Israel Heads Into Rafah
The strikes have begun in Rafah. The day began with Israel warning Gazans to evacuate Rafah neighborhoods in advance of a planned offensive. Now there’s some indication that Hamas has accepted some version of Tony Blinken’s “no-brainer” deal for a ceasefire, but details are murky and unreliable — including the length of the ceasefire, the future of hostages, and more. I would not trust the Hamas statement to that effect or the early reporting to turn out to be accurate.
Hamas said late Monday it had accepted a proposal to pause the fighting in Gaza, in a short statement with little detail hours after Israel warned Palestinians to evacuate ahead of an offensive on the southern city of Rafah.
Arab mediators and Israel were scrambling to find out what Hamas meant by its statement. Israel hasn’t agreed to the plan that Hamas said it approved, said a person familiar with the matter. An Israeli official said that Israel was reviewing the plan.
The U.S. and Israel have been painting Hamas as the obstacle to a deal for much of the past two weeks. The move, which set off celebrations in Gaza, now puts the ball in Israel’s court.
Talks toward a deal had faltered Sunday in Cairo. Israel faulted Hamas and Monday morning warned some Rafah residents via text messages, phone calls, fliers and media broadcasts in Arabic to move to a designated area farther north ahead of an anticipated offensive to rout the militant group in the southern Gazan city.
The wrangling follows the decision by Tony Blinken and the Biden administration to pause weapons shipments to Israel, a controversial step at odds with American voters. Charles Lipson has more at The Spectator:
The administration’s moves are dictated less by international strategy than by US politics. Biden fears he cannot win reelection if he loses Michigan and Minnesota, where Arab-American votes are crucial. He is also anxious about disaffected younger votes costing him other battleground states, either by voting for another candidate or not voting at all. For Biden, the “two-state solution” is less about Israel and Palestine and more about Michigan and Minnesota.
The dilemma for Biden and his party is that, when you look beyond voters under thirty and Arab Americans, the rest of the national electorate supports the Jewish state. Overwhelmingly. None of them teach anthropology at Columbia — and they are appalled by students’ open support for terrorism and the spread of vitriolic antisemitism. They are angered by administration efforts to appease students (and professional agitators) who hate Israel, openly support Hamas terrorists and have revived the old cry of defunding the police. (It’s a routine part of student demands.)
Biden already faced serious headwinds with centrist voters because of inflation, an open southern border and weak economic growth. The troubles in the Middle East and on college campuses add to those headwinds.
The dilemma for Biden is winning back those disaffected independent voters without losing those on the left. To solve it, the president has positioned himself squarely in the middle of the road, with cars and trucks whizzing past him in both directions. He ignored Margaret Thatcher’s admonition that standing in the middle of the road is where “you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.” But that is exactly where Biden now stands.
It is not a happy position to be in, and neither side likes it. That opposition was clearest this weekend on the campus of the University of Alabama, where a pro-Israel, pro-America group faced off against an anti-Israel, anti-American group. In unison, both groups shouted “Fuck Joe Biden.”
He promised to bring the country together — and he has.
At Columbia University where those leftists have gathered, as one of more than a hundred protest encampments across the country, their bold stand has now led to a meaningful result beyond bashing windows, kidnapping janitors, and demanding gluten free deliveries: They’ve successfully canceled graduation.
“Holding a large commencement ceremony on our campus presented security concerns that unfortunately proved insurmountable,” Columbia said in a statement Monday.
The university said it looked for another venue but couldn’t find one that could hold the more than 50,000 people who normally attend its graduation ceremony.
“Like our students, we are deeply disappointed with this outcome,” Columbia said.
Artem Ilyanok, a senior at Columbia who wasn’t part of the protests, said this is the second graduation he will miss out on, after his high school canceled its in-person 2020 graduation due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I am very disappointed to once again be deprived of a typical graduation experience,” said the 22-year-old history major.
Chicago gets more interesting with each passing day.
Who is Funding This Insanity?
Park Macdougald digs into it at Tablet.
These groups, Shideler says, typically operate in a decentralized manner, using successful tactics drawn from decades of anarchist organizing and spread through left-wing activist networks via word-of-mouth, as well as through formal trainings by professionals such as Fithian or the nonprofit “movement incubator” Momentum Strategies. “If you look at Fithian,” he says, “she has consulted with hundreds of groups on how to do these things: how to organize, how to protest, how to make sure your people don’t go to jail, how to help them once they’re in jail.” There is no one decision-maker; rather, decentralized “affinity” groups work together toward a shared goal, coordinating out in the open via social media and Google Docs.
This can create an impression of centralized planning. Shideler cites the matching tents that have cropped up on a number of campuses, prompting speculation that some shadowy entity is buying them en masse. “People keep pointing out, They all have the same tent!,” he says. “Well, yeah, it’s because the organizers told them to buy a tent, and sent around a Google Doc with a link to that specific tent on Amazon. So they all went out and bought the same tent.” …
The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.
JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.
In Praise of the Adults in Blue
Hannah Meyers in City Journal.
It was quite a scene on Tuesday night: NYPD officers entering Columbia’s illegally barricaded Hamilton Hall via an armored vehicle that got them through a second-floor window. Bodycam video illustrates what they encountered inside: physical blockades of furniture, garbage cans, and other objects obstructing their path, which they cut through with electric saws and blow torches. Then they had to deal with the demonstrators, some resisting—“Put it down, you’re gonna get hurt,” a cop told one idiot trying to block him with a makeshift shield—others complying, all amid the steady din of the rioters’ frenzied chanting. Not an easy day’s work: how many of us could handle it, even for a few minutes, without losing our composure? Yet the NYPD accomplished its assignment in an intensely hostile environment without using undue force. And when they were done, they lowered the Arab colors of the Palestinian flag that protesters had raised over CCNY and reinstated Old Glory.
Contrast this professionalism and competence with the squawks of protesters, most of whom have likely never been tested away from the protection of social media, group-brd entitlements, and the safety blanket of anonymity. Unlike protesters of earlier generations—Mayor Adams conjured his own participation in bygone demonstrations with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—the current crusaders distinguish themselves by cowering. They hide their faces behind pandemic-era masks, sinched hoodies, and keffiyehs wound tightly around their faces as if to keep out the worst Arabian sandstorm. They demand those who might challenge their ideas, mission, and strategy to stay away. And they block pro-Israel students from coming close enough to ask them a question—or even attend final exams in their vicinity.
Whatever the breakdown may be between outside agitators and enrolled students, these campus crusaders are leaders in the mold of Hamas’s own, who prolong the suffering of Gazans in their perennial dream of destroying Israel and world Jewry from the safety of hideaways throughout the Middle East and Europe. Even October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar is reportedly hiding underground with his family, surrounded by hostages as human shields.
Media reporting this week has been inundated with the petulant accounts of arrestees complaining about how “brutal” they found the experience of being held, finally, accountable for their actions. “As a human chain, draped in keffiyehs and shaking like leaves in the autumn wind, we sang with hushed tones,” recounts Columbia student and arrestee Allie Wong. “As [NYPD] approached from multiple directions, we sang with frail and cracking voices.” And then: “We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, and seized us like rag dolls.”
Wong professed herself shocked by the “brutality” of being “arrested, bound and shuttled down to 1 Police Plaza,” where “they threw us in cells like animals—cells where the only toilets women could use lacked any privacy.” (While, she gripes, the NYPD “had a pizza party prepared for arresting officers.”)
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Quote
“But it is admitted that a great number of the philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists. They became a sort of professional sceptics who went about asking uncomfortable questions, and were handsomely paid for making themselves a nuisance to normal people.”
— G.K. Chesterton