country’s security officials are already anticipating those questions, as it appears that Hamas is set to release as many as 50 hostages — mostly women and children — this week. In exchange, Israel will release about three times as many imprisoned Palestinians and will pause its invasion of Gaza for four days.
Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president of the conservative-leaning Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who has been speaking to Israeli government officials, said he expects the initial pause to lead to demands for a longer break in the fighting.
“Once there’s calm there are going to be international efforts to extend the calm because as far as the international community goes, quiet is a good thing,” he said.
Israel has vowed to restart its campaign after the pause, but calls for a long-term ceasefire are already increasing internationally and among Democrats in Congress. Recently, a rising number of Congress members and senators — including some Jewish lawmakers — have voiced calls for a ceasefire or criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza. About 40 Democrats in total have called for a ceasefire, although a number of their statements are qualified with demands that Hamas be dismantled and all the hostages be released — which are also Israel’s stated goals.
Watching how those Democrats respond during the anticipated pause in fighting will be key to understanding whether support for Israel will further erode, said Kevin Rachlin, the vice president of public affairs for J Street, the liberal Jewish Israel lobby that is influential among Democrats.
He pointed to a letter signed this week by 13 Senate Democrats, including leaders in the caucus, calling on Biden to press Israel to come up with a detailed plan for “sustained humanitarian aid” for the Gaza Palestinians.
“The growing pressure that we’re seeing right now is not just [because of] the civilian death toll but also on the finite definition of what does success look like with this military operation?” Rachlin said. “I think with a pause, that allows more of these questions to come into the forefront. You’ll start to see more members talk and ask about that more forcefully.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Israel during the pause, the Israeli news site Walla reported late Tuesday. It will be his fourth trip to the country since Oct. 7.
The Biden administration continues to back Israel’s war aims — although it too has questions about how Israel will conduct the war once the pause is over. In a call with reporters on Thursday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the administration had questions about how Israel would expand its military campaign in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, considering that Israel previously encouraged hundreds of thousands of civilians to move southward while it waged war with Hamas in the north.
“As they consider moving their operations to the south, we have said we don’t support those kinds of operations absent a cohesive plan by the Israelis to factor in how they’re going to be able to protect what is now mathematically a dramatically increased civilian population, because they were evacuated from the north at Israel’s urging,” he said.
Extending the pause into a ceasefire is not an option for Israel, which has vowed to eradicate Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday evening as his cabinet met to vote on the terms of the hostage release.
“I am here to say the war will continue” after the release, Netanyahu said in a press conference before the vote, which appeared guaranteed to approve the deal. “We will not give up until we achieve absolute victory and we return them all.”
Schanzer said the demands of the Israeli public left no other choice for Netanyahu.
“The Israeli government is or was deemed to be in violation of its contract with the people of the south” on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists breached Gaza’s border with southern Israel and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducted some 240 people, Schanzer said.
To restore trust with its population, Schanzer said, “from the government’s perspective, the goal is to completely clean out Hamas from the Gaza Strip so that the southern communities can return and live normal peaceful lives. Every Israeli that I’ve talked to since the start of this war has said that there cannot be a return to 10/6.”
In response to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency question, a spokesman for the Biden administration’s National Security Council said its support for Israel’s war against Hamas would not wane, citing a statement from a Hamas spokesman vowing to repeat the Oct. 7 attack.
“What we do not support are calls for Israel to stop defending itself from Hamas terrorists, which is what a permanent ceasefire would be,” the spokesman said, “Hamas has warned that what happened on October 7th ‘will happen again and again and again’ until Israel is annihilated. These comments are horrifying and are an important reminder of how much is at stake.”
Still, it was clear from the spokesman’s reply that the Biden administration still had questions about how Israel will conduct its war once it resumes. Biden officials are not happy with the frequency and extent of the humanitarian pauses Israel has recently agreed to.
“For a humanitarian pause to be fully successful, we have to have in place a system to maximize aid delivery and ensure the protection of humanitarian workers while also working to secure the release of hostages, and prevent the terrorists from using the pause to take advantage,” said the spokesman. “This is complex and we are continuing to work in earnest towards this goal.”
Kirby mentioned one measure of “fully successful” in his call with the media: the amount of humanitarian aid Israel allows into Gaza. “Our incremental goal was about [trucks of aid] 150 a day and we’re not close to achieving that,” Kirby said.
Since Israel struck back, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says that more than 12,000 people have been killed, including thousands of children. It is not clear what portion of that total number are combatants, or how many have been killed by misfired missiles aimed at Israel.
David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which has close ties to the U.S. and Israeli governments, said the pause would give Israel an opportunity to present to the Biden administration a detailed plan for its next steps.
“It’s a way for Israel to explain to the U.S. what it looks like,” he said of the continuation of the war. “Now you have 2 million people all in the south, and you’re going to have to navigate that,” he said. “That’s where, I think, the U.S. needs to be convinced.”
As of now, Biden stands as a bulwark against pressure for a ceasefire, Makovsky said, but that could change if the war becomes a quagmire with no clear way out.
“He’s going to be supportive but if he feels that Israel is stalled and that it’s not making progress on the objective, then I think there will probably be a reassessment,” he said.
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Should Jewish Students Stop Attending Sarah Lawrence College?
The Sarah Lawrence campus. Photo: Wiki Commons.
Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) — my alma mater — has an antisemitism problem that is driving Jewish students from campus and persuading others from attending.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded southern Israel and perpetrated the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
On Oct. 9, 2023, the SLC campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) celebrated the rapes, massacre, and hostage-taking of Israelis when it announced an “Hour of Solidarity with Palestine” event. The event flyer featured a Hamas bulldozer breaking into Israel through the security barrier.
As The Algemeiner reported, “Briana Martin — SLC director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) — called on students to ignore Jewish suffering by attending” the event. According to the report, Martin was SJP’s advisor and “club’s advocate and liaison.”
I am a member of an independent Sarah Lawrence alumni social media group that has almost 3,500 members. When the topic of Israel is raised, graduates frequently engage in hateful, antisemitic, and intolerant commentary — which partially explains the college’s tolerance and even encouragement of antisemitism on its campus.
Let’s take a look at what graduates of the college are saying.
In late 2024, a Sarah Lawrence graduate posted concerns about what she called a “despicable” banner hung at Sarah Lawrence which read, “ZIONISM WILL FALL. REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY. FREE PALESTINE.”
Many Sarah Lawrence graduates chimed in to support the hateful banner with comments such as “Get over yourself” and “This is EXACTLY the Sarah Lawrence I went to.” One graduate explained, “I learned about the foundation of zionism as a colonial ideology At slc! [sic].”
Some graduates joined the conversation to agree that antisemitism is currently a huge issue at the college. One responded, “The SLC I knew did not make other students feel unsafe … The SLC administration continues to be asleep at the wheel with both blindfolds and earplugs.”
Another graduate wrote, “Many Jewish students do not feel safe to be known or visible as Jewish on the campus.” This graduate explained she has a child attending Sarah Lawrence and also communicates with other parents of SLC students.
Another graduate added, “I know of many Jewish parents who have now crossed Sarah Lawrence off of their schools to visit list.”
In another thread on this alumni group, a graduate shared, “A Jewish senior [in high school] I know was accepted to SLC. But he has chosen to attend elsewhere because they heard from other Jewish students at SLC that they don’t feel safe and they don’t feel the admin[istration] takes their concerns seriously.”
As I recently reported, at the anti-Israel encampment on its campus last year, Sarah Lawrence students planted a large banner promoting Samidoun, which was designated by the US government under President Biden as a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.”
In a 2024 zine written by “Anonymous Sarah Lawrence Students,” the authors state that they answered Hamas’ call for “escalation” by occupying a building on campus.
Sarah Lawrence students have masked up to conceal their identities and dressed up like Hamas — the very terrorists dedicated to killing Jews across the globe — to occupy the main administration building on campus in a failed attempt to have the college divest from Israel.
Ask yourself, would Sarah Lawrence or any college or university allow students to dress up like the Ku Klux Klan and conceal their identities while they occupy buildings, disrupt campus life, and terrorize the community? I surely doubt it.
In a column published this month, Sarah Lawrence professor Samuel J. Abrams discussed a student who is Jewish and a Zionist and afraid to return to campus. I shared Abrams’ column with the social media alumni group. A graduate responded, “imagine the kind of coward you’d have to be to be afraid to go to school.”
Such a total lack of empathy from a fellow Sarah Lawrence graduate helps explain why Jewish students don’t want to attend SLC, and why Jewish parents are looking elsewhere.
In the same thread, another graduate of the college responded: “i’m not a zionist but nevertheless … when i was at SLC someone graffitied a swastika onto my dorm and i had fake eviction notices slipped under my door, just because i celebrated jewish holidays. people threatened me because i went to hillel. it’s tough out there even for jews who 1000% support Palestine [sic].”
Recently, students at SLC have encouraged fellow students to boycott Abrams’ classes. Abrams explained that the boycott is because he supports “Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself” and because he is a “Zionist Jew.” Just last week, Abrams published a column detailing how the social media alumni group has allowed antisemitism directed at him.
In August, a graduate posted to the alumni group, “I asked the current Dean of Students what SLC was doing to make Jewish students feel safe. The answer was ‘nothing.’”
I emailed Dave Stanfield, the Dean of Students, about this. He responded:
While I do not comment on private conversations with students or on social media posts, I can say that the College remains committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive environment for all students, including our Jewish community. In my role, I regularly engage with students to understand their concerns and ensure their voices are reflected in our policies and programs.
This month, I reported in The Algemeiner that a graduate of Sarah Lawrence recently commented in the alumni group, “May no Zionist, be they Christian, Jewish, or atheist (because all of these exist) be safe from harassment just as white men who espouse white supremacy should not be safe from harassment either.”
Not a single graduate among the almost 3,500 who belong to this alumni group spoke up against this hateful, antisemitic comment.
This month, I also posted my first column detailing antisemitism at Sarah Lawrence on the alumni social media group. My fellow graduates regularly post our work and interests in the group, which is one of the reasons the alumni group exists. My post was initially published and then it was declined or removed. Apparently, Sarah Lawrence graduates do not like reading about their own intolerance and antisemitism.
Before my post was declined, a fellow graduate responded, “Peter Reitzes thank you for this brave post. It echoes my impression exactly and I will add that although I have given to SLC’s annual fund every year since 1983 I will no longer provide financial support to the college.”
Another graduate responded, “I wouldn’t send my dog there.”
Recently, several Sarah Lawrence graduates have denigrated the politically progressive Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the alumni group by calling it a terrorist organization. The ADL is one of the leading organizations in the world fighting hatred and antisemitism.
Emmaia Gelman — Sarah Lawrence professor and Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism — has as her current Instagram profile picture a photo that reads “GO TO HELL ADL.” In 2024, Gelman shared a photo on Instagram that included the messages “NO ADL” and “SHAME ON GLAAD.” GLAAD is the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
In August, Sarah Lawrence professor Suzanne Gardinier posted on X, “That sick uniformed glee in civilian suffering I used to call Nazi—watching a whole generation learn to call it Israeli.” According to the US Department of State, one example of antisemitism is “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
It may come as a huge shock to parents spending more than $66,000 a year in tuition to send their children to Sarah Lawrence that professors would espouse such views.
Some of my fellow graduates even rely upon gaslighting or trolling arguments in attempts to deny or diminish antisemitism. In one such absurd exchange, a graduate actually stated that it is a “weak argument” for Zionists to complain of antisemitism because Palestinians are Semites too.
In another such exchange, a graduate put forth the view that it is antisemitic if you do not ask if Sarah Lawrence has “any investments in Israel that we need to divest from?” To make such a noxious view even worse, it was made by a graduate who identified herself as an instructor or professor at a nearby university.
In his most recent column, published last week, Abrams concludes: “Those numerous alumni who have engaged in anti-Semitic behavior serve as a stark reminder that SLC has not instilled the critical thinking skills necessary to foster a truly open and tolerant society.”
In early 2025, the US Department of Education opened a Title VI antisemitism investigation in response to a complaint filed by Hillel accusing the college of fostering a hostile environment towards Jewish students.
Jewish families and our allies need to stop sending our children to Sarah Lawrence. The college has chosen its side. Now it is time for Jewish families to move on from Sarah Lawrence.
Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.
The post Should Jewish Students Stop Attending Sarah Lawrence College? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Palestinian Authority: Jews Should Go to America or Europe, and Gazans Should Flood Israel
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, April 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is trying to garner international support for an alternative to President Trump’s plan to relocate the Arabs of Gaza to countries “with humanitarian hearts.”
The PA has called Trump’s plan “satanic,” and instead wants the Jews to leave Israel to make room for the Gazans in Israel — the place that the PA calls Gazans’ rightful home.
Official PA TV suggested that the Jews should go back to Poland or Russia, as Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported last week.
A senior PA official, Jibril Rajoub, is now suggesting that Trump take the Jews to America:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “[US President Trump] is talking about expelling the original residents of Palestine and forgets that Israelis come from 76 countries, so let him take them to him.”
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Feb. 15, 2025]
Rajoub also hopes for Fatah-Hamas unity to “besiege” Israel, “and those who stand behind the Jewish State, ” through “comprehensive popular resistance” — a term that also refers to the use of terrorism:
Jibril Rajoub: “We in the Fatah Movement support building bilateral rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas… so that our strategic option in the next stage will be comprehensive popular resistance and an organizational rapprochement that pertains to the PLO… What Netanyahu and Trump have said must constitute for us an incentive to achieve our unity and re-examine many political policies. I hope our brothers in Hamas will also understand that they need to do some self-inspection in a way that will allow building a future for our people and besiege this occupation (i.e., Israel) and those who stand behind it.”
The concept of Israel becoming Jew-free was also echoed in the PA’s official daily:
Instead of uprooting the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, why don’t you return the Israelis to the countries from which they came?’
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 7, 2025]
Senior PA officials, such as Mahmoud Abbas himself and his senior advisor, propose that Gazans flooding Israel would bring “comprehensive peace and real coexistence” and that “then there will be no problem”:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: “If the Americans want a solution, the only place they [the refugees] need to return to is their cities and villages from which they were expelled during the Nakba [i.e., “the catastrophe,” the establishment of Israel] … He [US President Trump] who thinks he has the power to impose a new deal of the century or to exile our people and take control of any inch of our land is deceiving himself.”
[Official PA TV News, Feb. 15, 2025]
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “The solution is simple and easy: To return them to the cities and villages from which they were forcibly removed in 1948, then there will be no problem…”
[Mahmoud Al-Habbash, YouTube channel, Feb. 5, 2025]
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “He should return them to the cities and villages from which they were expelled in 1948.”
[Mahmoud Al-Habbash, YouTube channel, Feb. 5, 2025]
PMW has reported numerous times that the Palestinian Authority does not recognize Israel’s right to exist within any borders. All of these statements by the PA leadership hoping for Israelis to leave and be replaced by so-called refugees reflect messages that the PA regularly broadcasts to its people and upon which it educates its children.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is PMW’s Founder and Director. A version of this article originally appeared at PMW.
The post Palestinian Authority: Jews Should Go to America or Europe, and Gazans Should Flood Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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How Hamas Is Using Goebbels’ Propaganda Tactics in Gaza
US-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen and Russian-Israeli Sasha (Alexander) Troufanov, hostages held in Gaza since the deadly October 7, 2023 attack, are escorted by Palestinian Hamas terrorists and Islamic Jihad terrorists as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, February 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle.”
That statement is often attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, who understood the power of a lie, repeated over and over again. Whether the quote is accurate or not, Goebbels certainly used that very principle to cultivate the myth of the so-called Jewish-Communist betrayal that allegedly led to Germany’s defeat in World War I.
This propaganda enabled Hitler to tap into the frustrations of many Germans suffering from the Great Depression of the 1920s — and also fueled long-standing hatred toward Jews, which eventually culminated in the Holocaust.
It is doubtful that Goebbels, sitting in a Berlin bunker just before taking his own life along with his wife and six children, could have imagined how his principles would live on in the modern era — adopted by those far removed from the so-called Aryan master race. But reality proves that the method works: A lie repeated often enough becomes an absolute truth.
This past Thursday, we witnessed yet another instance of Hamas’ propaganda — this time regarding the return of the bodies of Oded Lifshitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two young children, Ariel and Kfir, who were kidnapped during the October 7 massacre. For months, Hamas operatives claimed that the family had been killed in Israeli airstrikes, even conveying this false information to the captive father. However, forensic examinations have now revealed the grim truth: They were brutally murdered by these terrorists. Yet, just as in 1930s Germany, the lie was repeated so frequently that it became a fact in the eyes of many.
Another example of Hamas’ propaganda unfolded last Saturday, when the release of six Israeli hostages was accompanied by a carefully orchestrated propaganda spectacle — when two other hostages were forced to watch, enduring yet another round of psychological terror. It is worth noting that Hisham Al-Sayed was released discreetly — perhaps because he is Arab or Muslim, or maybe because he did not fit Hamas’ propaganda narrative.
These events played out before crowds of Gazan families who came to cheer and praise the “heroism” of the kidnappers.
Israeli television, rightfully, refrained from broadcasting this spectacle, which echoed Goebbels’ tactics of creating a narrative in which Jews are portrayed as the real monsters. We have seen this before — in pro-Hamas posters depicting the Israeli Prime Minister as a bloodthirsty vampire.
The big lie continues to thrive: We are told that the Bibas family was kidnapped for their “protection”; that Hamas seeks to establish a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel; that a genocide is occurring in Gaza; and that Palestinians are the descendants of the Philistines and Jebusites. There is no truth here — only an endless repetition of falsehoods until they are ingrained in the global consciousness.
Thus, when Israel’s forensic institute confirmed that the Bibas children were brutally murdered as early as November 2023, and that Shiri Bibas’ body wasn’t returned but was instead replaced with that of an unidentified Gazan woman — it no longer came as a shock. The only question that remains is: What lie will they try to sell us next week?
What Joseph Goebbels pioneered in the 1930s has found new life in the age of social media. History proves that in the fight for truth, silence is not an option.
Itamar Tzur is the author of The Invention of the Palestinian Narrative and an Israeli scholar specializing in Middle Eastern history. He holds a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Jewish History and a Master’s degree with honors in Middle Eastern Studies. As a senior member of the “Forum Kedem for Middle Eastern Studies and Public Diplomacy,” he leverages his academic expertise to deepen understanding of regional dynamics and historical contexts.
The post How Hamas Is Using Goebbels’ Propaganda Tactics in Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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