Anti-Zionists think American military leaders are stupid

Section 224 of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act, since renumbered 219 in the House, creates a "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative." It directs the Secretary of Defense to appoint an executive agent to synchronize joint work on missile defense, counter-drone systems, AI, autonomous platforms, and cybersecurity, and to move that work faster from research into production. Its text derives from the stalled U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act, folded into a must-pass bill.

Anti-Zionists are livid.

It is true that no other country has quite this arrangement with the U.S. military. The provision shifts a deepening relationship out of the annual appropriations process, where each year's aid faces a vote and conditions, and into Pentagon procurement channels that are harder to see and harder to unwind. That's a real risk that needs to be weighed against the benefits.

But critics are  going past the logical objections into antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

Khanna posted, "We cannot integrate our military with Israel's and lose our sovereignty." How does that work?

The United States runs AUKUS with Australia and the United Kingdom, a submarine and advanced-technology pact deeper than anything Section 224 contemplates. It shares co-development across NATO. Foreign components run throughout the F-35 supply chain by design. None of that is said to cost America its sovereignty, because they plainly do not. No amount of technical cooperation changes who sits in the Pentagon and decides how to defend the country; command, acquisition authority, and classification rules stay in American hands, as they do with every ally. For "lose our sovereignty" to mean anything, you need an unstated premise: that partnering with this particular party can somehow override the judgment of American leaders and bend their decisions against American interests. That the mere presence of Israelis in the process corrupts the process. That premise is not an argument. It is a spell.

Khanna is only the beginning. Joe Kent, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, warned that opening sensitive technology to Israel means "back doors and spyware can be installed that will most certainly be used by the Israelis to influence U.S. policy." Not "might be" but "most certainly," a categorical prophecy that Israeli technology inside American systems will function as a hypnotic device operating on American policy itself. This is the sovereignty spell restated in software: contact with Israeli code does not add a supplier to be vetted, it plants a mechanism that overrides American will.

The other headline objection is quite different from Kent's. Josh Paul of the Arab Center presses it hardest: Israel will use its access to steal American technology, pursuing espionage against the systems it now touches. 

Paul adds another fantasy: "Israel will be able to threaten to withhold, or actually withhold, subcomponents or software updates that might be key to the operability of future US weapons systems, essentially holding US military capabilities hostage."  

Then there are the simultaneous social media accounts popping up with the single word: "merger." They are claiming that this bill would merge the US and Israeli militaries into a single force. This has become a major theme in recent days, from CAIR to BDS to lots of social media "news" sites. This is too stupid for words. 

Another objection from Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick in The Guardian spins an amazing conspiracy theory that has to be read to be believed. Describing the people behind the FUTURES Act, they say:

Their vision is of “New Jerusalem” (the US) wedded to “Old Jerusalem” (Israel) on the basis of both having been divinely chosen for the mission of saving civilization from the “red-green” (Marxist-Muslim) alliance.

For Israel, this means not just ruling all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but dominating the Middle East, launching wars of “prevention” against all potential adversaries (including Turkey, Iran and even Egypt) and, with Britain and France succumbing to the influence of foreign immigrants and the disease of “European secularism”, serving as the US’s most important ally in its global struggle to preserve “civilization” – labeled either “Jewish-Christian” or “western”.

The extravagance of such ideas clearly marks the origins of the project, exposing the influence of well-funded dark-money groups and thinktanks exerting their influence on behalf of Israel’s government.

Not coincidentally, Clufton and Lustick are releasing a book in August titled "Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power."

The assumption behind each objection is that Israel is inherently an evil power hellbent on world domination leveraging America as its unwitting slave. 

In the end all of these criticisms are not just assuming Israeli brilliance and duplicity, but also American naivete and stupidity. 

In reality, US military and political leaders don't enter agreements that are bad for America. They have every ability to rebuff Israel and that all-powerful "Zionist Lobby" when they feel that their interests diverge. And they have, repeatedly.

In the real world, nations extensively test weapons systems and software before adopting them. In the real world, the harm from being discovered to install spyware far outweighs any benefits. In the real world, nations sign agreements for each shared technology to impose real penalties for anyone who breaks the agreement.  In the real world, any implementation of technology would include controls to ensure that the risks of depending on a single component are mitigated (i.e., with source code included with the software.) These are all risks that armies (and even regular corporations) know how to handle. 

And notice what none of them address: the benefits to the US of such an agreement. Why would it even be entertained if the US didn't see a real advantage of adopting Israeli technologies and share information that might give them new ways to attack known problems? 

When you refuse to even acknowledge the benefits along with the risks, then it is not a serious analysis. It is the retroactive justification for the pre-designed anti-Israel opinion. Which explains why so many different critics come up with so many different yet equally bizarre objections - because the point isn't a coherent argument, but the appearance of one.  Something for other anti-Zionists to grab onto and think, look, this "expert" says what I want to believe.. 

As I said, there are reasonable arguments against the act. Ro Khanna even says some of them separately. But when the rhetoric reaches into conspiracy theory and the assumption of American incompetence to hold onto its own sovereignty, we are no longer dealing with responsible argument.

We are looking at age-old antisemitism swapping the Elders of Zion with "Zionists."

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The antisemitic assumption behind anti-Zionist libels

Wendy Bacon is one of the most decorated investigative journalists Australia has produced. She won a Walkley Award, the country’s highest journalism honor, in 1984 for exposing police and official corruption in New South Wales; her reporting on the bribery and attempted murder of a detective became the basis for the acclaimed ABC series Blue Murder; she worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine, and SBS before spending two decades as Professor of Journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has been arrested some eighteen times for causes she believed in, from anti-censorship fights to environmental protests. She now writes for Michael West Media, and she describes herself openly as an investigative journalist who is also a political activist, one who wants her work to be useful to those resisting abuses of power.

Bacon would strenuously deny that she holds any antisemitic opinions, and she would be completely sincere in the denial. So would many of the prominent activist-journalists she works among. But as this piece will demonstrate, their arguments are antisemitic on two levels at once. Every judgment they reach consistently slants against the Jewish community and the Jewish state, and every claim rests on a shared, unspoken assumption of Jewish duplicity and inherent malice. They would deny this too, and point to Jewish friends they admire and Jewish allies they cite. An objective look at the structure of their position shows a pattern too consistent to be accidental.

Let’s go through Bacon’s recent interview on Bogan Intelligentsia, because it canbe generalized to much of the Leftist anti-Zionist thinking.

The interview makes three main points. The first is that ties between the Australian medical community and Israel are growing and that this should alarm us, because Israel is committing “medicide,” the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system as an instrument of genocide. The second is that the Australian Jewish community is working to silence pro-Palestinian voices in medicine, chiefly by pushing hospitals and regulators to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The third is the case of Professor Peter Macdonald, the St Vincent’s cardiologist suspended after a single comment, offered as proof of how the machinery punishes dissent.

Each point sounds like reporting. Each depends on an implicit assumption: that Jews support genocide and scheme to silence anyone who objects. Remove the assumption and all three points dissolve. Keep it, and the interview coheres into a single seamless narrative of Jewish power and Jewish malice.

Bacon never has to argue the assumption, because she trusts her audience to supply it.

The whole edifice rests on the word “medicide.” For those who bother to look, it is well documented - video, photos, first person testimony - that Hamas uses Gaza’s hospitals for military planning and attacks, it builds tunnels adjacent to and underneath the same hospitals for fighters, it held hostages in hospitals and it uses ambulances to transport terrorists. Both international law and basic morality allows targeting medical facilities that lose their protection by being used for military services. There is no “medicide” - there is only Hamas cynically using hospitals to defend its military. I’m not making this up, it is in the Geneva Conventions: “The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.” “Medicide” assumes Israeli (and Jewish) intent to specifically harm the medical infrastructure, and Hamas’ use of that infrastructure is what endangered it.

The next floor is built using the same trick. In 2023, the New South Wales Liberal health minister signed a five-year memorandum of understanding between NSW Health and Sheba Medical Centre, Israel’s largest hospital and one of the ten best-rated in the world. St. Vincent’s hospital bought Israeli health software Datos.

The interview never answers a basic question: exactly how does partnering with an Israeli hospital or buying Israeli medical software endanger patients? An Australian hospital runs on its own clinical governance, its own ethics committees, its own regulators. For an Israeli MOU or a piece of Israeli scheduling software to harm anyone, you would have to believe that Australian hospitals are so bad they have no policies of their own to protect patients, or that their policies are so poorly written an outside consultant can twist them into murdering undesirable patients. The mechanism is never named because naming it would expose the assumption underneath. This is classic slander by association — the very fact that there is an Israeli involved is enough to make the entire enterprise suspect, and the means doesn’t even have to be described, because the Jews are assumed crafty enough to figure out how to get around any obstacle.

The alarm is selective because it was never really about conduct. It is Deadly Exchange logic, the campaign Jewish Voice for Peace launched in 2017 claiming that American police who trained with Israeli counterparts were importing Israeli brutality into American streets. The American Jewish Committee identified it as an antisemitic trope, and JVP itself eventually admitted the campaign “furthers an antisemitic ideology.” Swap police for hospitals and the mechanism is identical: contact with Jews spreads Jewish malevolence, so partnership becomes contamination.

Next comes Bacon’s claim that the Australian Jewish community is weaponizing antisemitism to protect Israel. The reality is the reverse of what Bacon describes. Jewish medical staff have faced open hostility inside Australian wards, colleagues wearing Palestinian flags while treating patients, WhatsApp groups organizing to target them, and a steady erosion of any sense of institutional safety. The campaign to adopt the IHRA definition is a response to that. Bacon inverts it, casting the IHRA definition as a gag on Palestinian doctors and a chilling of speech. The definition does nothing of the kind. It silences no one; it supplies a tool for recognizing when speech has crossed into antisemitism, which is a different thing entirely and threatens only those who would prefer antisemitism go unnamed.

Which brings us to Macdonald. At a public forum he declared it a “no-brainer” that Mossad, not Iran, was behind the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue and the arson at a Sydney restaurant, contradicting ASIO and the Prime Minister, who had named Iran. He blamed Jews for attacking Jews, a false-flag fantasy that is antisemitic on its face. He was suspended for seven weeks and then reinstated, and the reinstatement is the part Bacon cannot fit into her frame, because it happened for a principled reason: his comment, made off duty as a private citizen, did not breach hospital policy. His later lecture invitation was withdrawn for an equally principled reason. He has every right to voice an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and an institution has every right to decline to hand him a prestigious platform and absorb the reputational cost of doing so. Speech is free; employers are not obligated to platform it.

Every one of these judgments runs in the same direction. The Israeli army is presumed guilty of a crime that its enemy’s conduct explains. Israeli hospitals are presumed complicit in a policy no evidence connects them to. Australian Jews demanding protection from documented harassment are presumed to be faking it in service of a foreign government. Real antisemitism, the firebombed synagogue, the fifteen thousand threats against a Jewish businessman that Bacon pauses to wonder aloud might not “actually” be antisemitic, gets downgraded, explained away, or reassigned to Mossad. The assumption cuts one way only. Jews scheme, Jews lie, Jews manufacture their own victimhood, and anything they say in their defense is evidence against them because they are presumed liars.

That one-directional flow is the whole structure, and it is built like a house of cards, each claim resting on the one before it. There is no medicide, so there is no genocidal policy for Israeli hospitals to serve. There is no link between an Israeli cardiac unit and a battlefield decision, so partnering with one endangers no one. Australian Jews are genuinely under attack, so their demand for protection is not a covert operation against Palestinians. Pull the bottom card and the tower falls, because every floor above was supported only by the libel beneath it, and every libel was supported only by the assumption that Jews lie and scheme at each stage. Without that assumption, nothing stands.

Naming this is not weaponizing antisemitism, the charge always leveled the moment anyone points it out. It is the opposite. It exposes the antisemitism that was load-bearing all along, the belief in Jewish malice that anti-Zionism of this kind needs at its foundation and works hardest to keep out of sight. When you remove that assumption, the entire anti-Zionist argument falls apart.

Wendy Bacon may be sincere, but sincere hate is still hate. And the only throughline that makes sense during her entire interview is that of Jewish deception at the national, institutional, and personal levels. Underneath the human-rights vocabulary sits the oldest assumption there is, asking only that no one look directly at it.

(h/t Jill)

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/08 Links Pt2: Foreign donors ‘funding hate on Britain’s streets’; Platner suspends campaign; The Democrats’ Real Red Line; Israel extends Venezuela aid mission after request from interim president

From Ian:

Top New York Times Editor Joe Kahn Distances Newsroom From Kristof Dog-Rape Column—‘Wouldn’t Have’ Run It

The highest-ranking news editor at the New York Times, executive editor Joe Kahn, is publicly distancing himself and the paper’s 2,200-person newsroom from a May 11 Times opinion column that accused Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners.

The article, by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose father served on the Nazi side during World War II, was denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as "Hamas propaganda," "fabricated," and a "baseless blood libel." It also generated a legal threat from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a formal condemnation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The piece relied largely on anonymous or Hamas-affiliated sources.

"It wasn’t edited by the newsroom," Kahn said in a podcast interview with the media and technology journalist Peter Kafka released Wednesday, July 8. Asked whether he would have published the article in the news pages, Kahn first replied, "we probably wouldn’t have." Then he provided a more definitive answer: "No, we wouldn’t have done that exact piece."

Kahn’s statement seems to put him publicly at odds with—and certainly struck a different tone from—Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, who, in a May question-and-answer-format column, defended the article. Asked, "Given the volume of the critical response, do you stand by this column?" she answered, "Yes. … Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors."

Kingsbury did also make the point that "The Times’s news staff in the Middle East played no role in Nick’s column."

Federal judge rejects CAIR bid to block Florida terror designation

A federal judge declined on Monday to block Florida’s planned designation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a domestic terrorist organization.

CAIR and its Florida chapter sued last week after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans to designate the organization under the statute, arguing the law violates the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiffs also sought a temporary restraining order to prevent enforcement pending the outcome of the case.

U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker denied the request, writing that he was “not persuaded that relief must be afforded before defendants are heard.”

On Tuesday, CAIR and CAIR-Florida asked Walker to reconsider, arguing the designation could take effect as early as July 8 and would force the organizations to “shut down their operations in Florida and will substantially impair CAIR’s ability to pursue its mission nationwide.”

CAIR is represented by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was recently indicted on charges including wire fraud, false statements to a bank and conspiracy to commit money laundering over its alleged use of donor funds to pay informants embedded in extremist groups.

UK group hosts speakers who celebrated October 7 attacks

The UK’s largest Palestinian cultural centre hosted two speakers who have openly celebrated the October 7th terror attacks, Metro can reveal.

Palestine House in central London platformed Latifa Abouchakra and Batool Subeiti at a ‘Lessons of Resistance’ panel event last week.

The controversial activists have both praised the deadly October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas in 2023, calling it a ‘moment of triumph’ and ‘unprecedented revenge’.

Subeiti, a pro-Iranian political commentator, was also given a central role in Palestine House’s educational programme for children on ‘resistance’ and history.

During the event last Thursday, panellists appeared to defend a Palestine Action activist convicted of criminal damage, while Subeiti spoke about ‘martrydom’ as a form of ‘victory’.

The Community Security Trust (CST) called Abouchakra and Subeiti’s role in the evening ‘deeply troubling’ while a representative of October 7th victims said it was ‘heartbreaking’ they were given a platform.

Palestine House is a six-storey building in Holborn, central London, which opened in 2025 as a ‘cultural embassy’ and ‘gathering hub’ for Palestinian identity.

The centre regularly speaks out on political issues, with founder Osama Qashoo erecting a ‘Stop the Genocide’ flag at the building earlier this year.

Last Thursday, Palestine House and Shia student society Absoc for Justice held an event exploring how the death of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussain, in 680CE ‘continue[s] to inspire resistance to injustice today, including in the context of Palestine’.

However the decision to invite Abouchakra and Subeiti to the event has sparked outrage from antisemitism campaigners because of their history of support for October 7th.

On that day in 2023, Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostage, sparking years of conflict in the Middle east.

To get the latest news from the capital, visit Metro's London news hub.

Abouchakra, a presenter at the banned Iran-backed channel PressTV, told viewers on the day of the attacks that the violence was ‘the homecoming of at least 1,000 Palestinians from the resistance factions into the fragile Zionist entity’.

In an Instagram post on the same day, she said: ‘Nothing will ever be able to take back this moment, this moment of triumph, this moment of resistance, this moment of surprise, this moment of humiliation on behalf of the Zionist entity.’

ITV News was forced to apologise later that month after they platformed Abouchakr as British Palestinian concerned about prejudice without explaining her background.

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07/08 Links Pt1: US strikes 90 Iranian military targets, hours after Trump says ceasefire a ‘waste of time’; Rahm Emanuel’s anti-Israel bash won’t win over the jew-hating Dems

-From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Trump must not abandon his promise to people of Iran as collapse of Tehran deal looms

Trump is right that dealing with this regime is a waste of time. He is also right that a regime that shoots protesters in the street cannot be trusted to reform itself through polite diplomacy.

The conclusion, though, cannot be to abandon the Iranian people until the next round of negotiations collapses or the next oil shock alarms global markets.

The conclusion must be that regime change in Iran is not the only strategic and moral horizon that fits the reality before us. Such change cannot be imposed by outsiders; it must be Iranian-led.

It must respect Iran’s people, history, culture, and future but must be supported by the free world with sanctions on killers, technology to break censorship, documentation for accountability, diplomatic isolation of regime officials, and refusal to reward Tehran for surviving crises of its own making.

A free Iran would not solve every problem in the Middle East, but it could transform the region in ways no memorandum with the Islamic Republic ever will.

It could weaken Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias sustained by Tehran’s money and ideology. It could allow one of the region’s great civilizations to rebuild.

This is not something that can be done by one power alone; it requires collaboration, and must remain the clear goal of every actor involved.

In January, the Iranian people were told help was coming; six months later, they deserve more than silence, bargaining, and regret.

JO Investigation: Massive Gaza Archive Targeting Israelis is Being Run by "American" in Saudi Arabia

Key Findings:
An anonymous operator claiming to be American but based in Saudi Arabia runs one of the largest Gaza “war crimes” archives—82,000+ videos and images—whose authenticity and chain of custody remain unverified.
The operator feeds purported evidence to the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, which has been linked to the Hezbollah terrorist organization.
Despite claiming American identity, the operator calls Americans “complicit in genocide,” urges U.S. soldiers to disobey orders, and demands U.S. officials stand trial at The Hague.
The operation runs from Saudi Arabia—a kingdom that has received extensive U.S. and Israeli security assistance, including protection during the 2026 Iran conflict.
The archive’s sophisticated infrastructure—dual websites, 2.4 terabytes of torrents, encrypted submissions, Icelandic privacy protection—suggests resources beyond typical grassroots activism.
The operator’s language shifted from singular “I” to plural “we,” raising questions about who is actually running the operation and whether it represents a coordinated network.

Seth Mandel: Karim Khan and the Perils of Anti-Israel Obsession

Khan’s case against Israel was a sham—he canceled important fact-finding trips in order to file the warrants before he could be outed as an office pest. The ICC report establishes “the accuser’s credibility,” which puts all past testimony and reporting in an even more damning light. The internal investigation also found Khan’s belated denials to be “devoid of credibility.”

From the Times, which obtained the internal report:
“First, she said, there was overfamiliarity during a work trip to London, then incidents in his office in which ‘he would grab and paw at her breasts, try to access her pelvic area, and suck on her ear or neck,’ according to a summary of the U.N. investigation’s findings obtained by The Times.

“Eventually, she said, the advances progressed to unwanted sexual activity. She told investigators that ‘the power dynamic between them meant that she could not say no.’”

Now, why would someone with access to this report want to ensure that such details saw the light of day before the ICC made its final decision on Khan’s job?

Most likely, the answer is: because there is reason to worry that court members’ anti-Israel fervor is such that they may still try to protect him. But now the public knows what the ICC believes Khan did, and it would destroy the court to leave him as chief prosecutor.

It is yet another example of the dangers of the world’s obsession with Israel. the UN’s refugee agency has been coopted by Hamas. The Committee to Protect Journalists is facing an internal revolt over the possibility that the organization might stop referring to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists as “journalists.” The International Committee of the Red Cross’s callous disregard of Israeli hostages and its participation in Hamas’s own public mistreatment of those hostages has disgraced its work.

Unfortunately, I could go on. But the point should be clear. Allowing anti-Zionist radicals to hijack human-rights groups has left genuine humanitarianism and genuine justice hobbled. This is the destruction left in the wake of an industry that destroyed itself because it was solely focused on destroying Israel.

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Spokane "human rights" leader forced to resign after antisemitic comments

From the Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA):

Under fire for alleged antisemitism, Spokane pastor Luc Jasmin II has resigned from the state Human Rights Commission.

In a March 2025 meeting of the commission, Jasmin accused Jewish people of “crying” over discrimination during debate on a resolution condemning antisemitism. Jasmin’s comments came under scrutiny more than a year after they were made when video of the meeting was posted in June on the Commission’s YouTube channel.

“This word ‘antisemitism’ has been around since the Jewish got trampled by Hitler, and it seems like the Jewish people keep on crying and crying and crying and crying and crying – always crying with the antisemitism,” Jasmin said in the meeting. “And today there are many other groups who are subject to mistreatment, who are even subject to mistreatment by the Jewish, and they’re not crying so much.”

The meeting is remarkable. For nearly 20 minutes, Jasmin insists that Jews are not being victimized, and in fact that Jews are attacking millions of others.

Jasmin spouted this hate at a human rights commission meeting, and he remained a member of the commission for over a year afterwards even after the other members heard his hate themselves. Two of them tried to reason with Jasmin, but he disqualified himself from the commission at that moment.

Interestingly, the minutes of the meeting do not say a word about Jasmin's outburst. 

This is not only the story of one antisemitic human rights commission member who was forced to resign. It is a story about the three other commissioners and members. While they voted to condemn antisemitism over Jasmin's objections, they kept him on for 15 more months.

That is the real scandal. 

Jasmin does not admit he did anything wrong and insists this is all political. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/07 Links Pt2: Anti-Zionism Is Repackaged Antisemitism; How the NYT's Boosted Graham Platner; Mamdani’s wife co-hosting pricey pro-Palestine retreat in Corsica — after skipping July 4

From Ian:

Anti-Zionism Is Repackaged Antisemitism

Yes, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Unless one believes, in the spirit of John Lennon's "Imagine," in a world without any nation states, denying the Jewish people the right to a state - where more than 10 million live today and which is roughly the size of Wales - goes far beyond political disagreement. It signals deep-seated prejudice.

There are 193 UN member states. Only one - Israel, the lone Jewish-majority nation - has its legitimacy routinely questioned. That is ironic, since very few states can match the longevity of the Jewish people's ancestral link to a specific territory, stretching back more than three millennia.

The Hebrew Bible is replete with place names that existed in ancient times and endure today, beginning with Zion - a hill in King David's Jerusalem - and Jerusalem, the ancient and modern center of Jewish national life and capital of Israel. The Christian Bible builds on the Hebrew Bible, and its geography is inseparable from Jesus, the Judean Jew. The seventh-century Qur'an contains more than 40 references to the "Children of Israel."

Wars imposed on Israel since its rebirth in 1948 by those who rejected any Jewish national presence led to conflict. But Zionism's core purposes are to ensure Jews are no longer dependent on the goodwill of others for their survival; to provide a safe haven after centuries of persecution; to serve as a "light unto the nations"; and to establish a state at peace and in coexistence with its neighbors.

Israel rests on multiple layers of international recognition of a Jewish national home in the land. Compare that to the "legitimacy" of other states. What precisely are the foundations of legitimacy for the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? In historical terms, they rest on conquest and subjugation of indigenous populations.

Most states derive legitimacy from the simple fact of their existence: they exist, therefore they are. Only Israel is persistently required to relitigate its right to exist in the face of persistent anti-Zionism - even 78 years after its rebirth and 77 years after joining the UN.

Palestinian Culture of Anti-Normalization Is a Central Obstacle to Peace

Were all Palestinians supporters of Hamas, or were there Palestinians who opposed the massacre and longed for a different future? My search for the answer led me to Moataz Al-Mansi in Gaza. "The future of Palestine is not built on hatred or on the dreams of cancelling the other," he wrote. "I dream of a relationship based on good neighbors, shared interests, and mutual respect."

I invited him to appear on my podcast, "Conversations at the Peace Table." Moataz told me he had lost both of his businesses during the war. His children had not attended school in years. Yet he refused to abandon his belief that Israelis and Palestinians must one day live as neighbors rather than enemies.

My friend Inbal, who worked closely with Palestinians in the West Bank for years, often told me that many Palestinians quietly desired coexistence but were afraid to say so publicly. Those who engaged with Israelis risked being labeled collaborators or traitors. Again and again, I heard the same story: Palestinians who sought dialogue often faced pressure from their own society, while Israelis who sought partnership struggled to find counterparts who could safely engage.

This helped me understand a central obstacle to peace: the culture of anti-normalization. Anti-normalization discourages dialogue, joint initiatives, business partnerships, cultural exchanges, and even personal friendships with Israelis or Jews. A Palestinian who speaks publicly about cooperation can be accused of betrayal. The result is that peace becomes socially dangerous and the public square becomes dominated by those who reject coexistence.

Two days ago, Moataz contacted me again. An article had appeared in a Gaza newspaper calling him a traitor. He believed the danger to his life had become immediate. He asked me to tell his story. "If something happens to me, it is because I chose peace."

Peace must first become socially acceptable among ordinary people. That requires protecting those courageous enough to see humanity in the other side. The ideology that condemns Moataz for reaching across the divide is the obstacle to peace. Until Palestinians who seek coexistence are free to do so without fear, and until activists stop treating anti-normalization as a moral virtue, those yearning for peace will continue to pay the highest price.

Solomon’s Pools: How the Palestinian Authority Neglected a Historical Treasure

To the north of the Israeli town of Efrat, and to the south of Bethlehem, lie Solomon’s Pools. The pools were part of an extensive water infrastructure originating in the Judean hills that supplied water to the Jewish Temples in Jerusalem. Whether the pools are those referred to by King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes (2.6), who wrote, “I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees,” remains a subject of debate.

In the Oslo Accords, Judea and Samaria were divided into three areas, which can generally be defined as follows: Area A – mostly under the complete jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, subject to overriding Israeli jurisdiction to combat terror; Area B – joint control with the PA holding jurisdiction for civilian affairs and Israel holding security jurisdiction; Area C – full Israeli jurisdiction.

Each area in which Israel transferred jurisdiction to the PA – i.e., every area that would become part of areas A and B – was carefully delineated on agreed maps, with area C being the remainder.

The Oslo Accords never envisaged a situation in which Areas A and B would be off limits to Israelis. Rather, the accords included specific provisions regarding both the treatment of Israelis present in those areas and the manner in which the PA treated Jewish historical sites that were included therein.

The Israeli participants in the talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli authors of the accords certainly did not anticipate a situation in which this area would become dominated by hostile PA forces and other Palestinian terrorist organizations, and that almost every entry of a Jew into those areas would potentially be accompanied by mortal danger.

Here, it should be stressed that the danger posed in areas A and B is only to Israeli Jews. Israeli Arabs – i.e., the millions of Arabs Israeli citizens – are free to enter, study, and even live in areas A and B.

Since the classification of an area as Area A, B, or C was not meant to be a hindrance to access, the Oslo negotiating sides saw no obstacle to including Solomon’s Pools within Area A. The inclusion of this specific site within area A, did, however, present a unique challenge to the PA.

According to the PA narrative, Jews are modern-day European colonizers of “Palestine,” a state that never actually existed. Jews, according to the PA, have no history or connection to the area. For the PA, the statement in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, in which “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country,” was simply wrong and baseless. The PA narrative is so dogmatic that it even outrageously denies any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount.

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07/07 Links Pt1: A Richer Iranian Regime Means a More Violent One; US launches ‘powerful strikes’ against Iran in response to Iran firing on ships in Hormuz

From Ian:

Tom Tugendhat: A Richer Iranian Regime Means a More Violent One

Supporters of the U.S.-Iran MoU in Tehran consider it an ideological victory, a deal that confirms the regime's claims to dominate the Strait of Hormuz and project power in the Middle East. Yet, skeptical observers want to know: How much extra security spending will be necessary if Iranian terror groups receive the biggest injection of funds in a generation?

A decade ago, once the Obama administration eased sanctions as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iranian regime spent billions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' support for the Assad regime in Syria and on Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen.

Some in Europe have viewed Iran as a regional problem, but in October 2025, the director general of MI5, Britain's domestic security agency, said the country had tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in the past year alone. Tehran's influence campaigns have evidently moved online too. Pro-Scottish independence accounts recently went silent when the internet was shut off in Iran.

Since the death of the last supreme leader, the IRGC has largely taken over the state. They aren't interested in serving their fellow citizens but in killing ours. Whatever any treaty says, once new money is in the country, it will allow funds once spent on essentials to be used to spread hate. No deal will tie the hands of the IRGC.

History suggests, then, that this deal is more expensive than the fine print lets on. A richer Iranian regime will be a more violent regime, costing lives in the region and threatening others around the world. That means national security services will face more hostile state activity and a new urgency in detecting and disrupting threats. They will need more resources for that fight.

Jake Wallis Simons: The three-word chant that demolishes the case for peace with Iran

The Iranians want peace, apparently. At least, that’s what Donald Trump has been claiming since he exchanged his determination to defeat the Islamic Regime for an insatiable desire to appease it.

Sure, the US president has sometimes oscillated back towards childish threats of death and destruction. Last month, he vowed to “finish the job” and “resume a bombing campaign” if Iran did not “behave”.

But his actions – cancelling the most effective parts of his campaign before signing a deal that vowed to end US hostility, lift all sanctions, fund a rebuilding effort, tie Israel’s hands in Lebanon and kick the nuclear can down the road – have already shown the world which of his Janus faces should be taken more seriously.

Well, one can only imagine how he feels watching the dreadful scenes at the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which was so provocatively timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the birth of America.

A cowed and broken regime might have been expected to tone down the usual “death to America” and “death to Israel” content, for fear of further aggravating the world’s only superpower. We’d better give it a rest, they might have muttered. For now, at least.

Instead, the rhetoric was gratuitous. Along with the standard “death to America” cries, they shouted, “our word is one! revenge! revenge!” amid the sight of Khamenei’s coffin. In the mob at Grand Mosalla, a banner displayed the slogan: “#KillTrump”.

Hamas Rakes in Millions, Prepares for War

Israeli security officials say Hamas is continuing to grow stronger and rebuild itself for a confrontation with Israel, both through money reaching it from outside Gaza and thanks to the "humanitarian" aid that continues to enter Gaza unchecked, about 600 trucks a day, while the real need is only about 200-250 trucks a day.

Hamas directly taxes the incoming trucks, collecting a tax of 15-30% from merchants. Hamas also forces merchants to sell their goods to traders operating under its auspices at a "supervised" price, so it can take a cut of the profits. In addition, Hamas manages to smuggle banned products into Gaza, such as cigarettes, which are sold at high prices and taxed at a higher rate.

There is evidence that Hamas sells electricity produced by hospital generators to residents living near the hospitals, using fuel that enters Gaza for humanitarian needs. It also charges rent for local merchants operating markets and stalls, and imposes fees for renewing business licenses. All this enables Hamas to efficiently fund its military arrays.

Sources in the defense establishment said, "The money Hamas receives from outside Gaza, along with the strengthening it achieves through the aid entering the Strip, enables it to rehabilitate military infrastructure and recruit new and young operatives who cannot find other work in Gaza. The money Hamas offers is their solution."

"We cannot repeat the statements we made before Oct. 7, according to which Hamas was deterred and would not attack. We cannot once again ignore what the other side is doing."

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Does Bernie Sanders think that he will never get the Scott Wiener treatment?

Bernie Sanders tweeted:

AIPAC, and other billionaire-funded super PACs, are spending millions to buy the Democratic primaries in Michigan and Minnesota.

This is not about Abdul El-Sayed v. Haley Stevens or Peggy Flanagan v. Angie Craig.

This is about Abdul and Peggy v. AIPAC and the establishment.

It is precious that a white millionaire who has been in Congress and the Senate for 35 years pretends that he isn't the "establishment."

Beyond that, Sanders gets the fault line completely wrong. The actual line runs between people who think America has been the greatest nation on earth for 250 years, including in how it treats Jews and its allies, and people who want that America torn down and replaced with something that would be horrific to Jews nationally and internationally. AIPAC's spending is defending a system it values for the good of America; there is nothing more American than that. 

Sanders, as a Jew, couldn't have become a senator without America being as exceptional as it is. He is the beneficiary of the system he now decries. He has power and wealth unimaginable in most other countries. Instead, he has dedicated his life to supporting those who want to tear it all down because Jews are considered oppressors in the us vs. them universe he pretends exists. 

The Hebrew term for what's missing from his framing is hakarat hatov — recognition of the good, the obligation to acknowledge the system that made him. Sanders is a Jew who reached the Senate, ran twice for president, and became the most influential socialist in American life; no country he holds up as a model would have let him get anywhere near that position as a Jew. He is also a millionaire several times over, built inside the American system he now describes as a corrupt machine serving only "the establishment," his wealth and his platform both products of the same country he suggests needs to be fundamentally remade.

Does Sanders have principles? In his early career he routinely voted against military aid to Israel; he even objected to others blaming the Second Intifada on Palestinian terror. But in 2014 he angrily defended Israel's Gaza campaign to his own constituents at a town hall, deploying the same "Hamas fires from populated areas" line the Israeli government itself used, and he stayed largely quiet on the subject through his first presidential run. 

In the wake of October 7 Sanders affirmed Israel's right to defend itself, pushing back on colleagues who wanted an instant cease-fire because Hamas couldn't be trusted. His own former campaign staffers signed an open letter demanding he reverse course, the DSA-aligned wing of his coalition organized against him, and within a year he was praising the International Criminal Court for indicting Israel's prime minister for doing what he had supported a year before.

His supposed principles are most obvious with his support of Graham Platner, the Senate candidate Sanders endorsed in Maine and has refused to abandon through a Totenkopf tattoo modeled on an SS insignia and a New York Times report in which multiple women described disturbing behavior, including an accusation of rape. Sanders waved off the tattoo as a distraction from "one or two more important issues" and asked the country for "a little bit of forgiveness." A Jewish senator campaigning for a man with Nazi imagery on his chest has no standing to lecture anyone about principles. It is all politics and Sanders pivots his towards where the wind is blowing. 

Picture a young socialist challenging him the way DSA candidates now challenge every establishment Democrat: career politician, out of touch, wealthy, doesn't represent the people anymore — the standard toolkit, and every word of it fits his record. Thirty-five years in federal office, a net worth in the millions, multiple properties, a movement he built now being primaried from further left by people who consider him a relic of the system he claims to be fighting. An AOC figure would eat him for lunch.

He wouldn't even need to imagine what that looks like. Scott Wiener already lived it. Wiener had called Israel's campaign in Gaza a genocide, voted against military aid, and stepped down as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus to appease exactly this crowd. None of it mattered. Activists chased him out of San Francisco's Trans March, screaming about his "Zionist handlers" and his "tainted bloodline," days after another activist cornered him at a bar and demanded he say "Free Palestine" on camera. Total capitulation bought him nothing, because the target was never his positions. It was that he's a Jew who hadn't disappeared.

Sanders, for all his purported principles, did not say a word in Wiener's defense. Because if he would, the same machine he helped build that attacks a young gay Jew with an impeccable progressive record would go after an older wealthy Jew in a nanosecond. He knows that better than most, because the knives have already come out for him.

When the socialists Sanders supports today inevitably turn on him tomorrow,  the country he's spent a career denouncing won't be there to save him. The Jewish state that he regularly demonizes, though, would welcome him. 

Because that is what principles look like. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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When the Hospital Ward Became a Front in the War Against Jews

Weeks before Sydney's Bondi Beach attack, an international trauma medicine conference in Perth was set to feature Dr. Elon Glassberg, the former head of the Israeli military's medical corps, sharing the protocols that gave the Israeli army the lowest battlefield mortality rate in military history. Anti-Israel doctors and nurses groups threatened mass pickets. The organizers folded, and the conference was cancelled. Australian trauma specialists lost the chance to learn techniques that could have saved lives at Bondi itself — a cost one Adelaide trauma doctor, interviewed for a major investigation by Megan Goldin in The Australian (paywalled), says his own colleagues paid weeks later.

That is the shape of the story Goldin lays out over more than thirty interviews with Australian doctors, nurses, and midwives: an industry-wide activist campaign, running since October 7, 2023, that has repeatedly put ideology ahead of the patient in front of the practitioner. It is a chilling article that did not get enough publicity.

The pattern started with symbols. Doctors and nurses wore "river to the sea" pins on shift and plastered hospital corridors with a Star of David crossed out in red. At Melbourne's Alfred Hospital — a facility built in part on tens of millions of dollars from Jewish philanthropy — one such sticker ended up on the bedside wall of a dying elderly Jewish patient, in the last hours of his life.

The online conduct got worse than the stickers. Physicians posted Nazi caricatures relabeled with the word "Zionist" instead of "Jew," a substitution one Jewish pediatric neurologist in the piece calls a way of dressing up old hatred as new virtue. A prominent doctor described Jews mourning at a Bondi memorial vigil as "genocide supporting Zionists." Facebook groups that once existed for parenting advice turned on Jewish members who so much as mentioned the 251 hostages held in Gaza, or the mass rape and slaughter of October 7 itself.

Then the activism reached the bedside. Two nurses at Sydney's Bankstown Hospital were filmed describing what they would do to an Israeli patient who came through their doors — footage serious enough that police became involved. After it surfaced, Jewish patients across the country began hiding their religion on hospital admission forms. Charlotte Frajman, the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, calls having to conceal her faith on a medical record a line she never expected to face in Australia.

The suspicious pattern shows up in cannula insertions — the ordinary act of placing an IV line. Frajman describes a nurse who took four attempts and left her bruised for weeks, after visibly registering her religion on his screen. Orit Brand, at a different Melbourne clinic, endured eight failed attempts before a different staff member was called in and succeeded immediately, without pain or bruising. Hospital protocol caps failed attempts at two before a colleague takes over; nurses at both hospitals confirm that cap was ignored. A mental health nurse who now counsels antisemitism victims calls the needle a nearly perfect weapon: it leaves a practitioner able to say, with total deniability, that the vein simply wouldn't cooperate.

The mistreatment extended to obstetrics and psychiatric care. A Jewish woman recovering from a C-section at a Sydney hospital was left overnight in a pool of blood with no pain relief while her newborn cried in the bassinet beside her. A Jewish ICU patient in Adelaide was given a bedside lecture by her own nurse denying the Holocaust and denying October 7. A Queensland psychotherapist posted online that Israelis were "not fit to live." A university psychiatry academic compared food-line queues in Gaza to gas chambers.

Regulatory failure compounded the clinical one. AHPRA, Australia's national health practitioner oversight body, took nearly three years to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and now faces a campaign from more than 1,400 healthcare workers demanding it reverse that decision. In the meantime, the agency's own numbers — 124 antisemitism complaints against 97 Islamophobia complaints since mid-2023 — obscure a documented double standard: midwife Sharon Stoliar drew more than fifteen complaints for objecting to a doctor's post quoting Hitler on "the Jewish question," while AHPRA closed the file on that doctor without action. Perth physician Deborah Cohen-Jones was formally cautioned by AHPRA for a social media post; the post in question compared a masked pro-Palestinian protester to a Klansman, after two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered in Washington. Stoliar, who isn't herself Jewish, was separately called "Jewish mafia" online and told her grandmother had been raped by Hitler in hell.

None of this occurs in a vacuum stripped of the war's brutality on both sides. But the piece is careful to note what the activist narrative leaves out: Hamas ran command bunkers inside Gaza hospitals, launched its October 7 assault partly from vehicles that departed hospital compounds, and held hostages inside them — one of whom was murdered by hospital medical staff. Palestinian Islamic Jihad's own misfired rocket, not an Israeli strike, caused the al-Ahli Hospital blast in the war's first days, a fact that took only hours to establish and made no difference to the doctors and nurses who marched through Sydney and Melbourne in scrubs chanting about Israeli hospital bombings.

The through-line across every incident Goldin documents is simple: a 2,500-year-old medical principle, that the patient's interest comes before the practitioner's politics, gave way the moment the patient was Jewish. A regulator that spent three years failing to say so plainly is now being lobbied, by more than a thousand of its own licensees, to say so even more quietly.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/06 Links Pt2: From Historian to Polemicist: What Went Wrong with Omer Bartov; Are the Democrats to become America’s anti-Israel party?; GOP Voters Remain Deeply Supportive of Israel

From Ian:

Jeffrey Herf: From Historian to Polemicist: What Went Wrong with Omer Bartov

Bartov’s betrayal of the craft of history is apparent in a deficiency of evidence and causal reasoning. He refers to the “genocidal intentions openly expressed by Israel politicians and senior military officials” as if this was a proven fact. Nowhere in this book is there a discussion of the details of Israeli military operations, of the battle for specific towns or areas in Gaza, or of how various Israeli units conducted themselves. Yet Bartov claims that “the pattern of operations by the IDF” in Gaza, which he has not examined, leads him to conclude “that these [genocidal] intentions were put into practice.” Attacks on civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, water supplies, and electricity grids “went far beyond military necessity … . All of this was not accidental, but part of a strategy to destroy Gaza as a livable space for Palestinians. Even if there was no formal order for genocide, military logic show that genocide was the consequence.” It was “no longer a coincidence” but was “a deliberately pursued policy” (pp. 193-194).

Bartov fails both to establish that a genocide occurred and, even on that assumption, to provide evidence or a causal account of it as a “deliberately pursued policy.” This is a shocking conclusion for an historian of Nazi Germany to advance. As readers familiar with the works of Yehuda Bauer, Richard Breitman, Christopher Browning, Lucy Dawidowicz, Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, Ian Kershaw, Peter Longerich, and many others know very well, the effort to establish the causal connections between Hitler’s ideology and the decision-making that led to the Final Solution has consumed thousands of pages, tens of thousands of footnotes, years of research in archives, careful examination of the dates and sequence of statements, meetings and orders to the Einsatzgruppen, and the construction and operation of the death camps. Yet Bartov, without access to Israeli archives and having made no serious examination of the public record of Israeli decision-making confidently asserts the existence of a “deliberately pursued policy.” There is no reason to take this conclusion seriously. Here again, Bartov has abandoned the historian’s craft in favor of polemics.

Bartov the polemicist concludes with an accusation of collective guilt against Israelis. “How,” he asks, “How do we come to terms with the obliteration of Gaza? Will Israel ever face justice for its genocidal actions?” (p. 201). The long-term consequence of “this travesty may, however, be that the genocide in Gaza will finally liberate Israel of its status as a unique state rooted in a unique Holocaust.” The “license that Israel, the land of the victim, has long enjoyed and abused may be expiring. The sons and daughters of the next generation will be free to rethink their own lives and their future, beyond the memory of the Holocaust; they will also have to pay for the sins of their parents and bear the burden of the genocide perpetrated in their name” (p. 203).

So having written a book of unsubstantiated accusations, Bartov plays judge and jury declaring the accused guilty. Israel will “not be viable,” will become a “pariah state … isolated from its allies and the Jewish diaspora,” and eventually “Israeli apartheid will implode, as happened in South Africa under the pressure of mass protests, violence an arms embargo and economic sanctions by the international community” (206). An alternative to that is the replacement of the existing state of Israel with some form of confederation of Israelis and Palestinians that replaces the Zionist project.

Bartov has written a book that combines a paucity of evidence and a compelling causal argument with a writing style that is likely to appeal to journalists and political activists and even academics eager to read an Israeli-born historian of the Holocaust who eloquently reinforces their increasingly antagonistic views not only of the State of Israel but also of the Israelis as people. The question is not whether Bartov is an antisemite, though it is clear that he thoroughly rejects Zionism. The issue is whether, in Israel: What Went Wrong, he advances arguments that are true or false—and, if false, whether the book recycles and skillfully refurbishes the oldest and most enduring accusation at the core of antisemitic ideology: namely, that the Jews, since the time of the Crucifixion, through the Koranic stories of Jews killing the prophets, to the blood libels and modern conspiracy theories blaming them for wars, are a people uniquely inclined by habit, tradition, and character toward the murder of the innocent. This calumny lay at the heart of centuries of anti-Jewish persecution and culminated in the Holocaust, when the Nazis propagated the idea of international Jewry bent on the “extermination” of the German people.

The charge of genocide against the State of Israel should be understood within this long history of antisemitic libels. Like the calumnies that preceded it, it transmutes claims supported by little or no evidence into articles of faith and passionately held convictions. The problem with Bartov’s argument is not that it is wrong because it is antisemitic; it is wrong because it is false. Yet the repeated circulation of such falsehoods against the Jews—and now against Israel—inevitably fuels antisemitism, intensifying hatred of Jews around the world, and deepening the growing hostility toward Israel.

Bartov’s tome is likely to contribute to the ongoing effort to make hatred of Israel respectable in the faculty lounge, the editorial office, the think tank, and in many political parties. I hope that in this case, the strategy of prestige transfer fails and that more discerning readers will ponder the question “What went wrong with Omer Bartov?” The book does not represent the standards expected from professional historians nor from what we should expect from a distinguished publisher such as Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Nevertheless, initial responses indicate that it may be a successful polemic and a commercial success. Its lack of scholarly distinction will not diminish its contribution to the global campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel. If so, it will not be the first time that a very bad book has an outsized impact on public and published opinion.

Jonathan Tobin: Are the Democrats to become America’s anti-Israel party?

Is it possible for the pendulum among Democrats to swing back to the center over the course of the next two years? Possibly. If leftist candidates, like Michigan’s pro-Islamist Abdul El-Sayeed, are defeated by Republicans in November (Maine’s Nazi-tattooed Israel-bashing Graham Platner may be crashing and burning due to allegations of sexual assault that may destroy his candidacy long before the voters render their verdict), it could convince many Democrats to change course. The far left’s dominance in primaries has given Trump an issue that could lead to the disappointment of the Democrats’ expectations for a midterm blue wave in the same manner that sunk the GOP’s hopes for a red wave in 2022.

Such a scenario could be ideal for Shapiro. But in a party that seems convinced that it lost the White House and Congress in 2024 because their leaders were insufficiently anti-Israel, rather than because of their embrace of far-left ideas like gender ideology and critical race theory, that sort of sensible thinking seems unlikely.

And it’s unclear if Fetterman, whose health issues have dogged him for the past four years, will even try to hold onto his seat in 2028. Though he has a respectable amount of money on hand in his campaign treasury, his fundraising efforts have stalled in the last couple of years. Were he to cross the aisle and become a Republican, that might be an easier path to another six-year term, though that seems unlikely. And while independents have won Senate races in other states, that is viewed as less likely in Pennsylvania, due to both the partisan spirit of the times and the way the commonwealth’s election system is skewed toward enforcing party dominance. The smart money is now on him simply not running for re-election. If so, he will be missed because of his rather unique style, both in terms of his centrism and his sartorial choices.

A haunting precedent
The problem for someone like Shapiro, who tries but usually fails to conceal his unquenchable ambition for higher office, is that the shift to the left among Democrats may have already gone too far to accommodate someone with his views, particularly on Israel.

Indeed, his hopes for a return of the Democratic Party of 1992 should worry rather than encourage him. In that time, the dominant politician in Pennsylvania was one of his predecessors in Harrisburg, Gov. Bob Casey Sr. (father to his namesake, who represented Pennsylvania in the Senate from 2007 to 2025). The popular Casey was a throwback to an earlier era of American politics in many ways, not least because he is usually referred to as the last of the pro-life Democrats. The Clinton camp denied him a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention largely because they felt that it was no longer possible to give that sort of prominence to someone who was so out of touch with the rest of the party on an issue on which so many felt so strongly.

That precedent should haunt Shapiro. Because just as anti-abortion Democrats are now extinct, it’s entirely possible that if current trends hold, by 2028 or soon thereafter, pro-Israel Democrats might be put in the same position. Indeed, right now, I’d say the odds of Shapiro being denied a speaking slot at the 2028 DNC are slightly higher than his rather minimal chances of being nominated for president at that gathering.

Even if you don’t share Shapiro’s high opinion of his capabilities, that’s tragic. If, as recent primaries and the polls indicate, opposition to Israel is a requirement to get the votes of most Democrats, the party is on the verge of becoming as anti-Israel as it is pro-abortion. While the rise of antisemitism on the right is creating genuine concerns about the future of the Republican Party, the far more serious situation on the left is now creating the possibility that the national Democratic Party will soon not be so much divided on Israel but will have become a space where politicians like Shapiro, let alone Fetterman, will have no place in it.

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07/06 Links Pt1: Why Entebbe Wouldn’t be Celebrated Today; Hamas move to dissolve Gaza governance ‘means nothing,’; Sa’ar says Turkish FM’s remarks a ‘clear call for genocide’

From Ian:

Why Entebbe Wouldn’t be Celebrated Today

Zionism, once understood by many as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, had become, in much of Western discourse, synonymous with colonialism, racism and oppression. The Jewish homeland became the Jewish oppressor, while Jewish self-defence became uniquely suspect.

After the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, many Jews found themselves accused not because they celebrated murder, but because they celebrated rescue.

Think about that for a moment.

More Jews were murdered on 7 October than on any day since the Holocaust, hundreds more were kidnapped, families watched parents, children and grandparents dragged into Gaza to face torture, sexual violence and captivity.

Yet the expectation placed upon Israel by much of the international community was unlike that demanded of almost any other democracy. If rescuing your own citizens risks too many civilian casualties because terrorists have embedded themselves among civilians, then perhaps your citizens should remain where they are.

That expectation would have been unimaginable in 1976.

The Jewish state was created because Jewish history had demonstrated, catastrophically, what happens when Jews lack both sovereignty and the means to defend themselves. After the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, many seemed to believe that lesson should be forgotten.

Entebbe taught the world that Jews would never again be abandoned. Nuseirat revealed how many people now believed they should have been.

This is not an argument against criticising Israel. Criticise governments, criticise military strategy, criticise political leaders. Every democracy should expect that scrutiny. It is, however, an argument against changing the moral principles by which democracies are judged.

Because if we conclude that the rescue of hostages becomes illegitimate simply because terrorists have made the rescue sufficiently costly, then we hand every terrorist organisation in the world a blueprint.

Hide behind civilians, kidnap innocents, raise the price of rescue. Wait for democracies to decide that saving their own people is no longer worth the condemnation.

Fifty years ago, the world looked at Entebbe and saw a democracy refusing to abandon its citizens. Almost fifty years later, much of the world looked at Nuseirat and asked whether those citizens should have been rescued at all.

Fifty years ago, Israel was admired because it refused to abandon Jews. Today, it is too often condemned for refusing to abandon them.

The operation changed remarkably little. It was the world that changed.

Israel urges WHO to condemn Hamas over press conference at Gaza hospital

Israel’s mission in Geneva on Monday called on the World Health Organization to denounce Hamas after the terrorist group held a press conference outside a hospital in the Gaza Strip.

“Hamas held a press conference today at Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza,” the mission wrote on X, using the Arabic name for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.

“Any silence on Hamas’ exploitation of the hospital for propaganda will be a choice,” it continued, tagging the WHO and its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“Al-Shifa, Nasser, and Kamal Adwan Hospitals, all have been abused by Hamas to hide terrorists and weapons, cynically and brazenly. They used them as terror hubs to hide and torture hostages. And now they use a hospital as a stage for propaganda,” the post added. “With each step, WHO’s silence is so much more deafening.”

The press conference was held outside the emergency department of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital on Monday afternoon by Ismail Thawabta, head of Hamas’s “government” media office, and Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem.

Thawabta and Qassem announced that Hamas was dissolving one of the key “civilian” bodies through which it administers Gaza, while saying employees would remain in their posts, in what appeared to be a largely symbolic move.

An Israeli official told Kan News public broadcaster that the purported resignation of the Hamas government, while all of its members remain in office, was “a spin that means absolutely nothing.”

A Turning Point in a Parking Lot

A single nighttime photo from October 17, 2023 exposed the Hamas playbook and Al Jazeera’s role in laundering it through global media and human rights organizations. It was the first consequential press event for Palestinians since October 7 and was a turning point in the war.

The photo is the choreographed scene broadcast live from Al-Shifa hospital in the immediate aftermath of an explosion at the nearby Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health claimed that 500 Palestinians were killed in a “targeted” Israeli airstrike of the 80-bed hospital in Gaza City just two hours before.

It was a lie.

An errant rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) landed among a dense crowd of Palestinian civilians seeking shelter in the hospital parking lot. The bodies from Al-Ahli Baptist were rushed to a press conference at Gaza’s largest hospital, where they knew international media were already stationed and ready.

The shrouded bodies are presumably real. But note the unidentified young man in front of the podium posing with a dead infant still in its bloodied clothing. Note the second young man holding the corpse of a young girl.

This was not merely a press conference. It was macabre theatre for a global audience that was in denial about the mass atrocities Hamas perpetrated only ten days prior.

It was an attempt to stop the war while Hamas still held 240 hostages and before Israeli ground forces could enter the Strip to rescue them and stop the incessant rocket fire.

While it failed to halt Israel's offensive, this is the event that crystallized the "Israel bombs hospitals" narrative and that primed audiences for the rapid spread of the genocide libel.

At the press conference, Dr. Abu-Sittah said:
“Every western politician who has declared unconditional support for Israel’s war effort on the Palestinian people has the blood of these children on their hands. That unconditional support is what led us to this massacre… no other country feels free to target hospitals and get away with it. What happened today is a war crime.”

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