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The Determination of Israel’s Reservists

IDF soldiers are seen at rest stop near the border with Gaza. Photo: Reuters/Jim Hollander

JNS.orgWho is the Israel soldier? They can be of any age and profession. It may have been a long time since they held a weapon. Many of them are at Tze’elim, one of the IDF’s largest bases, just across the border from Gaza on yellow sand.

When I meet them, they are waiting, as the brief ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was still holding. A short time later, Hamas broke the truce, attacked Israel with rockets, and the fighting began again.

These soldiers are older and more emotional than you would imagine. Their intentions are clear: “Never Again.” The Oct. 7 massacre will never be permitted to reoccur. Israel must be freed from the nightmare of Hamas.

In Tze’elim, rows of barracks and numerous disorderly tents house thousands of soldiers of all kinds. We meet with a group of them from Brigade 252. They are soldiers from the miluim—the reserves. They have completed their three-year military service—or two years, if they are women—but they all keep their “miluim bag” under the bed. If the phone rings, as happened on Oct. 7, they rush to the front, whether they are in Tel Aviv or traveling in Japan, whether they are left-wing or right-wing, professors or taxi drivers. They tear themselves away from the operating room and the shop, the lawyer’s office and the bus they drive.

Commander A. is thin, with gray hair and a kind smile. He is religious. On the morning of Oct. 7, he was in synagogue without a telephone. Someone told him “something never seen before is happening.” A. rushed to his collection point in the south and has yet to return home.

On Oct. 7, the reserves were immediately thrown into the battle to retake the kibbutzim that had been attacked and massacred by Hamas terrorists. They hunted down the Hamas men who remained and collected the wounded and dead Israelis in the fields and on the roads. A. closes his eyes. He has seen hell.

The 252 was then sent into the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, home to 50,000 inhabitants who serve as human shields for what is essentially a massive rocket launching pad. The reservists were trained in a mock-up of a Gaza city. They practiced how to enter, shoot, exit, climb, attack and go through tunnels full of TNT. They trained against ambushes, snipers and RPGs.

A. says that, when they went into Beit Hanoun itself, “We had to quickly learn a lesson: Beit Hanoun’s ambush is in his heart, not its outer circles. The terrorists let you enter easily. There’s a row of houses, two or three more, and that’s where Hamas is waiting for you—where you don’t expect it, in civilian structures.”

A. explains, “If we decide to destroy a structure and there are civilians inside, we warn the civilian population. … There are precise rules for evaluating whether we have to act, whether it’s essential because if we don’t act, the lives of soldiers or Israeli civilians are in danger. We try to stop Hamas’s continuous use of human shields by moving the civilians out completely.”

A. is happy to say, “Of civilians killed in Ben Hanoun, the number is zero.”

Israeli soldiers, however, were killed. Maj. Moshe, a 50-year-old engineer who works in high-tech, explained, “An army generally advances on a territory that, once occupied, is the starting point of your next step. But here, through the tunnels under the ground, suddenly you find the enemy shooting at you from behind.”

Thus, great efforts were made to locate the tunnels. “With the use of sophisticated instruments, and also sometimes suffering unexpected explosions given that Hamas’s specialty is to mine everything with large quantities of explosives, we quickly understood that the tunnels were a very sophisticated network, not holes of various sizes dug here and there, but an enormous spider web that converged on the urban center.”

“The structures used by Hamas, which they protected with human shields, included a mosque, a school, a hospital, a public swimming pool, civilian homes, children’s rooms, even their beds. There were weapons everywhere,” he says.

As a result of the truce, Moshe states, some of the evacuated civilians have begun to return. “We can block them,” he says, “but not attack them or approach them. There is a truce.”

Nonetheless, I point out, three soldiers were wounded two days ago in an attack. “True,” Moshe replies, “and we returned fire. If we are in danger we respond.” He notes that some of the returnees are Hamas terrorists, “but we are in a truce, we act according to the rules of defense.”

“We have two ways of being at war: offensive and defensive,” he continues. “The offensive is much easier: You face the enemy. You can move. Defense is unnerving, even dangerous, especially when there are civilians around.”

However, he says, there is much to do, even during a truce. “For example, we had completely dismantled the explosive systems inside a building, and then we realized that everything had been mined again.”

Hamas, he says, is “easier to deal with than endure while you can’t move. So, we wait for orders. The mission is to destroy Hamas and bring the kidnapped people home. That and nothing else.”

Now that the soldiers are back at war, the humanitarian issue is certainly important to them; not because of what the Biden administration tells them, but because that is what an Israeli soldier is.

First and foremost, however, they are Jews who know exactly what was done to their people on Oct. 7 and will continue their war of justice and survival. One of them tells me, “Yes, I feel when we fight, feel it physically, that our kidnapped citizens are not far away, and I fight for them too with all my heart. This is the most just war of all time.”

The post The Determination of Israel’s Reservists first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israel Can’t Be Expected to Give Aid to Gaza Unless it Bypasses Hamas

FILE PHOTO: Palestinians carry aid supplies they collected from trucks that entered Gaza through Israel, in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip August 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo

While Israel has denied the tidal wave of lies that it’s causing a famine in Gaza, to what extent is Israel legally obligated to supply aid to Gaza, if the aid also helps Hamas?

Obviously, no one wants to see civilians suffer. But things are not so simple, because while Hamas has been mauled, it has yet to be eliminated, it’s still attacking the IDF and Israelis, it’s still holding hostages, and it’s still stealing and reselling food, often with the effective cooperation of certain “humanitarian” organizations, like the UN-affiliated World Food Programme..

So far, only the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been willing to make sure that its aid goes only to civilians. And a recent whistleblower complaint to USAID outlines how these other “humanitarian” groups have refused IDF offers to work together to ensure that aid was not stolen by Hamas, thereby acting to protect Hamas rather than Gaza civilians.

According to the whistleblower:

A firsthand eyewitnessing of senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials offering any support necessary, including security protection and coordination, to representatives from the World Food Programme (WFP) and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) only to have WFP and OCHA respond that they were not prepared to discuss such coordination…

[The] IDF is actively helping the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) get food into the hands of civilians while U.N. agencies, including WFP and OCHA, through their unwillingness to coordinate with the IDF, are inhibiting the distribution of such aid … [this refusal] raises serious questions.

Under international law, the refusal by these other “humanitarian organizations” to prevent Hamas from stealing aid makes all the difference in the world. That’s because Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, on Consignment of medical supplies, food and clothing, states that a party to the conflict is not obligated to allow aid convoys if it has “serious reasons for fearing”:

(a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination,

(b) that the control may not be effective, or

(c) that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy through the substitution of the above-mentioned consignments for goods which would otherwise be provided or produced by the enemy or through the release of such material, services or facilities as would otherwise be required for the production of such goods.

The next paragraphs of Article 23 underscore that Israel has the right to block aid because its “permission is conditional” and it has the “right to prescribe the technical arrangements under which such passage is allowed.”

Prescribing the “technical arrangements” includes working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is ensuring that the aid goes directly to civilians and that it is not stolen by Hamas. And it also includes not working with the WFP, OCHA, UNRWA, and other “humanitarian” organizations that seem to actually be agents of Hamas.

Not surprisingly, because it is actually aiding Gaza civilians rather than Hamas, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been condemned by the “humanitarian” community, as reported by the BBC:

More than 170 charities and other NGOs are calling for the controversial aid distribution scheme in Gaza run by the Israel- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to be shut down.

Also not surprising is that a UN press release, titled “UN experts call for immediate dismantling of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” has as its lead expert signer Francesca Albanese, the notorious antisemite who has been sanctioned by the United States.

The bottom line is that under international law, Israel has every right to refuse to work with these self-discrediting Hamas-adjacent “humanitarian” organizations, especially when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is there to pick up the slack.

Alex Safian, PhD, was until recently the Associate Director and Research Director of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. 

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What the Brandeis Study Gets Shockingly Wrong About Antisemitism on Campus

Brandeis University. Photo: Wiki Commons.

American higher education prides itself on truth-telling. Yet when the subject is antisemitism, the academy often resorts to denial and minimization.

A recent Brandeis University study is a striking case in point. Its authors, Dr. Graham Wright and Prof. Leonard Saxe of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, claim that only three percent of non-Jewish faculty are hostile toward Israel.

In a recent Inside Higher Ed editorial, the authors argue that most professors are in fact allies, not adversaries, in the fight against antisemitism.

This narrative is reassuring — but dangerously misleading. It rests on a narrow definition of “hostility” that excludes far more pervasive expressions of animus.

Wright and Saxe classified as hostile only those faculty who denied Israel’s right to exist and refused to collaborate with colleagues who affirmed it. By that measure, just three percent of professors qualified. Yet their own data tell a different story: a majority — 54 percent — agreed that Israel is an apartheid state; 8 percent said they would not collaborate with a colleague who supports Israel’s existence; and 7 percent denied Israel’s right to exist outright.

Calling Israel an apartheid state — when it manifestly is not — is an act of hostility, one that delegitimizes the Jewish State and stigmatizes its supporters. By any reasonable standard, then, hostility among non-Jewish faculty is not marginal but widespread.

Jewish students’ experiences reinforce this reality about faculty.

Wright and Saxe’s own earlier 2023 report, In the Shadow of War: Hotspots of Antisemitism on US College Campuses, found that at some of the most hostile schools since October 7, 2023, “about 80 percent of Jewish students reported encountering hostility toward Israel from other students ‘sometimes’ or ‘often,’” and 30 percent reported hostility directly from faculty.

Is it remotely plausible that only three percent of faculty are hostile when nearly one in three Jewish students perceive faculty hostility firsthand?

The authors’ subsequent 2024 report, Antisemitism on Campus: Understanding Hostility to Jews and Israel, reached similar conclusions: a majority of Jewish students (60 percent) reported a hostile environment toward Jews on their campus, and 82 percent reported hostility toward Israel.

Non-Jewish students largely agreed: 56 percent said there was a hostile climate toward Israel on their campus. And in February 2025, the American Jewish Committee reported that nearly one-third of Jewish college students believe faculty themselves have promoted antisemitism or hostile learning environments, which matches the 2023 numbers on faculty. These findings make clear that many faculty are part of the problem, not simply neutral bystanders.

Campus incidents drive the point home. At NYU in April 2024, professors formed a human barricade to shield a pro-Hamas encampment from police. At Columbia, professors rallied in defense of encampments accused of harassing Jewish students. At Barnard, a professor proudly supported students in a building takeover and berated a student who challenged her extreme anti-Israel views.

At Sarah Lawrence, where I teach, many faculty openly embrace anti-Zionist narratives, justify calls for violence, and encourage disruptive tactics such as building takeovers. The president of the American Association of University Professors has even endorsed militant “direct action,” betraying its founding mission of protecting academic freedom in favor of raw activism. This posture lends legitimacy to those who would turn campuses into platforms for radical politics and intimidation.

These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a broader pattern of faculty normalizing antisemitic rhetoric, excusing intimidation, and modeling for students that radical activism trumps pluralism. If only a handful — say three percent — of professors were hostile, then the rest would be allies. Yet where are the teach-ins against antisemitism? The op-eds condemning dehumanizing chants? The marches for pluralism led by senior professors with tenure? They scarcely exist, and certainly not in meaningful numbers.

Instead, we see that Jewish and Zionist faculty very publicly retreat in frustration or fear. Many resign or fall silent rather than rally colleagues. Outside groups such as the Academic Engagement Network have tried to fill the void, but on campus, the absence of strong faculty support for beleaguered students is glaring. That silence sustains an anti-Israel culture that cannot credibly be blamed on only three percent of professors.

The Brandeis study also overlooks a structural reality: much of the actual teaching of undergraduates is done not by tenured or tenure-track professors, but by adjuncts, lecturers, and contingent instructors. These are the faculty who most directly shape classroom climate, yet they were excluded from the survey. By extrapolating from a narrower, more insulated slice of faculty, the study presents a portrait of classrooms that is rosier than the reality Jewish students encounter.

The consequences of the study’s myths are profound. Administrators cite it to downplay problems. Policymakers invoke it to avoid reform. Faculty hide behind it to excuse their inaction. The result is a campus environment where hostility toward Israel and its supporters festers unchecked, while institutions point to “data” purporting to show that almost all faculty are allies.

Wright and Saxe close their piece by warning that while the actions of a few faculty can shape the climate of an entire campus, punishing faculty as a whole is unwise. They add that changes are needed, but can only succeed if faculty are part of the process. On that last point, they are right: faculty must be part of any solution. Universities cannot be reformed over the heads of the people who teach and mentor students every day.

But solutions cannot rest on misinterpretation. The Brandeis study’s own data reveal serious problems, yet its framing implies that faculty hostility is statistically marginal. That misleading conclusion obscures the lived reality of Jewish students — and the actual reality on campus.

As I have argued in AEIdeas, faculty bear a responsibility not only to avoid hostility, but to actively sustain pluralism and resist intimidation. When professors retreat into silence, they create a vacuum that the most radical voices inevitably fill. Recognizing that reality is essential if faculty are to become part of the solution rather than bystanders to the problem.

Until faculty themselves prove otherwise, the evidence is clear: too many are not allies of Israel or of Jewish students, but part of the problem itself.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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The Future of Journalism? The Columbia Journalism Review’s Skewed View of Israel & Gaza

A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a bullhorn during a protest at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 11, 2025. Photo: Daniel Cole via Reuters Connect.

The Columbia Journalism Review, the official organ of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, recently published a round table discussion on press freedom in Gaza and Israeli restrictions on foreign journalists entering Gaza.

This was not, however, an academic and nuanced discussion on such hot-button topics. Rather, it was an orgy of radical voices accusing Israel of the most heinous crimes, dismissing any connection between certain Gazan journalists and Hamas, and ignoring the role that Hamas plays in obstructing press freedom in Gaza.

The tone of this piece was immediately set by the introductory remarks by Azmat Khan, the initiator of this discussion, and both an assistant professor of journalism and the director of the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

Khan engages in a blistering diatribe against Israeli actions in Gaza, accusing the Jewish State of committing genocide, purposefully targeting Gazan journalists in order to stop them from reporting on the war, and manufacturing a “man-made human catastrophe in Gaza.”

Khan dismisses Israeli allegations that certain Gazan journalists and media workers that were moonlighting as terrorists as “poorly evidenced accusations that someone Israel killed was a combatant, rather than well-documented evidence of that person’s work as a reporter” and also goes after “pro-Israel advocacy groups that dub themselves ‘media watchdogs’ and wage systematic campaigns, fomented by Israeli intelligence, to discredit, dehumanize, and blacklist them—and to harass those who defend them.”

There is no doubt that Khan had HonestReporting in mind on that last point, after we exposed the terror links of certain Palestinian journalists in Gaza and how Hamas frames the narrative emerging from the coastal enclave.

Clearly, rather than engaging with the serious questions about the journalistic integrity of some Gazan reporters and media workers, Khan prefers to blindly absolve them of any wrongdoing and vilify those bringing these terror ties to light. This is not the work of an influential academic committed to truth and accuracy but of a propagandist obfuscating reality to serve a prepared narrative.

Khan’s ire then turned toward governments and news outlets, accusing them of turning a blind eye to Israel’s actions in Gaza and endangering the lives of Palestinian journalists.

It is here that Khan turned to a litany of “thinkers from across the fields of journalism, human rights, literature, academia, and advocacy,” asking for new strategies and ideas on how to promote “press freedom” in Gaza. With such a biased introduction, it is no surprise that the respondents all shared Khan’s animus towards Israel and placed all blame at the feet of the Jewish state, completely ignoring the terror organization that still exerts control inside the Gaza Strip.

Here are some of the most radical proposals and claims that were put forward in this piece:

  • Sharif Abdel Kouddous, the Middle East and North Africa editor for Drop Site News (an alternative news organization that has no problem parroting Hamas talking points and sympathizing with the terror group), suggested journalists strike until media organizations include a disclaimer that Israel is responsible for the most journalist deaths around the world. He said the veracity of any Israeli statement “is dubious.”
  • Arwa Damon, a former CNN correspondent who was quick to  contextualize Hamas’ October 7 attacks, recommended “banning Israeli government and military voices from air and print until they let the press into Gaza.”
  • Activist and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd, no stranger to misinformation and bending the truth, suggested a flotilla or march of foreign journalists to Gaza.
  • Lila Hassan, an independent journalist, accused the media of favoring the Israeli narrative and not questioning it, thus violating media ethics.
  • Assal Rad, a media critic, urged journalists and media organizations to platform Palestinian voices from inside Gaza and to stop treating Israeli government statements as “a reliable source of information.”
  • Similarly, Diana Buttu, a former spokesperson for the PLO, called on journalists to stop “interviewing or giving space” to Israeli spokespeople.
  • Abubaker Abed, a Palestinian journalist who glorifies Hamas and incites violence, suggested that media organizations should hire more Gazan journalists and pay them double the current rate while also providing cover for them in the international arena.

The publication of such a one-sided piece in an elite university’s journalism review calls into question the ethics and standards that are being taught to budding journalists. What hope is there for journalistic standards to be maintained in future reporting on Israel and the Palestinians if this is the approach taken by those who are tasked with influencing the next generation of journalists?

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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