Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

02/24 Links Pt2: The world no longer feels sorry for Jews. Now what?; Australia opens Sydney terror inquiry; Corbyn accused of ‘wild blood libel’ after claiming Israel harvesting Gazan organs

From Ian:

The world no longer feels sorry for Jews. Now what?

An overreliance on Holocaust-centered narratives can unintentionally produce what might be called museum Judaism: a Jewish identity organized primarily around remembrance of destruction rather than experience of vitality. A culture defined chiefly by what was lost risks appearing static, even mournful, to younger generations seeking meaning in living traditions.

If Israel is taught primarily as a response to catastrophe, it can come to feel like a historical artifact rather than a living civilizational project. A Judaism organized around death will struggle to compete with cultures organized around life. This does not diminish the centrality of Holocaust memory; it underscores the need to embed that memory within a broader narrative of continuity and renewal.

The Jewish claim to sovereignty does not begin in 1933 and does not depend exclusively on 1945. It stretches back through millennia of continuous identity, attachment to land, liturgy, language, and collective memory.

Zionism was not invented as a reaction to Hitler; it was accelerated by him. To ground Jewish attachment to Israel primarily in 20th-century catastrophe is to truncate a much longer story of peoplehood and purpose. If Israel is understood only as a shelter from persecution, its moral standing appears contingent on Jewish weakness. Yet Zionism at its core is not a plea for safety; it is an assertion of normalcy, of the right of the Jewish People to exercise self-determination in our ancestral homeland. That right does not expire when Jews are strong.

A generation raised to see itself primarily as history’s victim may struggle to see itself as history’s author. When educational frameworks emphasize fragility without agency, they can produce defensive identities oriented toward seeking approval rather than exercising responsibility. The post-Holocaust sympathy world allowed many Jews to assume that understanding Jewish suffering would naturally produce support for Jewish sovereignty.

That assumption no longer holds.

In much of today’s pop culture, perceived power (not history) often determines perceived legitimacy. An Israel that is strong, armed, and assertive will not automatically inherit the moral credit of Jewish victimhood. If Jewish education does not adjust to this reality, it risks preparing students for a world that no longer exists.

This adjustment does not require abandoning Holocaust education; it requires repositioning it within a larger civilizational narrative. The task is to integrate it with meaning. Israel must be taught not only as refuge but as arena: the place where Jewish civilization unfolds in modern form — Hebrew revived as a living language, ancient holidays reborn in public space, ethical traditions translated into the dilemmas of governance, technological and cultural creativity flourishing in a Jewish context. These are not footnotes to catastrophe but expressions of continuity; they represent the positive content of sovereignty.

In a post-sympathy world, Jewish education must mature from a pedagogy of trauma to a pedagogy of covenant and responsibility.

Jewish students must be prepared to engage in self-defense — verbal, social, even physical — rather than shielded from it. They must understand the historical and ethical foundations of Jewish sovereignty without relying solely on the emotional authority of past suffering. They must see themselves not as passive inheritors of tragedy, but as active participants in an ongoing civilizational story. Jewish students must be taught that Jewish particularism is a source of pride, not an apology to make or a permission slip to request from others.

This requires cultivating and renewing civilizational literacy, cultural fluency, and a sense of shared stake in the future of Jewish life.

The post-Holocaust sympathy world represented a rare alignment between global conscience and Jewish necessity. That alignment cannot be assumed in the present or relied upon in the future. As memory recedes and geopolitical perceptions shift, the foundation of Jewish attachment to Israel must rest less on the tears of others and more on the internal coherence of Jewish history and purpose. Sympathy fades. Sovereignty endures.

The challenge for Jewish education now is to ensure that a new generation understands Israel not because the world once pitied the Jews, but because they recognize themselves as heirs to an unbroken national story whose next chapters they are responsible for writing.

With J Street backing, 26 Democrats introduce legislation to impose wide-ranging conditions on aid to Israel

Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) and 25 Democratic co-sponsors introduced a bill on Monday that would implement wide-ranging new conditions and restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel.

The Ceasefire Compliance Act would require the administration to assess and report to Congress every 90 days on whether Israel is complying with the October 2025 ceasefire agreement in Gaza, including halting military operations and bombing campaigns.

The legislation does not appear to contain exceptions for the strikes Israel has taken in retaliation for Hamas’ own violations of the ceasefire deal, nor mention its targeting of individual Hamas leaders.

Under the terms of the legislation, if Israel does not meet the conditions included in the law, the U.S. would be banned from selling or transferring any U.S. military systems to Israel for use in Gaza or the West Bank, any further transfers would be subject to a specific agreement by Israel that the weapons would not be used in Gaza or the West Bank and the administration would be required to reach an agreement with Israel that U.S.-origin systems already in Israel’s possession would also be banned from use in Gaza or the West Bank.

Those restrictions would remain in effect until Israel is in compliance with all conditions. The legislation establishes an end-use monitoring group within the administration to monitor whether U.S.-provided systems are in use in Gaza or the West Bank.

The legislation includes language guaranteeing that U.S. defensive assistance to and intelligence sharing with Israel, as well as provision of missile-defense systems to Israel, are exempt from the conditions. The bill would sunset after five years.

Nick Cave: The Red Hand Files

Q: At the International Film Festival in Berlin, jury president Wim Wenders sparked controversy, stating that art and artists are “the counterweight to politics, we are the opposite of politics.” He said, artists “have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.” Any thoughts on this?

A: Dear Rainer,
I have known Wim for over forty years, and his response to the question at the Berlinale moved me deeply. It reaffirmed my understanding of him as a passionately principled, thoughtful, and courageous man — a person who cares profoundly about film and the state of the creative world. His words were a caring, gentle, and protective gesture, directed not only at the artistic community but at humanity itself, and despite the predictable pile-on, I suspect that many artists, maybe most, will genuinely appreciate his words.

Of course, I can’t speak for Wim, but perhaps, like me, he laments the state of art as it has unfolded into this present moment. Perhaps, as the president of the Berlinale Jury, he despairs over the fate that has befallen other film and literary events. The furore around the Adelaide Writers’ Week was happening while I was on tour in Australia. In an almost cosmic display of stupidity, that entire event was vaporised in a mushroom cloud of cowardice, performative outrage, self-righteous posturing, cancellations, counter-cancellations, mob trots and general narcissistic silliness. ‘Political art’, taken to its extreme, became ‘no art’. No art at all, as Australia’s longest running literary festival collapsed under a mass walkout.

Perhaps Wim is trying to save the Berlinale from succumbing to the fate of those festivals that have become little more than a narrowing of the cultural imagination, where the concept of an arts festival as a space for free-ranging and diverse ideas, a place of vitality and originality that encourages disagreement and good faith debate, is being sucked down the sinkhole of a single monolithic ideology — one voice, one cause, one dissent.

02/24 Links Pt1: New Palestinian constitution slams door on Mideast peace; Trump's Churchill Moment on Iran; PLO: Hamas ‘not a terror organization’, slams US demands to disarm

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: How Anti-Zionists’ Knowledge Deficit Shapes the Gaza Debate

Buried deep within a Haaretz article about the EU’s anti-Semitism coordinator is an implicit threat of moral blackmail that explains much of the anti-Israel discourse today.

The article is a hit piece on Katharina von Schnurbein, the head of the EU’s office of the European Coordinator for Combating Antisemitism and Fostering Jewish Life. Von Schnurbein is the rare EU official who stands again the otherwise nonstop flood of single-minded Israel condemnation from the union’s officials. Haaretz, and the sources who spoke to the paper for the piece, are putting a bureaucratic target on her back in the hopes that she will be reined in.

Von Schnurbein knows that certain criticism of Israel, even when it ostensibly addresses policy, can bleed into anti-Semitic tropes or collective blame. She is therefore a moderating force, but the EU establishment (and Haaretz, apparently) sees her as a threat. Supra-national bodies like the EU and UN thought they had figured out a clever way to lob blood libels at the Jewish state without taking responsibility for them: They would support a network of NGOs and pressure groups who would claim expertise and let those groups, behind a veneer of objectivity, make the harshest accusations.

Von Schnurbein undermines this system of criticism-by-catspaw. And former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell used the Haaretz article to make that clear:

“In an interview with Haaretz, Borrell warned over ‘inflationary misuse’ of accusations of antisemitism against Israel’s critics.

“The Catalonian former chief EU diplomat added that labeling the institutions mandated to uphold international law — including the UN, the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice — as ‘antisemitic’ implies that, by opposing crimes against humanity, you oppose Jews. ‘That is playing into the hands of Jew-haters,’ he says.”

And that’s the scam underlying the entire narrative of the Gaza war: Jews cannot defend themselves against spurious accusations of blood-lust because then they’ll be confirming for the world that “Jews” and “crimes against humanity” are synonymous. You see, even in trying to bat away claims of anti-Semitism, these officials cannot help but express anti-Semitic tropes.

This is called blackmail. Jews must either accept the libelous denunciations of those who seek their destruction or they will trigger an escalating campaign of libelous denunciations.

New Palestinian constitution slams door on Mideast peace

The Palestinian Authority’s recent draft of a shiny new constitution is meant to mollify Western nations who demand an end to the P.A.’s obsession with killing Jews and destroying the Jewish state. But anyone who’s ever uttered the words “Middle East peace” will surely be disappointed with the make-over.

Apparently, the Palestinians can’t help themselves: Their new constitution simply recommits them to the same old jihad they’ve waged for 78 years against Israel. Indeed, the Palestinians’ new document issues no call for peacemaking with Israel—in fact, it doesn’t mention Jews or Israel at all.

This constitution is more like a declaration of war, reaffirming four belligerent policies that have blocked “two states for two peoples” for decades:

1) Insistence on the fictional “right of return” to Israel of millions of refugee descendants who have never set foot in Israel.
2) Continuation of the Palestinians’ terrorist incentive program—“pay for slay”—that handsomely rewards murderers of innocent Jews;
3) Declaration of Jerusalem as the Palestinians’ eternal capital, though it has never been the capital of a Palestinian nation, nor even a Muslim or Arab capital; and
4) Uninterrupted support for [armed] “resistance” against [Israeli] “occupation” of the Palestinian “homeland,” which mentions no sharing of territory with Israel or the Jewish people.

While the new constitution does make promises about introducing some civil liberties for Palestinians, these sops to liberality are like decorative icing on a rotten cake, nullified by the constitution’s commitment to Islamic supremacy.

If the Palestinians really want acceptance from Israel, the United States and the rest of the Western world, they will need to reform—throwing out and thoroughly condemning the goals and policies that deny every possibility for peace with their Jewish neighbors. This means affirming reality by renouncing the “right of return,” acknowledging 3,000 years of Jewish history and heritage in the land of Israel, accepting the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their indigenous homeland and renouncing terrorism.

Unfortunately, given new Middle East poll results showing that 91% of Palestinians oppose recognition of Israel, any constitution that approves peaceful relations with the Jewish state will face tough Arab opposition.

PLO secretary-general says Hamas ‘not a terror organization’, slams US demands to disarm

Azzam al-Ahmad, the secretary-general of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Organization, on Monday declared that the PLO opposes the disarmament of Hamas, which he said was “not a terror organization.”

In an interview with Egypt’s Al Shorouk newspaper, al-Ahmad slammed U.S. demands that the terrorist organization that led the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre disarm and cede its power in Gaza.

“They don’t want Hamas to have any role in the Strip,” explained the veteran official in Abbas’s Fatah Party, adding: “We completely reject this, because Hamas is part of the Palestinian national movement.”

Though Hamas has “not yet” joined the PLO, the body has held a “continuous national dialogue with them in order to fulfill the requirements for their entry into the organization,” he said.

The PLO, recognized worldwide as the representative of the Palestinian people, sets overall policy through its Executive Committee, headed by al-Ahmad. It also appoints the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, which administers limited self-rule in parts of Judea and Samaria.

Al-Ahmad stressed Monday that the PLO has “always rejected decisions issued by international institutions or governments to classify [Hamas] as a terror organization, as they are part of the Palestinian national fabric.”

“Everything that is said about disarming Hamas and that it is a terrorist group is rejected by us; Hamas is not a terror organization,” he added.

Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre was a “strategic mistake that inflicted immense damage on Gaza, and we paid a heavy price,” he emphasized.

A Peer-Reviewed Blueprint for Teaching Children to Hate Jews

A newly published paper in a peer-reviewed academic journal demands that all US educators teach their students to hate Jews as their primary goal.

I am not exaggerating.

"Do Palestinian Lives Matter in Teacher Education? Centering an Anti-Zionist Commitment in (Early Childhood) Teacher Education," by Lilly Padía of the Erikson Institute, published in Critical Education (Vol. 17, No. 1, 2026), makes two interlocking demands. First, that all teachers — especially those working with the youngest children — must commit to anti-Zionism as a precondition of legitimate teaching. Second, that they must train their students to understand their world primarily through the lens of powerful people crushing the helpless.

Who are these powerful people? The paper is explicit:

"Universities and institutions of higher education are often beholden to local, state, and national politicians, political interests, and funders with certain political interests. Often funders with a great deal of power and influence encourage university administrators to engage in compulsory Zionism by making statements condemning antisemitism whilst ignoring campus-based violence driven by Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism..."

Read that again. Jewish donors — "funders with certain political interests" — are secretly controlling university administrators, forcing them to protect Jews from criticism under the guise of fighting antisemitism. This is an antisemitic conspiracy theory published in a peer-reviewed academic paper being disseminated to teacher educators across the United States.

This is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with a faculty appointment.

And this is not incidental to the paper. It is the paper's engine. Because once you establish that Jews — excuse me, "powerful Zionist funders" — are the hidden power pulling institutional strings, then you have justified teaching children that Jewish power, Jewish funders, and Jewish influence is the enemy of justice. Starting in preschool.

That is not teaching children to love Palestine. The paper's subtitle makes it clear that the focus is not to support Palestinians but to center anti-Zionism in teacher education as the ultimate example of evil driven by power. That is teaching children to fear and hate Jews. The distinction matters, and the paper erases it deliberately.

Before dissecting the apparatus, we should let Padía state her own purpose. Buried in the paper's recommendations for teacher educators is a sentence that renders everything else unnecessary:

"The point of this turn is not to share 'balanced' views, but to unearth and help teacher candidates understand how power and oppression operate in interconnected ways, support them in their understanding of anti-Zionism in the context of anti-racist, anti-oppressive teaching and learning, and how to teach about systems of power and interconnected struggles for justice to (young) children."

There it is. The explicit, stated, unapologetic goal is not truth, not balance, not critical thinking, not even education in any recognizable sense. It is to instill a specific ideological framework — anti-Zionism embedded in a power/oppression worldview — in young children through the teachers trained under this program. Any semblance of balance or competing perspectives is dismissed as part of the problem.

Her goal is to brainwash young children.

Everything that follows in this analysis flows from that single sentence.

Padía presents what she calls "Pedagogical Integrity" — illustrated with this Venn diagram:

On one side: "Curiosity." On the other: "Conviction." The curiosity side contains two vague open questions: "What are the systems at play?" and "Who are my students and what are their identities?" The conviction side contains four fully pre-loaded political conclusions stated as facts: that Palestine deserves to be free, that Zionism is built on violent dispossession, that Jewish identity requires opposing Zionism, and that Palestine must be centered in teacher education.

The overlap — the alleged intersection of curiosity and conviction, the place where "pedagogical integrity" supposedly lives — contains exactly one thing: "Anti-Zionist turns in teacher education."

This is not a pedagogy. It is a funnel. Curiosity is the on-ramp. Conviction is the destination. The only permitted question is not whether Zionism is evil but how best to teach children that it is.

Padía argues explicitly that authentic Jewish identity requires anti-Zionism — that her own Jewishness is most fully expressed when she is, in her words, "dismantling the Zionist entity." She presents this position, held by a small minority of Jews worldwide, as the authentic Jewish moral voice. The Jewish student in her class who expressed discomfort with pro-Palestinian protest chants was not engaged with the curiosity her framework claims to prize. He was corrected. His concern was treated as something to overcome, a misconception to be resolved through proper instruction.

Jewish children in classrooms run by teachers trained under this framework will be taught that their families are wrong about their own identity. That their connection to Israel — religious, historical, cultural, familial — is not heritage but complicity. That the Judaism they were raised in is a tool of colonial oppression. That the real Jews, the morally legitimate Jews, are the ones who oppose Jewish self-determination.

This is not liberation pedagogy. It is the substitution of one coercive identity narrative for another, performed by someone who claims to be dismantling coercive identity narratives. It tells Jewish children: your people's understanding of your own heritage is illegitimate. Your grandparents' relationship to Israel is part of the power structure that you should be dismantling. The teacher in front of you has determined what being Jewish actually means — and your family got it wrong.

We have seen this move before. It has never ended well for Jews.

A genuine pedagogy of curiosity would have no pre-loaded conclusions in either circle. The fact that Padía's does — and that she published it apparently without awareness of what it reveals — tells you everything about the intellectual honesty of this enterprise.

The paper's very name for this framework — "pedagogical integrity" — is Orwellian. Integrity normally implies honesty, openness, fidelity to truth wherever it leads. Here it means ideological fidelity. It means having the courage of your pre-loaded conclusions. The name itself is propaganda.

There is a particular obscenity at the center of this paper that is worth isolating. Padía's framework rests on the claim that power is the fundamental axis of moral reality. Powerful people oppress powerless people. The powerless must be liberated. Teachers must help children identify who holds power and who is crushed by it.

Now consider who is the most powerful figure in a young child's life outside their parents. It is their teacher. Children cannot fact-check their teacher. They cannot resist their teacher's framing of reality. They cannot detect ideological loading in the vocabulary of love and justice and liberation. The teacher is, to a six-year-old, an authority as absolute and as trusted as gravity.

Padía knows this. Her entire paper depends on it. She says explicitly that teacher educators shape "the political imagination of the next generation." She is not unaware of the power she holds over young minds. She is banking on it.

And yet the content of what she wants transmitted through that unchallengeable authority is: powerful people are your enemy.

She wants to use total power over a child's developing mind to teach that child to fear power. She wants to exploit the most asymmetric power relationship in civilian life — credentialed adult authority over a trusting child who cannot yet read chapter books — to install suspicion of powerful people. Specifically, as we have seen, Jewish powerful people.

This is psychological projection in the clinical sense. She is doing to children exactly what she accuses "Zionist funders" of doing to universities — using institutional power to determine what thoughts are permissible. Except her targets are six years old who are the most powerless humans on the planet.

Education has one foundational purpose that distinguishes it from propaganda: it gives children the tools to eventually evaluate what their teachers told them. A real education plants the seeds of its own questioning. It hands children the instruments of their own intellectual liberation. What Padía proposes is the precise opposite. She wants to install conclusions so early, so authoritatively, and so emotionally — wrapped in the language of love, justice, and liberation — that they become part of the child's identity before the child has the cognitive capacity to examine them. By the time that child is old enough to think critically, the hatred will feel like conscience. The indoctrination will feel like awakening. The prejudice will feel like justice.

That is not education perverted. That is education destroyed and replaced with its photographic negative.

The power/powerless framework that runs through this paper presents itself as a tool for liberation. It is actually a trap — and this paper is the trap springing.

The world is not divided into the powerful and the powerless. Power is not a fixed substance held by permanent oppressors and permanently denied to permanent victims. It is dynamic, contextual, distributed, and transferable. People move between positions of power and vulnerability constantly, often simultaneously. The binary framework cannot tolerate this complexity because it is not actually a tool of analysis. It is a tool of mobilization. It sorts the world into heroes and villains, assigns permanent moral status to each, and then justifies whatever the heroes do as liberation and whatever the villains do as oppression — by definition, regardless of the specific action.

The result is visible throughout this paper. Padía holds extraordinary institutional power over her teacher candidates. She uses it to pre-load their conclusions, override their disagreements, work around the wishes of parents, and install a political identity in the children those candidates will teach. When a Jewish student pushes back, he is corrected. When a Palestinian mother asks for her child to be protected from political content, she is worked around. When a conference chair asks Padía to keep her presentation focused on her actual research topic and not to smuggle in anti-Zionist slides in a talk about bilingual education, it becomes an act of "compulsory Zionism" oppression.

Padia is guilty of what she accuses the "powerful" of doing. And this is clear from her own words.

This explains something that puzzles observers who watch anticolonial and "anti-oppression" movements metastasize into the very thing they claimed to oppose. It is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is the logical endpoint of the binary framework. If power is the problem, and you have defined yourself as outside power, then when you acquire power you cannot see it. Your framework has no instrument for detecting it. So you use it — on the most vulnerable people available, in this case children — while your theory assures you that you cannot possibly be doing what you are doing.

If Padía's goal were genuinely to teach children about suffering, power, displacement, and injustice, the curriculum she proposed would be broad. She might include the Uyghur cultural genocide — an ongoing campaign of mass incarceration, forced sterilization, and cultural erasure affecting over a million people. She might include the famine in the Sahel, North Korean prison camps, the Rohingya ethnic cleansing, the Iranian government's systematic murder of protesters who want to overthrow their own oppressive power.

None of these appear in this paper. None are proposed for early childhood curricula. The author does not argue that children should learn about suffering generally, or that a power-analysis lens should be applied to multiple conflicts. She argues that this specific conflict requires an ideological commitment as a precondition for teaching, that this specific conflict must be named in every lesson, every conference presentation, every syllabus.

This is not concern for children's education. It is a pathology of hate against nearly all of the committed Jews on the planet, a hate that Padia insists must be the central lesson to be taught to young children, as obligatory as reading or arithmetic.

Critical Education is a journal whose stated purpose is challenging the imposition of dominant ideological frameworks on students. It has just published a paper explicitly calling for the imposition of an ideological framework on students — on the youngest and most defenseless students — through the systematic training of an entire generation of teachers.

The contradiction is not incidental. It reflects a captured field. "Critical" in this context no longer means epistemically rigorous. It means politically aligned with a predetermined set of conclusions. In this captured field, the question is never whether to indoctrinate. It is only whose indoctrination counts as liberation.

The answer, in this paper and increasingly across this field, is the indoctrination that teaches children that Jews who support Jewish self-determination are the enemy.

This paper will be assigned in education courses. It will be cited in tenure dossiers. It will shape the pedagogy of teachers who will stand in front of children who trust them absolutely. It presents as a framework for humanization a program that is, in its bones, a mechanism for producing the next generation of people who have been carefully taught that Jewish power is the enemy of justice.

That this is considered normal academic discourse is not merely an outrage about one paper. It is a symptom of a field that has lost the thread of its own stated purpose — and the children, as always, will pay for it.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Axios reported Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon for what a senior Defense official described as a "sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting." The reason for the pressure is that Anthropic's Claude is the only Ai model approved for use at the Department of War, but it has refused to lift its ethical safeguards in ways the Pentagon demands.

The Pentagon wants what it calls access for "all lawful uses." Anthropic is willing to loosen restrictions but insists on maintaining two red lines: no mass surveillance of American citizens, and no weapons systems that fire without human involvement. The Pentagon has threatened to declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," which would not only void its contracts but effectively blacklist Anthropic technology from any workflow touching the Defense Department.

The framing on both sides is wrong. The repercussions of getting this wrong will impact using AI in governments for decades to come. How we frame this dispute will determine whether we get to a principled resolution or a dangerous one.

The Pentagon's demand for access to "all lawful uses" sounds reasonable until you realize what it actually means. It means the Pentagon wants the moral ceiling to be whatever Congress has authorized and courts have not yet struck down. But legal does not mean moral.

AI is too important a technology to simply treat it as if it is morally neutral like a hammer. It can make decisions, and those decisions affect human lives. when AI is incorporated autonomously in weapons systems, for example, humans lose all responsibility for murder. That may be technically legal but it is far from ethical.

An AI system designed to operate at the ceiling of current legality will, by design, operate right at the edge of whatever political winds currently allow — with no buffer, no friction, no institutional conscience. Legality is a floor, not a ceiling, and treating it as the latter is precisely how institutions drift into abuses that future generations will look back on with horror.

The Pentagon is also being strategically shortsighted. If its own argument is that Anthropic's constraints are "unduly restrictive," the burden is on the Pentagon to specify what legitimate operational need those constraints prevent. "All lawful uses" is not a specification. It is a power grab dressed in procedural language.

Anthropic's position is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that is making the problem worse.

"We refuse to enable mass surveillance of Americans" is a principled stance. But if that is the entirety of the position, it creates an operational nightmare for legitimate defense use, and it invites exactly the kind of frustration the Pentagon is expressing. A vendor-by-vendor permission slip regime for individual use cases does not scale across a military enterprise. That is a real problem.

The deeper issue is this: Anthropic's safeguards are largely in implementation — in deployment constraints, operator agreements, and policy guardrails — not deeply baked into the model itself. That means they are, to a significant degree, negotiable under sufficient pressure, bypassable through clever system design, and vulnerable to erosion over time. A red line that only holds when the other party respects it is not a red line. It is a preference.

And there is a strategic problem Anthropic cannot ignore: if it says no without offering a workable alternative, the Pentagon will rationally accelerate its search for replacements. These might include open source models, or even foreign-trained models with no safeguards whatsoever. The very outcome Anthropic is trying to prevent becomes more likely the more inflexible it is in negotiation.

Underneath this dispute is a question neither side is addressing directly: what is the appropriate institutional architecture for governing AI in national security contexts?

This is not primarily an AI ethics question. It is a governance question. And the answer cannot come from Anthropic alone, nor from the Pentagon alone. Both are the wrong institution to resolve it unilaterally.

Anthropic deciding what the U.S. military can use its technology for is a form of private technocratic governance that has no democratic legitimacy. A company — even a well-intentioned one — should not be in the business of making constitutional determinations about surveillance or rules of engagement. That is what courts, legislatures, and executive oversight mechanisms are for.

But the Pentagon demanding "all lawful uses" as a blank check is equally problematic. It means the only constraint on AI-enabled military capability is whatever the current administration has not yet been stopped from doing. That is a recipe for exactly the kind of incremental erosion that makes permanent damage inevitable.

Perhaps the best analogy, although far from perfect, is military dogs. There are very specific regulations on how dogs are used for military purposes, and some cases include attacking. But even in those cases, the handler is the one responsible for making the decision of what the dog can or cannot do, and he or she is responsible for any mistakes. The dog, no matter how clever, is never given agency, .

A human must similarly be making the decisions for anything an AI can do which can cause harm to people.

What a Good Solution Would Look Like

The parties are treating this as a binary: Anthropic either lifts its safeguards or loses the contract. But there is a third option, and it is the only one that makes long-term sense.

Build the governance architecture that makes the red lines operational, scalable, and enforceable — and bake it into U.S. policy.

Concretely, this would mean:

Pre-approved mission categories rather than case-by-case approvals. Intelligence analysis, logistics optimization, cyber defense, translation, planning support — these can be approved in advance without Anthropic having to vet each individual request. The friction point is approval architecture, not the underlying values.

Mandatory human accountability chains. For any lethal or rights-affecting decision, there must be an identifiable human who is legally and institutionally responsible. Not "the model recommended it." A person. This is not a technical constraint — it is a structural requirement that can be built into deployment protocols. And in the absence of such accountability, the legal and moral responsibility goes to the level of the person who approved the software and the policy to begin with. Not too many leaders want that kind of responsibility.

Audit trails and drift monitoring. Not just "did this specific case comply?" but "is the pattern of use over time moving toward or away from the stated constraints?" Erosion happens gradually. The only way to catch it is to watch for it systematically.

Defined civilian protection constraints for autonomous systems. The question of whether AI can execute within a bounded battlefield engagement zone — without human approval for each individual action — is no longer black and white. If a human commander defines the engagement envelope, retains override authority, and is accountable for outcomes, that may be defensible. But those conditions have to be encoded in the system, not just promised in a briefing.

Meaningful judicial and congressional oversight for any domestic-facing use. "Mass surveillance" is too broad a term to be useful. Bulk metadata collection for counterterror purposes under judicial warrant is different from continuous population-level behavioral modeling for political risk assessment. The law already tries to make these distinctions. AI deployment should reinforce those distinctions, not sidestep them. This is implemented in policy and control systems, not in the AI logic itself.

Transparency about the standards themselves. If Anthropic is going to hold lines — and it should — the criteria for where those lines are must be public, explicit, and reviewable. "We know it when we see it" is not a governance framework. Neither side gets to operate in opacity.

The strongest argument for the Pentagon's position is also the one least carefully made: if China is deploying AI in weapons systems with no ethical constraints, the United States cannot afford to fight with one hand tied behind its back.

This argument deserves a serious answer.

National defense is a moral obligation, not merely a political preference. The preservation of a society that can maintain ethical governance is itself an ethical imperative. So the China comparison is not irrelevant — if adversaries develop unconstrained AI-enabled weapons and the U.S. does not, that creates a real capability gap with real consequences for real people.

But "our adversaries do it" does not automatically sanctify every countermeasure. History is full of examples of nations winning military contests while losing something more fundamental — the institutional integrity, civic trust, and moral coherence that make a society worth defending in the first place. Domestic mass surveillance infrastructure, once built, does not typically get dismantled when the emergency passes. The Patriot Act is not a historical curiosity.

The correct response to China's unconstrained AI deployment is not to abandon constraints. It is to build the governance architecture that allows robust capability with maintained accountability. Those are not mutually exclusive goals. They only seem that way when the negotiation is structured as a power contest rather than a design problem.

Here is the standard I would propose: AI should be refused — by companies, by institutions, by policy — when its use would systematically destroy the accountability architecture that makes moral governance possible.

That means AI that makes meaningful human oversight technically impossible should be refused. AI that is designed to be unauditable should be refused. AI that enables domestic coercion without legal process should be refused. AI that removes identifiable human responsibility from lethal decisions should be refused — not because autonomous execution is always wrong, but because accountability is not optional. And AI must be corrigible - when it makes mistakes it must be able to be corrected.

Everything else — including a great deal of powerful, sensitive, consequential capability — can be permitted if the governance architecture is sound. You don't put a notice on the hammer that it is not meant to be used on skulls. You make a policy that prohibits hurting others.

It isn't like the Pentagon is unfamiliar with policies and procedures. It has detailed rules of what is allowed in battle and detailed manuals on how to use weapons systems. How it uses AI must be as similarly well thought out and, as much as possible, public.

This is not to say that AI shouldn't have morals baked in - it absolutely should. But it should not be expected to understand how it might be manipulated, or second-order consequences from its decisions that are outside its domain. AI, especially in government, is part of a huge ecosystem of software, governance and politics.

The current negotiation is structured to produce a bad outcome for everyone. Anthropic loses its contract or its principles. The Pentagon gets either a constrained tool or an unconstrained one with no safeguards. The American public gets whatever the executive branch decides it can get away with.

A better outcome requires both parties to stop treating this as a contest and start treating it as a design problem. The principles exist. The technical capability exists. The policy framework does not yet exist — but it could, and building it would serve everyone's legitimate interests, including the country's.

Everyone wants the same thing. But they are arguing on the wrong level.

That is the conversation worth having.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/23 Links Pt2: What’s wrong with Zionism, Hugh Laurie?; Media Fall Silent on Palestinian Draft Constitution; Former Hamas hostage turns ordeal into music

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: What’s wrong with Zionism, Hugh Laurie?

If Zionism is defined minimally as support for the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, then opposition to Zionism entails opposition to that principle. Israel is home to roughly eight million Jewish citizens. To advocate dismantling the state as a Jewish polity is to propose a fundamental restructuring of sovereignty in a region where minority protection has always ended badly for us Jews.

Judea Pearl, the Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher and father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, has argued that one should ‘shock the anti-Zionist out of his pompous self-righteousness’. He is right.

His challenge is uncomfortable. If anti-Zionism involves dissolving Jewish self-determination in the only state where it currently exists, what becomes of its population? Are they to entrust their security to political arrangements that have yet to demonstrate durability? Are they to accept permanent exposure as the price of ideological consistency?

Those who identify as anti-Zionist often insist that their position targets a political ideology rather than a people. They frame it as opposition to nationalism, or to specific Israeli policies. Criticism of a government is ordinary political speech. Advocacy for the eradication of a state’s defining national character carries different consequences.

Laurie has not articulated a doctrine. He mourned a colleague and resisted being labelled. Others supplied the ideological frame around his words. But he took the bait and seemed at least to imply his rejection of Zionism by pointedly responding to critics that he had never said he supports it.

When celebrities feel compelled to signal distance from Zionism, even defensively, clarity becomes essential. If the objection concerns government policy, say so. If it concerns the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood in Israel, confront the implications directly and own the full genocidal implications of your beliefs.

Dana Eden’s tragic death remains under investigation. The argument that followed reveals how quickly grief is conscripted into ideological struggle. A tribute became a test of political identity. Before adopting or repudiating a word as freighted as Zionism, one ought to ask what world that choice implies. And whether one is prepared to defend it.

Report: Inside Hamas's Sophisticated Media Empire Waging Psychological Warfare

A recent report by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), based on Hamas documents seized by the IDF in Gaza, argues that Hamas maintains centralized managerial, financial, and strategic control over a broad media ecosystem, including outlets presented publicly as “independent.”

The report, published on February 22, 2026, draws from documents captured during military operations in Gaza and provides an unprecedented window into how the Palestinian terrorist organization coordinates its information warfare against Israel and the broader international community.

The Hybrid Media Model
At the heart of Hamas’s strategy lies what Israeli analysts term a “hybrid” media ecosystem—a deliberately constructed system designed to create the appearance of press diversity while maintaining absolute editorial control. According to the report, Hamas operates both official outlets like the Al-Resala media institution, the Al-Aqsa television network, and the Palestine newspaper, alongside news agencies Shehab and SAFA that publicly present themselves as independent journalistic organizations.

“This hybrid media system is not accidental,” the report states. “It is designed to allow Hamas to appear to advocate for media pluralism, while in fact it fully controls the media discourse.” This arrangement also provides the organization with diplomatic and operational flexibility, including the ability to circumvent sanctions and deny association with extreme content by attributing it to “independent” outlets.

The information department, led by Ali Al-Amoudi, maintains oversight of the entire ecosystem through regular inspections and coordination meetings designed to ensure all media activity aligns with Hamas’s broader strategic messaging and tactical objectives.

"The new acting head of Hamas’ political bureau in Gaza."
*released as part of the Gilad Shalit "prisoner deal" in 2011 - was among those very close to Sinwar during their imprisonment and after their release, accompanying him frequently to meetings and events. v The report adds that unofficial reports in late 2025 claimed al-Amoudi was appointed acting head of Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza and was being discussed as a potential successor to Yahya Sinwar.

It traces his proximity to Sinwar back to their time in Israeli prison: al-Amoudi was arrested in 2004, released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange, and, according to the report, developed a close relationship with Sinwar while incarcerated. The report says al-Amoudi later served as Sinwar’s office manager during Sinwar’s first term leading Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza (2017–2021).

CAIR-Ohio Director Invokes Blood Libel at Ohio Senate Antisemitism Hearing

Khalid Turaani, Executive Director of the Ohio branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), appeared before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee on February 18, 2026 to testify against Senate Bill 87, which would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism into Ohio state law.

During his testimony, Turaani alleged that Israel operates the world's largest human skin bank and that the skin is harvested from the bodies of dead Palestinians. CAIR’s lobbying arm, CAIR Action, and a coalition of other anti-Israel Ohio-based organizations also testified in opposition to SB 87 at the same hearing.

A Modern Blood Libel Before a State Legislature
The Anti-Defamation League has explicitly catalogued claims of this type — that Israel systematically harvests body parts from Palestinians — as a modern iteration of the medieval blood libel: the centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory alleging that Jews murder non-Jews to harvest their bodily matter. The ADL notes that in the current Israeli-Palestinian context, organs and tissue are substituted for blood, and that in some cases activists have gone further, alleging Israel deliberately kills Palestinians in order to harvest their remains. The ADL has found no credible evidentiary basis for these claims.

The specific “skin bank” framing Turaani deployed before Ohio state senators has circulated in anti-Israel activist circles since at least late 2023, traceable to social media accounts and pro-Palestinian advocacy networks. The ADL has directly addressed these claims, finding that they lack documented factual support and function as vehicles for antisemitic conspiracy narratives rather than substantiated reporting.

The context in which Turaani made this claim adds a significant dimension. SB 87, which he was testifying to defeat, would codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism into Ohio law. The IHRA definition, which has been used by the U.S. State Department and endorsed by over 40 countries, explicitly lists as an illustrative example of antisemitism: “Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.”

Turaani’s testimony did not remain confined to the hearing room. Ramy Abdu, the founder and chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (EuroMed), amplified the clip on X, stating: “Israel is skinning dead bodies of Palestinians.”

Abdu’s promotion of the claim is notable given EuroMed’s documented record and his own background. Abdu, along with EuroMed’s former chairman Dr. Mazen Kahel, were both named in a 2013 list released by the Israeli government identifying Hamas operatives and affiliated institutions in Europe. The watchdog group HonestReporting has described EuroMed as a “Hamas front org.”

EuroMed’s track record of unverified atrocity claims extends well beyond the Turaani clip. The organization has previously accused the Israeli army of organ theft from Palestinians and of “systematically” using police dogs to “brutally attack, rape Palestinian civilians” — claims that HonestReporting has characterized as part of a pattern of fake news, conspiracy theories, and blood libels the group has championed since the October 7, 2023 attacks.

02/23 Links Pt1: The End of Anarchy; Where did it go so wrong for the International Criminal Court?; Keffiyeh-clad anti-Zionists to protest outside Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The End of Anarchy

October 7 and the war that followed seem to have broken the spell. The Temple Mount status quo, for example, has thankfully been eroded. Jews had been prohibited from praying at their own holy site, over which the state of Israel has sovereignty, so as not to provoke Palestinian violence. This overt religious discrimination against Jews was indefensible. Now the “terrorist’s veto” has been withdrawn.

Also frozen in 1967 were land registrations in Judea and Samaria, in expectation of an eventual resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The result was that Israel is met with global opprobrium any time it seeks to enforce land-use regulations against Palestinian scofflaws. (There is no such disapproval expressed when illegally built Jewish housing is removed.) So Israel is planning to slowly resume registration to curb an anarchic state of affairs beyond the green line.

Most important, Israel and the U.S. are making the new “no reset” policy clear to Iran. President Trump has positioned U.S. assets in the region such that pretty much every option for an attack on Iran would be on the table. Trump has come closer to embracing full regime change over the past few months. Clearly, he does not want Iran to be able to revert to its prewar state.

Along those lines, he has been arguably even more hawkish than Benjamin Netanyahu’s government regarding Hezbollah. Iran’s Lebanese proxy has been brought to its knees by the IDF, and both Trump and Netanyahu want it to stay there. Iran doesn’t get to be its old self again. Now, apparently, we live in the age of consequences.

Same goes for Gaza. It would appear the days of unilateral Israeli disengagement are over. In the past, once a round of hostilities ceased, Israel would go back to its corner and wait for the next round. But the recent war ended with a deal, not a one-way Israeli concession. And that deal requires Hamas to disarm if the IDF is to retreat. Trump occasionally seems to waver on the definition of “disarm,” but he isn’t telling Israel to move off an inch of Gaza.

The old status quo, in which Israel’s antagonists were permitted to hit the reset button if they lost a war of their own making, meant Israel was essentially penalized for winning a defensive war. This set up a perverse incentive structure. It also created an atmosphere of anarchy in which the rules could be ignored at will.

The American-led world order lacked order. That is being remedied, and not a moment too soon.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Who Will Become the Biggest Beneficiary of the Billions of Dollars About To Be Invested in the Gaza Strip? The Terrorist Group Hamas

Although Hamas has expressed its willingness to hand over its government institutions to the NCAG [Palestinian National Committee for the Administration of Gaza], there are indications that the terror group seeks to control the new committee and turn it into a Hamas puppet.

The NCAG is already under pressure from the terror group to incorporate thousands of Hamas terrorists into a newly established Palestinian police force in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, in addition, is seeking to ensure that its civil servants be placed on the payroll of the NCAG.

"There is a prevailing sense within the committee and other parties that Hamas is determined, by all means, to keep its members within the new administrative framework overseeing the Gaza Strip." — Asharq al-Awsat, quoting "sources close to" NCAG, February 14, 2026.

What we are currently witnessing are direct and indirect efforts by Hamas to continue governing the Gaza Strip even after the establishment of Trump's "Board of Peace" and the NCAG.

Hamas... sees itself as an essential part of the post-war arrangements in the Gaza Strip. In the viewpoint of Hamas, the role of bodies such as the "Board of Peace" and NCAG should be limited only to paying salaries, funding reconstruction and ensuring the entry of aid supplies into the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, the terror group will focus its efforts on rearming, regrouping, rebuilding its terror infrastructure, and planning more attacks on Israel.

Anyone who believes that the NCAG will be able to operate as an independent governing body in the Gaza Strip is abysmally uninformed. Its members will undoubtedly be at the mercy of Hamas and its masked thugs.

"The image promoted by some international parties that the committee is a means to remove Hamas from power seems far removed from reality. The facts on the ground indicate that Hamas still maintains military, organizational, and ideological control within Gaza, and that any new administrative body cannot operate independently of its will or outside its sphere of influence. Real power remains in the hands of those who possess weapons, organizational networks, and the capacity for sustained popular mobilization." — Mahdi Mubarak, Arab political analyst, rumonline.net, February 16, 2026

Hamas should have been asked to end its rule over the Gaza Strip and hand over all its weapons before, and not after, the formation of the NCAG. Since that has not happened, Hamas will become the largest beneficiary of the billions of dollars that are about to be invested in the Gaza Strip.

Palestine Today reports that Houthi leader Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din al-Houthi said on Sunday that one of the ultimate goals of the Jews is to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

He says that often.

He said it in May 2022.

September 2024.

January 2025.

August 2025.

Muslims have been predicting this for over a hundred years, yet the domed building is still there.

Israel could have destroyed it a thousand times over, and built several Temples in all that time, yet it is still there.

The usual reason given is Palestinian "steadfastness."

Inciting anger is a major Islamist weapon. And it still frightens the West.

But as far as the Dome of the Rock is concerned - we can only hope.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

From The New York Times:

Iran Could Direct Proxies to Attack U.S. Targets Abroad, Officials Warn
Security officials are monitoring increasingly worrisome signs as President Trump considers another military campaign against Iran.

U.S. and other Western security officials say they are monitoring increasingly worrisome signs that Iran could direct proxies to conduct retaliatory terrorist attacks against American targets in Europe and the Middle East if President Trump orders large-scale strikes against Iran.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments, say they have not yet detected any specific plots in the works. But they say heightened “chatter” — spy jargon for electronic intercepts of terrorists’ communications — indicates some level of attack planning and coordination.

Threats abound. There is concern among intelligence and counterterrorism officials that Tehran could enlist the Houthis in Yemen to resume attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea. There is also concern in Europe that Hezbollah sleeper cells or even Al Qaeda or its affiliates could be ordered to attack American bases or embassies. One senior U.S. official said that government analysts were tracking “a lot” of activity and planning but that it was unclear what could trigger an attack.

“Iran can work through proxies to conduct terrorist attacks that will raise costs for any U.S. military campaign,” said Colin P. Clarke, the executive director of the Soufan Center, an intelligence and consulting firm in New York.

What, specifically, are the threats?

The anonymous sources, while described as senior officials, offer no concrete intelligence beyond "heightened chatter" - a term that routinely appears in counterterrorism reporting during any period of tensions. Terrorist networks discuss targets constantly; spikes in intercepts are expected whenever headlines feature American military posturing, inflammatory statements, or regional crises. Yet the article presents this as a novel, worrisome development tied specifically to potential strikes, without historical calibration or acknowledgment that such "chatter" is a background constant rather than a unique harbinger of Iran-directed retaliation.

That being said, there is nothing wrong with this specific article. It is appropriately restrained, it frames the potential repercussions as things that "could happen."

But as always, the question isn't what is being reported, but what isn't.

There were similar articles and expert warnings last June when the US was weighing whether to support Israel's attacks on Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

Like this:

“It is never too late not to start a war,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates a restrained foreign policy. Ms. Kelanic acknowledged that Israel’s strike had given Iran an incentive to potentially develop a nuclear weapon. But she added that the incentive would “multiply dramatically if the United States joins the war.” “Once you get involved, man, it’s really hard to step back,” she said. “You are just going to go all in.”

Or this:

“Subcontracting the Fordo job would put the United States in Iran’s sights,” Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Steven N. Simon, a veteran of the National Security Council, wrote in Foreign Affairs on Wednesday. “Iran would almost certainly retaliate by killing American civilians. That, in turn, would compel the United States to reciprocate.”

“Soon enough,” they continued, “the only targets left for Washington to hit would be the Iranian regime’s leaders, and the United States would again go into the regime-change business — a business in which exceedingly few Americans want to be involved any longer.”

Has the NYT ever looked back on the track record of their experts to see if their predictions were accurate? Because in my experience, they rarely are.

Beyond that - do they ever quote experts who hold that there are greater benefits to military action than costs? Strikingly missing from all these articles is even the hint that attacking Iran would help its protesters. Or that it could weaken the Russia/China/North Korea axis. Or that it could hurt worldwide terrorist networks? Or hurt the Houthis in their reign of terror in Yemen? Or damage the the Shiite militias in Iraq? Or weaken Hezbollah, allowing Lebanon to rule its own country again?

And what, exactly, is the downside of wanting regime change? It is often not successful, to be sure, but if the Iranian people want to topple the regime - which they do - evening the playing field by attacking the IRGC ability to murder civilians would and should be a welcome development among those who claim to care about human rights. It wouldn't be the US installing a new regime, it would be the Iranian people.

Isn't that a good thing?

One may be tempted to think that the US military knows what it is doing a lot better than "experts" who do not have access to its capabilities and intelligence, as seen by the Maduro capture. To make sure you don't think so, the NYT has two nearly identical headlines three weeks apart to disavow you of thinking of that analogy.

I do not think the Trump administration has successfully described its strategy on Iran, and that is a problem. It is their job to tell the American people what its policy is, at least to the extent that it does not compromise strategy.

But any objective media source should look at both sides of the story as well, and it should evaluate its use of "experts" and anonymous sources and framing to ensure that its coverage is fair. When article after article only describes risks, without mentioning benefits or even how the US could counter the risks, moves from journalism to advocacy.

It might not violate the NYT's own journalistic standards. Each individual article in isolation is defensible. But it sure violates any trust that readers have that they are being told the entire story.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/22 Links: Trump's Board of Peace Must Deradicalize Gaza; Bondi hero: ‘I just ran to stop him killing innocent people’; Mike Huckabee handles Tucker Carlson’s ‘Gish Gallop’ with grace

From Ian:

Trump's Board of Peace Must Deradicalize Gaza

President Trump convened his Board of Peace on Thursday, announcing new commitments to fund Gaza's reconstruction and provide troops for a Gaza stabilization force. But so far, everyone's avoided an essential question: How will future generations of Palestinian children be raised and educated - and will they again be indoctrinated with radical hatred of Jews and Israel? If so, then the president's vision of Gaza as a "deradicalized, terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors" will remain a pipe dream.

Many of the Hamas terrorists who stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, were raised on a steady diet of hatred. As children, they watched a Hamas-produced TV show hosted by a Mickey Mouse knockoff named Farfour, who preached jihad and urged the killing of Jews. Surrounded by smiling children, Farfour vowed to "liberate Jerusalem from the criminal Zionists," repeatedly exhorting: "Kill! Kill! Kill!" A talking bee named Nahoul ranted about "the filth of the criminal Jews." That reality helps explain why hundreds of Gaza civilians joined the rampage on Oct. 7, and many more celebrated in the streets.

The urgent question now is whether the machinery of radicalization that produced Hamas will finally be dismantled. If it is not, a return to war is inevitable. As long as Hamas remains embedded in Gaza's institutions, Palestinian children will continue to be indoctrinated to hate and kill Jews - in schools, on screens and at home. If Trump wants peace in Gaza to endure, he should establish a Deradicalization Commission through the Board of Peace, charged with dismantling the entire infrastructure of hate.

Pierre Rehov: Erdogan's Sunni Noose: Turkey's Bid to Encircle Israel

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has launched an ambitious diplomatic offensive aimed at unifying the Sunni world under Ankara's leadership. The objective is not merely reconciliation with former rivals. It is the construction of a Sunni diplomatic and strategic "wall," or "noose," around Israel, replacing the Iranian "Shi'ite crescent" with a new configuration of Sunni power.

The Turkish-Saudi reconciliation is particularly significant. Following years of tension after the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Ankara and Riyadh have now moved decisively toward strategic cooperation.

Turkish and Saudi officials increasingly frame Israel as a destabilizing actor in these theaters. The emerging partnership is not merely economic; it reflects coordinated positioning against perceived external threats, with Israel explicitly cited.

Turkey and Egypt have now signed a $350 million military framework agreement covering joint weapons production, intelligence sharing, and military exercises. Turkish air defense systems and munitions are slated for delivery, and bilateral trade is projected to reach $15 billion.

As the guardian of the Suez Canal and a dominant actor in North Africa, Egypt provides logistical leverage capable of influencing maritime routes critical to Israel's economy.

On February 9, 2026, the foreign ministers of Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates issued a joint communiqué condemning what they called "Israeli expansionist policies in occupied territories" and calling for Islamic unity.

Some analysts describe an emerging "Sunni axis," or noose, influenced by Muslim Brotherhood ideology; backed by Turkish military power, financed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and designed, by expanding into Gaza, to encircle and finish off Israel.

The UAE, under the impressive leadership of Sheikh Mohamed ben Zayed al Nahyan, pursues a technocratic, anti-political Islam agenda that diverges sharply from Erdogan's ideological sympathies.... Still, the coalition's ultimate aim, apart from the UAE, unmistakably seems to be "containing" Israel.

Recently, Saudi media have featured openly anti-Israel and antisemitic headlines not seen in years. The kingdom appears to be totally aligning itself with anti-Israel countries such as Qatar and Turkey, while "tensions with the UAE explode."

Egypt, Israel's chilly peace partner since 1979, has reportedly expanded military infrastructure in the Sinai Peninsula in ways that should, under the supposed peace treaty, raise serious questions.

Turkish and Egyptian intelligence services are reportedly coordinating efforts to counter rival influences and restrict Israel's strategic access.

Israeli analysts increasingly describe it as the replacement of Iran's Shiite axis with a Sunni bloc influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The coalition presents itself as promoting regional peace. Yet "peace" may translate into the vaporization of Israel, especially should a future Israeli government prove more pliable.

Erdogan's participation in "stabilization" efforts would significantly expand Turkish influence within the emerging Sunni crescent. Ankara's well-documented support for Muslim Brotherhood networks — which are Hamas's patrons, ideologically and financially – should raise obvious concerns.

Netanyahu's insistence that Israel determine which international actors, if any, operate in Gaza, serves multiple strategic purposes. It prevents Turkish entrenchment in Gaza, maintains Israeli control over post-war arrangements, and signals to Washington that Israel views Turkish expansionism as a long-term threat transcending personal or political relationships.

Whatever the obstacles, Erdogan's direction seems clear: a militarily and economically anchored Sunni alignment to constrict Israel's strategic space.

Ruthie Blum: Mike Huckabee handles Tucker Carlson’s ‘Gish Gallop’ with grace

By anchoring the exchange in Islamist conduct, Huckabee stripped the argument to its essentials. For instance, asked by Carlson what it cost the United States to “move the fleet off Iran into the Persian Gulf,” the ambassador replied, “A lot less than it would to bury a lot of Americans if [the ayatollahs] ever got a long-range ballistic missile. A lot less.”

He also pointed out that if Carlson cares so much about America, he should be concerned that Iran’s proxies are already “deeply embedded” in the Western Hemisphere.

This back-and-forth was among many fronts in the rhetorical battlefield of Carlson’s crazed conspiracy-theory arena, however. It might even have been the sanest section of the Q&A.

The looniest was his casting of aspersions on the authenticity of Netanyahu’s Jewish roots, since the prime minister’s family hails from Eastern Europe, and his sneering suggestion that Israelis might need DNA tests to prove their biblical connection to the land.

Other jibes were just as jaw-dropping, beginning with his impugning of a brief meeting Huckabee had with Jonathan Pollard after the death of the latter’s wife; declaring that Jeffrey Epstein was known to be connected with the Mossad (adding a lie about Israeli President Isaac Herzog having been a guest on the pedophile’s island—for which he later apologized but may still be sued); citing fabricated statistics about Israel’s persecution of Christians; and besmirching Israel Defense Forces behavior in Gaza. Oh, and insisting that Israel provide free abortions courtesy of U.S. aid.

It’s no wonder, then, that Carlson, who’s built a following among Israel-bashing antisemites, remains a groyper favorite.

It has to be said, though, that Huckabee knew what he was in for with Carlson. The pair had been sparring publicly on social media, which led to Huckabee’s challenging his former Fox News colleague to “come talk to me, instead of about me.”

Because of Huckabee’s naturally cheerful demeanor and impeccable manners, the interview concluded on a cordial note, with his extending an invitation to Carlson to return to Israel and attend his church. It was a magnanimous gesture, to be sure.

But the rest of us would prefer that Tucker Carlson never darken our doorstep—or VIP lounge—again.