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Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your weekly foreign policy edition with me, Julia Ioffe. Happy New Year!
Last night, my amazing colleague Abby Livingston filled in for Peter Hamby with an excellent dispatch on how the Israel-Hamas war is radicalizing Gen Z staffers on the Hill, including people who didn’t care much about the issue of Israel-Palestine until October 7, and how their bosses don’t fully grasp the amount of disinformation they’re consuming on TikTok. If you haven’t read it yet, do.
Also, as the names on Jeffrey Epstein’s list start coming out, check out our own Tara Palmeri’s wrenching podcast, Broken, about the women whose lives Epstein destroyed, as well as her podcast about Ghislaine Maxwell and the Maxwell family.
Also also: a quick thought on the ouster of Harvard president Claudine Gay, ostensibly on plagiarism charges. We should understand what really happened: Gay is the latest casualty of the right-wing assault on higher education and efforts to diversify our universities, waged by activists like Christopher Rufo, who has been quite open and honest about exactly what he’s doing. The cause was then taken up by G.O.P. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who defended Trump in the wake of January 6 and has embraced the racist great replacement theory. Stefanik then swaddled this anti-Ivory Tower crusade in the veil of fighting antisemitism on campus—of which, by the way, there is plenty. (Stefanik, by the way, has also been honest about laying traps for the university presidents.) After Gay’s lawyerly evasions on the antisemitism answer, right-wingers (led by the conservative Washington Free Beacon) went after her in classic oppo-hunting style and, in a world where all of us have something unflattering to hide, they found it.
But I just want to say to my fellow Jews who are happy with Gay’s ouster as a stand against campus antisemitism: Be careful. We have been deftly used as a political football by people very happy to ally with American fascists who are, most often, antisemites themselves. Give them a few spins of the Earth, and we’ll find ourselves thrown under the train once again by people who defended chants of “Jews will not replace us”—and will do so again. Also, for those in our community who have been anxious about the rift that the war between Israel and Hamas has opened up between American Jews and Black Americans, serving up a Black scalp in the name of fighting antisemitism will only widen that chasm.
Read Gay’s powerful parting warning here.
Now, before I get to the rest, here’s Abby again from the Hill, which is now officially in 2024 mode…
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| Yesterday evening, an explosion in a Hezbollah enclave of Beirut, apparently caused by a drone, killed Saleh al-Arouri, a senior leader of Hamas and the founder of the group’s militant wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. Al-Arouri was also one of the architects of the October 7 massacre, and though Israel hasn’t officially claimed responsibility for the assassination, which also took out a handful of other senior Hamas figures, it’s hard to imagine who else would have been behind it. A Biden administration official told The Washington Post that it was Israel’s doing and a senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday afternoon that al-Arouri “had American blood on his hands” and... |
