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December 10, 2023
Key Takeaways from a longer-than-usual newsletter (details and analysis are in the body of the newsletter):
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Freed Hamas captives are reporting sexual assault, food deprivation, beatings, psychological torture, and drugging by Hamas. The UN and some (not all) women's groups are finally beginning to acknowledge and condemn Hamas's horrific sexual violence on October 7. Hamas continues to hold 138 captives. The international community must demand their immediate release and Hamas's surrender before thinking about a ceasefire.
- A ceasefire now is a victory for Hamas and a death sentence for Jews. On Friday, President Biden vetoed a UN Security Council Resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Thirteen of the Council's 15 members supported the resolution. The administration's veto message is a model of moral clarity and what it means to be pro-Israel and truly pro-peace.
- The death of every innocent Palestinian is tragic. The blame lies with Hamas for terrorizing Israel, not with Israel for defending itself while Hamas deliberately uses civilians, including babies, as human shields. Hamas has promised to repeat October 7 again and again. No country would allow anything like Hamas to remain armed and dangerous on its border.
- President Biden requested emergency aid for Israel and Ukraine on October 20. Thanks to the Republican Party, neither country has seen a dime 51 days later. Republicans are refusing to fund (or trying to defund) programs critical to protecting the Jewish community in the U.S. The GOP continues to waste time on partisan gotcha games and cheap value signaling, including a conceptually confused resolution ostensibly opposing antisemitism last week and another absurd censure resolution against a Democratic House member.
- Anti-Zionism can be and often is antisemitism, but not always. We lose credibility and weaken efforts to fight real antisemitism when we make sweeping generalizations that don't hold up to scrutiny. I am a Zionist. I can defend Zionism without resorting to inappropriate charges of antisemitism and I can call out real antisemitism when it occurs. You can too.
- Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but Tuesday was not the day for Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), despite the arrogance and inexcusable inability of three heads of universities to effectively answer her question. But Stefanik was wrong and they were right. The question was not whether advocating genocide reflects our values. There is no context in which it does. The question was whether it is protected speech, and that question can only be answered in context. The answer is more free speech and zero tolerance for bullying, harassment, and intimidation, let alone vandalism and trespassing--with the same standards for everyone, regardless of viewpoint.
- I might regret asking this but what parts of this newsletter do you like and dislike? Should it be longer, shorter, or is it about right?
Read to the end for corrections, what you may have missed last week, and fun stuff. Chag Urim Sameach--Happy Hanukkah!
You're welcome to read for free, but if you want to chip in to help defray the cost of the newsletter, click here to pay by credit card or PayPal. Just fill in the amount of your choice. If you see something that says "Save your info and create a PayPal account," click the button to the right and it will go away. You don't need a PayPal account. Or you can Venmo @Steven-Sheffey (last four phone digits are 9479). You can send a check too. But no crypto or gold bars.
Hi Steve,
Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, deliberately murdering 1,200 people, murdering more Jews on any day since the Holocaust, and kidnapping 240 people, including babies, children, women, and the elderly. It was the stuff of nightmares but it was real. Hamas still holds 138 captives--dead or alive? We don't know because Hamas denies access.
As Jennifer Rubin explains, the released hostages are not okay. Hamas captors sexually assaulted and humiliated women and men. Hamas gave hostages clonazepam (Klonopin), a tranquilizer, before releasing them so that they would appear calm. After weeks of silence from the UN and pressure from Jewish groups--because so-called women's rights groups were silent--we are finally seeing condemnation of Hamas's sexual violence from the international community, but their protected silence will forever be their shame. Read more from women's rights activists and leaders.
President Biden said on December 5 that "it’s on all of us — the government, international organizations, civil society, individual citizens — to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation, without exception."
Julie Zebrak attended the December 4 special UN session. Watch Secretary Hillary Clinton and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) at the session, and watch this testimony from a first responder.
How many innocent Palestinians must die? Let me ask another question: How many Israelis must die? How long must Israelis live with a genocidal terrorist organization on its southern border that has promised to repeat October 7 again and again and again? How long must millions of Israelis flee to bomb shelters on seconds' notice?
Do you expect Israel to do nothing, to let Hamas attack again and again--as it promised it would? As Yehuda Kurtzer wrote, "just wars" are "not just because they are easy or victimless. Just wars are just because they are morally necessary, because pacifism in the face of an unfettered evil is an untenable moral position."
Hamas is operating out of densely populated areas, embedded in hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure. Hamas terrorists don't wear uniforms. Israel has to destroy their hiding places, and if Hamas will not allow civilians to evacuate and if the international community will not pressure Hamas to stop using civilians as human shields, then Israel cannot do much more.
For us, Gaza is some distant land, like Iraq or Afghanistan. For Israel, Gaza is on its border. Every Israeli lives less than 300 miles from Gaza--that's how small Israel is. Israel is fighting a war against Hamas that it must win and that a ceasefire would prevent it from winning.
The Biden administration continues to stand firmly with Israel. The U.S. vetoed a resolution at the United Nations Security Council Friday demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza that was supported by 13 out of the 15 members of the Security Council. The Biden administration's veto message is a model of moral clarity, noting that an unconditional ceasefire would be "not only unrealistic but dangerous: it would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7."
Imagine telling the U.S. to stop fighting World War II because "innocent" Germans were getting killed. Gabriel Schoenfeld reminds us that "Israel has the means to level Gaza and eradicate Hamas without suffering any casualties at all. But it has never engaged in the kind of tactics that were routinized by the Allies in World War II."
The difference between now and World War II is that now, everyone has a television. We see the destruction and we are horrified. We forget, as Michael Walzer wrote, that Hamas's "deliberately putting the entire civilian population in harm’s way is a military and political strategy. It is designed to make it impossible for the enemy to fight without killing civilians ... Every dead civilian is a political asset for Hamas ... But the toll of death and injury is horrifying, and the normal human response to such suffering is a cry for it all to end: stop the fighting!—which is, again, the response Hamas’s strategy is meant to produce ... But we have to think beyond our feelings and acknowledge that the suffering will continue until those who designed and began the war have been defeated ... The defeat of Hamas is a moral necessity and it requires a kind of moral toughness that isn’t always admirable."
Walzer explains that this does not give Israel license to do anything. But it does mean that it is "difficult to engage Hamas’s strategy militarily without contributing to its success, and it is critically important to acknowledge the difficulties when we judge the engagement."
Every life, Jewish and Palestinian, is precious and of infinite worth. No matter how strongly we support Israel's right to defend itself, we must acknowledge the horrific tragedy and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and commit to building a better future for Israel and the Palestinians when this war ends.
My support for the realization of Jewish national aspirations in the Jewish homeland--my Zionism--does not preclude my support for the realization of Palestinian national aspirations in their homeland. My democratic Zionism cannot be fully realized until Palestinian national aspirations are realized. The only way forward is a two-state solution, and that means finding leaders and building institutions capable of realizing the national aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians. No hope means no peace--for anyone.
Why won't Republicans help Israel? Why won't Republicans take antisemitism seriously? On October 20, President Biden proposed an emergency aid package to our allies that included $14.3 billion for Israel--nearly four times the amount of aid we give Israel annually. When Democrats controlled the House and Biden requested $1 billion in emergency aid for Iron Dome in 2021, it took Democrats two days to pass it (Republicans criticized them for taking so long--and then it stalled for six months in the Senate because Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) filibustered it).
But 51 days later, House Republicans haven't called Biden's package for a vote. Instead, they waited until November and then stripped out the aid to allies other than Israel (including Ukraine) and added provisions that would cut funding to the IRS and increase the deficit, knowing that such a bill would never pass the Senate. This after they voted to cut funding to Israel by 30% in September.
Thanks to the GOP, Israel has not seen a dime of Biden's proposed $14.3 billion. The Senate GOP blocked Biden's emergency aid request on December 6 because it did not include unrelated border security measures. Whatever the GOP is, it's not "pro-Israel." Not while it insists on adding poison pills on domestic policy to what should be an uncontroversial but essential emergency foreign aid package.
It gets worse. Republicans have done nothing to implement the White House’s unprecedented National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. How many Jews must be attacked before the GOP takes this seriously? Republicans are trying to
defund the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which protects Jewish students from discrimination on campus.
As Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) points out, "to enforce Title VI—the law that prevents such discrimination in education—the Department needs the resources to put legal and investigatory boots on the ground [but] the Majority still supports defunding this office, and that means Jewish students remain at terrible risk." And Republicans have done nothing to shore up the High-Risk Nonprofit Security Grant Program run through the Department of Homeland Security, which keeps synagogues and other Jewish institutions safe.
Instead, Republicans are wasting their time and ours playing political theater with antisemitism. Last week, instead of acting on any of these issues, Republicans brought H.Res.894 to the floor, which Nadler accurately described as "another try, in a long series of veiled efforts by the GOP, to weaponize Jewish lives for political gains. It is another partisan gotcha game that amounts to cheap value signaling, not serious action."
The non-binding resolution is titled "Strongly condemning and denouncing the drastic rise of antisemitism in the United States and around the world." Who could be against that, right? But that's not all it was. If it was, it would have passed with overwhelming Democratic support, as a resolution recognizing that "denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism" passed 412-1-1 on November 28.
Nadler, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) urged their colleagues to vote Present on H.Res.894, regardless of their views on the resolution, because "it is beneath the dignity of Congress and it is an affront to Jews everywhere to treat rising antisemitism as an opportunity to create partisan division with conceptual confusion." The resolution passed, with 95 Democrats voting yes, 92 voting present, and 11 voting no. All but one Republican voted yes.
The resolution is problematic for several substantive reasons. It calls the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism (the resolution left out "non legally binding," which is part of the title of the definition) a "critical tool" but in irony unintended even by Republican standards, the resolution "clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism." The IHRA definition, deemed "critical" by the resolution, does not mention Zionism at all. Do Republicans even read their show bills before they introduce them?
Anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism. It can be, it often is, but not always. Nadler is right: "Most anti-Zionism, particularly in this moment, has a real antisemitism problem. But we cannot fairly say that one equals the other."
One of the tools mentioned in President Biden's National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism but not in this misguided resolution is the Nexus Document, which delineates when anti-Zionism is and is not antisemitism. Urge your Republican friends enamored with the IHRA definition to read anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and the fallacy of bright lines, written by the author of the IHRA definition, Ken Stern. Read this thread from Dov Waxman.
I am a Zionist. I am confident that I can defend Zionism on its merits without inappropriately labeling anti-Zionism as antisemitism and that I can call out antisemitism when it occurs. You can too. But when anti-Zionism is antisemitic, as it too often is, it must be called out.
The first response to anyone who says they are anti-Zionist should be to ask what they mean by "Zionism." The Zionism they don't believe in might be the Zionism you don't believe in either.
And as Michael Koplow urges, let's focus less attention on categorizing behavior and more attention calling out deplorable behavior regardless of whether it meets or does not meet someone's definition of antisemitism or anti-Zionism.
Harvard, MIT, and Penn Oh My. Leaders of Harvard, Penn, and MIT made Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) look almost smart last week. Stefanik is the House GOP Conference Chair. She voted against certifying the 2020 election hours after Trump incited a violent insurrection and supports Great Replacement Theory, the same racist, antisemitic conspiracy theory that the shooter who killed ten Black Americans in Buffalo believed in. Stefanik backed Carl Paladino for Congress. She is awful.
She should be on the witness stand, not questioning others. Watch that same Elise Stefanik question heads of major universities on December 5. She lobbed them softballs they should have hit out of the park but they swung and missed every time. The question was not whether advocating genocide reflects our values, to which the answer must be "no" regardless of context. The question was whether it is protected speech, and that question can only be answered in context.
If these arrogant receptive amusiacs are fired, it should not be because they were wrong, but because they came down with a bad case of Michael Dukakis, testified incompetently, showed no moral backbone, and perhaps most embarrassingly, lost a debate to Elise Stefanik.
Following the hearing, Harvard's president issued a statement, Penn's president released a video, and Stanford tweeted, saying the second time what they wished they said the first time. (We seem to be facing an epidemic of saying the second time what we wished we said the first time.) Harvard's president later apologized, and Penn's president resigned.
But Stefanik was wrong and the witnesses, despite their inability to cogently defend their position (speech can be protected but called out as abhorrent and against our values), were right: The answer to the question Stefanik asked again and again does depend on context, even if the witnesses did not or could not explain why.
This result might trouble you. It troubles me. I urge you to at least read Ken White's analysis, and if you can, read this from FIRE, this from David Schraub, and this from Yascha Mounk. I won't repeat their arguments here because their explanations are worth reading in their entirety. If you read them, you will understand why context matters.
The problem is not free speech but, as Michelle Goldberg writes, that "the defense of free speech has been inconsistent. Some elite schools now cloaking themselves in the mantle of the First Amendment to ward off charges of coddling antisemites have, in the past, privileged community sensitivity over unbridled expression." The answer is more free speech and zero tolerance for bullying, harassment, and intimidation, let alone vandalism and trespassing--with the same standards for everyone, regardless of viewpoint. When is the line crossed? That depends on the context.
Chag Urim Sameach. Miracles happened then and can happen now if we keep fighting no matter what the odds. Happy Hanukkah from me and from the Space Station.
Corrections. I'm entitled to my own opinions but not to my own facts, so I appreciate it when readers bring errors to my attention. No one brought any mistakes to my attention last week, so it looks like last week's newsletter was perfect. It was so perfect that it was featured by the Jewish Democratic Council of America in a better format.
In Case You Missed It:
- Last week, Republicans wasted our time with more than conceptually confused antisemitism resolutions. They censured Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) on an overwhelmingly party-line vote that Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries called a "sad and silly charade" in a floor speech that you should read or watch if you have any doubt.
- The State Department implemented new visa restrictions targeting Israeli settlers who commit violence against Palestinians. Blinken noted that “immediate family members of such persons also may be subject to these restrictions.” Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL) said that "these acts are morally unacceptable, undermine Israel’s legitimate fight to dismantle Hamas, and threaten West Bank stability."
- Zionist Rabbinic Coalition open letter to the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) on its refusal to condemn Hamas's sexual violence.
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Yoni Ish-Hurwitz: I worked for the UN; it is failing Israel and the world community.
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Dov Waxman: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) deserves to be unequivocally and universally condemned for its morally repugnant support for Hamas terrorism, and disciplined when its members harass other students. But banning them from campuses is the wrong response.
Tweets of the Week. Naftali Bennett and Eric Alterman.
Twitter Threads of the Week. Laura Adkins and Daniel Bral.
Facebook Post of the Week: Yehuda Kurtzer.
John Kirby Video Clips of the Week. On IDF strategy and telegraphing punches.
Long Video Clip of the Week. Those of you who've urged me to watch a video or listen to a podcast know that unless it's either very short or very funny, I'm not going to bother. I don't know where people find the time. And even if you find the time, I can't watch everything you recommend and everything all my other readers recommend. But this...this JDCA program with Rabbi Sharon Brous is worth every second. She answers the questions you've been asking.
Funny Video Clips of the Week. Eretz Nehederet (A Wonderful Country) is Israel’s version of Saturday Night Live. Watch their sketch on UN Women's belated recognition of Hamas sexual atrocities.
And from the Daily Show, Ron DeSantis gets normal.
For those new to this newsletter. This is the newsletter even Republicans have to read and the original home of the viral and beloved 2022 and 2023 Top Ten Signs You're At a Republican Seder. If someone forwarded this to you, why not subscribe and get it in your inbox every Sunday? Just click here--it's free.
I periodically update my Medium posts on why Democrats are better than Republicans on Israel and antisemitism and on why the Antisemitism Awareness Act and the IHRA definition are the wrong solutions to real problems. You can read my most recent effort to define "pro-Israel" here (it's a work in progress, as am I).
I hope you enjoyed today's newsletter. Donations are welcome (this takes time to write and costs money to send). If you'd like to chip in, click here and fill in the amount of your choice. If you see something that says "Save your info and create a PayPal account," click the button to the right and it will go away. You don't need a PayPal account. Or you can Venmo @Steven-Sheffey (last four phone digits are 9479). You can send a check too. But no crypto or gold bars.
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