The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Friday that it imposed sanctions on Iran’s “ghost fleet” of tankers and shipping companies that the Islamic Republic uses to sell oil.

The department designated 23 vessels and 16 companies for their participation in Iran’s efforts to contravene U.S. sanctions.

Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security advisor, said the new sanctions were part of the “severe consequences” that he had threatened Iran would face after its Oct. 1 ballistic-missile attack on Israel.

He said the sanctions involve “new and significant measures to more effectively target Iran’s energy trade.”

“The new designations today also include measures against the ‘Ghost Fleet’ that carries Iran’s illicit oil to buyers around the world,” Sullivan stated. “These measures will help further deny Iran financial resources used to support its missile programs and provide support for terrorist groups that threaten the United States, its allies and partners.”

Iran uses a variety of methods to try to conceal the origin of its oil for sale on the global market, including falsifying ship location data to disguise oil transfers in the Persian Gulf, conducting ship-to-ship oil transfers and using foreign corporations to forge cargo documents to mask the Iranian origin of petroleum shipments.

Much of this oil is then sold to China, which does not recognize U.S. sanctions on Iran. Friday’s sanctions announcement notes that Iran has sold millions of barrels of oil to Chinese refineries but does not include new designations of any Chinese companies.

Critics, including former President Donald Trump, allege that these tactics and the Biden administration’s failure to enforce existing sanctions have allowed Iran to reap billions of dollars in profits to fund its ballistic missile and nuclear programs and to support terrorist proxy groups throughout the region.

Nearly all of the vessels sanctioned by the Treasury on Friday are included in a database of 459 Iranian ghost fleet tankers maintained by United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit that advocates tougher U.S. measures against the regime.

Jason Brodsky, UANI’s policy director, argued that Friday’s sanctions don’t do enough to punish Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel.

“I remember when Jake Sullivan promised ‘severe consequences’ for Iran's regime,” Brodsky wrote. “While welcome and overdue, sanctions are easy for U.S. policymakers to impose. Combining sanctions with kinetic action and diplomatic pressure is what's needed.”

International and U.S. leaders and officials released statements on Friday ahead of Yom Kippur, the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar.

“Sending our very best wishes to British Jews and Jewish communities around the world observing Yom Kippur,” stated the office of Keir Starmer, the United Kingdom prime minister. “Gmar chatimah tovah.” (The latter expression refers to Jews being sealed for a positive fate in the proverbial "Book of Life.")

“Tonight, Jewish communities will come together to mark the beginning of Yom Kippur. More than a year after Oct. 7, and in the face of emboldened antisemitism at home, I know this time is a difficult time,” said Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister. “As you come together during this painful period for the Jewish people, I hope you feel hope and community. Gmar chatimah tovah.”

Pierre Poilievre, the Canadian opposition leader, wrote that “as the sun goes down tonight, Jews will gather to mark Judaism’s holiest day of the year—Yom Kippur—a reminder of God’s eternal love and His timeless promises of mercy and justice to His people.”

“As the Jewish community faces a resurgence of antisemitism, we commit ourselves to making Canada a safer country where everyone can live and worship in peace and security,” he said. “Gmar chatimah tovah.”

The United Nations released a Yom Kippur statement—“We wish all those observing it a blessed and peaceful Yom Kippur”—three hours after JNS reported that the global body releases statements recognizing holidays of other faiths, but not Jewish ones.

U.S. President Joe Biden also shared a Yom Kippur message, and Vice President Kamala Harris held a campaign High Holidays call pitching Jewish voters.

“The blessing of Yom Kippur is that it is not just a day of reflection, repentance and reverence—but a day of transformation, forgiveness and hope,” Biden stated. “On behalf of my family and my entire administration, we wish you a meaningful and easy fast. Gmar chatimah tovah.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wrote: “We are wishing everyone observing Yom Kippur across the world a blessed and meaningful fast. Gmar chatimah tovah.”

Pope Francis, who reiterated his call for a ceasefire to the fighting in the Middle East on Friday, had not issued a Yom Kippur statement at press time.

Among the U.S. lawmakers who released Yom Kippur statements were Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) and Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Andy Barr (R-Ky.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), August Pfluger (R-Texas), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) and John Rutherford (R-Fla.).

On Yom Kippur, there will, as there is every year, be a lot of collective breast-beating in the American Jewish community for all that we’ve done wrong. And, then, as usual, we generally go back to doing many of the same things as soon as the fast is broken and our stomachs full. That this will happen is human nature and no different from innumerable times in the past when we have made collective promises.

But this past year was different. So is the one that is about to unfold. As such, our willingness simply to move on from our failures is insufficient.

In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas and Palestinian terrorists in southern Israel, Jews in the United States witnessed an unprecedented surge in antisemitism. Mobs on the streets of major cities, and especially on the campuses of universities, made manifest the new intellectual and cultural orthodoxy in which woke ideology deems Jews and Israelis to be “white” oppressors who must be resisted “by any means necessary,” as goes the popular phrase on the political left.

Students were harassed and shunned if they weren’t willing to renounce their communal affiliations or join those chanting “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada”—in effect, assenting to the idea of the genocide of the Jews of Israel. A generation of students and professors who had come to believe that “microaggressions” in which alleged slights towards minorities should be treated as the moral equivalent of violent crimes took part in activities whose only real purpose was to support those engaged in a campaign of the murder of Jews and the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet.

Jewish show fear and not outrage

Just as tragic is the fact that the reaction from most American Jews was shock and fear, rather than outrage and a willingness to confront those seeking to intimidate them.

While some believed that the new academic year would be different, what we’ve already seen, especially on the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, was more of the same. The most memorable images from that day were not of ceremonies mourning for those lost in the Palestinian assault on Israeli communities but of lone Jewish students in places like Columbia University trying to stand their ground against mobs who—whether violating rules that would have forbidden their conduct or not—were brazenly chanting support for the murderous goals of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists. Equally memorable were the images of pro-Hamas mobs assaulting a single man—a leader of a Democratic Party pro-Israel group—for having the temerity to hold up an Israeli flag in the face of their curses, physical harassment and anti-Jewish threats.

Why has none of this provoked mass outrage from American Jewry? Why have there been no comparable pro-Israel marches or organized counter-demonstrations that would attempt to show the antisemites that they—and not the Jews—were the isolated extremist minority?

The answer lies mostly in the fact that many American Jews have been happily swimming in the same cultural sea of hostility towards Zionism, and until recently, never suspected that its venom could drown them. They were sure that the hostility to the canon of Western civilization inherent in the myths of critical race theory and intersectionality had absolutely nothing to do with them. Their willingness to endorse the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, despite its close ties to antisemitism—along with their liberal-leaning and cultural views as well as fealty to the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—should have exempted them from any connection to the oppressor class that these toxic theories singled out for opprobrium.

But they were wrong about all of that. As much as many on the Jewish left considered concerns about these issues to be indications of racism or right-wing extremism on the part of those who raised them, it was, of course, the Jews who were the first and easiest targets for the woke left.

It’s true that most Jewish institutions rallied behind Israel in the first weeks after Oct. 7 and then helped organize a mass pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14, 2023. But the facade of unity soon faded.

Why?

In no small measure, the problem was politics.

Support for Israel after the terror attacks became an issue that impacted President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. Beset by the Democratic Party’s anti-Israel activist left-wing base, the president soon wavered on his position and spent the next year talking out of both sides of his mouth on the topic. Pressing him or Vice President Kamala Harris (who replaced him on the Democratic ticket in a party establishment coup three months before the election due to Biden’s incapacities) to resist the pro-Hamas and antisemitic activists within his own party and even administration was something many pro-Israel Democrats were reluctant to do. That’s because they viewed defeating his opponent—former President Donald Trump—to be a higher priority, despite the latter’s historic support for the Jewish state.

As much as they resented and feared the way how the mobs on campuses were targeting Jewish students, the notion of helping organize more counter-protests seemed beyond their capabilities and something they were inclined to avoid. The instincts of liberal Jewish Americans were very much in sync with those who urged Jews to “shelter in place” or to avoid confrontations with supporters of Hamas.

As a result, the message sent to the hard left organizing these outrages was that the Jews were as isolated and weak as they imagined. The message from the broader cultural milieu only reinforced the belief on the part of the anti-Zionists that they had the wind at their backs.

The fact that the week of the Oct. 7 anniversary was marked by the celebration of a new book by a literary celebrity calling for Israel’s destruction was no accident.

Celebrated African-American author Ta-Nehisi Coates was feted throughout the mainstream media for writing an ignorant book libeling Israel as a new version of the “Jim Crow” American South based on a 10-day tour, his first trip to the region. The one reporter from a mainstream outlet that challenged him was publicly shamed by his organization for doing so. Meanwhile, other outlets became his shameless collaborators, such as The New York Times, which provided him with new platforms from which to spew his libels against the Jews and his justifications for the atrocities of Oct. 7, and even immoral speculations about whether he would have the personal strength to have joined in the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction carried out by the Palestinians.

While Coates’s disturbing speculations are of little importance, the fact that they are trumpeted by the very outlets that many liberal Jews still venerate is deeply troubling.

All of this requires a clear course correction on the part of American Jewish institutions, though it’s likely that such an effort is something that most national legacy groups, like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, are unlikely to accomplish.

Stand with other pro-Israel supporters

What’s needed most now is a new commitment to put aside partisanship or any inclination to rerun the same sterile debates about Israel that American Jews have been engaging in for decades. Instead of pretending that the possibility of liberals losing power in Washington will bring on a new reign of fascism or Nazism, the majority of the community must wake up to the reality that the mobs on campuses and in the streets—and more importantly, what they represent in terms of a new woke cultural orthodoxy that rules our educational system, cultural institutions and even the corporate world—is very much a clear and present danger to Jewish life in this country.

In the coming months, they must find the courage to put aside their partisan differences and inclinations, and unite to fight the anti-Zionists and antisemites, even if they thought of these groups as allies in the past. And they must do so in as loud and public a manner as possible. They must also be willing to call upon non-Jewish supporters of Israel, including evangelical Christians who have stood by Israel through this difficult year, even if their political opinions don’t always mesh with their own. They must act to send the message that Jew-haters are the ones who should be shamed and marginalized. And they must stop apologizing for Israel and openly support the Jewish state’s efforts to defend its borders and defeat its enemies.

Jews and Israel aren’t alone. But American Jews are isolating themselves with a communal consensus that sometimes seems to be based on false priorities and sheer cowardice. If they don’t change their ways, they will have more to account for next Yom Kippur.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, courted Jewish voters on Friday in a campaign call ahead of Yom Kippur.

Speaking on a “Jewish Voters for Harris-Walz” livestream, Harris touted her record of support for Israel and accused her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, of trafficking in anti-Jewish tropes.

“As president, it is my pledge that I will always ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists, and I will always support Israel’s right to defend itself,” she said on the call, which ran about 10 minutes and didn’t allow for questions. “My commitment to the security of Israel is unwavering.”

“As we have seen a rise in antisemitism in our own country, Trump has espoused dangerous and hateful antisemitic tropes creating fear and division,” she added. “He praised some of the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville as ‘very fine people.’ He reportedly said Hitler did some ‘good things.’”

Trump has disputed that he was referring to neo-Nazis when he said that there were “very fine people” on “both sides” of the 2017 Charlottesville, Va., “Unite the Right” rally led by white supremacists. The former president has also denied making the positive comment about former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, which was attributed to him by his former chief of staff John Kelly.

During the campaign call, Harris largely reiterated existing Biden administration positions on Middle Eastern issues. She said that she preferred a diplomatic solution to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon but added that “all options are on the table,” an allusion to the potential use of military force. 

She and the Biden administration continue to pursue a ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Hamas to end the war in Gaza, added Harris.

“It is time to bring the conflict to an end, and I am working to ensure it ends, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom and self-determination,” she said. 

“I will never stop fighting for the release of all the hostages, including, of course, the seven American citizens, living and deceased, who are still held,” Harris said.

Her husband, Douglas Emhoff, who is Jewish, said on the call that as president, Harris would be a supporter of the U.S. Jewish community.

“I love being Jewish. I love the joy that comes with being Jewish, and Kamala, well, she shares that love with me,” Emhoff said. “When Kamala is president, she’s going to continue to stand up to fight against antisemitism and fight against hate in all of its forms, and she will continue to be a friend and advocate for the Jewish people.”

Jewish voters could play a deciding factor in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, where they make up 3.3% and 1.2% of the population, respectively, per the 2023 American Jewish Year Book. 

Polls show inconsistent results about whether Jews, who traditionally vote overwhelmingly Democrat, are shifting towards Trump and the Republican Party. 

In a poll that the Jewish Democratic Council of America released on Wednesday of key battleground states, 71% of Jewish voters said they would support Harris and just 26% said they would support Trump. Those figures would be largely consistent with election results in recent decades.

A Siena College poll in September of likely voters in New York, however, showed Trump with a 54% to 44% lead over Harris among Jewish respondents. Jews made up 8% of that poll’s 1,003-person sample.

Days after CBS executives admonished Tony Dokoupil for his line of questioning of author Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which the CBS host said that the latter’s new anti-Israel book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” video footage circulated of Coates discussing Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack with former Daily Show host Trevor Noah.

“Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open-air jail, and what I mean by that is if my father is a fisherman, and he goes too far out into the sea he might get shot by someone off the side of Israeli boats,” he said. “If my mother picks the olive trees. If she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot. If my little sister has cancer, and she needs treatment, because there are no facilities that do that in Gaza, and I don’t get the right permit, she might die.”

“And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty and the wall comes down,” he added. “Am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say this is too far? I don’t know that I am.”

“The process is complete,” wrote Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism. “Demonization: Israel as all that is evil. Delegitimization: Israel as having no right to exist. Double standards: burning alive, mutilation, rape, massacre as legitimate when perpetrated against Israel.”

“Good demonstration of what’s inside and what’s outside the norms of the discourse,” wrote Seth Mandel, senior editor at Commentary magazine. “Guy who says he can imagine going pogroming is celebrated. Guy who says, gee, you sound like an extremist is raked over the coals.”

“The problem with ‘words are violence’ is that violence is therefore words—and just another form of expression,” wrote James Panero, executive editor of the New Criterion.

“Tony Dokoupil was admonished by his own network for saying that if you take away the prestige and the awards, Coates’s book could be found in the backpack of an extremist,” wrote Stephen Miller, a prominent conservative writer. “Here is Coates proving that exact point.”

“The law of wokeness dictates that if you see yourself as less powerful than your perceived foe—white America or Israel—you have no agency and thus no moral responsibility, including not to commit atrocities,” wrote Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek opinion editor. “Hence Coates thinks he may have participated in Oct. 7.”

While most American Jews are interested in supporting the well-being of the Jewish community and Israel, the prominence accorded these issues in shaping people’s political priorities varies widely. Yet to the extent that these issues do rank high in the political thinking of much of the community, their translation into continued, overwhelming support for Democrats reflects the embrace of several false beliefs regarding the party, American Jewish well-being and Israel.

Five of them are: 

1. Antisemitism in America is mainly a right-wing, conservative phenomenon.

This is a long-standing conviction among Jews that can be traced to their forebears’ experiences in late 18th- and 19th-century Europe—that the extension of civic rights to Jews largely garnered more support from liberal cadres than from conservatives, although this pattern was not consistent. Polls of American Jewish opinion throughout many decades have revealed a vast majority believing antisemitism to be more rife among American conservatives than liberals; however, actual surveys of American opinion regarding Jews do not support this belief. One might have expected that the emergence, particularly in the last decade, of leftist-dominated American academia as the chief institutional bastion of domestic antisemitism would have led to some questioning of the long-held association of Jew-hatred primarily with the right. But it has generally not done so. One might likewise have expected that since Jewish fealty to the Democrats has been grounded in the perception of the Democrats as the traditionally liberal party and, therefore, more congenial for Jews, the rejection in recent years by much of the American left and the Democratic Party of basic liberal principles would have led to a rethinking of old assumptions. An example of abandoned liberal principles is the commitment to free speech now being attacked on campuses. Another is a commitment to judging individuals by the content of their character rather than their group identity, also rejected by key left-dominated institutions. But again, there is little evidence of such a rethinking by American Jews even as the Republican Party has become the major political defender of such principles. Certainly, the vile antisemitism of far-right, white-supremacist and neo-Nazi sources has been garnering significant support on social media in recent years. Media personality Tucker Carlson’s popularity and his promotion of such rightist mouthpieces for Jew-hatred as the unhinged Candace Owens and Holocaust-denier “historian” Darryl Cooper are notable examples. But the other major sources of antisemitism—the progressive left and Islamists (the so-called red-green alliance) and black radicals—have penetrated much more into the American mainstream. In addition, they often make common cause with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Any examination of social-media accounts belonging to Islamists and black radicals will, not infrequently, find praise of Hitler and the Nazi agenda, and the admiration goes the other way as well. In addition, the recent burgeoning of antisemitism in the United States, again largely from leftist, Islamist and black-radical sources, has been accompanied by a reluctance of the Democratic Party to address the hate. In Congress, there has been a consistent pattern to avoid discussion of the issue or to insist that any discussion be immersed in a wider consideration of bigotry. The recent greater attention to the issue in the House of Representatives has been a result of Republican control of the House. Yet the belief that Jew-hatred is promoted primarily by the right remains an article of faith for many American Jews.

2. Left-wing anti-Jewish sentiment is rooted in hostility to Israel.

This false belief is largely grounded in wishful thinking. Many American Jews are simply unprepared to acknowledge that left-leaning groups and the institutions with which they identify hold them in bigoted disregard. Therefore, they prefer to interpret that disregard as Israel’s fault. Much of the domestic anti-Jewish sentiment is indeed couched in anti-Israel or anti-Zionist terms, with any animus towards Jews often explained by bigots as stemming from Jewish support for Israel. But the wholesale attacks on Jews at college campuses and in the streets since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in southern Israel ought to have raised some doubts about such explanations. In fact, there has been a domestic, left-dominated campaign fostering Jew-hatred that is only loosely linked to Israel. The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) movement, ubiquitous in its academic spawning grounds and in much of corporate America, promotes Jew-hatred by categorizing Jews as privileged whites and by singling them out as particular beneficiaries of racist advantage by virtue of their being disproportionately successful. Jews are also viewed as proper targets of DEI venom because of their history of supporting meritocracy. These rationales for peddling Jew-hatred are distinct from and not simply secondary to anti-Israel bias, even though that bias—with Israel caricatured as a white-colonial project—is another facet of DEI hate-mongering.

3. Left-wing hostility to Israel is due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing Israeli policies.

Israeli political sentiment has swung to the right in the past two decades in response initially to the terror war unleashed by PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 2000. The rightward shift was subsequently reinforced by Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005; the territory’s seizure by Hamas two years later; and the multiple Hamas-initiated wars since then. But to believe that this right-ward swing in Israeli politics is the source of left-wing anti-Israel animus in America is to ignore the reality that such animus is widely directed at the very existence of the nation and not simply its political shifts. The canards of racism, apartheid and genocide emanating from the campuses, elements of the media and the nation’s cultural elites, as well as from some members of Congress, have nothing to do with a particular Israeli government. And when President Joe Biden withholds weapons amid a war initiated by Hamas—and Vice President Kamala Harris endorses his doing so and promises to do more of the same if elected president, or when both press for an immediate ceasefire and allowing Hamas to survive with an opening to reconstitute itself—that puts Israel and its people in danger. The false belief that the American leftist hostility to Israel is due to the current right-wing political dominance in Israel is—like the false belief that antisemitism in America is due to anti-Israel hostility—a matter of wishful thinking. Many Jews want to believe that the leftist elites with whom they identify and who are so hostile to Israel are only hostile to its leadership, and that their bigoted anti-Israel rhetoric is not as hateful and as directed against Israel’s very existence as it obviously is.  

4. Israel has been remiss in not promoting a Palestinian state and doing so would resolve left-wing hostility.

An obvious retort to this false belief is to cite all the times that Israel has offered the Palestinians a state only to have the offer rejected, as in 2000 and again in 2008. But a more substantive response is to note that there has never been a Palestinian leadership that has been willing to accept a state alongside Israel. On the contrary, Palestinian leaders have time and again insisted that they would never recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state in any part of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And all have used their schools, mosques and media to promote genocidal antisemitism and to incite their people to pursue Israel’s annihilation. This is, of course, true of Hamas, which declares in its charter that it has a religious duty to kill the world’s Jews. And it is true of the Palestinian Authority, which offers generous cash rewards to Palestinians (shaheeds or "martyrs") who kill or at least try to kill Jews, and which indoctrinates its children to dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction. Additionally, calls on college campuses and in the streets for Palestinian liberation “from the river to the sea,” coupled with the repetition of those calls by left-wing advocates of the Palestinian agenda, provide further proof that offers of a Palestinian state alongside Israel will not end left-wing hatred.

5. Democratic assertions of commitment to Israel’s defense prove that the left is no threat to Israel’s well-being, but rather, a guarantor of it.

Administration officials, including Biden and Harris, reiterate that Washington’s commitment to Israel’s defense is “ironclad.” But neither pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza nor withholding all but defensive weapons is supportive of Israel’s struggle for survival. In Gaza, there are policies that allow Hamas to survive, potentially rebuild its power and attempt to fulfill its promise of repeating the Oct. 7 massacre. More broadly, Israel’s fending off Iran, which is close to becoming a nuclear power and consistently declares its objective of eradicating the Jewish state, requires more than defensive weapons. So, too, does combating Iran’s myriad proxies—the circle of fire Iran has established around the Jewish state. It requires Israel to be equipped with the means to go on the offensive against those sworn to annihilate it. When, in April, Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of drones and missiles—and the attack was effectively countered—Biden insisted that Israel not respond. As though an attack’s being blunted should somehow exempt Iran from any action to deter it from its promised future aggression. Iran is free to pursue a war against Israel, either directly or through its proxies, but Israel is pressured not to counterattack and denied weapons for doing so. Purely defensive weapons won’t prevent Iran from realizing its nuclear ambitions and presenting a still greater threat. Imagine if America, when it was aiding Britain in the many months between the start of World War II and America’s entry into the war, had told the British that it would only provide them with defensive weapons but not with arms that would enable them to take the war to the Nazis.

American Jews like to think of themselves as a particularly well-informed part of the electorate. But their vulnerability to being swayed by wishful beliefs while ignoring undeniable facts is real and dangerous. It all too often results in political choices that are detrimental to the well-being of both the domestic Jewish community and Israel. 

Author and journalist Bob Woodward is out with a new book titled War, scheduled for release on Oct. 15.

The 448-page work chronicles the Biden administration’s handling of and challenges associated with Russia’s war with Ukraine; Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon; and how these foreign-policy quagmires might affect a successful Democratic outcome in the 2024 presidential election come November.

In it, Woodward writes that U.S. President Joe Biden said privately that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a “son of a bitch,” “a bad f****** guy” and “a f****** liar.”

He reported that Biden argued with Netanyahu behind the scenes about numerous combat-related issues. He specifically questioned the Israeli government’s focus on destroying Hamas before negotiating the release of hostages the terrorists dragged into the Gaza Strip after it crossed the border with southern Israel and massacred 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023.

Of a phone call in April, Woodward—long associated with his work for The Washington Post—writes that Biden asked Netanyahu: “What’s your strategy, man?” The prime minister responded that Israel needed to go into Rafah, in the southernmost part of Gaza and the suspected holdout of Hamas, prompting Biden to respond: “Bibi, you’ve got no strategy.” 

When Iran fired more than 100 missiles at Israel later that month, Woodward says Biden discouraged Netanyahu from launching a counterattack, saying “take the win.”

Following an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on July 30 that killed Hamas military commander Fuad Shukr, Woodward writes that Biden yelled at Netanyahu over the phone, “Bibi, what the f***?”

Biden reportedly told Netanyahu on the call that “you know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor.”

Netanyahu defended the attack, calling Shukr “one of the leading terrorists” and stating that “the harder you hit, the more successful you’re going to be in the negotiation.”

The Biden administration favors a “diplomatic solution” to the conflict on Israel’s northern border, Robert Wood, the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said at an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council.

Wood did not call for a ceasefire in his remarks on Thursday during the session on increased hostilities between Israel and the Hezbollah terror group, which controls Southern Lebanon.

“The solution to this crisis is not a weaker Lebanon,” Wood said. “It’s a strong and truly sovereign Lebanon, protected by a legitimate security force, embodied in the Lebanese Armed Forces.”

Lebanon’s government and its army are supposed to enforce Security Council Resolution 1701, which was designed 18 years ago to bring permanent peace to the country after the 2006 Lebanon War. The resolution calls for disarming Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, and restoring full Lebanese sovereignty in the south.

Despite the resolution being in effect for 18 years, Hezbollah has flourished.

The terror group has fired some 10,000 rockets at the Jewish state since Oct. 8, the day after Hamas’s terror attack on southern Israel. Hezbollah has proclaimed solidarity with Hamas. Both are U.S.-designated terror groups.

Israel has degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities severely over the past month, including sabotaging and donating pagers and other communications equipment belonging to Hezbollah terrorists en masse. “As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history,” The Washington Post reported.

The Jewish state has also eliminated the terror group’s entire leadership structure.

The Israel Defense Forces requested earlier this week that troops from the U.N.’s Israel-Lebanon peacekeeping mission, UNIFIL, relocate out of certain areas near the border to allow the IDF to operate during its ground incursions in Lebanon without putting UNIFIL troops in harm’s way.

The U.N. force, which has regularly heeded Hezbollah’s demands to stay out of certain areas that the mission is mandated to patrol and investigate, for fear of drawing the terror group’s ire, opted not to listen to Israel’s request.

Nicolas de Rivière, the French U.N. ambassador, told the Security Council on Thursday that Paris still backs a three-week ceasefire that it and Washinton proposed last month.

Wood told the global body that the Biden administration is working toward a diplomatic solution without mentioning a ceasefire.

“Colleagues, the United States has been clear: a diplomatic solution between Israel and Lebanon along the Blue Line is the only path to restore lasting calm and allow residents in both Lebanon and Israel to return safely to their homes,” he said.

“Even as Israel has a right to protect its citizens from Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of missiles and rockets into Israel over the past year alone, it needs to minimize harm to civilians, particularly in the densely populated areas of Beirut,” he added.

Biden administration officials have suggested publicly that they support the IDF’s efforts to further degrade Hezbollah, after initial anger following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to endorse a ceasefire and instead order the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, then the terror group’s secretary-general.

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, stated on Thursday that Israel is “fulfilling our obligations to ensure” the enforcement of Security Council resolutions related to Israeli-Lebanese peace.

“The council must support us in our efforts,” he said.

Speaking in Arabic to the Lebanese people, Danon said that “the land of Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese, not the Iranians.”

The Israeli envoy implored the Lebanese army and UNIFIL to “step up” and fulfill their duties.

“The Lebanese people have been held hostage by an Iran-backed terror organization,” Danon told the council. “Hezbollah has established a terrorist state within a failed state.”

The antisemitic intimidation that arose at universities across America last year has inspired an initiative to empower and educate Jewish high-schoolers.  

In reaction to the spate of antisemitism that has proliferated on college campuses throughout North America in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, Sinai Temple in Los Angeles has just launched the Beren Scholars Program.

Nearly two dozen juniors or seniors are expected to participate in monthly academic seminars followed by real-world experiences. The program started in September and is slated to run through the spring, with hopes that it can expand nationally in the fall of 2025 by partnering with other synagogues.

The goal is to teach students the roots of antisemitism and how to identify its manifestations. On the docket are lessons on social-media advocacy, and defining individual rights and violations of those rights.

Notable figures speaking at sessions will include Sarah Idan, 2017 Miss Iraq and an Israeli Peace Ambassador; and Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

Rabbi Erez Sherman at Sinai Temple is leading the new program, which includes a Shabbat dinner at the University of California, Los Angeles; an interfaith dialogue during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend; and a trip to the state capital of Sacramento to learn how to lobby legislators.

“I want them to realize that when they share their story, people are going to respect them more than if they hide that story,” he told JNS.

The Robert M. Beren Family Foundation is funding the program. 

Julie Platt, chair of the board of trustees for Jewish Federations of North America, stated in a release: “We hope their lives will be filled with proper intention to spread light unto the communities in which they will join. In a world where Jews are thinking to retreat, our Beren scholars will not hide. Instead, they will stand tall, speak out and create a world of empathetic, intellectual, strong, joyful Jewish leaders.”