Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

The Candy Tax: A lesson in civics for US students (book excerpt)

Most schools don't teach civics anymore. The reasons are mundane: schools teach to standardized tests. But this is a mistake. Citizenship includes obligations, and obligations mean understanding and participating in the important questions of the day.

This is an excerpt from my book Reclaiming the Covenant: America's Remarkable 250 Years and Assuring it Continues. It describes a fun way to teach how bills work in Congress, where the students affect the decisions by writing letters to their representatives and Ai ensures that even the teachers don't know what will happen.

06/15 Links Pt2: Coleman Hughes vs. Peter Beinart; Boy George: ‘I would never turn my back on my Jewish friends’; Post-Platner Democrats must ask: ‘Are we the baddies?’

From Ian:

David Collier: From anti-Zionism to Antizionism

One of the most disturbing political developments in the modern West is watching self-described progressive universalists adopt one of the most aggressive nationalist movements on the planet while failing to recognise it as nationalism at all.

That contradiction is the beating heart of antizionism.

Antizionism presents itself as opposition to nationalism while marching beneath a national flag. It speaks the language of universal human rights while denying Jews the very national rights it demands for others. And because the movement refuses to recognise itself for what it is, it increasingly treats opposition not as disagreement, but as complicity with evil.

Spurred on by Islamist rhetoric, fed by decades of Soviet-era propaganda, and radicalised inside social media echo chambers, modern antizionism draws much of its energy from antisemitism – a prejudice far older than the State of Israel itself.

And that is what makes the movement so dangerous: The moral certainty with which it carries itself. The belief that any action, slogan, intimidation, or even violence can become justified once directed against the world’s designated evil: Israel.

And the most unsettling part of all?

They believe they are the good guys.

Stop using the hyphen. Antizionism is a modern hate movement.

Boy George: ‘I would never turn my back on my Jewish friends’

Pop icon Boy George says he would “never turn his back on his Jewish friends”, despite being targeted by pro-Palestinian activists.

The colourful singer who achieved worldwide fame in the 80s with his group Culture Club, lived in Golders Green during the 90s and was in the area on the day on the day two Jewish men were stabbed.

He was interviewed ahead of a charity auction which will see some his most outrageous clothing sold to raise funds for struggling musicians.

George, 65, whose biggest hits include Do You Really Want to Hurt Me and Karma Chameleon, has incorporated the Star of David into some of his clothes.

He said: “Over the years it’s been a really personal thing. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have compassion for Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that I agree with what’s going on in Israel, but I am always going to defend the people that I love.

He added: “I have a lot of Jewish friends and there would never be a situation where I’d turn my back on them.”

He also spoke about Culture Club’s Jewish drummer Jon Moss, and his great friend, club promoter Phillip Sallon.

George told The Sunday Telegraph: “Jon Moss was one of the great loves of my life. He’s Jewish, and I remember when I met Philip Sallon [known as the ‘King of Clubs’ in the 80s] he said: ‘I’m a Jew, I’m a homosexual and I’m f--king proud of it.’”

The auction will feature some of his hats from British milliners Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy, and the striking Hasidic Samet hats that he’s worn throughout his life.

He says he's always worn the hats as a subliminal symbol of support and one coming under the hammer is a felt black hat, given to him by Moss.

In May he hit the headlines after appearing on Patrick Kielty’s Irish talk show.

Having been in Golders Green on the day of the attack, which saw two Jewish men allegedly stabbed by a Somali-born British national, he expressed his support for the Jewish community.

In response, Kielty referenced “the backdrop of that obviously is the horrors of Gaza and this is a complex thing”.

It led to a fierce backlash online, with the charity Holocaust Awareness Ireland condemning the Kielty's response because the show airs on the Irish state broadcaster.

George, who appeared in Eurovision singing alongside San Marino’s entry, was also singled out by pro-Palestinian activists who criticised him for participating, as well as for his statements supporting Israel’s continued participation in the contest.

Brendan O'Neill: How synagogues became fair game for the Israelophobic mob

In fact, the political class helped to whip up the anti-Zionist mob. The day before the Edgware event, London mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted: ‘I condemn any attempt to sell property in the settlements in the West Bank, be that in London or anywhere else in the world.’ Again, the organisers firmly deny that West Bank property was on sale. The mayor’s comment came off like incitement of the mob. He was making it clear that he, too, was morally repulsed by what was due to unfold in Edgware, effectively giving a green light to every wanker who wanted to rage about it. Let’s see if he now tweets: ‘I condemn anyone who tells London’s Jews to “watch their backs”.’ I won’t hold my breath.

There’s one thing the synagogue mob didn’t reckon with – the determination of Edgware’s Jews to defend their place of worship. Huge numbers of Jews and their friends gathered to tell the keffiyeh bigots that ‘They shall not pass’. It was like a mini-Cable Street, only this time ‘the left’ was firmly on the other side – not the side of Jews who only want to live free of harassment, but the side of that twisted Islamo-left nexus that has made a bloodsport of taunting ‘Zionists’. The Jews danced and sang and waved the Israeli flag and the Union flag: a display of genuine anti-fascism against the fake anti-fascists of the Jew-state haters.

The magnitude of these events cannot be overstated. The unthinkable is not just thinkable now – it is doable. In vile mimicry of those 1930s mobs that swarmed synagogues and boycotted Jewish goods, now ‘the righteous’ scream about Zionism at the doors of synagogues and boycott Jewish State goods. In Manhattan, keffiyeh gangs raged outside the Park East Synagogue, also on the pretext that it was hosting an Israeli real estate event. A Jewish girl had her hair violently yanked by a masked bigot. Placards featuring Jeffrey Epstein said: ‘Free America from Isra-hell.’ The synagogue mobs of the 1930s likewise looked upon the Jews as a paedophilic race from which Germany should be ‘freed’. There have also been synagogue protests in New Jersey, LA, Canada and France.

At the New Jersey protest, Jews were called ‘Zionist pigs’ and ‘baby killers’. At the Paris protest, hundreds of Jews were trapped inside their synagogue as stones rained down on the building. And now in Edgware, Jews are told by a frothing mob to ‘watch their backs’. Can we be real? These are not protests – they’re practice pogroms. We are witnessing the sinister resuscitation of the medieval belief that Jews are pigs who kill children and thus their ‘Synagogues of Satan’ are fair game for mob fury. Not content with making life harder for Jews in the West, now the keffiyeh army tells them they are forbidden from escaping to Israel. So where can they go? Don’t answer that.

It is a testament to the battering our civilisational values have taken since 7 October that 1930s-style mobbings have returned and no one in power seems to give a damn. Good on the Jews who stood up to the keffiyeh bigots in Edgware – next time I want to see many more non-Jews standing with them.

06/15 Links Pt1: Trump’s ‘peace deal’ leaves all the big questions unanswered; Netanyahu: Iran will not have nukes ‘with or without an agreement’

From Ian:

Trump’s ‘peace deal’ leaves all the big questions unanswered

There is as yet no clear answer to any of the key questions that prompted the original military action. No solution to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear plans, its backing of proxy armies, its brutal oppression of the Iranian people, or even its control of the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, no answer to the problem of the Islamic Republic itself, the Islamist source of so much instability in the Middle East and increasingly beyond.

Replete with potential for seeming concessions and fudges, this ceasefire does not appear to be a victory for the US. It looks and feels like a testament to the Trump administration’s desperate desire to end the war – which the vast majority of Americans now oppose – regardless of the cost to itself and to its chief regional ally, Israel.

Indeed, one of the main casualties of this conflict has been the White House’s relationship with Israel. Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered into this war in seeming lockstep in their opposition to the Iranian regime. But the two allies’ geopolitical interests have since diverged. Finding himself under increasing domestic pressure due in part to rising energy costs, Trump has zeroed in on reopening the Strait of Hormuz and therefore making peace with Iran. The Israeli state, meanwhile, has rather more existential concerns and has continued to focus on destroying Iran’s proxy armies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is understandably rather less interested in making peace with a regime that remains constitutionally hellbent on its destruction.

With Israel’s ongoing war with Iran’s proxies frequently intruding on negotiations between the US and Iran, Trump has even started publicly criticising Netanyahu – a tension that Iran, Hezbollah and the rest have frequently played on. That’s why Hezbollah continues to fire rockets into northern Israel when US-Iran peace negotiations appear to be reaching sensitive points. As Jake Wallis Simons has observed, it’s designed to elicit a response from Israel and further drive a wedge between the two allies. Just last week, Trump called Netanyahu a ‘difficult guy’ who has ‘no fucking judgment’.

So we now have a situation in which negotiations to end the joint US-Israeli war with Iran seem to have sidelined Israel almost entirely. And no wonder. There is little about the mooted deal that Israel would deem worth supporting. Not least the demand that Israel cease operations against Iranian proxies – something that, according to Haaretz, the Israel Defence Forces will not do. The Times of Israel put the matter succinctly a couple of weeks ago:
‘The Iranian regime still exists. It still possesses much of its ballistic missile arsenal and its stockpile of enriched uranium. And it also controls the Strait of Hormuz.’

From Israel’s perspective, the Islamic Republic, armed with the Strait of Hormuz, looks more threatening now than it did a few months ago.

None of this is to suggest that the Islamic Republic, already an economic horror show, is emerging from this conflict unscathed. The military assault of the past few months has devastated Iranian sea and air power, and has wiped out a whole stratum of leadership, including the Ayatollah Khamenei himself. Nevertheless, it has survived in the face of the Great Satan, and that is more than enough for it to feel emboldened.

In the next couple of months, the US and Iran may well reach an agreement that both the White House and Tehran can dress up as a victory. But for as long as the Islamic Republic and its proxies menace what they deride as ‘the Zionist entity’, peace in the Middle East will remain as elusive as ever.

JPost Editorial: Israel cannot applaud an Iran deal that leaves key threats intact

A ceasefire is valuable if it locks in Iranian defeat. It is dangerous if it locks in Iranian survival.

The reported 60-day negotiation period is the most troubling part. Sixty days sounds orderly in Washington. In the Middle East, it is enough time for Iran to move assets, rebuild confidence, reframe the war at home, and test how badly the US wants quiet. Tehran knows how to use delay. Hezbollah knows how to use delay. Israel has paid for those delays before.

Lebanon may be the immediate danger. Any arrangement that restrains Israel while leaving Hezbollah in place is unacceptable. Northern Israel cannot be secured by language in a US-Iran memorandum. Kiryat Shmona, Metula, and the Galilee need Hezbollah to be moved, disarmed, and deterred.

Trump deserves credit for understanding Iran’s danger better than many Western leaders. He left the Obama deal. He imposed pressure. He backed Israel at critical moments.

That record makes this moment more serious. Trump should not attach his name to a weaker version of the mistake he once condemned.

If this agreement removes Iran’s nuclear threat, cuts off its proxies, protects Israel’s freedom of action, and gives the regime no path back to strength, the administration should publish the details and defend them.

If it does less than that, Israel should not applaud.

Neither should Congress.

Andrew Fox: Anatomy of a debacle

This piece has been weeks in the writing, awaiting a conclusion. Now we have it, this long article is an autopsy of the calamity we have watched unfold for the last few months. As with all my writing on the Iran War, I will keep this free. All I ask is that you share and subscribe if you do not already.

Yesterday, Trump announced the deal he had spent weeks insisting he did not need.

The White House has called it a peace deal. At this stage, it is a memorandum of understanding, scheduled for formal signature in Switzerland on Friday. The text remains opaque: we do not yet know the final terms. However, the outline is clear enough to grasp the political meaning. Washington appears to have bought time. Hormuz is to reopen. The naval blockade is to be lifted. Iran receives some combination of oil waivers, asset releases, sanctions relief, or economic breathing space. The nuclear file moves into a 60-day negotiating window. Trump gets a ceasefire and lower oil prices. Tehran gets survival, liquidity, and time.

That is the endpoint of the debacle, at least for now. A war launched with maximalist assumptions has reached an interim understanding that leaves the regime in place, Hezbollah in the field, Iran’s missile architecture as the central fact of regional security, and the nuclear question in the long grass. What forced Washington’s hand was the oil clock. Emergency reserves, rerouting schemes, naval workarounds, tanker insurance, Asian demand destruction, and political patience were all running down at once. Trump rushed to a deal because the alternative was a global oil shock that would hit American gas stations just in time for the domestic political season.

The war was supposed to show that American and Israeli power could reorder the region. Instead, it showed how quickly tactical dominance can become strategic dependence. Washington could destroy targets inside Iran, but it could not force Tehran to surrender its political position. It could not open the Strait of Hormuz by military means at an acceptable cost. It could not push Saudi Arabia into war. It could not impose normalisation with Israel on the Gulf states. It could not get Europe to join the campaign. It could not convince China to pull away from Iran. It could not stop Gulf states from privately seeking understandings with Tehran to keep themselves off Iran’s target list. It could not protect allies from cheaper Iranian missiles without burning through expensive Western interceptors at a rate that made every other theatre nervous.

The global image of American power has been significantly diminished. The United States remains capable of extraordinary destruction. The war has made something else equally clear: destruction is not the same thing as control. The limits of American hard power have been brutally exposed.

Controversy in Italy over religious painting with an Orthodox Jew counting money

From Shalom.it (Italy):

The Jewish Community of Naples has called for the immediate removal of one of the installations created for the Feast of the Four Altars in Torre del Greco, a historic city event that combines religious celebrations, art, and cultural initiatives.

At the center of the protest is a work inspired by the Last Supper, displayed in the Largo Costantinopoli area, which features the figure of "an elderly bearded man with a black hat handling money," an image the Community believes evokes "a classic anti-Judaism stereotype."

In a letter addressed to Mayor Luigi Mennella and also forwarded to the relevant authorities, the Council of the Jewish Community of Naples called the display of an image deemed "offensive and defamatory towards Jews" in a public space "unacceptable." The document calls for the installation's removal and announces the possibility of legal action against those responsible.

The contested work was created by artist Salvatore Seme. In the explanation accompanying the installation, the artist states that he was inspired by an episode from the Gospel of Luke in which Jesus sits at the table of sinners and tax collectors. The work, titled Frantio Panis, offers a contemporary reinterpretation of the Gospel scene; the figure in question, he claims, represents the tax collector Levi counting money.

Because that's what modern tax collectors look like, right?

The artist responded, and it didn't help matters:

“I am saddened and surprised,” said Seme, “by this reaction from the Jewish community, especially by being accused of Nazi-Fascism when I am the complete opposite, like most artists. To create the Altar, I was inspired by the theme and interpreted in a modern way two passages from the Gospel of Luke. It tells of the episode where Jesus sits at the table with sinners, including Levi, the tax collector, and Christ tells parables of mercy. To make the work, I studied the Gospel, and it was never my intention to offend anyone.”

Why was Levi depicted with those features?

“How do you represent a tax collector of the time—in a modern way?” Seme replied. “It seems absurd to accuse artists of antisemitism. I regret that someone felt offended by my work; the message was entirely different and not the banal one of antisemitism. Everyone is free to interpret art as they wish. What scares me is that just talking about Jews brings accusations of racial hatred and Nazi-Fascism.”

Let's think. He wanted to portray a modern tax collector as a sinner. When I asked various AIs to draw one, none of them drew stereotypical Jews. Isn't that strange?

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)

06/14 Links: Trump says peace deal with Iran completed; The Case Against Another Iran Deal; Operation Rising Lion: One year later; Somaliland president on first visit to Israel

From Ian:

We Are Told that Israel Has Lost the World

Since Oct. 7, we are told that Israel has lost the world. It has squandered international goodwill. It has alienated its allies. It has isolated itself through its conduct in Gaza. Israel was attacked in the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, responded by fighting a just war against the organization that carried out that massacre, and somehow emerged as the primary culprit in the eyes of much of the international community.

There is only one problem with this theory. It assumes Israel enjoyed remarkable support before Oct. 7. When exactly was this golden age? Was it when student groups were calling for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the Jewish state? Was it when anti-Israel activism became a permanent feature of university life? Or was it at the UN, where Israel has long occupied a unique category of international obsession?

From 2015 through 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted more than twice as many resolutions against Israel as it did against all other countries combined. At the UN Human Rights Council, democratic Israel has routinely attracted more condemnation than regimes run by dictators, warlords, and revolutionary clerics. Apparently, the world's most pressing human rights crisis is not Syria, Iran, North Korea, or Russia.

We are told Gaza transformed Israel into an international outcast. Curiously, many international institutions seem to have reached that conclusion years before Gaza. The idea that Oct. 7 destroyed decades of goodwill would be more persuasive if anyone could point to the decades of goodwill.

Before Israeli forces had entered Gaza in significant numbers, before casualty figures dominated headlines, before military operations had fully unfolded, many people had already decided who the villain was. A remarkable amount of outrage appeared before Israel had done much of anything in Gaza at all. Israel is subjected to demands rarely made of any other country. It is expected to defeat enemies without defeating them and eliminate threats without using force.

If support disappears the moment it is tested, was it ever support at all? An ally who vanishes during a war was never much of an ally. And support that exists only during periods of calm is not support in any meaningful sense of the word.

The Case Against Another Iran Deal

Iran has treated international commitments as instruments of convenience, complying when under acute pressure and accelerating forbidden activities when that pressure eases. Verification has always been the Achilles' heel. Iran's territory, history of undeclared facilities, and demonstrated ability to delay or obstruct inspectors make robust, real-time monitoring extraordinarily difficult.

Even the 2015 JCPOA's relatively intrusive provisions proved insufficient once political will in key capitals wavered. Enforcement mechanisms, whether snapback sanctions or military consequences, have depended on sustained U.S. and allied commitment - something that has proven elusive across administrations.

Military pressure alone has not transformed the regime's ideology or behavior. The Islamic Republic's core opposition to U.S. influence and support for regional proxies has survived leadership losses and battlefield setbacks. Long-term strategy against Iran has repeatedly foundered on domestic political shifts.

Iran's leadership has learned to play for time, calculating that U.S. policy coherence rarely survives a single presidential term. Any agreement that depends on consistent enforcement across future administrations asks for something the American political system has not delivered on Iran policy in decades.

The current posture - sustained but episodic pressure combined with openness to a possible new deal - assumes that a verifiable and enforceable agreement is achievable with a leadership whose ideology prioritizes resistance and whose external patrons have incentives to help it evade constraints.

A decisive and overt regime change campaign represents the alternative that confronts these realities directly. It does not rely on persuading Iran's current leadership to abandon core strategic assets or on maintaining perfect verification against a determined cheater. Instead, it targets the source of the problem. We must weigh the risks of action against the mounting, compounding perils of inaction.

Jake Wallis Simons: The Iranian ayatollahs don’t want a deal. They want apocalypse

Over the past few days, Iran has shot down an American helicopter, attacked Kuwait's international airport, menaced Hormuz with drones, and launched missiles at Israel. This is not the behavior of an adversary that is desperate for peace.

Meanwhile, Iran has been secretly sealing off its subterranean cache of highly enriched uranium. This will make securing the material, America's main objective, immeasurably more difficult, even if an agreement is signed.

The regime has always had the same beliefs. Apocalyptic war against the West will cause a Messianic figure to emerge from invisibility and lead the Shia faithful to global domination in the endtimes. That remains its reality. You can't do a deal with that.

Melissa Brodsky notes on Substack that a road was recently "adopted" in West Bloomfield, MI by a group called "Voices for Palestinians" to be responsible for cleaning it up.

A sign was placed on the road at taxpayer expense to mark the portion adopted.

When people or organizations adopt a road in Oakland County, they get to choose from all available roads. So churches will typically adopt a road near their facilities, or people will adopt one in memory of a loved one who might have died in a traffic accident on that road.

Out of all the roads available in Oakland County, "Voices for Palestinians" chose Orchard Lake Road between West Maple Road and Walnut Lake Road - the epicenter of the Jewish community of West Bloomfield. There are at least 8 synagogues and at least three Jewish schools plus Jewish community centers and other Jewish organizations near that mile of road.

Including Temple Israel, which was attacked last March by an Islamist terrorist. For Palestine.

There are no mosques that I can find in that immediate area.

Who is "Voices for Palestinians?" I can find no mention of this group anywhere. There are plenty of pro-Palestinian groups in the Detroit metro area but this one seems to have no website, no social media presence. No one ever heard of them before this sign was put up.

This is the only major road that hadn't already been adopted in the Jewish neighborhood. The sign is northbound right at the entrance of the Jewish community.

It is hard to escape the idea that this organization was created just to get the county to put up the sign, with the primary purpose to intimidate the Jewish community of West Bloomfield. It costs nothing, except volunteering twice a year. (And if they don't show up, the sign is still there for a year, so it does its job.)

This is legal Jew-baiting.

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)

At the far Left site Countercurrents, Dr. Ghassan Shahrour writes "Why Palestinianism Is Misread as Hostility, and Why That Misreading Must End."

This should be fun.

First of all, what exactly is "Palestinianism?" Shahrour gives us a definition. Actually, his short article gives us about eight definitions.

Palestinianism is a dignity-centered framework grounded in humanitarian practice.
Palestinianism examines how systems of protection operate, why they fail, and how they might become more equitable.
The purpose of Palestinianism is not to elevate one people above another. It is to use a prolonged encounter with exclusion to illuminate how protection systems function across contexts.
Palestinianism critiques structures, not identities.
Palestinianism is grounded in humanitarian practice, not ideology.
Palestinianism reveals how protection mechanisms can be selectively applied, withheld, or manipulated.
Palestinianism brings suppressed memory into analytical view.
Palestinianism offers something constructive: a universal lens for analyzing exclusion and a human-centered ethic that applies to all peoples. It helps identify structural failures in protection systems and offers pathways toward more equitable responses. It is grounded in decades of humanitarian practice and in the lived experience of communities whose dignity has been repeatedly denied.

Do you understand now?

No one does. It is defined by whatever word salad comes into his head. It sounds roughly like a field of social science, or maybe psychology, or perhaps politics. But from what we can see, it has nothing to do with...Palestinians.

Which is really the point. If it was about Palestinians, then Palestinianism would be critiquing Lebanon or Jordan or Egypt for how they mistreat Palestinians today, or Gulf and other Arab countries for refusing to give Palestinians citizenship even after four generations of living there. But Palestinianism is really anti-Israelism dressed up as a positive movement for a people who are, at best, pawns in the entire framework.

But let's take the article seriously for a minute. It quotes Jewish thinkers to defend Palestinianism: "Jewish philosopher Judith Butler." "Jewish historian Alon Confino." "Jewish physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté, who lost family members in the Holocaust." Richard Falk is introduced as "one of the most respected Jewish public intellectuals of our time." Ilan Pappe is also quoted, and Eyal Weizman is mentioned. All of them are anti-Zionist Jews.

Since only Jewish experts are quoted, most of them explicitly as Jews, then Shahrour must believe that Jews have a special insight into Palestinianism and support its goals. But 90% of Jews support Israel. I would venture that, say, Bernard-Henri Lévy is a bit more prestigious than Richard Falk as a public intellectual. If Jews are the ones to listen to about Palestinianism and Israel, then by Shahrour's own standards, he should be a Zionist.

In this light, Shahrour's use of Judith Butler is richly ironic. He says that she charged that Zionists “instrumentalize Jewish identity to shield power from accountability.” Which is exactly what he does by citing seven Jews and not one non-Jew.

Let's go deeper.

Sharour says that a protection system is a mechanism that shields a favored party and can be "selectively applied, withheld, or manipulated," under which "accusations become tools of narrative control rather than genuine ethical concerns."

He just perfectly described his entire essay. Palestinianism shields a favored party — Palestinian nationalism — and it withholds that shielding from every critic by defining them out of the picture. It manipulates the incoming accusation, converting bias, antisemitism, and hidden-agenda charges alike into evidence for the position they were meant to test. Each objection is reclassified, on contact, as a "tool of narrative control." Shahrour has built, in the act of denouncing protection systems, a flawless specimen of one, and it fails in exactly the manner his definition specifies. if Sharour would point his own framework at Palestinianism itself as a protection system, by his own metrics, it fails.

This is a ridiculous essay dressed up in pseudo-academic garb. Maybe readers of Countercurrents think it is brilliant, but if you actually try to figure out his arguments, there aren't any - just his own assertions framed in such a way that there is little to attack since he keeps his subject so nebulous. But since he claims that it is a structural analysis, any structural analysis of his system shows that it damns itself.

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)

06/13 Links: Any deal with Tehran is a deadly farce; Mike Pence: The Case for Israel; Why Israel should close every UN office in the country

From Ian:

Mike Pence: The Case for Israel

As anti-Israel and even antisemitic sentiment has taken hold on the progressive left, many right-wing populists have become isolationists who criticize U.S. support for Israel and even indulge in age-old conspiracies grounded in antisemitism. Chief among those voices is Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who was fired following the $787 million settlement of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems following the 2020 election. Carlson has condemned U.S. support for Israel and in 2024 he platformed a Holocaust denier who called Winston Churchill the "chief villain of the Second World War." During an interview with the avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes on his show in 2025, Carlson actually denounced American conservatives who support Israel, saying that Christian Zionism is a "heresy" and that non-Jewish Republicans who support Israel are "seized by this brain virus."

He and other populists have also questioned U.S. military support for Israel. Carlson even predicted that Trump's strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would "end his presidency." His fellow right-wing populist, podcaster Steve Bannon, warned that a U.S. strike on Iran would start "the Third World War." The result was quite the opposite: Israel and America demonstrated strength and won the peace. Trump's decision to bomb was a bold move that made the world safer and eased tensions throughout the Middle East. It diminished Iran's ability to threaten its neighbors. The action even helped secure the release of Israelis whom Hamas had held hostage for two years. Carlson and Bannon were wrong and allowed their anti-Israel and isolationist views to cloud their judgment. Fortunately, in that instance, Trump ignored them. Conservatives should recognize open hostility to U.S. support for Israel for what it is and reject these voices in shaping our movement or our party.

In addition to rejecting anti-Israel sentiment, conservatives must reject antisemitism of any form in our nation. Sadly, many right-wing populists are not simply wrong about geopolitics. Many also traffic in antisemitism. Fringe figures such as Fuentes and Candace Owens have attracted followings for their podcasts and social media posts by spewing filth. These and other so-called influencers on the right deliver diatribes full of hateful dog whistles, spin conspiracy theories about Jewish influence, and interview guests who question the reality and enormity of the Holocaust. They often hide behind the claim that they are merely "asking questions." They are in fact utterly incurious, always seeming to know in advance the answers they want to hear and amplify. Just as National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. expelled antisemites from the conservative movement in the 1960s, today's conservatives must reject the new voices of antisemitism today. There is no room in the conservative movement for opponents of U.S. support for Israel, and there is no place in America for antisemitic rhetoric and bigotry.

The United States must remain engaged with Israel and never compromise its safety and security. Radical Islamic terrorism knows no borders as it targets America, Israel, and other nations. It respects no creed as it steals the lives of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And it understands no reality other than brute force.

America must continue to provide Israel with the means to defend itself and its people. Peace in the Middle East begins with Israeli strength. When Israel is strong, old enemies can start over and become partners. Familiar foes can find new ground for cooperation. And the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael can come together as never before. While at times it may be hard to see, Jews and Muslims have more that unites them than divides them—not only in common threats, but in the common hope for a future of prosperity and peace, and in the common ancestry of a monotheistic belief that runs throughout these lands. Through engagement with Israel and its neighbors, the United States must seek to restore the rich splendor of religious diversity across the Middle East, so that all faiths may once again flourish in the lands where they were born.

Nearly four thousand years ago, a man left his home in Ur of the Chaldeans and traveled to Israel. He ruled no empire, wore no crown, commanded no army, performed no miracles, and delivered no prophecies. Yet to him was promised "descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky." Today, Jews, Christians, and Muslims—more than half the population of the earth, and nearly all the people of the Middle East—claim Abraham as their forefather in faith. In the Old City of Jerusalem, we see the followers of these three great religions living out their beliefs. At the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Christian children receive the gift of grace, in baptism. At the Western Wall, Jewish boys celebrate their bar mitzvahs. And at the Haram al-Sharif, young Muslims bow their heads in prayer. All who hope for freedom and a brighter future should cast their eyes to Jerusalem and marvel at what they behold.

Throughout the history of our nation, generations of Americans have claimed God's promise in Genesis to the people of Israel and all who cherish her: "I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse." For the sake of our cherished ally and the future blessing of the United States, if the world knows nothing else, let the world know this: America stands with Israel.

Christian leaders hold emergency summit in Jerusalem to confront global rise in antisemitism

The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) convened an emergency summit this week amid growing concern over the global rise in antisemitism following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in 2023.

The three-day conference in the Israeli capital comes at a time when social media influencers are consistently pushing antisemitic hate to their millions of followers.

"Attacking the Jews means attacking the very roots of one’s own faith. It means fighting against the people who gave us the Bible. Jesus was Jewish," ICEJ President Jürgen Bühler told Fox News Digital.

"If you don’t fight antisemitism, you are sawing off the branch you sit on. For the church to survive, we need to connect to our roots, (and) fighting antisemitism needs to be at the forefront of every pastor and every leader around the world," he added.

One of the central themes of the conference is replacement theology, a doctrine that holds the church has replaced the Jewish people in God’s plan.

"The Bible is full of God’s eternal plan, which includes the Jewish people. Paul’s statement in Romans 11 that ‘the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable' relates to Israel. This is a doctrine that goes contrary to what the New and Old Testament are teaching and that’s why we need to have this conference," Bühler said.

"One cannot deny the Jewishness of the Bible. The most frequent word in the Bible is the name of God, and the second most used name is Israel. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he died in Jerusalem, resurrected in Jerusalem, rose to heaven from Jerusalem, and he is coming back to Jerusalem. If you read the Bible, it is so easy to see the connection to Israel," he added.

Israel’s newly appointed special envoy to the Christian world, George Deek, addressed the meeting on Wednesday, while Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee are scheduled to attend the summit’s closing event Thursday at the foreign ministry as keynote speakers.

In a recorded message broadcast at the summit, Israeli President Isaac Herzog thanked Christian leaders for mobilizing against antisemitism.

"We are witnessing a very disturbing surge of antisemitism all over the world. This is a major challenge for humanity. This is the age-old, perhaps the oldest plague in humanity, and we have to stand up together — thought leaders and religious leaders — and say, ‘No more' and teach people about the sources of this evil and how to counter antisemitism," Herzog said.

"I believe that countering antisemitism requires a combination of three major elements: law enforcement, adjudication and education.

"You, dear leaders, have a huge capability of fighting back, and I bless you. Truly, I bless you as the president of Israel for coming here and fighting back, for coming here and discussing how to fight back," Herzog concluded.

Zionism as Decolonization — How I Went From Anti-Zionist to Zionist

As a former anti-zionist, I often get asked what changed my views on this very heavy, complex, and emotive subject.

Ironically, it was the same question that got me out of anti-zionism that got me into it — what relationship do Jews have to the land?

The lens through which we view this question colours the entire conflict — the history, events, and dynamics involved, what they are, and to what extent they are moral or immoral.

For a number of years, I opposed the existence of Israel and everything to do with it. A matter of principle. Like most other anti-zionists, it was seemingly obvious that Jews are foreign to the land, that they are just white settler-colonizers from Europe who were using the Jewish religion as a racist excuse to steal the land of a vulnerable brown indigenous population. Anyone with a moral conscience would be opposed, no?

Because of this pretext, this mindset presupposes that everything else Israel does must therefore be in service of settler-colonialism. Hence why it launches attacks on Palestinians, displaces civilians, puts up walls, checkpoints, and blockades, bans DNA tests, builds settlements, and the like. Israel must be committing apartheid. Israel must be committing genocide. Everything Israel does (exist, defend itself, maintain national security) is unjustifiable, because the premise of Israel is unjustifiable. And conversely, everything the Palestinians do is justifiable, because they are innocent native people resisting the evils of colonization. The Jews are foreigners who took the land from the natives, just like here in North America, right? Right!?

Wrong. As someone with an academic background in Anthropology and Indigenous studies, who also spent many years as a decolonial advocate focused on indigenous rights, I was inclined to agree. However, when I started seeing the argumentation for Jews being Indigenous (from Ryan Bellerose, Rudy Rochman, Thomas Gallezot, StandWithUS, among others), I was skeptical yet curious, and sought to investigate further. If my beliefs were true, they would hold up to scrutiny, I thought.

Upon actually reading about Jewish history, linguistics, archaeology, and genetics, and also Arab history, and the history of the conflict, it turns out, my opinions were very much rooted in ignorance. Everything clicked into place and my worldviews came crashing down (although accepting it was a gradual process).

Jews are not just white people with a Jewish religion, they are a displaced Levantine people. Arabs are not just innocent natives, they are the descendants of Caliphates that colonized the entire MENA region. Israel is not acting in service of settler-colonialism, it is acting in service of decolonization. There was so much more that I was never told, and so never considered. I was lied to.

06/12 Links Pt2: Civilization and Barbarism in the Biblical Heartland; Melanie Phillips; Islam and Jihad in the UK; Four Palestine Action activists jailed for Elbit factory raid

From Ian:

Josh Hammer: Civilization and Barbarism in the Biblical Heartland

I’ve just returned from my seventh trip to Israel. I spent a good amount of time in Judea and Samaria. I visited some of the major Jewish “settlements”—tendentious nomenclature aside, better thought of simply as flourishing suburbs—such as Ariel and Efrat. I visited a brand-new hilltop settlement outside Efrat, called Eitam, where the founder offered a tour of the local Herodian ruins and explained why he first pitched a tent without so much as electricity or running water. Further out in the Judean Desert, at the stunning Arugot Farm, the founders quoted biblical passages that harmonized their project with the vision of the prophets. The Israeli government is not advertising the extension of sovereignty on a mass scale, but there is a lot of new building happening on a micro level on the ground.

In a sensible world, this would be celebrated. But it’s not. Humorously, in virtually every other geopolitical hot spot, it is the Chinese- and Russian-funded anti-civilizational Left that clamors for “indigenous rights” at every opportunity. Yet in Judea and Samaria, the leftist Soros/NGO script flips on its head entirely. The actual indigenous population, acting in furtherance of the miraculous fulfilment of the biblical prophecy of the ingathering of the exiles, is instead deemed cruel, oppressive, “colonialist,” or even “genocidal.” Curious, that. Even worse: In our morally confused and biblically illiterate age, far too many on the “Right” accept the prevailing narrative and clap along.

Even holding aside the terror-supporting, Hamas-loving nature (as confirmed by myriad polling) of the radicalized local Arab population, it is difficult to describe the extraordinary impracticability of any kind of divided political resolution to the question of Judea and Samaria. The Western mind often thinks of the “settlements” as comprising a few gruff hilltop cranks—and some surely do exist. But there are now well over a half-million Jews living in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria—from the tony suburbs of Gush Etzion to the far-flung outposts near the Jordan River or the Dead Sea. Simply put, the Jews of Judea are not going anywhere. And on the ground, Jewish towns are interspersed all throughout with Arab towns. There are no clean borders to be drawn here.

To attempt to neatly divide this on a map is an exercise in logistical and cartographic futility. Give the freaks of “Students for Justice in Palestine” credit for one thing: The geopolitical unity inherent in the cry of “from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea” makes a heck of a lot more sense than continuing to indulge the Oslo Accords-era delusion of a workable carving out of a new Palestine Liberation Organization/Hamas terror entity in the core of the biblical heartland—even if, per leading Oslo proponent Yitzhak Rabin himself, the entity would be “less than a (full) state.” The land is going to be controlled by either Jews or, after 90-year-old Ramallah-based PLO kleptocrat-in-chief Mahmoud Abbas croaks, Hamas.

It’s pretty much that simple.

As in so much else in our politics, then, the relevant question in Judea and Samaria is not the procedural question of whether there will be one or two (or more) states, but the substantive question of who will rule in the entirety of the biblical heartland. The Left knows its answer: Hamas and the broader Muslim Brotherhood of which it is a part. But again: Why doesn’t most of the Right, which is at least ostensibly committed to the defense of Western civilization, have its own competing answer in response to the Red-Green Alliance narrative?

The answer to this specific geopolitical question dovetails with the broader explanation for the rise of the “Retard Right” phenomenon, in the first place: increased lack of civilizational or national self-confidence, diminished understanding of America as founded upon the ecumenical biblical inheritance and committed to upholding it for our progeny, the successful injection of debilitating information operations from wily foes such as Russia and Qatar, and a broader rotting of the American people’s minds that has led to a chronic inability to distinguish fact from fiction and right from wrong.

But the Trump administration, though not immune to infiltration by some prominent individuals (Joe Kent, anyone?) who are card-carrying members of the “Retard Right,” has generally acted in a way to diminish the influence of the most cancerous pro-Russia, pro-China, Islamophilic, and anti-American voices within the Right’s midst. Furthermore, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel is evangelical Mike Huckabee, a lifelong proponent of Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria and a deep skeptic of the Palestinian-Arab narrative.

Even if rudimentary morality is off the table in our confused time, the Trump administration can and should make an even more straightforward argument about the American national interest when it comes to the future of the biblical heartland.

To be “America First” is to ask, in each and every geopolitical hot spot around the world, what course of action best advances the American national interest. In Judea and Samaria, the answer—especially in the aftermath of the regional Israeli-Arab rapprochement that was the 2020 Abraham Accords pacts—should be obvious: Greater Israeli autonomy is preferable to greater Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood autonomy. This is true for national security reasons. This is true for Iranian regime containment regions. This is true for China great power competition reasons. This true for Christian holy site protection reasons. Indeed, this is true for virtually every reason conceivable. Even the Arab states know it, despite their meek protestations to the contrary—and they especially know it in light of Operation Epic Fury, which has fully exposed Iran’s threat to the region.

If Western civilization is going to be saved, then America must do the saving. If America is going to be saved, then the Right must do the saving. But that can only if the Right actually understands what it is fighting to preserve: the intellectual and tangible fruits of the ecumenical biblical inheritance. After my most recent trip to the Holy Land, I’ve never felt firmer in my conviction that such an effort must encompass a robust defense of the biblical heartland itself. Judea and Samara must forever remain part of Team Civilization, not Team Barbarism. And “America First” should understand that.

Man in the mirror: Norman Finkelstein and his own Holocaust industry

I owe Norman Finkelstein something. He was my professor at New York University in the mid-1990s, and for a young Jewish kid from Queens, N.Y., he was an electric disruption. He challenged everything I thought I knew, introduced me to Noam Chomsky and wrote the recommendation that got me into graduate school. I read his work for more than 30 years. This essay is not written in contempt. It is written in disappointment, with the same demand for consistency he spent his career imposing on others.

Norman Finkelstein built his reputation on a single devastating argument: that suffering can be exploited, historical trauma can be weaponized and moral authority can become currency. His 2000 book The Holocaust Industry accused Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel of turning tragedy into a brand, commanding speaking fees upward of $25,000 while claiming the Holocaust was “noncommunicable.”

He accused attorney Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, of fraud. He accused Jewish organizations of running “an outright extortion racket.” His standards were ferocious and he insisted they apply to everyone.

It is time to hold Finkelstein to his own standard.

Today, his public identity revolves around Gaza and his identity as the son of Holocaust survivors. His mother survived Majdanek. His father survived Auschwitz. Both survived the Warsaw Ghetto. Their suffering is not incidental to his public persona. It is the credential that accompanies him into every interview, every introduction, every podcast appearance.

He has built two books totaling more than 900 pages on Gaza alone, to be sold as a matched box set modeled on Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s documentation of Nazi atrocities. He promotes his new volume, Gaza’s Gravediggers, across every available platform.

The man who accused others of transforming historical suffering into moral authority now relies on his own inherited suffering as his primary credential. The man who condemned what he called an industry has built one himself. The subject matter changed. The mechanism did not.

Earlier this year, I reached out to Finkelstein directly, as a former student who had read his work for 30 years. I asked about antisemitism that predates Israel by centuries. I asked about the institutional silences that followed the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, before any Israeli military response began. I asked about the future of Jewish life in the Diaspora.

Not one question was engaged. Instead came dismissal, sarcasm and the declaration that “those who want to know, know.”

He told me Gaza was “about as complex as an Auschwitz gas chamber.” That comparison, deployed casually in a personal letter to the son and grandson of survivors of Bergen-Belsen and Terezín, reveals something important. The man who once demanded that arguments be answered rather than dismissed now pronounces verdicts and calls it scholarship.

On Oct. 7, Finkelstein posted that it “warms every fiber of my soul” to see Gaza’s “Jewish supremacist oppressors” humbled. He invoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—the very one his own parents survived—as a parallel to Hamas’s assault on a music festival and kibbutz families.

Insurance giant Allianz given green light to sue Palestine activists

A British court has allowed German insurance giant Allianz to pursue a civil lawsuit against six pro-Palestine activists accused of vandalising its offices in London and Guildford, Surrey.

The defendants, who conducted separate protests at the site in 2024 and 2025, are facing criminal damage charges after targeting the company as the then-insurer of Elbit Systems, an Israeli-based defence firm.

Known as the Allianz6, the activists occupied the office building and sprayed it with red paint, which the firm said caused £79,000 in damage.

In its filings to Central London County Court, Allianz requested permission to seek up to £300,000 in damages, £200,000 of which it claimed were incurred through “reputational damage and commercial embarrassment”.

The activists represented themselves last month in the early stages of their criminal trial and say they cannot afford legal representation to contest the civil case.

They argued that the suit should be held until the conclusion of the criminal proceedings, scheduled separately for October this year and January 2028, to safeguard their right to a fair trial.

However, Judge Alan Johns rejected this request, ruling on Monday that the suit could proceed concurrently with the criminal cases.

One of the defendants, Seren John-Wood, told Middle East Eye: “We took action and are prepared to face legal consequences in a criminal court as we believe we are not guilty.

"But this attempt to move the case away from the criminal courts, where we are not able to access financial support for legal representation and have our cases heard by juries, is as appalling as it is unprecedented.”

06/12 Links Pt1: US-Iran deal to include dismantling of Iranian nuclear program; UNRWA fires 70 staffers over terrorist ties; Pal football chief denied US visa

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Trump’s civilizational moment

This lethal blindness is not just endangering the West in foreign wars, but is doing so at home in the refusal to face the reality of Islamization.

Britain refuses to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, jail or deport jihadi preachers, ban sharia courts or stop immigration from countries posing an Islamist threat.

In America, although Trump has taken measures against extremism, an Islamist beachhead has been created in New York with its sectarian Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and with sharia enclaves expanding in Texas and elsewhere.

The reason all of this has been allowed to grow is wider and deeper than the promotion of multiculturalism and the intersectional dogma that holds the West is innately bad because it is white. At the core of these secular ideologies is a loss of belief in the biblical norms that underpin Western culture, and the replacement of what is held to be irrational Christian and Jewish mumbo-jumbo by the superior power of the Western mind.

The West has told itself that it is the acme of reason—by which it means that its core principle is the pursuit of individual happiness, prosperity and self-realization.

Accordingly, war is always totally dumb because people get killed; ranking different cultures in any kind of hierarchy is a form of bigotry that is not only evil but proof of imbecility; and everyone in the world is assumed only to want to have a nice life.

Believing that only universal values are moral and rational, such Westerners can’t see the catastrophic results of failing to fight for their own. They refuse to acknowledge that there is no brotherhood of man; there are instead people who believe in civilization, and other people who intend to destroy it.

The paradox is that in making a fetish of reason and self-interest, the West repudiates reason by inventing its own reality.

Meanwhile, the Islamists have grasped all this. They understand that without a religious scaffolding, a society eventually collapses. They have watched the West steadily destroying that religious core and, in the vacuum that’s been created, giving them the opportunity to strike.

This is why Britain, which has led the retreat from Christianity in the West, is ground zero for the Islamist onslaught. Islamization has penetrated throughout Britain’s political and civic architecture, with British leaders absolutely refusing to push back.

Now there’s a rapidly rising sectarian Islamic bloc, aided by the left, increasingly focusing British politics on the jihadi agenda of destroying Israel and the Jews as an essential precursor to conquering the West.

We are currently, and rightly, transfixed by Iran. If America doesn’t neutralize the Islamic revolutionary regime and instead allows it to regenerate, this will be catastrophic for America and the West.

It all depends on one mercurial and imperfect man in the White House. But whether he succeeds or fails, he is leading a free world, much of which no longer understands what it needs to do to survive.

Ruthie Blum: Translating Trump in Tehran

Listening to U.S. President Donald Trump’s June 3 Oval Office press conference, one couldn’t help worrying about how his words sounded in Farsi—not only to the mullahs and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but to the masses who believed that “help was on the way.”

Now it’s true that every statement made by Trump, whether in response to journalists’ questions or as a post on Truth Social, is aimed at multiple audiences at home and abroad. The trouble is that he often makes off-the-cuff remarks that lately have been music to the ears of the powers-that-be in Tehran.

Though he’s said about Iran that “it’s never won a war, but never lost a negotiation,” Trump has been behaving as if the joint American-Israeli military victories against the now-fractured regime were simply a precursor to engaging in dialogue with it.

On one hand, he seems to be aware that the ayatollahs and their henchmen have spent nearly half a century perfecting the art of exploiting Western assumptions about war and peace. On the other, he continues to view talks with regime representatives—mediated by Pakistan, no less—through the transactional lens of a real-estate developer.

The Islamic Republic, in contrast, sees everything through a revolutionary religious prism. The result is a clash of perceptions that’s not beneficial to the United States.

Take Trump’s explanation for Iran’s latest violations of the so-called “ceasefire,” for example. Asked by a reporter about Tehran’s attacks in the Gulf, the president replied, “Some people would say they were slightly provoked,” since the United States had struck first, and hard, the previous night.

This wasn’t merely a false depiction of what’s been going on; it was rightly interpreted by Tehran to provide an explanation, if not an excuse, to Iranian belligerence. You don’t have to be a Mideast expert to figure that out.

Nor do you require a degree in international relations to grasp that when Washington rationalizes Iranian aggression, rather than treating it as an immediate casus belli—in this case, the imperative to resume the unfinished war—Tehran concludes that its actions are paying off.

Ditto in relation to Trump’s saying, “I hear the negotiation itself is going very well, actually. Very well.”

The Last Superpower Test By Abe Greenwald

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If the U.S. wins, we will live in a safer world. Bad actors will be made to understand that American power remains the ultimate block on their ambitions. If the U.S. loses, extremist and predatory regimes will be free to do as they please. They all know that America is the only guarantor of sovereignty for the countries of the free world. No other power can underwrite the stability of the global order.

At this moment, that stability hangs in the balance. If the U.S. reaches a deal with Iran’s leaders that leaves the regime intact and fundamentally unchanged, it will be rightly regarded as an American instrument of surrender. The U.S. will have bombarded the regime from the skies, killed multiple tiers of leadership, destroyed its nuclear program, and degraded its missile stocks only to accept defeat. World leaders will understand this as America’s last, failed attempt to project military power on a large scale. For decades, Donald Trump has insisted that Iran must be stopped. If he decides that the job is too big to finish, no future president will try again.

My hope is that Trump’s seeming eagerness for a deal isn’t the spectacle of desperation that it appears to be. This isn’t unfounded. Although the president has been lured into negotiating with Iran again and again, he has never failed to reject the regime’s dangerous demands. He even did so this morning. It could be that Trump simply hasn’t yet grasped that this regime is incapable of making peace on terms that are acceptable to the U.S. Perhaps this is becoming clearer to him with every scrapped diplomatic “framework.” And maybe he will come to understand that there’s only one path to American victory—and it’s not negotiation.

This war will decide more than the future of Iran or the Middle East. It will define America’s ongoing role in the world that it shaped, and it will either set free or rein in those who wish to tear that world down.

The ups and downs that really matter: Why Israel, the US are not fighting the same war

This striking, grimly satirical political cartoon expresses what is being said in diplomatic circles this week, capturing the strategic vertigo gripping both Jerusalem and Washington. It depicts an elevator labeled “Lobby of Hell.”

The newest Iranian cleric and his partner, the Hezbollah operative, stand hand-in-hand, staring out as an elevator car descends into an abyss watched over by a welcoming devil. On either side of the shaft stand US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, their fingers pressed firmly on the elevator call buttons.

Above Trump, floating in an idealized cloud, is Uncle Sam; above Netanyahu floats Theodor Herzl. Both leaders look grimly determined, convinced their fingers are guided from above by foundational visions of American greatness and a safe, iron-clad Jewish state. Netanyahu, wanting to guarantee the future of the Jewish state, and Trump, who is out of options looking for an agreement and a way out of the quagmire, keep pushing the hold call button.

But look closer at the cartoon, and the unsettling truth reveals itself: we are all staring intently at the elevator buttons, but we have completely lost track of the shaft itself. We are trapped in a dangerous collective delusion, focusing on political theater while completely missing the structural architecture of the war we are supposedly fighting.

The shaft symbolizes that the Iranians are happy to pull us all down to hell with them in a jihad-like suicidal moment. Worse still, it is no longer clear whether Uncle Sam or Theodor Herzl possess the same binding relevance or moral authority in modern America or contemporary Israel that they once did.

We are executing policies based on outdated paradigms, and in doing so, we run the risk of fulfilling the grim punchline of the old medical joke: the operation was a spectacular success, but the patient died on the table.

Uncle Sam was created for the American public and reinforced by political cartoonists who wanted a symbol that represented the strength, authority, and government of the nation itself, rather than just its abstract ideals. The lack of American support for the war with Iran is evident in that the American people are not looking at Uncle Sam in the same way as they did before.

A Vermont newspaper, the National Standard, published this on June 13, 1826 — two hundred years ago this month:

A late London paper says: The society for the conversion of the Jews annually spend about $14,000. Many knowing Israelites, however, contrive to turn the pious zeal of the society to good account, by obtaining sums of money for their expenses whilst under a course of conversion, which having gained they relapse into their former heresies.

The Jews—The conversion of a Jew costs the society in London an average sum of about one thousand pounds; and about one half of the converted return to the "error of their ways" as soon as converting-money is no longer to be had. The makeing of a half Christian out of a full Jew would render twenty poor and honest Christian families comfortable for a whole year. How is it that persons can thus abuse the charities of society by so wasting money which the merciful contribute?

The two figures contradict each other — $14,000 a year in one item, a thousand pounds per convert in the next — because these were polemical numbers passed from paper to paper rather than anything audited. The arithmetic behind the mockery, however, was sound, as the society's own published reports would confirm over the following decades.

Throughout the 19th century there was a concerted effort by many Christians to "save" the Jews. The most famous example was the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, founded in 1809 with backing from evangelical luminaries including William Wilberforce. Its driving force was Joseph Frey, a Jewish convert from Germany who tirelessly tried to find other Jews to join him.

The Jewish community fought against these efforts fiercely and ostracized any converts, which meant that conversion carried enormous real costs — expulsion from family, community and livelihood. The London Society's answer was financial: it offered converts stipends, housing and training to overcome community pressure. The predictable result was a class of professional converts, who pretended to convert for the money, left when the money ran dry, and in some cases traveled to other cities in Europe to repeat the process with the next missionary society. The society was paying Jews to become Christians, and some Jews concluded that Christian charity of that sort was a business opportunity. By 1826 the relapse rate was a standing joke in the London press, and the joke crossed the Atlantic through the exchange papers into venues as remote as Middlebury, Vermont.

Frey crossed the Atlantic too. He arrived in New York in 1816, after a scandal pushed him out of London, and set about building an American version of the enterprise. The result was the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, chartered in 1820 — the founders wanted to call it a society for evangelizing the Jews, but the New York legislature balked at incorporating an openly proselytizing body, so the name was softened to "meliorating." Its first president was Elias Boudinot, the former president of the Continental Congress, and its donor rolls drew on the Protestant establishment of the entire eastern seaboard. Frey must have been very charismatic to raise such large sums of money both sides of the ocean but that charisma never translated to his intended Jewish audience.

The American incentive structure was different from London's: instead of stipends, they tried land. The ASMCJ bought a large tract in Westchester County, New York, to serve as a farm colony for converted European Jews who had been expelled from their communities. The farm was a spectacular failure — it consumed enormous sums while attracting almost nobody, and the few converted Jews placed on it refused to follow the society's regulations and soon abandoned it. And it was reported in the media in the same month of June 1826, in the same newspaper.

On June 6, 1826, the National Standard reprinted a New York account of the ASMCJ's fourth anniversary meeting, and the report reads like a corporate collapse in miniature. The society had spent "seven or eight thousand dollars" in a single year on what its own annual report called a "Utopian scheme of colonization"; the few Jews placed on the farm "refused to conform to the regulations, and soon abandoned it." A member rose to declare the annual report "a spurious document." A faction had exploited a constitutional loophole — pay five dollars, become a voting director — to pack the meeting, and after hours of parliamentary warfare the society rejected its own annual report and elected a board "decidedly hostile to the colonizing project." The suspicion in the room was that money was being misused, and this time the suspects were members of the society rather than the Jews.

So within a single week in June 1826, American newspaper readers learned that the cash-incentive model in London produced mercenaries and that the land-incentive model in New York produced an empty farm and an internal revolt. Both versions of the scheme, built by the same man, were public jokes simultaneously — which might lead a reasonable observer to expect the donors to stop donating.

They did the opposite. The London Society remained lavishly funded for the rest of the century; newspaper accounts of its meetings, anniversaries and appeals appear continuously through the 1800s. By 1900 its annual income was £46,338 — roughly thirty times the budget the 1826 satirists found scandalous — supporting 199 workers at 52 mission stations around the world, including clergy, physicians, teachers and apothecaries. Against that century of expenditure, the society's own cumulative count stood at about 5,000 baptisms, about 50 a year, of whom an unknown number were Jews taking advantage of the system. The donors had read the same mockery we see in the Vermont newspaper, kept giving for another seventy-five years, and the conversion arithmetic never improved.

It never stopped, either. The London Society survives today as the Church's Ministry Among Jewish People (CMJ), one of the Church of England's official mission agencies, with branches in England, the United States and Israel — where it owns Christ Church inside Jerusalem's Old City and runs a school in its former mission hospital. The organization's entry in the UK Charity Commission register, number 1153457, still lists "The London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews" as its previous name, and still records its charitable object in language Frey would recognize: "the advancement of Christianity amongst Jewish people."

The "knowing Israelites" of 1826 took the blame for gaming an incentive they had no part in designing, and the societies that designed it took two more centuries of donations. The merciful, as the National Standard termed them, are still contributing to the goal of converting Jews.

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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)