In 2016, following major attacks targeting Jewish and Israeli targets around the world, and based on earlier text adopted by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, the government-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) published a two-page working definition of anti-Semitism. This initiative was designed to fill the vacuum that fostered ineffective policies and willful blindness in countering the sources of hate crimes directed specifically at Jews.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

It is hardly a surprise that Sa'ed Atshan would be given tenure at Swarthmore College. What is noteworthy is how this came about, something well beyond the normal tenure process in academe. It points to the special place Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) supporters have in academia.

To start, Atshan is a well-known BDS activist, and the college itself has endorsed BDS. In many ways, Atshan is a poster child for Quaker education—he's an alum of the Quaker school in Ramallah who now teaches for the same Quaker school he attended as an undergraduate. He represents the Quaker echo chamber regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that ensures that only the Palestinian narrative will be voiced.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: As we observed during the US presidential election of 2020, the presumption that tolerance and pluralism connote openness and acceptance is false. American Jews in particular have once again been forced to choose between their "pluralistic" tolerance and their Jewish identity.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: "The struggle for Palestine" has long been an axiomatic slogan in the Arab-Palestinian narrative and continues to be used to this day to galvanize the masses—but as the Middle East changes, the power of the phrase may be diminishing.

In his 1974 book Palestinians and Israel, the late Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote that following the Six-Day War,

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

For years, instead of focusing on problems plaguing much of the Arab world such as corruption, bad governance, and lack of accountability, too much attention was drawn to Israel and the plight of the Palestinians.

While the myth of the Israeli bogeyman was lifted after the Arab uprisings since 2010 and now with the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and now Sudan, there is one country which still uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means to win favor among the so-called "Arab street" and propel itself as a leader of the Muslim world. That country is Turkey.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles