“Oct 7 2023”

In the Gaza Strip, Israel clearly has the upper hand in its military campaign against Hamas. But in the wider arena of international opinion, that putative victory is increasingly starting to resemble a defeat.

It’s a startling reversal for Israel, which had near-universal support in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas. Analysts say Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has squandered nearly all of that goodwill – and aggravated key allies, including the United States – by refusing to lay out a postwar plan for the governance of Gaza, which most of the international community believes should be made part of a future Palestinian state.

Israel can only ignore the outside world.

Israel has found 70 tunnels in Rafah so far, 50 of which cross the border into Egypt.

That's what Egypt was hiding. These tunnels were used to smuggle arms and ammunition to Gaza. Mystery solved. No wonder Egypt and Joe Biden were against Rafah invasion.

One can speculate that…

— Imtiaz Mahmood (@ImtiazMadmood) May 17, 2024

h/t Mauser

Amid the ongoing war in Gaza, the calculation and reporting of Palestinian civilian casualties there have sparked intense debate by researchers and activists from both sides. Adding to the already complex situation, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has announced a significant revision to the numbers published previously. This revision, which cuts the original number of women and children in Gaza “identified” as deceased by more than half, has prompted questions about the general accuracy and transparency of casualty data until now.

It’s a standing joke in my family that I love Keanu Reeves. It started in my 30s when I loved how he looked, but over the years, it’s morphed into respect for a man who works in a filthy industry but seems to have retained a strong moral compass and avoids all of Hollywood’s worst trends. It says something about the man that the Hamas lovers have come after him.

Israel’s war teaches us what we should have done after September 11.

Rafah isn’t just the last stand for Hamas, but for an entire foreign policy establishment.

The desperate effort to keep Israeli soldiers from going into the last Gaza stronghold of the Islamic terrorist organization is about more than the sum of the geopolitical parts.

After nation building failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and everywhere else it’s been tried, the radioactive ‘Palestinian’ nation building experiment from over 30 years ago is its last hope.

Protesters, particularly if they are students, have every right to demonstrate or otherwise express themselves on university campuses, even when the cause is idiotic or hateful, such as from the pro-Hamas left. But it is ludicrous to suggest that means students have an unlimited right to protest on any part of the campus they want, and in any form they choose. There is no right to camp on the quad, at least until — God help us — our activist Supreme Court says otherwise.

Universities should be bastions of truth, not politics

On both sides of America’s Palestine campus wars, you find people making historical parallels. The protestors present themselves as the heirs to the Vietnam peaceniks, proudly bearing what Noam Chomsky called “the responsibility of intellectuals” and comparing their own run-ins with the police to the Kent State massacre. Their opponents take a different view. “Will Columbia be remembered as Heidelberg?”, the chair of Yad Vashem went as far as to ask: does Columbia risk alienating its Jewish students and scholars for good, and declining in prestige as a result?

On to Berlin! There’s the battle cry, and rightly so. But our leaders are too busy editing delusional press releases, so history passes them by. Or rolls over them… and us.

In the National Post on May 13, Joe Roberts wrote, “The allies could never have won the Second World War by making clear they would stop short of Berlin.” He was drawing a historical analogy with Israel pressing into Rafah, seeking “complete and uncompromising” victory over Hamas. And while historical counterfactuals are as tricky as they are vital, we know all too well he was right.