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The pro-Israel case for a negotiated end to the war in Gaza
(JTA) — First thing every morning, I open Israeli news sites, dreading what I will see: more soldiers killed in action, more hostages confirmed dead, more Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza. More drones and missiles flying at Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. More bereaved and terrified children and families. A darker and dimmer future for Israel and the entire region.
After Hamas’s atrocities of Oct. 7, it was clear that some kind of military response was both necessary and justified. No country could be expected to do otherwise in the face of a terror attack that including murdering, raping, and kidnapping hundreds of civilians — all of which are war crimes. Like so many others, I was horrified by those who argued that such depraved brutality must be excused and rationalized in the context of occupation and the siege of Gaza.
But as Israel’s massive bombardment and shelling of Gaza continues through a third month, with its devastating toll on Palestinian civilians, it’s time for those of us who consider ourselves supporters of Israel, who have loved ones in Israel, and who are committed to Israel’s long-term security to call for a negotiated end to the war.
Within the pro-Israel community, the very word “ceasefire” has become toxic because it has been seized upon by some who do not have Israel’s best interests at heart. Already on Oct. 7 and soon after, and even before Israel’s retaliatory attacks, there were some who launched protests of Israel, and who even celebrated Hamas’s cruel attacks. In that context, calls for ceasefire have amounted to a one-sided call for Israeli pacifism or surrender.
And while many calls for ceasefire are driven by a genuine desire to end the deaths of civilians, and some have included a call to return hostages, too many have been accompanied by false charges of genocide, a claim under international law that carries a high burden of proof of intent, or by justifying or even denying Hamas’s murders, rapes and kidnapping. Some of these protests have included antisemitic language, including demands that Israeli Jews leave Israel, denials of Jewish connection to the land, and calls to “globalize the intifada,” which many Jews understandably take to mean terrorist attacks on buses and other civilian targets, including Jewish institutions outside of Israel. Protesters have taken out anger at Israel on Jewish institutions, including through vandalism and even shootings directed at synagogues.
But I want to make a pro-Israel case for a negotiated end to the war. In Israel, some of those most affected by Hamas’s atrocities have been the loudest voices calling for a return to negotiations. This past Saturday night, families of the remaining hostages, along with Israelis who have been freed from captivity and thousands of their supporters, protested at the Kiryah, IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. Their demand was clear: As Noam Peri, whose father Haim Peri, remains in captivity, told the crowd, “We only receive dead bodies. We want you to stop the fight and start negotiations.”
I was in Israel during the initial ceasefire, which resulted in the return of more than 100 hostages. One night, I found myself in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv at the very moment when that evening’s group of redeemed hostages landed in Israel. I felt both relief and joy at seeing the faces of women and children flash on the giant screen, with the words “I have returned home,” as well as the pain of the families whose loved ones remained in Gaza.
That night in Tel Aviv, I watched multiple members of one family holding signs with the face of a young man. Days later, he was confirmed murdered in captivity. And last week, three escaped hostages were mistakenly gunned down by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. As the families and those who have returned from captivity continue to emphasize, the remaining hostages do not have much time left.
Pidyon Shvuyim, the redemption of captives, is one of the most important mitzvahs in Judaism, and one that, unfortunately, has had to be practiced over and over throughout Jewish history. While there is some concern over redeeming captives at too great a price, key figures such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the longtime Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, have argued that immediate danger to the lives of hostages overrules the possibility of future danger from the release of prisoners.
People hold a sign replicating the message painted by three hostages who were killed by Israeli troops, during a protest calling for the government to find a solution to have the hostages released, outside the Military Defense Headquarters in Tel Aviv, Dec. 19, 2023. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
Those of us who care about the long-term flourishing of Israel must ask whether those conducting this war have a strategy and whether the price of victory — whatever “victory” may mean — will be too high. As military analyst Amos Harel wrote this week, “Like in Lebanon in 1982, this consensus [in support of the war] rests on two conditions that gradually waned over time: a clear purpose for the war and the understanding that victory is attainable. The risk in Gaza will grow, too, when doubts begin to emerge about whether those conditions can be fulfilled.” Just as the United States learned in Afghanistan, a war might be justified, but it is very difficult to conduct justly, or wisely, especially when driven by strong emotions of shame, humiliation, rage, and revenge. It can end with extremists still in power — and even strengthened.
As the Biden administration has made clear, a negotiated ceasefire, would include the return of hostages, an end to Israeli attacks in Gaza and to missile attacks on Israel, and ultimately would lead to an international plan for a new government in Gaza. This does not necessarily preclude future targeted raids aimed at specific military capabilities if necessary. But it would bring to an end the current war, which has already killed, injured and displaced far too many Israelis and Palestinians.
Perhaps this war can be “won,” in the sense that Hamas’s top leaders may eventually be killed, but can the IDF really root out every last fighter and every last rifle and rocket in every last tunnel? And if so, at what cost?
Would it be a victory to bring about the deaths of tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians, whether from bombs, disease, starvation or exposure? To sacrifice even more Israeli soldiers on what Israeli poet Natan Alterman called “the silver platter” for a war that is increasingly unlikely to bring greater security to Israel?
Wounded Israeli soldiers were among the thousands who attended the funeral of Tomer Grinberg, an Israeli officer killed the previous day, at the Mt. Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, Dec. 13, 2023. (Eliyahu Freedman)
Would it be a victory to create a new generation of young Palestinians who believe they have nothing to lose, and who become the next generation of Hamas? Would it be a victory to spark a regional war that could inflame the entire world?
Would it be a victory to sacrifice Israel’s relations with the United States, which has increasingly made clear its position that Israel must end the intense phase of the war soon? Would it be a victory to turn Israel into a pariah state?
Those who call themselves pro-Israel need to get serious about which Israel they support. Is it this extremist government, driven by the settler agenda, with a bleak future, forever living by the sword? Or is it a democratic Israel, living within internationally-recognized borders, as a full member of the international community? The long-term security of Israel – ”victory” in its truest and deepest sense – will come about only through an Israel with stable borders alongside a Palestinian state and with normalized relations with neighboring Arab and Muslim countries.
In a legal opinion supporting the 1982 peace treaty with Egypt, Rabbi David Chaim HaLevy, then the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Tel Aviv, riffed on the verse, “May God grant strength to God’s people; may God bless God’s people with peace,” by saying, “Just as for a generation, we carried out wars with strength and might, God will bless us now that we will also know how to make peace. Because it’s very possible that it’s easier to fight than to achieve true peace.”
Given the polarization of the moment, and our deep wounds, it may be hard for those of us who care about Israel and Israelis, and who are committed to the long-term flourishing of the state, to call for a negotiated end to the war. But doing so might well be the most pro-Israel, and the most Jewish, position that one can take.
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The post The pro-Israel case for a negotiated end to the war in Gaza appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote
Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations
Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’
Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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