The View from Right Field

When Does Anti-Israel Become Antisemitism?

I have been thinking a lot about antisemitism lately.  I understand people can be opposed to some, or even many, of the policies Israel has pursued and is pursuing vis-à-vis Palestinians (both before and since October 7).  The issues between Israelis and Palestinians are difficult, and I don’t know the answers.  In this regard, I remember when I was a kid and I would go to my grandparents’ place in central Minnesota for two weeks each summer.  My grandparents had a little souvenir plaque on the wall that read: “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins”.  Which is probably a useful thing to keep in mind with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian question – for everybody.

But my concern is different than that.  I’m not talking about what Israelis and Palestinians think about each other.  I’m talking about people in America, and I’m wondering whether, at some point, if we’re not careful, anti-Israel views in America might turn into real antisemitism.

What’s Going to Happen in the Middle East?

Obviously, if I knew the answer to this, I would go to Las Vegas and get rich.  But here is one possibility with respect to how Iran/Hezbollah may react to the killings of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran:

1. Remember that Iran did basically nothing when the U.S. killed Qasam Soleimani in January of 2020 in a drone attack on Baghdad airport when Soleimani was visiting Iraq.  Soleimani was  commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC group responsible for Iran’s extraterritorial and clandestine military operations.

2. Iran follows U.S. politics.  They know about the Biden-Trump debate.  Like everybody else, they have to wonder how competent Biden is and who is running U.S. foreign policy.

Joe Biden: Getting Foreign Policy Wrong for 50 Years

In 2014, a former cabinet official from both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations wrote that Joe Biden had "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."¹  Even though this official likes President Biden as a person and has said President Biden “a man of integrity,” he reaffirmed his statement in an interview in May of 2019. 

And President Biden has continued his string of mistakes and bad decisions since he got into office.  The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster.  President Biden was left with a terrible situation by Donald Trump.  The Trump administration signed what was basically a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020.  While President Biden has said the Trump agreement left him no choice but to go forward with the withdrawal/surrender, that’s not true.  President Biden reversed all kinds of Trump administration decisions.  He could have changed this one, too, but he didn’t want to.  He wanted to get out of Afghanistan, and so we did.  It was the Biden administration that organized, or rather didn’t organize, the withdrawal.  If the withdrawal was a disaster, and if it has damaged the United States’ reputation for reliability and competence abroad, then that was on President Biden and his administration.

Biden’s Foreign Policy Just Isn’t Working – And It’s Not Deterring Anybody

At one point during the first Trump administration¹, I gave up (or at least cut back) on complaining about what he was doing both because it was becoming too time consuming and because the Democratic alternatives weren’t any better.  Well, I think I am just about there on Joe Biden’s foreign policy.  It’s bad, and I have no reason to think Trump 2.0 would be any better.

It has now been four days since an Iran proxy group killed three U.S. soldiers with a drone attack on a base we have in Jordan.  It may be that the Biden administration already has an appropriate response in process, and we don’t know about it yet.  I hope so.²  Because, if we want these attacks to stop, we need to respond in a really big way.  Iranian proxies, and others, have been attacking us for months.  Before Sunday, we were able to knock the drones or missiles down or they only injured people, they didn’t kill them.  So we didn’t respond (at least very much).  We just said: (i) if you kill any of our people (as opposed to merely injuring them), we’ll respond; (ii) we don’t want to escalate or to widen the war/conflict/tensions; and (iii) we don’t want World War III.  Which apparently didn’t scare anybody and probably encouraged some groups to keep attacking us  - because they did.

Peggy Noonan on “The Rape of the Israeli Women” – And Why Some Progressives Don’t Seem to Care

The Wall Street Journal had an article, “The Rape of the Israeli Women”, by Peggy Noonan last week on the absolutely horrible things that Hamas terrorists (or militants, or whatever you want to call them) did to Israeli women on October 7.  I don’t want to talk about it; you can read it in the Journal or here.  Ms. Noonan also talked about why many women on the progressive left don’t seem to care about what was done to Israeli women.

Here is a letter to the editor that I wrote to the Journal:

“A Trump win would change the world” – and Not for the Better.

Martin Wolf wrote in Wednesday’s Financial Times about his concerns, both for U.S. domestic policy and for the world as a whole, with respect to a second Donald Trump administration.¹  For example:

“[E]mbrace by the US of a man … that [has] repudiated the central norm of liberal democracy would dishearten those who believe in it and encourage despots and their lackeys everywhere. …

The mixture of this despair with Trumps’s avowedly transactional approach would weaken, if not destroy, the trust on which current US alliances are based.”

 I understand Mr. Wolf’s concerns.²  He is right that, in his first term, former President Trump initially picked traditional Republicans as advisers for foreign policy and defense, which slowed former President Trump down.  A Trump 2.0 administration would start with Trumpian true-believers, a scary thought.

Russia Attacks Ukrainian Power Stations. Where Are the Protests? Where Is the Outrage?

The Financial Times reported on Friday about the upcoming Russian attack on the Ukrainian power grid this winter:

“Ukraine is rushing to bolster its energy infrastructure ahead of winter as a renewed Russian aerial campaign starts to home in on the country’s power stations, seeking to leave its people in the cold and dark.”¹  

I don’t understand how such attacks, which are effectively aimed at civilians, aren’t viewed as terrorism.  I don’t understand how the people who are marching against Israel aren’t also marching against this.  Unlike Hamas, the Ukrainian government doesn’t use these buildings and structures to store ammunition, to launch missiles against Russia, to hide military headquarters.  So where are the marches, where are the protests, where is the outrage?
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¹ Roman Olearchyk, “Ukraine braced for winter attacks on power grid,” Financial Times, November 3, 2023.

Israel Is Keeping Its Gaza Assault Secret. Sounds About Right to Me.

The Washington Post has an article today about Israel’s offensive in Gaza that is titled “Early Stages of Israeli ground assault in Gaza shrouded in secrecy”, which I thought was just about right.  I know that Hamas broadcast its terror attack/killing spree on social media as it was happening.  But that was the purpose of Hamas’s attack, publicity and generation of anti-Israeli and antisemitic protests around the world.  Hanas was killing babies, etc., to get Israel to react so that people would then react to Israel’s overreaction (whether real or not).  If Palestinians were killed, it didn’t matter to Hamas, as long as Israel could be seen to overreact.  In fact, the ,more Palestinians killed, the better it was for Hamas’s strategy. 

But, back to The Washinton Post headline: “Early Stages of Israeli ground assault in Gaza shrouded in secrecy.”  I remember back during the Persian Gulf War in 1990/91.  The news media complained that reporters were being censored and they weren’t being allowed to report on U.S. and allied troop movements and locations.  This was back before social media and public satellite coverage, etc., so we were able to keep our troop locations and deployments secret.  This allowed us to swing around the Iraqi right flank with our tanks, disrupting the Iraqi positions and crushing their forces.  Which would not have been doable if the media had been able to broadcast our plans and positions to the world.

So, if the Israelis want to keep their plans and what they are doing as secret as possible, it’s fine with me.  I can wait a couple of weeks to find out what happened.

Hamas Leaders “Surprised” at U.S. Response – And What That Tells Us

The Financial Times reports:

“Hamas has admitted surprise that its attack on  Israel this month promoted such a muscular response, with Washington deploying two carrier strike groups, air defense systems and thousands of troops to the region.

Ali Barakeh, a senior member of Hamas’s political leadership in exile, said the groupv ‘didn’t expect this much if a response from America.

Blinken Announces Biden’s Red-Line. Let’s Hope They Mean It.

At the United Nations on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a pretty clear red-line to Iran and its “friends”:

“The United States does not seek conflict with Iran.  We do not want this war to widen. But if Iran or its proxies attack U.S. personnel anywhere, make no mistake: We will defend our people, we will defend our security - swiftly and decisively.” 

Good.  Now, we just have to hope the Biden administration means it.  In 2012, Barack Obama famously (perhaps infamously) announced his red-line on Syria’s use of poison gas: