The impact of Trump’s measures against “wokeism” is reminiscent of the effect of Israel’s Operation Grim Beepers on Hezbollah. In both cases, these are dramatic and highly effective moves against strategic threats to Israel that have been building up over years — even if they did not completely eliminate the threat or its potential for recovery.

Woke culture has deeply influenced the discourse of minorities in the United States in their (fundamentally justified) fight against discrimination and racism. However, as its influence grew, it became apparent that the movement’s agenda is far more radical, ideological, and ambitious than merely advancing minority rights. The central tenets of the woke movement — “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) — originally intended to correct social discrimination, have been transformed into puritanical goals that must be achieved at any cost.

The result is that woke culture today challenges the political and social fabric of the United States and other Western liberal democracies. For example, the DEI content introduced into American educational systems not only fails to promote the pluralistic education it claims to support, but in practice it advances a dogmatic, superficial, and distorted perspective. DEI’s approach alienates young Americans from their country by portraying the United States as a racist nation born of sin. This viewpoint may help explain the nonchalant reception of American flag burnings by young people on college campuses following Oct. 7.

DEI has led to the complete politicization of universities and the private sector at the expense of meritocracy. Israeli academics have been among the first to suffer from this. Proponents of woke culture act as agents of chaos, openly calling for the defunding of the police — without offering any alternative means for maintaining public order. It has reached the point where woke culture even dismisses basic scientific criteria; even leading journals influenced by this ideology, such as Nature, have begun to subject scientific articles to ideological scrutiny.

Woke culture promotes a superficial worldview that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed based on class and skin color. The implications of labeling Jews as “white” and “privileged” within this discourse manifest in a wide array of overt and covert forms of discrimination. Woke culture enables cooperation between American Islamist organizations ideologically aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and radical progressive groups — those at the forefront of efforts to promote boycotts of Israel and to effectively erase Jews from the public sphere. Jewish students feel insecure on campuses, fearing verbal and sometimes even physical attacks, and Jewish communities are increasingly experiencing isolation. 

Many Jews hide their Jewish identity or their support for Israel. Since Oct. 7, many have felt betrayed by colleagues who either do not understand their plight or choose to ignore it, resulting in their exclusion from public and professional spaces. The pro-Hamas variant of antisemitism undermines the Jewish establishment and even threatens Jewish identity, posing a clear threat to Jewish life in America.

At the heart of American Jewish thought was a longstanding disregard for the significance of labeling Jews as white. Under the shadow of woke discourse, antisemitism has come to be seen by many Americans as a “rich people’s problem” that does not demand urgent action — in some progressive circles, it is even regarded as a necessary part of the internal struggle against racism and discrimination. Moreover, framing Jews as white has further delegitimized the State of Israel by reinforcing the notion among many that the Jewish state is a white — and therefore colonial — state.

Under the shadow of woke discourse, antisemitism has come to be seen by many Americans as a “rich people’s problem” that does not demand urgent action — in some progressive circles, it is even regarded as a necessary part of the internal struggle against racism and discrimination. 

Since taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has spearheaded an aggressive campaign against DEI initiatives, marking a clear “anti-woke” turn in federal policy. In a rapid series of decisive actions — executed within less than two weeks — his administration issued an executive order that called for the sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s DEI programs. This order mandated that all federal DEI staff be placed on paid leave pending eventual layoffs and required the removal of all DEI-focused web pages from agency sites. In parallel, the administration moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting by revoking legacy orders and eliminated initiatives such as DEI-related training and diversity targets in performance evaluations. Furthermore, Trump directed the Attorney General and other agency leaders to produce a report outlining a strategic enforcement plan targeting DEI practices in the private sector, and revoked 78 previous executive orders related to these initiatives.

Furthermore, Trump established a special task force to combat antisemitism on college campuses, following a report released in December 2024 by the House Education and Labor Committee that exposed American universities’ failures in addressing the phenomenon. In the spirit of the new zeitgeist, Harvard University, for instance, agreed to adopt the definition of antisemitism as set by an international task force commemorating the Holocaust (IHRA); Yale University began using advanced security measures in response to rising antisemitism; at Columbia University, a law school faculty member lost her tenured position after allegedly discriminating against Israeli students; and even the United Nations launched a new program to combat antisemitism.

The blend of antisemitism based on woke culture has taken a significant hit in its overt and institutional dimensions. However, the cluster of ideas underlying woke culture might experience a resurgence, as it has not yet been dislodged from the hearts of its adherents. There is concern that if the future political climate again permits it, the Jewish community and Israel could find themselves, to their detriment, at the center of a sweeping backlash.

Moreover, unlike Operation Grim Beepers — where thousands of Hezbollah fighters were targeted in a focused manner with almost no collateral damage — the actions against woke culture have been total and aggressive. Many within the Jewish communities in the United States are also worried about actual “collateral damage” to the liberal values that form the foundation of Jewish identity in America, such as LGBT rights.

Therefore, the American Jewish community has a historic and important role to play. On the one hand, it must seize this unprecedented opportunity to launch a pincer movement that will prevent the resurgence of left-wing antisemitism even when the political climate changes. The community needs to do so through a response that reflects broad consensus and frames antisemitism as a symptom of a much larger challenge that threatens American values and interests. On the other hand, the Jewish community must serve as a voice of reason, working to preserve and promote the values that underpin American pluralism, and to advance the rights of minorities and vulnerable populations in a “sane” manner. In other words, it must act against the “industry of DEI” while simultaneously upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion as important values.

Eran Shayshon is the founder of Atchalta, an Israeli-based think and do tank; and Dor Lasker is Atchalta’s Deputy CEO. Atchalta will soon be publishing a conceptual framework addressing the blend of pro-Hamas antisemitism in the United States. 

The site of the giving of the Torah was about to become a tourist-packed heap of litter and Lance Morrow would have none of it. 

The longtime Time Magazine reporter, who passed away earlier this winter, penned a short piece that put the kibosh on plans Egypt was developing in 1990. As The New York Times recounted in his obituary, Morrow’s wife, visiting Cairo at the time, heard of the development of a cable car railway that would ferry folks up to the summit of the mount. “People were desperate to stop it, so I called Lance and asked what we can do about it, and he wrote an essay in two hours that stopped it dead,” she said.

Morrow’s essay is worth revisiting as the parsha of Yitro, containing the Ten Commandments, is read in synagogue this Shabbat. It testifies to the timeless spiritual power of God’s revelation to Israel well beyond the Jewish community.

“Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis has become a shrine, a sort of tackiness made sacred. Mount Sinai, where God came to earth, is about to become a sacred place made tacky,” Morrow’s piece began.

He then quoted a billboard sign spotted six miles north of Sinai’s Monastery of St. Catherine that proclaimed, “At this site will be 500 villas, a tourist village with 250 rooms, two hotels with 400 rooms, shopping center, school and hospital, supplied by all facilities.” 

Lamenting that the “‘great and terrible wilderness’ described by Deuteronomy is on its way to becoming a tourist trap,” Morrow movingly described how after the Lord said “Whosoever toucheth the mount shall surely be put to death,” in the Book of Exodus, “for over 3,000 years, the occupiers of the Sinai peninsula, from Justinian to the Prophet Muhammad to Abdel Nasser and Golda Meir, took the site under their protection. Mount Sinai is enclosed in a convective divinity that is primitive and powerful. The mountain seems to gather thousands of years into a prismatic clarity.”

Yet, he lamented, “The Egyptian Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction, however, is not awed.” It hoped for the economic windfall from what was projected to be a 1,800% increase in tourists per year.

So Morrow argued against the project on multiple grounds. 

The first was that the hustle and bustle of visitors would disturb the Greek Orthodox monastery, whose inhabitants had traditionally prayed there for 14 centuries. “The monks’ medieval tradition of hospitality to the wayfarer was never meant to accommodate tour buses,” he noted. 

Secondly, the earthly environment would not take kindly to the increased foot traffic. There are “812 species of plants in the Sinai,” Morrow wrote, “half of them found in the high mountains around St. Catherine’s. Of those, 27 are endemic, found nowhere else in the world … The contemplated tourism would arrive in that nature like a neutron bomb.”

But it was the short article’s last reason which resonates most profoundly for all those who hold dear the heavenly instruction offered in the desert three millennia ago. “Bulldozing desanctification for money must end,” Morrow starkly stated. “If the attraction of Mount Sinai is its holy wilderness, and even the physical effort required to approach it, tourist development threatens to destroy the uniqueness and transcendence of the pilgrimage. The Egyptians are often haphazard about protecting their dead treasures. Now they seem ready to sacrifice a powerful, living mountain that is in their care. Perhaps they will make the cable cars in the shape of calves and gild them. The golden calves can slide up and down Mount Sinai and show God who won.”

Thanks to Morrow’s missive scrapping the project, the Disneyfication of the site of divine revelation was avoided. Sinai would continue to stand tall as a source of awe and wonder, the call to transcendence and the commandedness of covenant. 

Thanks to Morrow’s missive scrapping the project, the Disneyfication of the site of divine revelation was avoided. Sinai would continue to stand tall as a source of awe and wonder, the call to transcendence and the commandedness of covenant. Where a people once stood, freed from tyranny and bound by faith, the gilded calves of commercialization could dare not tread.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”

“What can be, unburdened by what has been”: throughout the last U.S. presidential campaign, VP Kamala Harris regularly repeated this phrase, and conservative pundits, nearly as regularly, ridiculed her for it. And while Harris certainly repeated this phrase too often, the phrase is aspirational – a call to think unconventionally, even disruptively, without allowing the shackles of the past to restrain you or your vision for the future. 

When Trump said he sees a peaceful future for Gaza by the U.S. “taking over” Gaza and when he wrote on Truth Social: “The Palestinians … would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free” … he was imagining “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” 

And when he followed up these comments by saying that the USA would “slowly and carefully [in Gaza] begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth,” he was plainly thinking about what Gaza “can be, unburdened by what has been.”

Meanwhile, all the people reacting to Trump’s proposal with feigned or real outrage and claiming that the only “solution” to the ongoing conflict in Gaza (and between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs more generally) is the “two-state solution” are, just as plainly, “burdened by what has been.”

And what exactly, “has been” in Gaza? After all, those who don’t understand history … are doomed to repeat it.

For almost 2,000 years following the fall in 63 B.C.E. of the last truly sovereign state in the western Levant before 1948 (the Hasmonean Dynasty’s Kingdom of Judea) – the entire region, including Gaza, was ruled by successive imperialist empires (Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and British) until 1948 – when the Jewish people declared, fought for, and obtained their independence in part of their indigenous homeland … though not in Gaza. 

As global empires collapsed, Britain recognized the need to create separate Jewish and Arab states. The 1937 Peel Commission proposed partitioning the land, offering almost 75% — including Gaza — for the first-ever independent Arab state west of the Jordan River. While Jewish leaders accepted, the Arab leadership, led by Haj Amin el-Husseini, rejected the plan outright, refusing to acknowledge Jewish self-determination.

Fearing violence, Britain shelved the proposal and, under Arab pressure, severely restricted Jewish immigration — leaving Jews in Europe, North Africa and Iraq without escape from impending massacres and genocide. The Holocaust proved the devastating consequences of that decision.

After World War II, the “two-state solution” resurfaced in 1947, this time under the United Nations. While India and Pakistan successfully partitioned out of British control, the Arab world rejected partition west of the Jordan River, launching a self-described “war of annihilation” to push the Jews into the sea.

Despite facing vastly larger Arab forces, Israel won its War of Independence but suffered significant losses — more than 1% of its population was killed. Meanwhile, Egypt and Jordan seized the areas designated for an Arab state, including Gaza and the “West Bank.” However, instead of establishing a Palestinian state, they occupied the land, treated Palestinian Arabs as second-class citizens and used these territories as bases for terrorism against Israel.

Between 1949 and 1967, no Arab leader demanded Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza or the “West Bank.” When the PLO was founded in 1964, its mission statement wasn’t to liberate territories under Jordanian and Egyptian control but to destroy Israel.

In 1967, Egypt declared war, allied with Syria and Jordan, and blockaded Israeli shipping — an act of war. Israel’s counterstrike in the Six-Day War brought Gaza under Israeli control for the first time in 2,000 years.

Since then, at least five major attempts at a two-state solution have been made. Offers in 2001 (Camp David) and 2009 would have created a Palestinian state in Gaza and over 90% of the West Bank. Both were rejected — just as in 1937 and 1947 — resulting in more war and terrorism.

Gaza’s history since Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 demonstrates the repeated failure of land for peace efforts. When Israel unilaterally pulled out, removing all Jewish residents and leaving significant economic infrastructure behind, Gaza could have thrived, particularly with billions of dollars in international donations. Instead, Hamas destroyed the Israeli economic infrastructure, and took complete control in 2007 after violently ousting the Palestinian Authority.

Since then, the pattern has been consistent. International aid flows in, but rather than investing in development, Hamas diverts it to strengthen its grip, build terror tunnels and amass weapons. Periodic attacks on Israel lead to military responses, and each conflict results in devastation, with Hamas using civilians as human shields. This cycle — investment, corruption, terrorism and military retaliation — repeats (seemingly without end).

The Oct. 7, 2023 attack, however, marked a turning point. Its sheer brutality and Hamas’ pledge to repeat it “over and over again” convinced most Israelis that the old pattern must end. Winning wars only to cede territory back to Hamas guarantees continued bloodshed.

As Einstein famously said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” This is Gaza’s history. Trump, by contrast, is looking at what Gaza “can be, unburdened by what has been.”

As Einstein famously said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” This is Gaza’s history. 

Trump’s comments stirred controversy. No one should advocate forced population transfers, even when leaders start wars and lose them. While such actions were deemed acceptable or largely ignored (e.g., the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after WWII or the Kuwaiti expulsion of Palestinians after the Gulf War), they are rightfully unacceptable in 2025.

However, dismissing Trump’s ideas entirely in favor of the failed solutions of the past is myopic and shortsighted. The reality is that simply rebuilding Gaza while allowing Hamas to remain will only lead to more war. The Palestinian population is more radicalized today than when they collectively followed Haj Amin el-Husseini in 1937 and 1947 into over eight decades of war and misery.

Breaking free from the past requires a new vision. A Gaza where people who wish to relocate to safer places have the option to do so. A Gaza where Hamas does not regain control. A Gaza where reconstruction is conditional on the genuine possibility of peace. Would America have invested billions in post-war Germany if Nazis were allowed to return to power?

In Gaza, radical change is necessary. Gaza needs what Germany received after 1945 — a complete ideological shift, eliminating extremism and fostering economic stability. The Marshall Plan succeeded because Germany accepted total defeat and transformation. Without a similar approach, expecting Gaza to change is foolish.

Trump’s plan for Gaza may be impractical or controversial, but he is at least acknowledging that the status quo is unsustainable. Clinging to the past ensures continued war and devastation. The only way forward is to imagine a different Gaza — one truly unburdened by what has been.

Micha Danzig served in the Israeli Army and is a former police officer with the NYPD. He is currently an attorney and is very active with numerous Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, including Stand With Us and the FIDF, and is a national board member of Herut North America.