Dana Stroul, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said on Thursday that Iran’s proxy attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East — which have abated following a strike that killed three American service members — will likely resume.

“Iran’s strategic objective is to expel U.S. forces from the region, and it has not achieved that objective,” Stroul said on a webinar yesterday with the Washington Institute for Near East Peace, where she is now the director of research. “At this point in time, I would say it is positive that there’s been a pause. But we should expect these attacks to resume, mostly because we know that Iran continues to arm and fund and train these groups.”

A coalition of 17 U.S. Jewish groups wrote letters to House lawmakers this week expressing support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and urging against endorsing any alternative definitions.

The letter comes as many major Jewish groups are lobbying Congress to pass legislation related to the issue and amid a countervailing expanded lobbying effort in favor of the Nexus Task Force’s definition, an alternative antisemitism definition written in response to the IHRA definition that leaves more room for criticism of Israel.

Days after Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to Hitler’s treatment of Jews during the Holocaust, he met with Secretary of State Tony Blinken in Brasilia. 

Public communications from the State Department about the Wednesday meeting did not mention Lula’s comments on Israel, although an official readout said the two men discussed the war in Gaza. Blinken tweeted afterward that U.S.-Brazil “ties are stronger than ever,” with a photo of the men smiling and shaking hands. 

Harvard University, under scrutiny for its inaction against antisemitism on campus, took a tough stance this week against pro-Palestinian student and faculty groups for distributing “deeply offensive antisemitic tropes” posted to social media.  

The groups had posted an image containing a cartoon from 1967 of a puppeteer whose hand is marked by a dollar sign inside a Star of David, lynching two men who appear to be Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Multiple leading Democratic candidates in a newly drawn Alabama House district are openly vying for an endorsement from AIPAC — a pattern that runs counter to efforts from the progressive left to cast the group as a conservative influence at odds with the Democratic base.

One leading candidate in the race professed to have received an endorsement that AIPAC said it hadn’t issued, while another is publicly making a pitch for the group’s support. The seat, Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, was redrawn as a Black opportunity district for the 2024 cycle, giving Democrats a strong chance of picking up the seat and attracting a slew of congressional hopefuls.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu articulated the goals of the war against Hamas following the Oct. 7 attacks, he said they were to topple Hamas and free the hostages. It was unclear if both could be achieved and which should be prioritized.

More than four months later, as over 130 hostages languish in Gaza, the Israeli public is divided on what the war’s central goal should be. Now, the Hostages’ Families Forum, the central group advocating on behalf of the hostages, whose relatives have been divided over tactics, is facing a leadership vacuum, following the departure of founder and head Ronen Tzur.

Senior Political Correspondent Lahav Harkov and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Richard Goldberg discuss US opposition to an Israeli offensive in Rafah, Qatar’s role in propping up Hamas while claiming to be a fair mediator in hostage negotiations, the chances of Saudi normalization and the Biden administration’s push for a Palestinian state, plus, what the US and Israel should do next about the Iranian nuclear threat.

When a group of more than a dozen young Jewish and Muslim activists — among them several people of both Israeli descent and Palestinian descent — met in New York last week to discuss their experiences with antisemitism and Islamophobia after Oct. 7, organizers knew that breaking the ice, at a time of rising tensions, might be difficult. 

So the roundtable conversation, hosted at the United Nations by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, began with what one attendee described as “food diplomacy”: croissants from Librae, a Bahraini-owned bakery in the East Village, and black and white cookies from Russ & Daughters, the famed Jewish bakery that has been on the Lower East Side for more than a century.