Smoke billows over Khiam, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as pictured from Marjayoun, near the border with Israel, Oct. 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Karamallah Daher

Israel’s expanded military operations against the Iran-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah in Lebanon have enabled Jerusalem to take steps to return displaced Israeli citizens to their homes in the northern part of the country, according to researchers at two leading US think tanks.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), in conjunction with the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (CTP), explained the developments on Sunday in their daily Iran Update, “which provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests.”

According to the report, “Israeli Army Radio reported that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] has removed all military checkpoints and roadblocks on roads near the Israel-Lebanon border that have been closed to civilians over the past year.”

This was able to happen because of Israeli operations in Lebanon that have reduced the threat of anti-tank fire and other munitions targeting northern Israel.

“The IDF’s re-opening of roads along the border,” ISW and CTP explained, “indicates that the IDF has assessed that Israeli operations have significantly reduced the threat of anti-tank fire and other short-range munitions enough to allow civilians to return to previously targeted areas.”

Specifically, it has been Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, and “control of Lebanese territory” that have led to these steps, according to an IDF official who spoke to Israeli Army Radio.

In mid-September, the Israeli war cabinet expanded its war goals to include returning tens of thousands of Israeli citizens to their homes in the north after they were forced to flee amid unrelenting fire from Hezbollah in neighboring southern Lebanon.

“The possibility for an agreement is running out as Hezbollah continues to tie itself to Hamas, and refuses to end the conflict,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said at the time. “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.”

On Oct. 8, 2023, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s war on Israel, pummeling northern Israeli communities almost daily with barrages of drones, rockets, and missiles from southern Lebanon, where it wields significant political and military influence. One such attack killed 12 children in the small Druze town of Majdal Shams.

About 70,000 Israelis have been forced to evacuate Israel’s north during that time due to the unrelenting attacks. Most of them have spent the past 13 months living in hotels in other areas of the country.

Since Israel began its widened campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, it has achieved major successes. It has taken out the entire top echelon of Hezbollah, including its leader Hassan Nasrallah, along with his successor. This, along with other successful operations, has put significant pressure on Hezbollah to come to a diplomatic agreement to end hostilities — which could happen in the coming weeks.

The post Israel’s Operations in Lebanon Enabling Steps to Return Displaced Citizens to Their Homes: Think Tanks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar

Higher education antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative has launched a “National Campaign to Combat Faculty Antisemitism,” which aims to bring awareness to the correlation between increases in antisemitic incidents on college campuses and the presence of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters that act as “foot-soldiers” for the anti-Israel movement.

As The Algemeiner has previously reported, FJP is a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with links to Islamist terrorist organizations. FJP chapters have been cropping up at colleges since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, and throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.

In September, AMCHA published a groundbreaking new study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Unlike many studies on campus antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative researchers drew their conclusions from quantitative rather than qualitative, data, which tend to rely on anecdotes and self-reported responses. Using data analysis, they said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.

FJP, AMCHA’s researchers added, also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. They said that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty — who, they noted, spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools — were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students. Additionally, FJP facilitated the proposing and adopting of student government resolutions demanding adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which aims to isolate Israel culturally, financially, and diplomatically as the first steps towards its destruction. Wherever FJP was, the researchers said, BDS was “4.9 times likely to pass” and “nearly 11 times more likely to be included in student demands,” evincing, they continued, that FJP plays an outsized role in radicalizing university students at the more than 100 schools — including Harvard University, Brown University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University — where it is active.

AMCHA is now converting scholarship to action by sending over 170 presidents of colleges with an active FJP chapter a letter, signed by over 120 nonprofit and academic groups, which outlines the imminent threat FJP poses to Jewish students and university life. Signed by groups such as Alliance of Blacks and Jews, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the World Jewish Congress, the missive calls on college presidents to create “safeguards” which protect not only the physical safety of Jewish students but the university’s mission to be a haven for scholarship and the pursuit of truth.

“The primary mission of FJP chapters is to promote on their campuses an academic boycott of Israel — a boycott whose implementation denies your own students and faculty crucial educational opportunities and academic freedom and can’t help but incite animus and violence towards Jewish members of your campus community,” the letter says, noting that FJP is the project of the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) group, which is affiliated with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — all internationally designated terrorist groups.

It continues, “Faculty members should be free to speak their mind and to advocate for the positions that they support. However, it is essential for universities to establish robust safeguards and enforcement mechanisms to prevent those faculty members from using their academic positions and departmental affiliations to promote ideologically motivated activism that directly targets their own students and colleagues — your own campus community members — for harm.”

On Tuesday, The Algemeiner spoke with AMCHA founder and executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin about what inspired the new campaign. She explained that since last Oct. 7, experts and media outlets have focused their energy on tracking and reporting on the outrageous behavior of pro-Hamas students — as well as the administrators who coddled them — but neglected studying the extent to which their teachers use the classroom to inflame their passions against Israel and Jews. For example, she noted that one of the most insidious behaviors of pro-Hamas professors is instructing students in methods for concealing the antisemitic roots of anti-Zionist activism by denying that Zionism is a component of Jewish identity at all. Such a rationale, she said, arms pro-Hamas students with an ostensible academic argument which, despite being contrary to the opinions of the vast majority of the world’s Jews, allows them to engage in antisemitic behavior while denying that they are doing so.

Using a phrase popularized by millennials, Rossman-Benjamin said that this strategy is effectively the act of “gaslighting”: the insistence that an account of one’s observed behavior is fictional or imagined even as they continue it, causing them to question their sanity and perhaps concede, unsuspectingly, to further victimization.

“One of the important functions of these groups is to give academic legitimacy to the notion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that’s a hugely important trope being trafficked on campuses right now,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “So when scholars say that ‘anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,’ how could it be otherwise? When faculty, [anti-Zionist] Jewish faculty say that ‘Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism,’ who is anyone to say otherwise?’ When faculty are the ones to say that Jews who report being subject to antisemitism that is motivated by anti-Zionism are in reality bad actors attempting to quell free speech of pro-Palestinian activists, who can argue with that? If a faculty member or organization claims that, it seems true to someone whose knowledge of the issue is only surface level. Essentially, what they are doing is giving academic legitimacy to gaslighting.”

Rossman-Benjamin explained that in addition to denying their antisemitism, anti-Zionist faculty argue that it is protected by the intellectual and academic freedoms granted to professors. However, promoting ethnic hatred, in her view, disqualifies anti-Zionist professors from those protections and privileges, as they are the exclusive rewards of legitimate scholars who advance knowledge and thereby reduce prejudice and bigotry. She added that if university presidents cannot make such an important discernment then lawmakers must intervene and do so on their behalf.

“Congress should come in and tell universities to put in place and enforce safeguards and that they will lose their federal funding if they don’t,” she concluded. “If they don’t, I’m afraid that, in short order, universities in the United States will no longer be welcome to Jewish students or faculty.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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Sia performing at Anti-Defamation League’s 30th annual “In Concert Against Hate” on Nov. 18, 2024. Photo: Provided/Getty

Grammy-nominated Australian singer Sia performed on Monday night a slow rendition of her hit song “Titanium” in honor of survivors of the Nova music festival massacre that took place in southern Israel last year.

The performance took place at the Anti-Defamation League’s 30th annual “In Concert Against Hate,” a star-studded event inside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. It included remarks by America actor Blair Underwood and performances by Israeli singer Eden Golan of her original song “October Rain,” which she had to rewrite with different lyrics to perform at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest under the title “Hurricane,” and a rendition of “Oseh Shalom” by the National Symphony Orchestra. The event’s emcee was Jewish-American actor Ben Stiller and attendees included Jewish activists, philanthropists, and Jewish leaders.

Sia, who originally recorded “Titanium” with producer and DJ David Guetta, dedicated her performance on Monday night to survivors of the Hamas-led terrorist attack that took place at the Nova music festival in Re’im, Israel, on Oct. 7, 2023. The song includes lyrics such as “Machine gun, fired at the ones who run…” She sings in the chorus: “I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose/Fire away, fire away/Ricochet, you take your aim/Fire away, fire away/You shoot me down, but I won’t fall/I am titanium.”

Sia was introduced on stage by Nova survivor Danielle Gelbaum, who said the singer’s music “gave me the opportunity to know that I will dance and I am dancing again. And tonight, we will dance again.” Gelbaum said on stage that her first time seeing Sia in concert was in Israel in 2016 with her older sister, who also survived the Nova music festival terrorist attack last year. She had the opportunity to met Sia earlier this year at an exhibit in Los Angeles dedicated to the deadly Nova attack. Survivors of the massacre — in which hundreds were murdered and 40 others were taken as hostages — also joined Sia on stage after her performance, which was accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra.

The singer last performed in Israel in 2016 and was one of hundreds in the entertainment industry who signed an open letter in 2022 rejecting a cultural boycott of Israel. Sia met with Golan backstage at the event on Monday night and the Israeli singer shared a photo of them together on Instagram.

During his opening remarks on stage, Stiller talked about the rise of antisemitism in the world and joked about hiding his Jewish heritage — before he began listing the several Jewish characters he has played on screen. “It’s a very tough time in the world right now. So much anxiety, uncertainty. So much hate in the world,” he said. “But tonight we’re going to battle hate with a healthy dose of hope.”

Music executive Scooter Braun, whose clients include Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, was honored at Monday night’s event with the ADL’s Spotlight Award, for his work in bringing an exhibit about the Nova massacre to the United States. The grandson of Holocaust survivors, he said, “I grew up with the idea of ‘Never again.’ Never again will we walk to our deaths; never again will we be scared.”

“That training — I never thought that I’d have to put it into my everyday life, into my work,” added Braun, whose maternal grandparents met at an ADL event. “These Nova survivors have given me the greatest gift. Because my whole life I was taught ‘Never again’ and something changed after I met these kids. Because they live by this mantra, ‘We will dance again’ … I want to say, again we will be strong, and again we will be proud and again we will dance. Again and again and again.”

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