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Atlantic
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Jubilation in Israel Is Premature
In Israel, the war is over, and not over at all. In the two weeks since the cease-fire with Iran, praise for the Israeli military has been nearly unanimous within the country. Opposition politicians spoke of 'clear' and 'stunning' accomplishments by the Israel Defense Forces and the Mossad intelligence agency. That some Iranian missiles evaded Israel's defenses has largely faded from the news. Operationally, the Israeli campaign was indeed impressive. For 12 days, the Israeli air force ruled Iranian skies without losing a single plane. Any euphoria, however, is premature and discordant. Iran has not vanished as an enemy. And the routine state of affairs to which Israel has returned is not peacetime, but continuing war in Gaza. One reason to avoid triumphalism is that the war's effect is still not clear and could in the long run be the opposite of what Israel seeks. Precisely how much damage Iranian nuclear installations sustained from the Israeli bombing and the brief, fierce U.S. attack remains the subject of conflicting assessments. Meir Litvak, of Tel Aviv University's Alliance Center for Iranian Studies, told me that 'if Israel's goal was to completely destroy the entire nuclear project, it has not succeeded.' As a result, Litvak stressed, 'the danger now is redoubled': Iran will most likely rebuild its facilities, and its motivation to develop a nuclear weapon will have increased. This fits a historical pattern: Israeli words and deeds have played a role in the long cycle of escalation and counter-escalation with Iran. Anti-Semitism runs deep within the Iranian regime's ideology, and opposition to Israel's existence is among the Islamic Republic's core principles. But how that principle translates into policy has varied over time and in response to regional events. Raz Zimmt, an Iranian-studies specialist also at Tel Aviv University, wrote late last year that Israeli attacks on Iranian proxies and covert operations inside Iran had led some in Tehran to view Israel 'not only as an illegitimate entity that must be wiped off the map, but also as a growing menace' to Iran's national security. Zimmt cited the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist, and an explosion at the Natanz nuclear facility the following year as having possibly 'triggered Tehran's decision to increase its uranium enrichment,' first to 20 percent, then to 60 percent. Indeed, one reason conflicts escalate is that each side sees its actions as unavoidable responses to the other's aggression. From an Israeli perspective, the clandestine efforts over many years to keep Iran from creating a bomb were reasonably understood as defensive moves against an extreme danger. The risk that Israel's actions could actually push Iran's leaders to accelerate its nuclear program has been strikingly absent from Israeli public debate. What Iran will do now that Israel and the United States have unleashed their firepower on its nuclear sites remains to be seen. But here is one clue: President Masoud Pezeshkian has approved a law that ends cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and bars United Nations inspectors from Iran's nuclear facilities. This move suggests the possibility that Iran will push past threshold status and become an overt nuclear power. If that happens, the June war may well be remembered as another escalatory step. From the August 2025 issue: The nuclear club may soon double That danger is all the greater because Iran's conventional deterrents against Israel failed. The presence of heavily armed Iranian proxies did not dissuade Israel from striking: Lebanese Hezbollah stayed on the sidelines when Israel launched its attack on Iran. Nor did Iran's ballistic-missile arsenal prevent the Israeli onslaught. Iranian missiles did exact a price: 28 Israelis were killed, the last four just before the cease-fire took effect on June 24. Some 15,000 have been evacuated from their homes. For much of the public, the full extent of the destruction does not yet seem to have sunk in, partly because the military censor has prohibited publishing the location of direct hits. In one case, the censor banned a Haaretz culture columnist's piece about strolling through smashed Tel Aviv streets. Friends told me of arriving at a familiar spot for the first time after the cease-fire and being stunned by the sight of buildings ripped open by a blast. U.S. researchers used satellite data to determine that five Israeli military bases had been damaged by direct hits; this assessment could be cited in the Hebrew media only because it appeared first in The Telegraph in Britain. Still, neither the missiles nor any other Iranian capability effectively discouraged the Israeli campaign—further reason that Iran's leader may seek a nuclear deterrent instead. Perhaps the most salient reason that celebration feels out of place is that the war with Hamas has now lasted more than 50 times longer than the war with Iran did. Israel's successes in Iran throw its Gaza policy into sharp relief. Israel's intelligence services were able to penetrate Iran deeply. Its air force precisely struck missile sites. Mossad agents reportedly launched drones and missiles from inside the country. Israeli intelligence claimed to have solid information that Iran intended to complete the process of building a nuclear bomb. On October 7, 2023, by contrast, Israel was caught unaware by an enemy of small numbers, with unsophisticated weapons. Since the start of the Gaza war, a majority of Israelis have demanded an investigation into what went wrong. But one obvious answer is that attention is a limited resource, and its apportionment to Iran and Hezbollah, in preference to Hamas and the Palestinian issue near at hand, mirrored Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's worldview. More than 30 years ago, as he began his ascent to power, Netanyahu published a book called A Place Among the Nations. In it, he dismissed what he called the 'theory of Palestinian centrality.' Palestinian claims, in his description, were a propaganda tool of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Criticism of Israeli rule of the West Bank and Gaza was based on the false 'myth of 'Israeli expansionism.'' Aside from minor adjustments, Netanyahu has remained consistent in this worldview, and he has led Israel for most of the past 16 years. One implication of his vision has been that Israel could safely manage its conflict with the Palestinians in part by maintaining the split between Hamas rule in Gaza and Fatah control of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Another corollary was that the greatest danger to the nation lay farther away. Had Israel been as prepared for Hamas as it was for Iran, the Israeli army and air force could have struck Hamas's Nukhba commandos at their assembly points on October 7 before they entered Israel. In all likelihood, the conflict would have been much shorter. Not only would the loss of life on the Israeli side and the taking of hostages have been prevented, but the death toll in Gaza would likely be far less. The war with Iran allowed Netanyahu to focus national attention again on the distant enemy, but only briefly. Gaza will not go away. The extent to which Israeli civilians pay attention to the death of Palestinians and the damage or destruction of most of the buildings there depends largely on what news sources they choose. But the names and faces of Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting are impossible to avoid. Early Tuesday in Israel—Monday night in Washington—the top headline on Israeli news sites was not Netanyahu's meeting with Trump, or his sycophantic nomination of the president for the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the death of another five soldiers, in Beit Hanoun, at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. The 'root of our problems in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian issue,' the retired general Shlomo Brom, the former head of strategic planning for the Israeli general staff, told me. The Gaza war has put that back at the top of the Israeli and world agenda, whether or not the Netanyahu government acknowledges it. In strictly military terms, Brom told me, the war 'passed the point of diminishing returns' for Israel many months ago. 'The main reason that the war continues,' he said, is the 'question of the day after, of who will rule Gaza, which our government refuses to address.' The deal now being discussed between Israel and Hamas will not settle that issue, according to most reports. It would inaugurate a 60-day cease-fire and secure the release of half of the 20 living Israeli hostages Hamas is believed to still hold. In the most optimistic case, those two months would allow for negotiations that could finally bring an end to the war. That would mean allowing some form of Palestinian or other Arab government to administer Gaza and begin reconstruction. And then, just possibly, the long-postponed conversation in Israel about the moral and human cost of the war might begin.
New York Post
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Gunslinging rabbi hunts neo-Nazis in new indie thriller ‘Guns & Moses'
These Hollywood Jews take 'movie shoot' to a whole new level. 'Guns & Moses,' an indie thriller out this month about a gunslinging Hasidic rabbi who hunts down a killer, is set in a world hostile to Jews that's disturbingly like our own. Rabbi Mo Zaltzman, a fictional Chabad rabbi who runs a synagogue in the High Desert of Southern California, goes from clergyman to triggerman when one of his flock is murdered. 5 'Guns & Moses,' is an indie thriller out this month about a gunslinging Hasidic rabbi who hunts down a killer and is set in a world hostile to Jews. Pictures From The Fringe 'The story about Jews under attack, who fight back, that was always going to be relevant, right?' said director Sal Litvak, who co-wrote the script with his wife, Nina, after reading headlines in 2019 about a mass shooting at a California synagogue. In that incident, a gunman stormed the Chabad of Poway, killing one and injuring three – one of whom, Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, lost a finger when he heroically raised his hand trying to stop the hail of bullets. Poway was just one of a string of deadly attacks on Jewish institutions in the late 2010s, the worst being the 2018 murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. In the wake of these attacks, thousands of American synagogues hired armed security guards and enlisted their own members to carry guns and take self-defense classes. But after Hamas's devastating attack on Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, the Jewish call to arms has never been more urgent, Litvak said. 5 'Guns & Moses,' which hits theaters July 18th, stars Neil McDonough, Dermot Mulroney and Christopher Lloyd. Pictures From The Fringe 'If we're serious when we say, never again, well then we have to be accountable for our security and for our safety,' said Litvak. 'I mean, now you've got in New York a Democratic candidate who is still calling for globalizing Intifada, not distancing himself from those comments, and you've just got young people manipulated and lied to and buying into this stuff about colonist Israel and just nonsense. 'And there's a kind of horseshoe effect on the far right and the far left, where the one thing they can agree on is that they hate the Jews.' 5 Christopher Lloyd plays the role of a Holocaust survivor who, in a memorably dramatic sequence, schools a young neo Nazi on the value of tolerance. Pictures From The Fringe Hollywood veteran Mark Feuerstein, who plays the armed-and-dangerous Rabbi Zaltzman, said October 7th was his defining moment as a Jew. 'And I know a lot of Jews feel the same,' he said. 'If you told me that I would become not just a proud Jew act Jewish actor, but an activist, I would have been shocked. But so many of us have, because so many of us have woken up to the new reality of being Jewish in America and in the world.' 'Guns & Moses,' which hits theaters July 18th, also stars Neil McDonough, Dermot Mulroney and Christopher Lloyd in the role of a Holocaust survivor who, in a memorably dramatic sequence, schools a young neo Nazi on the value of tolerance. 5 Hollywood veteran Mark Feuerstein, who plays the armed-and-dangerous Rabbi Zaltzman, said October 7th was his defining moment as a Jew. Pictures From The Fringe 5 Feuerstein said he's proud to play a Jewish character who refuses to take antisemitic violence sitting down. Pictures From The Fringe Feuerstein said he's proud to play a Jewish character who refuses to take antisemitic violence sitting down. 'I'm so proud to be that character instead of the nebbish, who, though that stereotype exists, is not a reflection of who we are as a people,' he said. 'We are strong, we are proud and we are brave.'
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Harvard professor reveals university was 'not ready' after Oct 7 as Trump revokes tax-exempt status
An adjunct professor at Harvard spoke out Thursday after the Ivy League university's president, Alan Garber, apologized as scathing internal reports exposed that antisemitism and Islamophobia were prevalent on campus. Eugene Litvak, who teaches at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview that one of the nation's top universities "was not ready" for the anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic behavior that has plagued Harvard since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. "Obviously, I was really, really upset," Litvak told Fox. "What happened at Harvard after October 7th, and [at] the university, in my opinion, again, that's my personal opinion, the university was not ready to face these kinds of challenges. None of the universities were ready." Columbia University Janitors Sue Anti-israel Agitators Accused Of Holding Them Hostage In Campus Building "I'm commending, actually, the letter from the president of the university," the Harvard professor added. "What I really like, in science, we say that you cannot solve any problem unless you formulate it. So he formulated the problem in his letter. He acknowledged that there is a problem. Otherwise, nothing would happen." Harvard president Alan Garber apologized in a letter Tuesday after internal reports unveiled antisemitism and Islamophobia's presence at the Ivy League school. Garber described the findings as "disturbing." Read On The Fox News App Harvard President Apologizes For Failure To Address Antisemitism, Islamophobia After New Reports Released "I think that's a step in the absolutely right direction," Litvak told Fox News Digital. "I would like to see the fruits of it. But again, I was very, very pleased because of the acknowledgment that there is such a problem." Despite Garber's apology and admission, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social Friday stating that the administration will be "taking away Harvard's Tax Exempt Status," noting "It's what they deserve!" In addition to solving the troubling culture of one of America's top universities, the Harvard School of Public Health professor also stressed the importance of addressing the imminent danger publicly funded healthcare programs like Medicaid and Medicare face. Litvak, who serves as President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Optimization (IHO), noted that the Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) cuts to the government would not harm the programs. "I think Medicare and Medicaid are facing danger, regardless of what DOGE is doing," Litvak explained. "Medicare actually is going to become insolvent in 2036. It's very close. And Medicaid is not in the best position. I can tell you, we have, last year we had 4.9, this year I believe we would have more than $5 trillion spending." Dr. Oz Vows To 'Wage War On Fraud, Waste, Abuse,' Preserve Medicare And Medicaid The professor stated that reducing government spending, similar to DOGE cuts, on healthcare can be a solution to the looming crisis. "I agree with the goal to reduce waste. It was a very timely call for waste reduction. It's much-needed, the Harvard professor added. "Before doing that, if I were making decisions, before firing people, I would say, 'how can we improve the efficiency of what we already have?'" While Litvak pushes for change in the public healthcare space, a dark cloud continues to hang over the Boston-based university as tensions between the Trump Administration and the Ivy League school have shown no signs of cooling down. A lawsuit over $2.2 billion in frozen research grants is still ongoing, and the funds may likely be held up into the summer. Harvard president Alan Garber said the "consequences" of the decision to withhold grants would be "severe and long-lasting", and may impact work similar to that which Professor Litvak is hoping to accomplish. In response to the suit, a White House spokesperson told Fox News Digital in April that the "gravy train of federal assistance to institutions like Harvard, which enrich their grossly overpaid bureaucrats with tax dollars from struggling American families is coming to an end."Original article source: Harvard professor reveals university was 'not ready' after Oct 7 as Trump revokes tax-exempt status
Fox News
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Harvard professor reveals university was 'not ready' after Oct 7 as Trump revokes tax-exempt status
An adjunct professor at Harvard spoke out Thursday after the Ivy League university's president, Alan Garber, apologized as scathing internal reports exposed that antisemitism and Islamophobia were prevalent on campus. Eugene Litvak, who teaches at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview that one of the nation's top universities "was not ready" for the anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic behavior that has plagued Harvard since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. "Obviously, I was really, really upset," Litvak told Fox. "What happened at Harvard after October 7th, and [at] the university, in my opinion, again, that's my personal opinion, the university was not ready to face these kinds of challenges. None of the universities were ready." "I'm commending, actually, the letter from the president of the university," the Harvard professor added. "What I really like, in science, we say that you cannot solve any problem unless you formulate it. So he formulated the problem in his letter. He acknowledged that there is a problem. Otherwise, nothing would happen." Harvard president Alan Garber apologized in a letter Tuesday after internal reports unveiled antisemitism and Islamophobia's presence at the Ivy League school. Garber described the findings as "disturbing." "I think that's a step in the absolutely right direction," Litvak told Fox News Digital. "I would like to see the fruits of it. But again, I was very, very pleased because of the acknowledgment that there is such a problem." Despite Garber's apology and admission, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social Friday stating that the administration will be "taking away Harvard's Tax Exempt Status," noting "It's what they deserve!" In addition to solving the troubling culture of one of America's top universities, the Harvard School of Public Health professor also stressed the importance of addressing the imminent danger publicly funded healthcare programs like Medicaid and Medicare face. Litvak, who serves as President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Optimization (IHO), noted that the Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) cuts to the government would not harm the programs. "I think Medicare and Medicaid are facing danger, regardless of what DOGE is doing," Litvak explained. "Medicare actually is going to become insolvent in 2036. It's very close. And Medicaid is not in the best position. I can tell you, we have, last year we had 4.9, this year I believe we would have more than $5 trillion spending." The professor stated that reducing government spending, similar to DOGE cuts, on healthcare can be a solution to the looming crisis. "I agree with the goal to reduce waste. It was a very timely call for waste reduction. It's much-needed, the Harvard professor added. "Before doing that, if I were making decisions, before firing people, I would say, 'how can we improve the efficiency of what we already have?'" While Litvak pushes for change in the public healthcare space, a dark cloud continues to hang over the Boston-based university as tensions between the Trump Administration and the Ivy League school have shown no signs of cooling down. A lawsuit over $2.2 billion in frozen research grants is still ongoing, and the funds may likely be held up into the summer. Harvard president Alan Garber said the "consequences" of the decision to withhold grants would be "severe and long-lasting", and may impact work similar to that which Professor Litvak is hoping to accomplish. In response to the suit, a White House spokesperson told Fox News Digital in April that the "gravy train of federal assistance to institutions like Harvard, which enrich their grossly overpaid bureaucrats with tax dollars from struggling American families is coming to an end." Preston Mizell is a writer with Fox News Digital covering breaking news. Story tips can be sent to and on X @MizellPreston
