Tuesday, April 21, 2026

04/21 Links Pt1: Israel’s enemies are Britain’s, too; Trump extends Iran ceasefire indefinitely; The Death of a French Soldier in Lebanon

From Ian:

Israel’s enemies are Britain’s, too

Israel is the West’s front line in the Middle East. Whenever it’s hit, jihadi plots in Europe spike. If Israel falls, the vacuum won’t be filled by states that care about social justice or international law. It will be filled by the very forces that hate our way of life and want to destroy it.

Beyond ideology, the practical reality of British and European security is inextricably linked to Israeli survival. While our politicians posture, our security services are quietly relying on a partnership that keeps British citizens safe. This cooperation involves a vital exchange of high-end intelligence and defensive technology, including Israeli signals intelligence (the interception and analysis of electronic signals, from communications to radar) and other human assets – all which help thwart terror attacks on European soil. Be it drone technology or missile defence, Israeli innovation is woven into the fabric of Western military readiness. When Westminster downgrades this relationship because the optics get difficult, the UK degrades its own defences as a consequence.

I don’t argue this as a detached onlooker, but as someone who sees this collision from both sides. I was born and raised in Israel, but Britain has been my home for 17 years. My children are British. When I work to combat anti-Semitism here, it isn’t just out of tribal loyalty; it is also because the hatred being directed at Jews and the Jewish state is a precursor to a wider assault on the West. I have seen the front line first-hand, and I can tell you, it is moving closer to home.

And yet, British politicians are either totally unable or unwilling to contend with this reality. Westminster seems paralysed by a fear of domestic Islamic voting blocs and a loud, radicalised middle class. We have raised a generation of ‘anti-imperialist’ activists who view their own country as a racist, illegitimate entity that they would refuse to fight for. For members of this young, comfortable class, Israel is the ultimate villain because it represents everything they have been taught to loathe: national pride, borders and a willingness to fight for their own survival.

This weakness is mirrored in our crumbling hard power. Britain’s armed forces are at their smallest since the Napoleonic era. In the absence of the ability to deter threats, we seek instead to placate. We lecture Israel on ‘restraint’ because we no longer have the stomach for the reality of defence. British politicians parrot that ‘Israel has a right to exist’ while at the same time pursuing policies that directly threaten that existence. This has emboldened a growing anti-Zionist chorus in public life, including MPs, Green Party candidates and university lecturers who have moved beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and settler violence to denying Israel’s very right to nationhood. By tolerating this rhetoric, we are legitimising an ideology that views the entire Western order as something to be torn down.

As Israel celebrates 78 years of defiance, Britain needs to make a choice: we can continue to indulge the ‘anti-colonial’ fantasies of our radicalised youth, as well as the Islamist sectarianism that undermines our national security, or we can recognise Israel for what it is: an essential security asset. It is time to stop treating our allies like enemies and our enemies like partners. The survival of the West may well depend on it.

The Gulf Learns What It's Like to Be Israel

Forty days of war following the U.S. and Israel's joint campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran are reshaping the Middle East and its alliances. Countries across the Gulf region now see what it has been like to live in Israel in recent decades, as rockets, missiles and drones have struck civilian population centers.

For decades, Israelis endured attacks on their cities from Iran and its proxies. Much of the world treated those attacks as background noise, or something to rationalize or applaud. In the recent conflict, Israel absorbed wave after wave of Iranian ballistic missile fire. Beersheba, Haifa, Jerusalem, Nahariya, Arad and Tel Aviv all took hits. At the same time, outrage barely registers across the U.S. and Europe over Iran's targeting of civilians and infrastructure, both in Israel and across the region.

Unlike in Israel, homes and offices in parts of the Gulf lack hardened bomb shelters, leaving civilians more exposed. The same holds true for Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman. None of these states are parties to the conflict. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck vital infrastructure, including oil facilities and desalination plants. The expectation of safety across many of these nations, once taken for granted, no longer holds. Countries that once viewed Israel's security challenges from a distance now confront them directly.

When Israel comes under fire, the international reaction arrives late - diluted by equivocation - or not at all. This time, the missiles have not fallen on Israel alone. Yet where is the outrage? Where are the emergency sessions? Where is the Arab League? Where is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation? The UN Security Council cannot pass a resolution brought by Bahrain and other Gulf states calling for condemnation and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

This moment tests whether targeting civilians is truly unacceptable or only unacceptable when it is convenient to say so. If attacks of this scale, across this many countries, fail to produce clarity, then the language of international norms becomes performance. Silence is not neutrality. It is acquiescence. When aggression meets no consequence, it expands.

Iran War Sent Shock Waves through Asia

The impact of the war in Iran has hit Asia harder and faster than expected. The Asia-Pacific region relies more heavily on Middle Eastern energy imports than almost anywhere else in the world. Even before the war started on Feb. 28, Asia's energy capacity was falling short of demand. In interviews, farmers in Vietnam, laborers in India, innkeepers in Sri Lanka, drivers in the Philippines, and executives in Hong Kong and Singapore all sounded worried.

Carriers flying through the Middle East, where 24 million migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia are employed, suspended trips to Dubai and other Gulf hubs right away. With jet fuel nearly doubling in price and with its availability threatened, airlines are slashing many more routes indefinitely. Qantas, Air New Zealand, Lion Air of Indonesia, VietJet, AirAsia, Air India, Cathay Pacific and Batik Air of Malaysia are cutting service.

Copper and nickel production rely on natural gas and sulfur, a fossil fuel byproduct. Both are in short supply, forcing several Indonesian nickel processors to reduce output. Polyester and nylon are also derived from petroleum. In the sewing hubs of Bangladesh, severe disruptions to production and shipment schedules have become common. Prices have soared for helium, a gas byproduct used for semiconductors, and some Asian chipmakers are slowing production.

Without enough petrochemicals to make plastic packaging, fewer Korean beauty products are heading to stores. A lack of fertilizer is threatening rice crops in Vietnam. Cattle farmers in Australia are warning of a meat shortage because of idled slaughterhouses and truckers.

Twenty-five years ago I first wrote an essay called "Proud to be a Zionist." I return to it every Yom Ha'atzmaut, updating it for the year that passed. This year I want to step back from the news cycle and say something more fundamental — something that explains not just why I am proud to be a Zionist today, but why Zionism is, at its core, one of the most morally serious ideas in the modern world.

It begins with memory. Jewish memory, specifically, is unlike anyone else's.

Most people live in a relatively short now — the span of their own experience, maybe their parents', maybe a grandparent's stories fading at the edges. The world before they were born is abstract, academic, other people's business. But Jews do not experience history that way. We carry it. The destruction of the First Temple is not an event in a textbook; it is a fast we keep in the summer, a corner of our homes left unfinished, a broken glass at a wedding. The exile in Babylon lives in our Psalms. The dazzling intellectual flowering of the Talmudists — men reasoning through every dimension of human obligation across centuries and continents — is still the living framework through which observant Jews think. The Crusades, the expulsions, the Inquisition, the pogroms: these are not medieval curiosities but family stories, preserved in liturgy, in communal trauma, in the specific geography of where our ancestors ended up after each wave of violence pushed them somewhere new.

And then the modern world confirmed everything the long memory had taught. The Holocaust was not a rupture in history. It was the culmination of a pattern that any Jew paying attention could have recognized, and that many did recognize — including Theodor Herzl, who watched the Dreyfus Affair and understood, decades before the gas chambers, that Jewish powerlessness was an existential problem, not merely a social inconvenience.

Our long memory also carries the lesson of what dependence on others costs. "Put not your trust in princes" is not paranoia — it is the condensed wisdom of three thousand years of experience with princes. We have lived among peoples who were genuinely hospitable, and we are grateful. But the same memory that preserves the hospitality also preserves the pattern: that goodwill is not a guarantee, that conditions change, and that Jews, when the politics of a given moment required a scapegoat, were reliably available.

We did not reason our way to this understanding. We bled our way to it.

This is why Zionism is a profoundly moral idea, grounded in real knowledge of the world. It arose from a people that understood — from within living memory, not from books — what persecution looked like, what displacement felt like, what it meant to be at the mercy of governments that had decided Jews were a problem to be managed or eliminated. And it proposed a solution that the same memory validated: the Jews needed their own land, their own army, their own capacity to act in their own defense rather than to petition, negotiate, or mourn.

Israel is not a new chapter in Jewish history. It is a continuous one — another entry in the long record, as the Temples and the Exile and the Talmud are entries, each shaped by the ones that came before. The miracles that have preserved us from extinction across the millennia are the same kind of miracle that has preserved a small, isolated state against enemies who have never stopped trying to destroy it. We recognize the pattern because we have seen it before.

And what do we see today? Jews being physically attacked in New York, London, Paris, and Melbourne. Jewish institutions maintained behind security that no other community treats as routine. On university campuses, organized campaigns of exclusion and intimidation against Jewish students. The language has been updated — "Zionist" has replaced older slurs, "colonialism" has replaced older charges — but the structure of the hatred is recognizable to anyone who knows what European Jews were reporting in the 1930s, when the dangers of Nazism were apparent and the world was composing careful statements of concern. The Holocaust happened without Hitler worrying about world opinion. We remember.

Golda Meir said it plainly: if we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'll choose the second option, thank you. The contemporary progressive consensus — in which victimhood is righteousness, in which absorbing violence without response reads as moral virtue — is precisely inverted from what Jewish history teaches. We tried the path of suffering and hoping for sympathy. We know what it produced. "Never again" is not just a slogan.

Israel means it. It does not sit at the table of nations hoping to be treated with generosity. It acts on the understanding, purchased over centuries, that the only reliable guarantor of Jewish survival is Jewish power exercised with Jewish responsibility. There is nothing more moral than a people that knows, from its own memory, exactly what defenselessness costs — and refuses to be defenseless again.

The word "Zionist" is currently used as a slur, including by people who claim to be moderates. This tells us something about them, and nothing about us. Zionism means that Jewish lives are worth defending. It means that the lessons of history have been acted upon rather than merely commemorated. It means that Israel — messy, magnificent, maddening Israel, the same Israel that feels like home when I visit — is the living proof that the Jewish story did not end with any of the many catastrophes that were supposed to end it.

Our memory is long enough to know what we almost lost. It is also long enough to recognize what we have.

The word "Zionist" is a compliment. It has always been. And to the non-Jews who see clearly what is at stake and stand with us anyway — you are practicing something genuinely righteous, and we see you.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Springer Nature has published a second edition of Islamophobia and Psychiatry, billing it as an expert clinical resource for physicians, counselors, and social workers. Chapter 24, authored by Samah Jabr (George Washington University School of Medicine), Sarah Mohr (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley), and Elizabeth Berger (Alkaram Institute, Chicago), is titled "Islamophobia, Genocide, and Mental Health: A Palestinian Perspective on Collective Trauma."

A reader opening a psychiatry textbook expecting clinical analysis will find something rather different: a political manifesto that treats its most contested claims as established baselines, then builds a mental health framework on top of them.

The authors say at the outset:

[T]he state of Israel has from its outset regarded the Palestinian people as a group—as Muslim people—with an overall aim of assigning to them a disenfranchised and disempowered position relative to Jewish people. This political position is known by its supporters as well as by its opponents as Zionism.

They are saying that this is how Zionists define themselves - as having a primary aim of Jewish superiority over Palestinians. The fact that no Zionist actually thinks this way isn't important. It's only a paper in a respected journal, why bother checking facts?

The chapter's fundamental thesis is that Palestinian mental health suffers because Israel inflicts deliberate, genocidal harm. Every psychiatric symptom, every dimension of Palestinian psychological distress, traces back to Israeli policy. This is not presented as a hypothesis to be tested — it is declared as the premise from which clinical analysis proceeds.

There is a simple empirical test for this thesis: see if Palestinians outside the territories also have mental health issues that cannot be attributed to Israel.

There are in fact plenty of studies about that. Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan — far from Israeli military operations, outside Israeli jurisdiction, living under the governance of Arab host states — suffer severe and well-documented mental health crises. In Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Médecins Sans Frontières found that depression affects nearly one-third of patients, with others presenting with anxiety (22%), psychosis (14%), and bipolar disorders (10%). A Royal College of Psychiatrists essay examining Palestinian refugees in Jordan's Baqa'a camp — the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, home to 104,000 people — found that all 16 medical professionals interviewed acknowledged high prevalence of mental illness in the refugee population, with estimates ranging from 20 to 50%, and some participants placing it as high as 75%. The drivers identified were poverty, overcrowding, stigma, gender-based violence, and the grinding hopelessness of camp life without prospect of legal integration into Jordanian society. Israel does not appear in the causal chain, because Israel is not present in Jordan.

Do the authors care about the source of mental health problems for all Palestinians, or just the ones that they can claim are suffering from "apartheid"? We have the answer.

The chapter's inventory of claims accepted as clinical fact is worth laying out directly, because the academic packaging obscures how unargued they are.

The authors declare "the genocidal conduct of Israel" as their working premise, citing Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese's March 2024 report as the evidentiary foundation. Albanese is a political appointee of the UN Human Rights Council — the same body that has never once condemned Hamas — and her document is advocacy, not peer-reviewed research. From there, Israel's "overall epistemic of Western European colonialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism" is offered as description rather than contested theory. Zionism, they write, induced Jewish communities "to form a kind of fifth column within the Middle East." The Holocaust "lent surface credibility to the Zionist political position" — six million murdered Jews are reframed as useful propaganda for Jewish nationalism.

On territorial ambitions, the authors assert that Israel's 2018 Nation-State Law reflects "political ambitions of Israel for sovereignty over the whole of former Mandatory Palestine." Israel's 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza — evacuating every settlement and soldier from territory the authors claim Israel seeks to hold forever — goes unmentioned. So is the withdrawal from Area A to give Palestinians, for the first time in their history, self-rule. Seems strange for the rapacious ever-expanding state they describe.

On apartheid, the chapter describes "the massive Israeli apartheid system which denied basic human rights to Palestinians." Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, and practice medicine in Israeli hospitals. The comparison to South African apartheid is asserted; it is not argued.

The Islamophobia claim is the most structurally bizarre. The authors declare that "Islamophobia is both a weaponized major export of the state of Israel and a plank in the larger longstanding defense of the dehumanization and violence which typically characterize dominating oppressive systems." Israel — nine million people, a country smaller than New Jersey — is the primary global engine of anti-Muslim prejudice. The mechanism by which it exports this prejudice to Hindu nationalists in India, Serbian paramilitaries in the 1990s, or the architects of the Spanish Inquisition is never explained, because no such mechanism exists. Islamophobia long predates Israel and flourishes in regions with zero Israeli cultural footprint.

Then there is the pre-Israel history, where the revisionism becomes almost comedic. The authors describe Israel as having "rejected the previous model of religious and ethnic pluralism which had operated there for centuries." Yes, Israel defining itself as a Jewish state that gives equal rights to non-Jews is a Jewish supremacist state, while the Ottoman Empire - whose sultan was also the caliph, and which used separate legal systems for Muslims and Jews and Christians, was the model of pluralism.

Springer Nature's imprint on this chapter tells every clinician, librarian, and medical student who encounters it that what they're reading is science. The damage from that signal is harder to undo than anything in the text itself.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/20 Links Pt2: From grief to action: Ensuring the sacrifices of Israel’s fallen are not in vain; Full 60 Minutes interview with Rachel Goldberg-Polin; Boy George defends Eurovision participation

From Ian: JPost Editorial: From grief to action: Ensuring the sacrifices of Israel’s fallen are not in vain

Memory is a deeply entrenched concept within Israeli society.

Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars and Victims of Terrorism, which will be marked nationwide on Monday evening, is filled with promises that the fallen will not be forgotten.

Over the past year, 170 soldiers have been killed across multiple fronts, including 15 soldiers and reservists killed in southern Lebanon since fighting resumed on March 2. Fifty-four disabled veterans have died from complications linked to wounds sustained during their service.

Behind these numbers are 7,165 bereaved relatives who have grieved and mourned for their fallen father, mother, son, daughter, or sibling.

The annual transition from the somber ceremonies to the joy of Israel’s Independence Day celebrations serves as a reminder of a difficult question we as Israelis must ask ourselves every year: What can we do to ensure that the sacrifices made by our soldiers were not in vain?

On Sunday morning, Israelis gathered outside the homes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other government ministers for an impromptu ceremony honoring our fallen heroes.

After observing a minute of silence, the gatherings turned into a public demand: A call for a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding October 7. A direct message from the Israeli public

Their message was direct and unambiguous: “The blood of our loved ones cries out from the ground and demands truthful answers.”

This demand, rooted in grief, is sustained by a real fear among society that, without accountability by the political and military echelon, the failures of the past will continue to manifest themselves in the blood of Israelis being shed.

The question facing Israel is not only how to respond to the current threats, but whether it can alter the trajectory that keeps producing them.

Israelis have shown unprecedented levels of resilience since October 7, 2023. When Hamas invaded southern Israel and the IDF was nowhere to be found, citizens mobilized. When entire neighborhoods, towns, and kibbutzim were destroyed, their residents came back to rebuild them from the ruins. In the North and South alike, Israelis have accepted life under daily fire.

This resilience cannot be taken for granted.

‘To cover our ears to one cry is to silence them all,’ Kaploun says at concentration camp site in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Yehuda Kaploun, a rabbi and U.S. State Department special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, spoke at the annual Donja Gradina commemoration hosted in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp.

The Croatian regime killed between 77,000 and 99,000 people at Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“To cover our ears to one cry is to silence them all,” Kaploun said at the ceremony. “Whether it is denying the Holocaust, any genocide or any atrocity, any attempt to rewrite the historical record is an insult to the victims at Jasenovac and an insult to any victim of the atrocities.”

That is why U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio “have been clear: there can be no compromise with evil, and there can be no compromising the truth,” Kaploun said. “From standing with Jewish communities to fighting today’s axis of evil, we have made clear that hatred has no place in a civilized society.”

“As antisemitism surges globally, we have no choice but to remember,” he added. “Together, we must educate about the past, and learn from the past, to protect the living.  We must commit to fighting hatred wherever and whenever we see it, and we must build a better world for us all.”

Emir Suljagić, head of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, stated that he was “deeply moved” by Kaploun’s speech.

“Mr. Kaploun showed rare integrity and honesty in confronting contemporary genocide denial alongside Holocaust denial and antisemitism. He did not shy away from condemning all forms of historical revisionism and genocide denial,” Suljagić said. “That he said all of this in Jasenovac—a place that is hallowed ground for Jews—only underscores the weight of his words. His willingness to reach across historical and religious divides is a testament to his character and openness.”

04/20 Links Pt1: Ruthie Blum: Trump cards; PA Has Paid Convicted Terrorists Released in Gaza Deal; England’s Jews are being terrorised, and the left is silent

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Trump cards

This clash of narratives would be less troubling if it were merely rhetorical. But it goes to the heart of how the Islamic Republic wages war and, crucially, how it and the rest of the jihadist world try to avoid losing one.

Militarily, the imbalance is obvious. The United States possesses overwhelming superiority in every realm other than that of double-speak and propaganda-spreading.

Tehran’s advantage, like that of its proxies, has always existed in the ability to manipulate perception, to blur lines between perpetrator and victim and to exploit the West’s chronic susceptibility to wishful thinking. It understands that battles are not fought solely with planes and tanks, but by way of story lines that seep into public consciousness. It’s an arena in which jihadists are champions. One need look no further than the halls of Harvard.

While aware of this phenomenon, Trump doesn’t grasp the depths of Islamist religious ideology, which is far harder to confront than armies and navies. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that nobody, least of all Trump, likes being played for a fool. So, Iran is pushing its luck and not merely through bluster. Indeed, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired on two Indian ships in the Strait of Hormuz on April 18.

This is despite the fast-approaching end to the two-week ceasefire. The deadline for Tehran to agree to U.S. conditions for a deal is April 22.

Though Trump’s been vague about whether he means to extend the truce, he’s not likely to be flexible at this point.

During a joint press conference on April 16 with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth issued a warning to Tehran, referring to the U.S. blockade as the “polite way this can go.”

Addressing the Islamic Republic, he said, “You like to say publicly ... that you control the Strait of Hormuz. But you don’t have a navy or real domain awareness. You can’t control anything. To be clear: Threatening to shoot missiles and drones at commercial ships that are lawfully transiting international waters—that is not control. That’s piracy. That’s terrorism.”

He continued, “The United States Navy controls the traffic going in and out of the strait, because we have real assets and real capabilities. ... The math is clear. We’re using 10% of the world’s most powerful navy, and you have 0% of your navy. That’s real control, and we have a long track record of dealing with pirates and terrorists. But there is an alternative. As our negotiators have said, you, Iran, can choose a prosperous future, a golden bridge. And we hope that you do for the people of Iran. ... But if Iran chooses poorly, then they will have a blockade and bombs dropping on infrastructure, power and energy.”

Well, the IRGC certainly hasn’t been opting for the outcome desired by Washington, Jerusalem or the Iranian people. Trump, therefore, must stick to his literal and figurative guns.

After all, the last thing he would want is for the United States to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Palestinian Authority Has Paid Convicted Terrorists Released as Part of Gaza Ceasefire Deal, State Department Tells Congress

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has paid salaries to convicted terrorists Israel released from its prisons as part of its October 2025 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, the State Department formally determined in a non-public report to Congress obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The State Department's mandatory report—compiled between August 2025 and January 2026—marks the first U.S. government determination that the PA has "provided payments to convicted terrorists released from Israeli prisons in October 2025 under President Trump's 20-point peace plan."

The notice to Congress confirms a similar conclusion the State Department made in January, when it noted that, even though PA president Mahmoud Abbas claimed in 2025 that he had scrapped the so-called pay-to-slay program, his government had still doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists and their families. As the Free Beacon reported in February, the PA transitioned last year to concealing those payments from Western governments by funneling them through a newly established welfare authority. The most recent State Department report confirms that a portion of those funds has gone to the terrorists released in October.

The State Department report comes about six months after the beginning of President Donald Trump's Gaza ceasefire, which included a commitment from Abbas that the PA would undertake a series of reforms, including ending pay-to-slay. The notice to Congress demonstrates that he and his government have not followed through in any meaningful way.

The PA appears to have gone further since the end of the period covered in the State Department report. Abbas's Fatah party "announced that terrorists who have been imprisoned for more than 20 years will be granted leadership positions," according to the Palestinian Media Watch research group. Fatah Revolutionary Council member Tayseer Nasrallah said in a televised interview in March that these terrorists will serve as members in the upcoming Eighth Fatah Conference, the forum at which the PA sets government policy.

The State Department report includes other examples of the PA violating the terms of its agreements with the United States. The PA "incited and glorified violence, including on social media and media outlets," and "supported terrorism via educational materials and summer camps" that teach children jihadist ideologies, the notice states.

Khaled Abu Toameh: For the Leadership in Iran, Gaza and Beirut, What Is the Only Important Outcome?

[The US president's negotiations and ceasefires] are viewed by Tehran, Gaza and Beirut as infidels trying to tell Muslims what to do. For them, such a situation is unimaginable, unacceptable, and cannot be allowed to stand.

To Iran's current leaders, whoever they are, if Trump carries out his threat to bomb the country's bridges and power plants on Wednesday, so be it. In the view of Iran's theocratic regime, none of that is of any importance so long as it survives, in any form, to be able to continue waging jihad (holy war) against its people, its neighbors and the West.

A piece of paper signed with infidels at the point of a gun is, in their eyes, nothing more than a Western fantasy.

They see anything short of the total destruction of their entire power base as a total victory.

That is why all three regimes – the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon – need to be totally dismantled if there is to be any real, permanent change of conduct in the Middle East.

The message should by now be clear: Iran's regime, Hamas and Hezbollah have no intention of laying down their arms, no interest in compromise, and no respect for Trump and his policies. In fact, they are telling Trump: Your initiatives and efforts are irrelevant.

The intractability of their leaders also aligns with their long-term ideological objective of sustaining a permanent conflict with Israel and the West.

Even if the Iranian regime is no longer able to continue funding, arming, and guiding its proxies, all will remain committed to armed struggle until "victory."

"Victory," in their terms, means first the destruction of Israel ("the Little Satan"), then taking over their oil-rich neighbors, and eventually the destruction of Europe and the United States ("the Great Satan").

So long as the Iranian regime – or Hamas or Hezbollah -- is able to survive, there will be no disarmament, no moderation, and no peace.

The repeated refusals by Iran's regime, Hamas and Hezbollah expose the failure of any policy built on engagement, incentives, or accommodation.

These terror entities do not interpret diplomatic overtures, off-ramps and ceasefires as goodwill. They view them instead as weakness.

They are right. It is, indeed, the West's fault that it allows itself to be exploited. The West not only gives these leaders time to rearm and rebuild, but worse, it grants them legitimacy and power bases throughout Europe and the United States. No one in the West even asks them to concede anything of substance.

Until there is a better understanding by the West of what jihad actually is -- and the uncompromising determination behind it -- every negotiation, threat and ceasefire will only lead to more terrorism and the next war.

Part 2 of my book Reclaiming the Covenant: The Blueprint and the Builders (excerpt)

Here is the beginning of Part 2 of my upcoming book ion America at 250, Reclaiming the Covenant.

The full chapters are being published on my Substack for paid subscribers, and if you are are a subscriber through this blog, PayPal, Patreon or Ko-Fi, email me and I will give you a gift subscription on Substack so you can read the whole book as it comes out.

The Blueprint and the Builders

In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams — three of the five who had drafted the Declaration — to a committee to design a seal for the new United States. Adams reached for classical antiquity: Hercules choosing between Virtue and Sloth. Franklin and Jefferson both reached for the Exodus. Franklin's handwritten proposal described Moses standing on the shore, hand extended over the Red Sea, Pharaoh in his chariot overwhelmed by the returning waters, rays from a pillar of fire in the clouds reaching Moses "to express that he acts by Command of the Deity," with the motto "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." Jefferson's written submission was essentially Franklin's design with light edits; in committee discussion he also proposed the Israelites in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The committee adopted Franklin's Moses design for one side of the seal, with Jefferson drafting the August 20 report. Congress tabled it. Only the motto "E Pluribus Unum" — originally Du Simitière's — survived to the final 1782 seal.

The Exodus story encodes a specific answer to the hardest problem in political founding: how do you bind a diverse collection of people together in a way they cannot simply think their way out of? Blood ties do it, but they exclude by definition. Conquest does it, but it generates permanent resentment. Rational argument does it temporarily, until someone finds a better argument. The covenant at Sinai did something different — it made obligation constitutive of identity. The people who accepted it became something they had not been before. You could not exit the covenant without ceasing to be what the covenant had made you, which is a fundamentally different relationship to obligation than any contract or philosophical argument can create. Israel’s greatest king, David, was descended from Ruth, a Moabite who accepted the covenant — membership defined by acceptance, not ancestry, from the beginning.

But Sinai immediately posed the question the founders would later face in Philadelphia: how much uniformity does a covenant require, and how much difference can it tolerate? The twelve tribes that accepted the covenant at Sinai were culturally different. They had distinct territories, distinct economies, distinct characters — the tribe of Judah was not the tribe of Dan, and the tribe of Levi, scattered among the others as a priestly caste with no territorial holding, was different from both. What they shared was the covenant’s common floor: a body of law that applied to all, common national obligations (defense, the Temple service, the pilgrimage festivals), and the dual membership principle — a member of the tribe of Judah was simultaneously of Judah and of Israel, and neither membership cancelled the other.

Above that floor, the tribes governed themselves. The Torah legislated the common minimum; the silence above it belonged to the constituent parts. The leaders of Manasseh petitioned Moses for an inheritance rule that would protect tribal territory when daughters inherited land — and got it, a tribal policy modification within the national covenant’s framework. Centuries later, the Talmud records that marriage customs in Judah and Galilee differed in legally consequential ways, both fully within halacha, neither overriding it. A seafaring tribe and a ranching tribe developed different commercial norms for the same reason Delaware and Texas have different corporate and oil law: the national covenant sets the floor, and the silence above it belongs to the people whose lives actually posed the problems. The word the founders would later use for this structure derives from the Latin foedus — covenant. When they called their system “federal,” they were using, whether they knew it or not, the vocabulary of the model they were recovering.

This is the balance the covenant must maintain: enough unity to hold together, enough pluralism to stay legitimate. It is harder to maintain than it sounds, because the pressures run in both directions simultaneously. The covenant can fail by imposing too much uniformity — absorbing the constituent parts into a single mandatory identity, which destroys the pluralism that makes membership voluntary and meaningful. It can equally fail by tolerating too much fragmentation — allowing the shared floor to erode, the dual-membership principle to dissolve, the common obligations to go unmet. Both failures are real. The Hebrew political tradition experienced both.

The Hebrew legal tradition’s influence on the founders was not merely inspirational — it was jurisprudential.

John Selden (1584–1654) was simultaneously the greatest Hebraist of his century and the most important constitutional lawyer of his generation. He argued against the Crown in the Ship Money cases, helped draft the Petition of Right, and first articulated parliamentary sovereignty in terms English constitutional law still uses. He also spent decades producing the most systematic treatment of Hebrew law available in the European scholarly tradition — De Jure Naturali et Gentium Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum — arguing that the Noahide laws, the Hebrew legal tradition’s account of what any person owes to any other person prior to any particular covenant, constituted the foundation of universal natural law. What you owe to strangers — the floor of obligation that exists before any specific agreement, any citizenship, any tribal membership — had a Hebrew jurisprudential source, and Selden translated it into the vocabulary of English constitutional argument.

Locke read Selden carefully; the reading notebooks document it. Jefferson and Madison read Locke. The chain from Hebrew jurisprudence to the Declaration’s “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” runs through Selden’s legal scholarship, not just through the founders’ biblical literacy. The dignity floor that the American covenant will not breach — the claim that every person possesses inherent worth that no majority can revoke — has a genealogy that is simultaneously theological and jurisprudential, and Selden is the point where those two strands fuse into constitutional argument.

The Puritan founders understood the covenantal structure directly, a century and a half before Philadelphia. John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella in 1630, described the Massachusetts Bay Colony in entirely covenantal terms: “We are entered into covenant with Him for this work.” He closed his sermon by quoting Moses’s last speech to Israel before they entered the Promised Land — Deuteronomy 30: “I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse; therefore choose life.” The surrounding verses make the passage’s significance explicit: the covenant, Moses says, is not in heaven and not across the sea — it is in your mouth and in your heart, to do it. The covenant does not require superhuman effort or ongoing divine enforcement. It requires acceptance, and then action, and then acceptance again. Winthrop chose this passage deliberately: the structure works through what you become when you accept it, not through what punishes you if you don’t.

The Liberty Bell encodes the same logic in metal. The Pennsylvania Assembly chose its inscription in 1751, twenty-five years before independence: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” — Leviticus 25:10, the Jubilee passage, mandating the periodic restoration of freedom as a structural legal obligation. Exodus tells you how a people is freed; Leviticus tells you how a free people maintains its freedom. The inscription is a constitutional provision, not a sentiment: liberty requires institutional maintenance, it erodes without active renewal, and the law’s job is to restore it when circumstances have undermined it. The founders who chose that verse were reading the legislative books of Hebrew scripture, not just the liberation narrative.

The Hebrew model that Franklin and Jefferson reached for was not, then, a story of success. It was a story of a structural problem brilliantly solved and then, slowly, disastrously mismanaged.

....

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Some Academia Wake Up to the Antisemitism They Were Trained to Avoid

H-Judaic, the main scholarly network for Jewish studies, just announced the inaugural meeting of a new Scholarly Network for the Study of Muslim Antisemitism, convening May 4 on Zoom and led by FIU professor Iqbal Akhtar. The framing is careful — "the intersection of antisemitism and Islamic contexts," an agenda built around "research mapping" and "identifying gaps." Read past the academic register, though, and something remarkable is happening: a mainstream scholarly network is forming around a subject the academy has spent decades pretending did not exist as a distinct category worth studying.

This is part of a larger shift. Andrew Pessin's Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism launched in late 2025 with a seven-webinar lecture series, a roster that has grown past 180 scholars, and a multi-volume foundational book project now soliciting contributions. Pessin's diagnosis is blunt — antizionism is "the dominant ideology in the academy," and serious scholarship on it has been corrupted to the point that the standards themselves need to be rebuilt. ICSA's explicit model is that antizionism has its own history, internal logic, tactics, and archive, and that these need to be mapped with the same rigor that historians of antisemitism have applied to other variants. The Movement Against Antizionism, Stop Antizionism, and a growing number of faculty resilience groups are pulling in the same direction.

What makes the Scholarly Network for the Study of Muslim Antisemitism interesting is the piece of the puzzle it addresses. Surveys by the ADL and others have consistently shown that antisemitic attitudes in Muslim-majority countries run at extraordinary levels — often two to four times higher than in Western populations — and the diaspora communities carry measurable portions of that freight with them. Everyone in the field knows this. Almost nobody in the field will say it on the record, because the topic sits directly on top of the third rail of Western academic life: anything that could be framed as Islamophobia ends careers, and the taxonomy of acceptable bigotries has long placed Muslims in the protected column and Jews in the privileged one. The result has been a strange silence in which French authorities have scrubbed the Muslim identity of attackers from public descriptions of antisemitic assaults, and Arab antisemitism has been a hate that scholars cannot bring themselves to name even as they catalogue every other variant.

The silence is not only political cowardice; it is methodologically disastrous. Antisemitism is a shape-shifter, and its different hosts produce different pathologies. Christian supersessionism, Enlightenment racial theory, Soviet anti-cosmopolitanism, Black Hebrew Israelite replacement theology, Nation of Islam conspiracism, and the theologically grounded Jew-hatred embedded in significant strands of Islamic tradition each have their own origin, internal grammar, and relationship to Zionism as both provocation and response. Treating them as a single undifferentiated "rising antisemitism" produces analysis that cannot predict anything and interventions that cannot work. You cannot counter a theological claim with a civil rights framework, and you cannot counter a conspiracy theory with sensitivity training. The field has been systematically blurring these categories for so long that treating Muslim antisemitism as its own object of study is, in 2026, a minor scholarly revolution.

The detail that makes this particular initiative unusual is that Akhtar is Muslim. He founded Miami Interfaith after October 7 to build Jewish-Muslim dialogue in South Florida, hosts the Interfaiths podcast with frequent Jewish guests, and studied Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern topics as an undergraduate. A Jewish scholar announcing a network for the study of Muslim antisemitism would be dismissed in much of the academy as a polemicist before the Zoom link went out. A Muslim scholar announcing the same network, from inside a Muslim Studies center, creates space that did not exist the week before.

Whether the network produces serious scholarship or whether it gets captured and defanged by the surrounding disciplinary pressures is an open question. But the fact that these institutions are being founded at all — and that they are being founded simultaneously, across the Jewish/non-Jewish divide and across the antisemitism/antizionism distinction — suggests that a tipping point has been reached, even if it is only among a minority of scholars who have integrity.

As someone who has been writing about Muslim antisemitism for years, this is gratifying.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/19 Links: The West is losing its moral compass; Arson attempt hits London synagogue; Iran-linked group claims attack; Israel marks 83 years since Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: The West is losing its moral compass

Then there was October 7. If anything, the morality should have been even clearer, given that the jihadis of Hamas were of a piece with those who had attacked concert halls, Tube trains and cafés in Britain and across the West. Yet rather than seeing Israeli flags flying from every lamppost, we endured the disgraceful spectacle of people celebrating the pogrom in London less than 24 hours afterwards.

There followed a vicious propaganda campaign, driven by our enemies and embraced by international organisations and the media, which sexed up the war until it was inaccurately labelled a “genocide”. Millions of gullible people were swept up. Supporters of Israel – a democracy fighting for its life – became a dying breed. Once Trump entered the White House, however, there was little doubt which side he was on.

The moral certainty that deserted the president over Ukraine was suddenly there in spades. While European powers concluded it was best to reward Hamas by recognising a Palestinian state, Trump remained stalwart: jihadism was the enemy. Through the sheer force of his conviction, the hostages were freed and the war ended.

Which brings us to Iran. Although this is a regime that is believed to have butchered more than 30,000 people in two days, sows terror around the globe, lusts after nuclear weapons and is driven by apocalyptic theological fantasies, its fans have marched in our cities. Commentators, meanwhile, pay lip service to condemning Tehran while their true passions only gush forth when it comes to willing the downfall of Trump.

What is going on? Well, it’s all about the culture war. No crisis, it seems, is too grave to be bastardised by moral weaklings for petty politics. While Putin becomes some anti-woke folk hero, at the other end of the spectrum, the Ayatollah is given a glow-up as an icon of progressivism.

The problem is, one day we’ll need that ethical instinct we’re frittering away. Look to those with their lives on the line. Ask Ukrainians what they think of Israel. Ask Israelis what they think of Ukraine. Ask the Iranian people what they think of both countries, and ask them all what they think of the regime. Any questions?

Alan Dershowitz: Imminence Is No Longer the Criterion for Military Preventive Action

Extremists have accused President Trump of "war crimes" for his attack on Iran. Trump reasonably and understandably believed Iran was close to developing a nuclear arsenal, which the mullahs might have deployed against Israel in the near term, and perhaps eventually against the U.S.

Regardless of whether the potential timing of this threat fits the traditional definition of "imminent" - right on the verge of happening - it was real and would have been catastrophic if carried out. Accordingly, both the U.S. and Israel had the right - indeed, the obligation - to regard the threat that Iran would soon develop and deploy a nuclear arsenal as sufficiently dangerous to warrant preventive military action. Had either country waited until this nuclear threat was truly imminent, it might have been too late to stop it.

We can say this from experience. We waited too long with regard to North Korea, and that rogue nation managed to develop a nuclear arsenal under our noses. As a consequence, the Hermit Kingdom has been constantly threatening the world, and we can do nothing about it. Iran, the world's top state exporter of terrorism, would pose a far more serious near-term threat than North Korea.

Former Foreign Minister of Australia Gareth Evans wrote in a 2004 UN report that, "The classic non-threat imminent situation is early-stage acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by a state presumed to be hostile." Israel used such a justification to preemptively destroy both Iraq's and Syria's nuclear weapons programs before their threats became imminent.

An even stronger case can be made regarding Iran's nuclear arsenal program, since Iran has threatened to use it against Israel - which its leaders have called "a one-bomb state." Once Iran obtains a nuclear arsenal, it will already be too late for prevention or preemption.

IDF reservist killed, 9 wounded by Hezbollah IED in Southern Lebanon

Israel Defense Forces Sergeant First Class (res.) Lidor Porat, 31, from Ashdod, fell in Lebanon on Saturday, according to the Israeli military.

Nine other soldiers were wounded in the same incident, one severely, four moderately and four lightly, according to an IDF statement. The wounded were evacuated by helicopter and their families have been notified.

According to the IDF, a D-9 bulldozer operated by a force from the 769th Brigade in Southern Lebanon hit an IED planted by Hezbollah near Kfar Kila.

Kfar Kila was destroyed in the previous round of fighting against Hezbollah at the end of 2024. The army is investigating whether the explosive dated from that period or was recently placed there, Israel’s Channel 14 reported.

“My wife and I, together with all the citizens of Israel, share in the heavy grief and extend our deepest condolences to the family of Sgt. First Class (res.) Lidor Porat, of blessed memory, who fell in battle in Southern Lebanon,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.

“I wish a swift and full recovery to our soldiers who were wounded in the difficult incident. Together with his comrades, Lidor fought bravely to defend our communities and our citizens—and this is how we will continue to act,” he added.

The development follows the death on Friday of Warrant Officer (res.) Barak Kalfon, from Adi in northern Israel. Kalfon was an employee of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Married and the father of two, he would have turned 49 next month.

A Case Study: "Gender & Society" Violates Its Own Standards to Publish Anti-Israel Content

There is nothing interesting anymore about discovering that a top-ranked sociology journal has published a one-sided polemic against Israel. Entire fields have been ideologically captured by anti-Zionist rhetoric. I've documented this many times, both in individual papers and in academia as a whole.

What is interesting is watching a respected journal abandon every substantive standard in its own rulebook to publish a blatantly anti-Israel piece— and watching it do so eagerly, in the open, with editorial solicitation on the record.

The article is Sarah Ihmoud’s “Hunger and the Palestinian Womb,” published online March 25, 2026 in Gender & Society, a SAGE journal that describes itself as “a top-ranked, peer-reviewed, sociological journal” that “publishes less than 10% of all papers submitted to it.”

Here is the abstract, in full:

This article theorizes the Palestinian womb as both a site of Zionist colonial violence and Palestinian futurity through the story of Shema, a young woman who became pregnant and gave birth during Gaza’s ongoing genocide. Drawing on decolonial Palestinian feminism and Indigenous feminist scholarship, I argue that Israel’s weaponization of starvation constitutes a gendered assault on Palestinian social reproduction, targeting pregnant and breastfeeding women to sever intergenerational continuity. Shema’s narrative — from her interrupted wedding in October 2023 through forced displacement, miscarriage, and ultimately the birth of her son Youssef amid bombardment and acute malnutrition — reveals how genocide operates not only through military violence but also through the systematic destruction of life’s conditions. Her testimony illuminates what Shalhoub-Kevorkian terms genocidal “unchilding” and what I theorize as the colonial targeting of reproductive futures. Yet Shema’s story also embodies revolutionary mothering as insurgent care work, refusing to cede the future despite engineered hunger and psychic siege. Situating her experience within genealogies of anti-colonial resistance, I argue that storytelling itself becomes decolonial praxis — a refusal of erasure and a sacred map toward collective liberation. Grounded in intimate testimony and critical analysis, this work demands feminist engagement with starvation as reproductive violence and Palestinian life-making as radical resistance.

Every sweeping factual claim in this abstract — “Zionist colonial violence,” “Gaza’s ongoing genocide,” “Israel’s weaponization of starvation,” a deliberate campaign “targeting pregnant and breastfeeding women to sever intergenerational continuity” — is stated as established fact rather than as a hypothesis to be tested. All of the evidence in the piece, by the author’s own description, is a series of WhatsApp messages from one 23-year-old woman in Gaza.

The bias is unmistakable from the abstract alone. How this got published is the real question. Even a cursory review of both Gender & Society’s own stated standards and the standards that the journal claims to adhere to as a COPE member shows that this article doesn't just violate these rules - it tramples them.

The political content is treated as settled fact, which the journal’s standards forbid

The Gender & Society submission guidelines describe what the journal publishes: “empirical articles, which are both theoretically engaged and methodologically rigorous,” or occasionally “theoretical articles that meaningfully advance sociological theories about gender.”

An empirical article argues from evidence to a conclusion. It states its hypothesis, describes its method, presents its findings, and discusses what the findings can and cannot support. Ihmoud’s piece inverts this entirely. The conclusions — genocide, weaponized starvation, deliberate gendered targeting of Palestinian wombs — are the premises from which the analysis begins. The abstract announces them as established descriptive categories. The sections that follow do not argue for these conclusions; they illustrate them through selected excerpts of one woman’s messages.

This is backwards. If the claim is that Israel has a policy of targeting pregnant women, the claim must be defended with evidence of intent, policy, and outcome, with engagement of contrary evidence. Instead the article treats each claim as self-evident and reaches for ever more extreme restatements: “engineered hunger,” “psychic siege,” “colonial unchilding,” “the machinery of death.” No reviewer trained in empirical sociology could have permitted this as a finding rather than as an opinion. The guidelines require “methodologically rigorous” work. There is no methodology here to even test as rigorous.

The abstract uses “Zionist colonial violence,” “Gaza’s ongoing genocide,” “Israel’s weaponization of starvation,” and “engineered hunger” as neutral analytical vocabulary - assumed fact - not as positions being argued for.

The article could have stated an argument in a form that scholarly conventions recognize: “I argue that the conditions in Gaza are best characterized as genocide, for the following reasons…” It instead assumes the characterization as a starting premise. This is what distinguishes advocacy from scholarship. A paper published in a top-ranked sociology journal that treats the Israel-Hamas war as “Zionist colonial violence” in the abstract, without argument, has set the vocabulary of one side as the scholarly default.

The editor invited the piece — and the journal itself could not have applied its own peer review to it

The acknowledgments reveal the mechanism. Ihmoud thanks “Sharmila Rudrappa and Patricia Richards who invited her to contribute this piece to a symposium in Gender & Society.” Sharmila Rudrappa is the current editor of the journal; Patricia Richards is a former editor. The piece was solicited by the journal’s own editorial leadership.

Invited contributions exist at many journals, but COPE Core Practice 9 requires that “all peer review processes must be transparently described and well managed.” Gender & Society does not disclose anywhere on the article page what review this piece actually received, whether it was sent to external reviewers, whether those reviewers were blinded, or whether they were asked to apply the same methodological standards the journal applies to the roughly 97% of submissions it rejects.

One part of the ordinary process was structurally impossible. The submission guidelines require that review be anonymous, with authors cited in the third person (“As Collins (2014) has found…” and explicitly NOT “As I previously demonstrated…”). Ihmoud’s article contains exactly the forbidden first-person construction: “as Palestinian feminist analysis insists, and as I have argued elsewhere, genocide operates… (Ihmoud 2025).” She self-cites this way three times. The piece had already appeared five months earlier at Decolonial Hacker under her name, so any reviewer with a web browser would have known who wrote it.

The procedural question matters less than a deeper one: how anything calling itself peer review could have looked at this article and cleared it. A scholar competent in qualitative sociology, applying the journal’s stated methodological standards, would have returned this manuscript with comments on the n=1 sample, the absence of a methods section, the treatment of the conclusion as a premise, the lack of engagement with contrary evidence, and the circular self-citation. None of those comments made it into the published piece, which means either they were never made or they were ignored. Either way the “peer-reviewed” label at the top of the article page is doing work it cannot support.

The journal’s own rule against prior publication was waived — and the author said so in print

The journal’s submission rules are explicit: “Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal should not simultaneously submit them to another journal, nor should manuscripts have been published elsewhere in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content.”

The author’s note reads: “This piece was first published in Decolonial Hacker in October 2025… and is reprinted with permission here.” She adds that she “made the decision to stop updating data after its original publication.”

A side-by-side comparison confirms the two versions are the same article with trivial edits. Gender & Society apparently insisted that the word "Zionist" be capitalized. Otherwise, the piece is fundamentally identical to that published in an unapologetically biased source.

This is textbook redundant publication, which COPE Core Practice 7 requires every member journal to police. Gender & Society has the policy in its own submission guidelines. The editors simply ignored it, took a piece already running at an activist outlet, and reprinted it with a SAGE imprint.

A scholar submitting original, blinded, empirical research through the ordinary queue would be rejected immediately on this ground alone. For this piece the rule was waived. The reason, on the evidence available, was that the editors wanted its conclusions in their journal.

Worse, an article published as activism was republished verbatim as scholarship.

The author’s political commitments are not disclosed as a competing interest

We see this often, but it is worth highlighting.

COPE Core Practice 4 requires “clear definitions of conflicts of interest and processes for handling conflicts of interest of authors, reviewers, editors, journals and publishers.”

Ihmoud is a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, an advocacy organization with an explicit political mission. She has published in activist outlets including Decolonial Hacker and Jadaliyya, where the same arguments appear without the scholarly framing. The article’s conclusions are effectively identical to the political positions of the organization she co-founded.

This affiliation appears in her biography but is not flagged as a competing interest. Scholarly norms require that the conflict of interest be disclosed and managed. The journal made no such requirement of her.

The article’s analytical foundations are circular self-citation

The load-bearing theoretical claim — that “genocide operates not only through bombs and bullets but also through the slow, grinding destruction of life’s conditions” — is cited to Ihmoud 2025, while the claim that “decolonial Palestinian feminism refuses this futurelessness” is cited to Ihmoud 2022. The concept of the “Palestinian womb” as a theoretical object traces back to Ihmoud’s 2021 chapter.

Self-citation is normal in academic writing. Load-bearing self-citation for every core analytical move, with no serious engagement with contrary scholarship on any of these points, is not — it makes the piece a restatement of Ihmoud’s own prior positions rather than an original contribution. The journal’s guidelines are explicit that it publishes work making “original contributions to gender theory.” This article just rehashes.

The smaller violations

Several further breaches of the journal’s own rules and of COPE Core Practices are worth listing briefly, because each would on its own justify desk-rejecting an ordinary submission:

No methods section. The article does not describe how the interview material was collected, verified, coded, or analyzed. The sample size is one. The journal’s guidelines require empirical articles to include “discussions of both theory and method.”
No data availability statement. COPE Core Practice 5 requires journals to have data-availability policies. The raw data — in this case, WhatsApp messages — cannot be examined, verified, or independently interpreted. The research design is unfalsifiable.
No ethics review statement. COPE Core Practice 6 requires policies on research involving human subjects, particularly vulnerable populations. The article publishes a named, identifiable 23-year-old woman in an active war zone — her full name, her child’s name, her pregnancy history, her displacement history, and private photographs. The College of the Holy Cross, Ihmoud’s employer, has an Institutional Review Board; the article is silent on whether it was consulted.
Abstract 35% over the word limit. The submission guidelines specify 150-200 words; the published abstract is 265. Small on its own, but telling about how carefully anyone read this.

What this adds up to

The failures here all point in the same direction: the editors wanted this piece, and each rule that stood in the way was waived. The prior-publication rule was waived. The anonymous-review requirement was, by construction, impossible to honor. The methodological-rigor standard was not applied. The requirement that theoretical articles make original contributions was waived. The conflict-of-interest norm was not enforced. The ethics-oversight expectation was not raised.

Journals do bend their rules for invited contributions. What makes this case diagnostic is how thoroughly the rules were bent, how many were bent at once, how openly the violations are documented in the article itself, and how reliably the bending ran in one political direction. Gender & Society did not publish an imperfect essay despite its standards. It published this essay by suspending its standards.

This is how bias functions inside institutions that still think of themselves as impartial. The infrastructure of impartiality — the submission rules, the peer-review process, the COPE membership, the low acceptance rate — remains fully intact as a set of public claims. It is only when you check whether any of it was applied to a particular piece that you discover that standards can be ignored when the journal wants.

Which means Gender & Society has no standards at all.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)