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In Israel, Oct. 6, 2023 was a day marked by optimism. Saudi Arabia was moving toward normalizing relations with the Jewish state, a once-unthinkable step that would dramatically improve Israel’s relationships with the Arab world.
A pact with the Saudis including trade, tourism and security provisions would expand the historic Abraham Accords forged under Donald Trump, bolster a regional alliance with the United States and further isolate Iran.
“Every day seems to bring a new advance in the fast-moving American effort to build a Saudi-Israeli alliance in the Middle East,” was how a Times of Israel columnist described the confident outlook that day. “Should an Israeli-Saudi deal be sealed, the two countries will owe much to Tehran for so expertly driving them into each other’s arms.”
In late September, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had told Fox News that “We’re getting closer to peace every day.” In early October, an Israeli government minister had been photographed celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot in Riyadh.
It was all too threatening for Iran and its terror proxies. The normalization process had to be stopped if Israel was ever going to be eliminated.
A date of infamy
And so, a year ago today, thousands of Hamas terrorists crossed the border from Gaza and slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, including women and children. Rape and torture were rampant and some victims, including whole families living on kibbutzim, were burned alive.
The Palestinian invaders took 250 hostages back to the hellholes of Gaza, hoping to trade them for their own survival in the war they had started.
It was Israel’s 9/11, the deadliest day since the end of the Holocaust. The horror echoes FDR’s famous description of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “a date which will live in infamy.”
Among the casualties was the agreement with Saudi Arabia. Soon after Oct. 7, the crown prince put the talks on hold and insisted any deal must include a pathway to a separate Palestinian state.
Chalk up a victory for terrorism.
The freeze in normalization is but one of many signs of a dramatically changed world. The most obvious is that Israel flattened much of Gaza while destroying Hamas as a major fighting force.
Still, nearly 100 hostages remain captive there, with one-third of them thought to be dead.
The Israel Defense Forces are now taking the fight to Hezbollah in Lebanon after terrorists there launched 8,000 missiles, rockets and drones in the last year and drove 60,000 Israelis from their homes near the border.
As with Hamas, Hezbollah has seen its leaders eliminated and its arsenal diminished.
Israeli units have carried out extraordinary acts of warfare that rival video game exploits. They managed to insert explosives in the beepers of Hezbollah fighters and commanders, then detonated them remotely to kill scores and injure thousands in a display of technological brilliance.
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen, another Iranian-funded group, are attacking Israel and cargo ships in the Red Sea. Iran’s agents also have provoked more violent attacks in the West Bank, opening yet another front in the war to destroy Israel.
Most significant, the aftershocks now include direct attacks by Israel and Iran on each other, provoking new fears of World War III.
White House wavering
It is often said that war brings out both the best and worst of humanity, and that includes politicians. The Biden administration has engaged in a strange, yearlong exercise in mixed messaging.
Early on, the president was forceful and made a bold trip to Israel just weeks after the Hamas attack. Soon, however, he began publicly criticizing its decisions and dispatched aides to attend War Cabinet meetings and dictate which targets Israel could strike.
The pattern continues even now, with the White House simultaneously beefing up our military presence in the region while also cautioning Israel to respond “proportionally” to Iran’s attacks on its homeland.
“In practice this means that there is no effective counteroffensive action that Israel can legitimately take,” former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren writes on Clarity. “Israelis can only sit and be pummeled by enemy barrages until our interceptors run out.”
Biden’s tit-for-tat restriction reflects his extreme fear of escalation and blindness to a key fact: Iran and its proxies are America’s enemies, too.
One of the Hezbollah terrorists Israel took out had a $7 million bounty on his head, put there by Washington for his role in the 1983 attacks on our marines’ barracks and embassy in Beirut, killing nearly 400 Americans.
Since we didn’t bring him to justice, we should at least be grateful Israel did.
Even more troubling is Biden’s lifting of sanctions Trump imposed on Iran’s oil sector. Much of the hundreds of billions are going to its military and allowing it to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others.
So instead of deterring Iran, this White House has effectively enabled it to carry out its aggressions against Israel.
European leaders are even worse. Many are anti-Israel to the core, and are so frightened of the millions of Muslims they imported that they want to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others on charges of war crimes.
The call by French President Emanuel Macron on Sunday for an arms embargo on Israel is one helluva way to mark the anniversary of the Hamas invasion. Whose side is he on?
Oren, a brilliant analyst and historian, writes that Israel’s Western allies “inhabit a universe utterly alien to ours. In their reality, wars against terrorists who hide behind and under their civilian population can be won without harming those civilians and jihadists can be mollified by creating a Palestinian state.”
He adds: “American and European leaders live in a simple, rational region that bears not the slightest resemblance to the real Middle East.”
The most alarming White House motive for restricting Israel is the concern that Muslim Americans angry at even Biden’s shaky support for Israel could stay home on Election Day, possibly handing Michigan and other battleground states to Trump.
That concern surely played a role in Vice President Kamala Harris making Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz her running mate instead of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish. It is not a small point that Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, an open antisemite, supported the selection of Walz.
But the fallout from Oct. 7 is not limited to Mideast battlefields or even presidential politics. Almost as shocking is the explosion of antisemitism in America and Europe.
Just as Israel was caught off guard by the Hamas terrorists, the outpouring of support for those savages on elite college campuses and the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington as well as London and Paris has been a rude awakening of its own.
The new antisemites
It’s as if a venomous snake had been in hiding and suddenly found a chance to emerge and strike.
For many Jews, the shocking support for terrorists shatters their view of America as a uniquely safe refuge. Post-World War II generations who believed they had escaped the hellfires of Europe are finding that some of the hell followed them here.
Much of this hate, as propagated by supposedly well-educated students, faculty and administrators, is disguised as sympathy for civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. That explanation would be more credible if there were equal concern for the Israeli civilians butchered on Oct. 7 and for the hostages.
Instead, even the hostages were fodder for the antisemites who tore down pictures of them on bulletin boards and lampposts.
The chronology is stunning: Israel is attacked and 1,200 of its citizens are slaughtered — and the radical left blames the victims.
As a friend puts it, the inane chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” by keffiyeh-wearing students “reflect a deep rooted belief that Israel had it coming.”
The marchers echo assaults on Israel’s right to exist that are common in the United Nations, where despotic regimes are celebrated and Israel alone is singled out for repeated censure and condemnation.
The late chief rabbi of Britain, Lord Jonathan Sachs, concluded years ago that anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism.
As he told a gathering of young people at a Birthright Israel event, “Antisemitism is a virus that mutates, so that new antisemites can deny they are antisemites at all.
“In the Middle Ages Jews were hated for their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated for their race. Today they are hated for their nation state, Israel.”
His insight fits the moment. In the radicals’ world view, Israel has been turned into an oppressor colonizer and Palestinians into their innocent victims.
The failures of university leaders to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence led to the firing of some of the most prominent ones, including those at Harvard and Penn.
Donors large and small also have punished the schools for their dereliction by withholding their money and canceling pledges, but quisling administrators can’t shake the habit of appeasing the radicals.
Learning nothing
Columbia stands out for its repeated examples of spinelessness. Its former president alternately called the police onto campus, then surrendered to the mob before quitting and leaving town.
Still, the school and its trustees have learned nothing. A doctoral student who defended campus protesters last year and warned they could “die of dehydration and starvation” unless Columbia provided “basic humanitarian aid” to their illegal tent city has been hired to teach a required course to undergrads.
Johannah King-Slutzky will be free to warp a new class of young minds when she teaches “Contemporary Western Civilization,” which undergrads at the Ivy League school have taken since 1919. The university says the course aims to help students “gain a better sense of the ideas that have shaped the world they have inherited.”
Rest assured that in her class, America and Israel will be the source of all evil. Chalk that up as another victory for terrorism.
That’s not to suggest all is lost. The battle can be won if America and Europe remember that the enemies of Israel are our enemies, too. Pray for that day to come soon.