Our community to host Middle East expert Dr. Jonathan Schanzer
For more than a decade, Israel has been engaged in what the Israeli military calls “the operation between the wars” against Iran and its regional terror proxies. For the most part, these operations are not reported in the American media. To learn more about this dangerous situation, our community will host Middle East expert Dr. Jonathan Schanzer who will speak on the topic: Iran’s Multifront Strategy Against Israel.
His talk is co-sponsored by Temple Beth-El’s Simon Foundation and the Federation’s Community Relations Committee. The event will take place on Wednesday night, October 11th at 7:00 PM at the Jewish Federation.
In describing his upcoming talk, Dr. Schanzer wrote, “Unbeknownst to most observers, Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been locked in a gray zone war for a decade, or perhaps even longer. With Iran on the cusp of a nuclear weapon and with multiple proxy groups doing its bidding, Israel has been forced to fight back. When will this shadow war emerge from the shadows?”
When we think of Iran’s terror proxies, we automatically think of Hezbollah in Lebanon that Iran has armed with 140,000 rockets. Over the past decade, Iran has been working to upgrade this vast arsenal with precision guided missiles. Yet, beyond Hezbollah, there are Iranian terror proxies in Syria and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad based in Gaza. Dr. Schanzer is an expert on Hamas.
After the 11 day conflict in May 2021 between Israel and Hamas, Dr. Schanzer authored the eye-opening book, Gaza Conflict 2021. As he wrote in the introduction, “What stayed with me after those 11 days of war were not the scenes of conflict…Rather, it was the disconnect between American news reporting versus what I was watching, reading and hearing from the region itself.”
There is no one more qualified to help us understand this “disconnect” than Jonathan Schanzer.
Dr. Jonathan Schanzer is Senior Vice President for Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he oversees the work of the organization’s experts and scholars. He is also on the leadership team of FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power, a project on the use of financial and economic power as a tool of statecraft.
Schanzer previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he played an integral role in the designation of numerous terrorist financiers. He has held previous think tank research positions at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Middle East Forum.
Jonathan has written hundreds of articles on the Middle East, along with more than a dozen monographs and chapters for edited volumes. His new book, Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War (FDD Press 2021), challenges and corrects some of the wildly inaccurate news reported during the conflict. His other books have made unique contributions to the field. State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine (Palgrave Macmillan 2008).
Please RSVP for the event at TheJewishFed.org/Iran.
Bob Feferman
Community Relations Director,
Jewish Federation of St. Joseph Valley
Phone: (574) 233-1164
Email: rfeferman@thejewishfed.org