The modern Maccabees on campus

Later this month, Jews around the world will celebrate Hanukkah, a holiday that recalls an ancient rebellion aimed at restoring the pride and purity of the Jewish people in the face of a hostile dominant culture.

Something of a similar heroic campaign is being waged today on American college campuses, where a small group of Israeli army veterans have deployed to help restore the reputation of the Jewish state.

The Jewish Agency’s Israel Fellows program, begun in 2003, has grown so that there are now 71 young Israelis embedded as professional educators on college campuses in the United States and Canada. The ancient Maccabees of the Hanukkah story fought with spears, swords and perhaps slingshots. Their modern descendants are using a contemporary approach that includes coffee dates, coalition building and subsidized or free trips to Israel for student leaders. Their aim is, in part, to combat the “boycott, divest, sanctions” movement, an attempt by Israel’s enemies to demonize the Jewish state.

At Ohio State University, Idan Simchony, 29, arrived in 2015 after five years in the Israel Defense Force’s Unit 8200, an intelligence corps. He’d never before been in the United States. He works with Buckeyes for Israel, the pro-Israel student group, and also coordinates with the various other national organizations — the American Jewish Committee, the David Project, the Zionist Organization of America, Christians United for Israel, Hillel, Stand With Us — to make sure they are cooperating rather than tripping over one another on campus.

At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the Israel Fellow is Rebecca Avera, 30, whose family came to Israel from Ethiopia. Last year, when she was stationed at Stanford, anti-Israel students infiltrated an on-campus observation of Israel’s Independence Day and staged a dramatic “die in” as a protest. But at Stanford, Avera was also able to co-sponsor an event with the African Student Union that attracted 300 people to celebrate Sigd, an Ethiopian Jewish holiday.

When I asked Avera how she answers efforts to depict Israel as an “apartheid state” for its treatment of Palestinian Arabs, she responds, “I use my personal story. … I’m just telling them, look at me, I’m Israeli, and I am black. How is that racism? If there is an apartheid state, I would be the first to be discriminated.”

At the University of Michigan, Israel Fellow Liraz Cohen, led a 10-day trip to Israel for student leaders, including student government officials. The personal relationships built on the trip helped in eventually defeating a boycott-divest-sanctions resolution when one came up for a vote on campus.

The executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, Jacob Baime, said the Israel Fellows “help the average student on campus see Israel through their eyes. They are showing students all over the country the real Israel. It’s amazing.”

Simchony, the Israel Fellow at Ohio State, recalls the emotional high last year when, after two weeks of intense preparation and six hours of debate at the student government, a boycott-divest-sanctions resolution was defeated. “Everyone was hugging each other,” he said. “It was a very happy moment.”

He said it reminded him of 1948, when the modern state of Israel was born.

Really turning around the hostile anti-Israel climate on college campuses might seem like a miracle akin to the one marked by the holiday of Hanukkah. If anything, universities have taken the place of the Temple in Jerusalem as institutions in the direction of which modern American Jews worship and send their money.

The miracle of Hanukkah was that the oil for the candelabra in the rededicated Temple lasted for eight nights even though there was enough for just one night. The Israel Fellows I talked to hope that their influence on students extends past a BDS vote and lasts even after graduation. That’s not an easy thing to measure, but if it happens, it will be worth celebrating, too.

We are now in a kind of political no-man’sland between an administration on its way out and a new administration taking shape. Predictions are always risky — and nowhere more so than in times like these.

What we can do, however, is to look at some of the opportunities and dangers.

The opportunities are many, which is to say that many things are in desperate need of changing, beginning with rebuilding our dangerously neglected and undermined military forces. The monstrosity of Obamacare needs to be gotten rid of, not just cosmetically adjusted.

Our fundamental freedoms under the Constitution are at stake in the choice of the next justice of the closely divided Supreme Court. We need someone with both the depth and the strength to resist the pressures and the temptations that have seduced too many supposedly “conservative” justices into betraying constitutional principles.

The current hysteria over “fake news” — including hysteria by people who have done more than their own fair share of faking news — shows the continuing efforts of the political left to stifle free speech in the country at large, as they already have on academic campuses.

These are just some of the opportunities the incoming administration has, now that the Republicans finally have control of both houses of Congress and the White House — which is to say, now that they no longer have any excuses for not doing what they said they were going to do, when they were running for election.

Opportunities are of course also challenges, and few of these challenges can be met without paying a price. Will the slim Republican majority in the Senate put bipartisan cooperation ahead of the Constitutio, when it comes to choosing a Supreme Court justice based on principles, rather than on avoiding a nasty fight with the Democrats?

The same question arises when it comes to repealing Obamacare. Democrats threw bipartisanship to the winds when it came to passing Obamacare. Republicans who wanted to have an input on this sweeping legislation were bluntly reminded of the outcome of the elections. “I won,” President Obama told them.

Now that the Republicans have won — not only the presidency but also the Congress, as well as most governorships and state legislatures across the country — do they have the guts to do what they were elected to do?

Surely no one can be unaware that one of the reasons why an unorthodox outsider like Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, and then the election, is that GOP voters were fed up with the betrayals by the Republican establishment, going all the way back to President Bush 41 and his betrayal of his bold assertion: “Read my lips, no new taxes!”

What do we know, at this point, about the people being tapped as nominees for key positions in the incoming administration? By and large, they are of a higher caliber than usual, especially Gen. James N. Mattis who has been selected to become defense secretary.

I have had the privilege of having discussions with many military people who have visited the Hoover Institution over the years, and have been impressed with officers of many ranks, including Gen. Mattis.

The liberal media are already expressing worry about the number of military people being considered for key positions. They would be worried about anyone who has not been brainwashed in the political correctness that reigns among the intelligentsia. The key individual in any administration, however, is the president — and that remains the key mystery in the new administration.