The Canadian university survey details how anti-Zionism is destroying academic freedom, today

There is a lot of material in the Canadian Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) survey that was just released, and I don't want to bury any of the important points. I already discussed the appendix pointing out how the students don't even understand that standard antisemitic tropes are bigoted to begin with. 

Another very disturbing finding is how the environment on campus is destroying the fundamental right of academic freedom to begin with.  

BDS justifies boycotting Israeli academia in the name of academic freedom, and the irony is obvious: they are shutting down access to Israeli research and study, the very opposite of such freedom, by claiming that this is what Israel does. In reality, every example they give is where Israel is responding to specific security needs: checkpoints that slow a professor's commute from Ramallah to Bir Zeit, a university closed after a wave of terror attacks, a permit denied to a visiting lecturer. That is the preferred frame. Israel restricts, the world's students and faculty must speak up.

CASE describes a chilling effect on academic freedom happening right now, on North American campuses, at a scale that dwarfs anything done to Palestinians.. It is the academic freedom of Jewish students, and almost nobody talks about it.

The survey polled roughly 900 Jewish students across Canadian postsecondary institutions. The results are chilling: 

• 71.8% limit what they say in class about being Jewish. 
• 41.3% avoid certain classes or events altogether. 
• 39.8% say antisemitism has hurt their academic performance. 
• 32.5% have considered dropping a course or leaving their program because of it. 
• 25.9% have considered leaving their university entirely.

When you look at classroom-level issues, the problem is worse. 36% encountered course content or discussion they experienced as antisemitic or biased. 34% had a professor bring up Jews, Israel, or Zionism in a class where the subject had nothing to do with any of it. 47% felt pressured to share their opinion of Israel with other students, 36% felt pressured to conform to a professor's views on the subject, and 20% felt pressured to join an anti-Israel protest. 

Eighteen percent of the incidents students described named a faculty member as the source of the problem, and another seven percent named a teaching assistant, meaning the people grading these students' work are, by their own account, sometimes the ones doing the intimidating.

This is what an actual academic freedom crisis looks like: a quarter of the affected population weighing whether to abandon their education, and two in five reporting that their grades have already suffered for it.

The usual debate about academic freedom discusses the freedom of the professors to say what they want. Do they have the right to write offensive things on social media? Do they have the right to bring their politics into the lecture hall? Can they move the class itself to a protest encampment? 

Nobody asks whether the professor lecturing on "Zionism as a death cult" or assigning a podcast that likens Zionism to Nazism is violating the academic freedom of the Jewish student sitting in the third row, the one who must now calculate whether raising their hand is worth the risk. A university is a place where students are supposed to be free to question a professor's claims, disagree with a reading, or simply stay silent, without paying for it in a grade or in the room's good opinion of them. The CASE report makes this argument explicitly: a professor's freedom to express a strong political view does not cancel a student's freedom to question it, dissent from it, or decline to answer at all. When 71.8% of a population self-censors and 18% name their professors as the source of the antisemitism they've faced, that second freedom is the one actually collapsing. 

Not to mention that there is a power asymmetry between the lecturer and the student. For all the talk among progressives  about the dangers of power disparities, this one is not considered a problem when the instructor is on the "right side of history." The silenced student has little power to fight back.

Grading a Jewish student down for writing about the sexual violence of October 7, as one CASE respondent describes happening to her, generates no petition and no coverage, because the assumption on campus is that this is simply what a controversial classroom discussion looks like. It is not. It is a professor using the power to grade as a weapon against a viewpoint she does not share, and the CASE data suggest it happens routinely enough that Jewish students have already built their behavior around expecting it. Self-censorship is as debilitating to a campus environment as external censorship is. 

Nobody needs to be fired, no protest needs to be banned, no professor needs to lose the freedom to say something odious about Zionism from behind a podium. A written policy protecting student dissent will not by itself produce it, because the student in the third row is weighing the cost of speaking up against the professor's actual conduct, not the student handbook. If a professor is going to declare that Zionism is an evil ideology or that Israel is a "sea of savages and barbarians," as CASE respondents report hearing, that professor has to say just as clearly, and just as often, that disagreement is welcome and will cost nothing in the grade book. The students deserve the same respect the professors demand for  themselves. A lecturer who loudly expresses an opinion must be equally loud that others can disagree. When the disagreement descends into sneering dismissal is when academic freedom is shut down.  

The side that has the power to give grades and decide on a student's future is in a position of power, and the more strident the opinion, the more important it is to make anyone who disagrees feel comfortable. 

A Jewish student who has watched classmates get frozen out for saying something politically incorrect about Israel or the Palestinians will read an unqualified political declaration as exactly what it is: a rule as to what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in the classroom.

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

 

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08/10 Links Pt2: Foreign money is flooding US politics — but AIPAC’s is American; Ireland’s fog of prejudice; Selective Outrage: The WSJ Distorts the Reality of Christians in Israel

From Ian:

Bethany Mandel: Foreign money is flooding US politics — but AIPAC’s is American

If Americans are actually concerned about foreign money influencing American politics and policy, there is plenty to investigate. And unlike AIPAC, much of it is actually foreign.

Americans for Public Trust has just launched a new database, FollowForeignMoney.org, attempting to track the enormous sums flowing from foreign sources into American nonprofit groups and advocacy organizations. At launch, APT says it has identified more than $5 billion in spending across more than 500 groups, documented in more than 12,000 records.

The scale is remarkable, but so is the loophole that makes much of it possible. Federal law prohibits foreign entities from contributing to candidates, political committees, and super PACs, or participating in a campaign’s decision-making process. But elections are hardly the only way to influence American politics, and there are far fewer restrictions on foreign money once it moves outside the narrow confines of electoral activity.

Foreign dollars can finance nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, voter registration, issue advertising, and various policy and lobbying efforts, all of which can help shape the political environment in which Americans eventually cast their ballots. As APT explains, the line between regulated electoral activity, where foreign money is prohibited, and unregulated issue activity, where it is typically permitted, is “nearly indistinguishable to the average American.”

For some perspective, AIPAC, which again is funded by American donors, spent $29 million in 2022, $46 million in 2024, and $67 million in 2026, much of it in Democratic primaries. Those are substantial sums, and Americans are perfectly entitled to debate whether they like AIPAC’s political priorities, its tactics, or the candidates it supports.

But there is something deeply unserious about treating money donated by Americans to an American organization advocating an issue they care about as a sinister form of foreign influence, while billions of dollars originating overseas can flow into American organizations seeking to shape our laws, institutions, and political culture with comparatively little scrutiny.

In a conversation with the Washington Examiner, Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, explained what her organization found when it began following the money.

“Foreign money is flowing through the nonprofit sector to implement an extremist climate agenda and bankroll radical left-wing causes and policies,” Sutherland said, including organizations supporting political causes such as radical ballot measures. “And it’s all propped up by foreign money.”

The database allows users to trace that money through the complicated network of foundations, nonprofit groups, and advocacy organizations through which it often travels. An organization spending millions of dollars trying to change public opinion, influence legislation, register voters, or pass a ballot measure is participating in American political life, whether its name ever appears on a candidate’s campaign-finance report.

Congress was beginning to take notice of the problem even before APT released its database. At a hearing this year, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) focused on how nonprofit organizations can exploit gaps in American law to bring foreign money into domestic political and policy fights.

Smith later put the problem plainly: “Tax-exempt status … exists to support legitimate charitable and educational work that strengthens our communities, not to serve as cover for foreign propaganda, election interference, or activities that undermine our national interest.”

There is a legitimate debate to be had about how far Congress should go in restricting foreign donations to American nonprofits, particularly because any new law would have to avoid inadvertently ensnaring legitimate charitable, educational, or religious organizations that receive support from abroad. But it is difficult to have that debate honestly when our political and media class applies the label “foreign influence” so selectively.

AIPAC’s donors are Americans exercising the same right every other American has to pool their money around an issue they consider important and support or oppose candidates accordingly. The fact that the issue is Israel does not transform those Americans into agents of Israel any more than Cuban Americans advocating policy toward Cuba or Ukrainian Americans lobbying for aid to Ukraine become agents of foreign governments.

That is what made Axelrod’s calculation so revealing. He was not simply complaining about the amount AIPAC spent, or making the familiar argument that there is too much money sloshing around American politics. He described an organization funded by Americans as “essentially an agent” of a foreign government because those Americans are politically engaged on behalf of the Jewish state.

My husband, Seth Mandel, identified the more disturbing implication in Commentary after watching the exchange. “Why would Axelrod, who has worked so hard to position himself as a moderate in temperament and a card-carrying member of the mainstream, go on CNN and slap American Jews across the face?” he asked.

“And that’s when I realized it. Axelrod is positioning himself in the party’s mainstream. Accusing AIPAC of being a foreign agent isn’t relegated to the fever swamps anymore. And Axelrod, a very smart observer of Democratic Party politics, saw El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens as confirmation that this is what the party is now. And that might be the most dispiriting part of it all.”

That observation makes the timing of APT’s database particularly useful because it offers a remarkably simple test of what this debate is actually about. If Axelrod and others are genuinely alarmed by foreign money influencing American politics, they have just been handed a database documenting more than $5 billion of it, spread across thousands of records and hundreds of organizations. There is enough there to keep journalists, lawmakers, and cable-news panels occupied for quite some time examining whether American law adequately protects our political system from money originating overseas.

Yet that wasn’t the money Axelrod was talking about on CNN. The $30 million that concerned him was raised and spent by Americans, and calling it foreign required treating the political interests of those Americans as somehow foreign themselves.

AIPAC’s supporters are not just Jews; they include evangelical Christians and millions of other Americans who believe, for religious, moral, or strategic reasons, that the United States should maintain a strong relationship with Israel. Americans organize politically around all sorts of foreign-policy questions, and we generally understand that doing so is an expression of their American political rights rather than evidence that they are acting on behalf of another government.

Something peculiar happens, however, when the country in question is Israel and a substantial number of the Americans doing the organizing are Jews.

Ireland’s fog of prejudice

It is striking that at a time when the Torah just commanded us to learn how to see, we are also confronted with examples of what happens when prejudice prevents people from seeing clearly.

Ireland has a long and painful history of living under British rule. The memory of oppression, struggle for national self-determination and resistance to a powerful empire is deeply embedded in the Irish consciousness.

Logically, that history should create a natural sympathy for the Jewish people and for Israel.

The Jewish people, too, have experienced centuries of foreign domination, persecution and exile. Israel has emerged from a history in which Jews were repeatedly denied security, sovereignty and the ability to determine their own destiny. Israel itself was also governed under the British Mandate before its independence in 1948.

One might therefore expect Ireland, of all countries, to understand the complexity of a people seeking security and self-determination after generations of suffering. Yet sometimes, history teaches the opposite lesson. People can remember their own oppression while becoming blind or indifferent to the experiences of others.

Last week exposed a particularly striking example in the debate over Israeli technology in Ireland.

Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense company, has developed a sophisticated aviation navigation technology that helps aircraft operate and land safely in difficult weather conditions, including conditions of poor visibility. This navigation system has become a near standard on military and state jets in countries across the world.

Ireland, a country famously familiar with fog, should be especially capable of appreciating the value of technology that helps pilots navigate safely when they cannot rely on their eyes alone.

And yet, headlines were made last week when it was reported that the Irish government refused to install this advanced landing system in official state aircraft—the Irish “Air Force One”—due to its Israeli origin. The twisted irony is so difficult to miss. A nation accustomed to physical fog is allowing the ideological fog that clouds its moral vision to imperil the safety of its leaders.

This is not just a hypothetical risk. In 2011, an airplane attempting to land in Cork, Ireland, crashed in dense fog after three failed attempts to land, killing a relative of the Irish president and five other people.

When a technology that can improve aviation is judged not according to what it does, but according to the nationality of the people who developed it, something has gone seriously wrong.

Made in India: Inside the India-Israel weapons alliance Amnesty wants dismantled

AMNESTY IS asking New Delhi to go considerably further than imposing additional checks on exports.

It called for an immediate halt to arms transfers to Israel and a comprehensive embargo covering weapons, components, technologies, technical assistance and training. It also recommended that Indian companies terminate business relationships, including joint research and development, with Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries.

“Israeli systems currently form the technological backbone of India’s security architecture along its sensitive borders with China and Pakistan,” Birvadker told the Post, on what possible consequences implementation would have for India’s own military.

“Companies like Elbit, Rafael, and IAI are not standard import suppliers,” she said. “They are India’s premier partners in building a domestic defense industry.”

Birvadker went further, arguing that severing the relationship could set back India’s objective of technological self-reliance “by decades.”

“India would once again find itself dependent on other global powers, a resurgence of defense colonialism,” Bivadker stated. “Who benefits from such an outcome?” The legal argument: The controversy lies in what is not publicly visible

Amnesty’s challenge is also directed at India’s export-control system itself.

India is not a party to the Arms Trade Treaty, although it is a party to the Geneva Conventions and Genocide Convention. Amnesty argues that those existing obligations are sufficient to require India to halt transfers where there is a clear risk that weapons could contribute to serious violations.

Indian arms exports are not unregulated. Military and dual-use goods are controlled through the SCOMET system and require authorization from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade. Applications are reviewed through an inter-ministerial process involving the foreign, defense, and home ministries, and official guidelines require consideration of the end user, declared end use, chain of transmission, and whether an export could conflict with Indian national security or foreign policy.

The controversy, according to Amnesty, lies in what is not publicly visible.

The inter-ministerial deliberations are confidential, leaving no public record showing whether international humanitarian law or India’s treaty obligations were specifically assessed when licenses for exports to Israel were approved.

Amnesty filed a Right to Information request seeking details of specific export licenses and any human rights assessments undertaken by the government, but said it had received no reply before publication.

Birvadker’s position is that New Delhi should resist external pressure rather than allow NGOs to determine its strategic relationships.

“New Delhi must categorically reject the pressure to suspend defense exports, fiercely guarding its principle of strategic autonomy and its sovereign right to conduct relations in alignment with its national interests,” she said.

“Yielding to Amnesty’s demands would severely undermine India’s credibility as a reliable defense partner on the global stage,” she told the Post.

India’s concept of strategic autonomy predates the Israel controversy. It was visible, for example, when New Delhi resisted Western pressure over Russian oil purchases following the invasion of Ukraine, prioritizing energy security and its freedom to maintain relationships across competing geopolitical blocs.

The relationship with Israel increasingly fits into that same model. India remains a major purchaser of Israeli technology while becoming a supplier in its own right. Israeli companies gain an enormous manufacturing base and access to Indian industry; India acquires technology, domestic production and exposure to global defense markets. The greater the integration, the harder it becomes to describe the partnership simply as one country selling weapons to another.

That is another revealing aspect of Amnesty’s report. Its authors see the hundreds of thousands of Indian-made components flowing to Israeli companies as evidence that the relationship should be curtailed. Birvadker cites the same supply chains as evidence that the relationship has become strategically indispensable.

The argument over Gaza will remain bitter and unresolved, particularly when the charge of genocide is treated as settled despite the substantial legal arguments against it. The industrial shift beneath that debate, however, is already taking shape.

India is no longer merely buying Israeli weapons. Increasingly, some of Israel’s weapons begin their journey in India.

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08/10 Links Pt1: The Arab-Islamic Formula for 'Peace': Ignore Hamas, Blame Israel; Bondi Royal Commission blasted over snubbing Josh Frydenberg; UN data counts Palestinian terror as ‘settler violence’

From Ian:

Jonathan Conricus: Disarm, verify, withdraw. The only path forward for Gaza

Nikolai Mladenov’s newly announced Gaza agreement offers a rare glimmer of hope amid years of bloodshed and despair. At its core is a straightforward proposition: the phased disarmament of Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations in exchange for the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip. Israelis and Gazans alike desperately want Hamas’s weapons taken away, Gaza demilitarized, and a new form of leadership to take root—one rooted in respectful coexistence rather than endless jihad.

The desire for this outcome runs deep. Many Israelis, stil reeling from the horrors of October 7, when Hamas invaders massacred civilians in border communities, see demilitarization as the only reliable way to restore security to the kibbutzim and towns that face Gaza. They have no appetite for indefinite military operations. Popular rhetoric aside, neither the Israeli public nor the military wants to remain in Gaza indefinitely. What they want is simple: the absence of a genocidal terror organization on the other side of the fence, armed with rockets, tunnels, and an ideology of annihilation.

Gazans, too, have every reason to support this. Years of rule by a mafia that prioritizes tunnels and rockets over schools, hospitals, and prosperity have exacted a terrible tol. A Gaza free of Hamas’s military apparatus could finally begin to rebuild and choose life over perpetual conflict.

Yet history teaches caution. Hamas has a well-documented record of tactical pauses. The Islamic concept of ‘Hudna’—a temporary cessation of hostilities—has been invoked when jihadi forces find themselves at a disadvantage, only to be broken once strength is regained. If the current peace deal amounts to nothing more than another Hudna, it wil fail.

What is required instead is genuine, complete disarmament: every long-range rocket, every AK-47, maps of the entire tunnel network, and the locations of weapons manufacturing sites, all handed over under independent international verification. Only then does the plan become something more than a ruse. Only then does it become a foundation for lasting change.

Israel’s actions wil hinge entirely on whether that verification occurs. The absence of an immediate official Israeli endorsement is understandable in the current political climate. With elections approaching, any government is wary of appearing to accept international dictates that place civilians at risk. No responsible leadership wil sign onto an arrangement that leaves the core threat intact. But once Hamas’s arsenal is demonstrably gone and the Strip is verifiably demilitarized, Israel has every incentive to withdraw. There is no strategic or public desire to remain. The moment the threat disappears, the justification for military action disappears with it.

Before October 7, Israel was not conducting operations inside Gaza. The pattern of cause and effect is clear: rockets, tunnels, and invasions produce defensive responses. Remove the cause, and the response ends.

Keep the gas on the counterterrorism pedal

In Gaza and Lebanon, Israel is compelled to play the diplomatic game being led by Washington in order to continue enjoying its support and avoid being portrayed as the recalcitrant party. But Israel must not allow that game to constrain its freedom of action to destroy terrorist infrastructure and eliminate terrorists wherever they may be.

Over the weekend, Israel rejected current plans to disarm Hamas. Its reasons were clear: Despite the efforts of the United States, the terrorist organization has no intent to do so.

While the CEO of the Board of Peace, Nikolay Mladenov, has maneuvered between the intricacies of the “20-point plan” and the “15-point framework” to reassure Israel, Hamas has made its intentions regarding the commitments contained in these agreements perfectly clear.

“We do not intend to hand over the weapons to Israel,” says senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad. “No disarmament process will take place before Israel completes its withdrawal from the Strip.”

For those who may have difficulty remembering, this is the same Ghazi Hamad who, just days after the massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, explained in media interviews that Israel is “a state that we want to bring down” and promised that the “‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ is only the first time. There will be a second, third and fourth time. We have the resilience and the ability to fight and pay the price.”

This is also the same Ghazi Hamad who, in an interview last week with English broadcaster Piers Morgan, insisted that Hamas had never intended to kill civilians on Oct. 7, attempting to blur—and even deny—the seminal event that ignited the ensuing war.

The long arm of Israel’s security services has not yet reached him, but the score will yet be settled.

Either way, if anyone had any doubts, Hamad’s words make clear that Hamas views the diplomatic talks merely as leverage to drive the Israel Defense Forces out of Gaza, without relinquishing either its military power or its ruling infrastructure.

Meanwhile, with the assistance of the Board of Peace, Gaza terrorists have received, free of charge, a 14-day respite from the blitz of Israeli targeted counterterrorism strikes that had been hitting them until a week ago.

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Arab-Islamic Formula for 'Peace': Ignore Hamas, Blame Israel

The foreign ministers of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt accused Israel of "violating" international law and undermining efforts to implement the Board of Peace's recently published "Roadmap for Completing the Implementation of President Trump's Comprehensive Peace Plan in Gaza." They also called for those responsible for "grave violations" to be held accountable.

The ministers forgot to mention that Hamas, by refusing to disarm and continuing to hold on to power in the Gaza Strip, is the party committing "grave violations."

If accountability is important, why does it apply only to Israel?

Where is the demand that Hamas be held accountable for bringing death and destruction upon the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by launching its invasion of Israel?

Why not issue a clear demand that Hamas surrender all its weapons? The omission is especially disturbing because three of the countries represented in the statement – Turkey, Qatar and Pakistan – are members of Trump's Board of Peace and are supposedly helping to bring security and stability to the Gaza Strip.

Do the Arabs and Muslims — or the Europeans — really believe that creating a Palestinian state would automatically produce peace? Who would prevent Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from taking over such a state? Who would confiscate their weapons? Who would prevent Iran or Turkey from supplying Palestinian proxies with weapons, money and training? Who would guarantee that a future Palestinian state would not be used to launch more October 7-style attacks against Israel?

Israel withdrew every soldier and expelled every Jewish resident from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Palestinians subsequently had an opportunity to demonstrate what self-rule could look like. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian Authority parliamentary election and seized full control of the Gaza Strip the following year.

Instead of turning the Gaza Strip into a model of prosperity and coexistence, Hamas transformed it into a base for terrorism against Israel. Why should Israel be expected to repeat this "experiment" on a much larger and more dangerous scale — either in Gaza or in the West Bank, overlooking major Israeli population centers?

Peace will not come from ignoring Hamas, demonizing Israel and Jews, or repeating slogans about a "two-state solution" as though October 7 had never happened. It will come only when the international community — including Arab and Islamic countries — makes it clear that armed jihadist organizations cannot be allowed to control Palestinian territory, possess private armies, or determine the future of Israelis and Palestinians through terrorism. That would be a far more useful message for Arab and Islamic governments to deliver than yet another communique condemning Israel.

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Canadian students don't think protesting synagogues, boycotting Jewish businesses or saying Jews are too economically powerful is antisemitic

A national report on antisemitism at Canadian universities has a lot of very concerning findings. For now, let's look at Appendix D.

That describes an upcoming report that concentrates on surveying all Canadian students, not just Jewish students. And it mentions three findings:

[M]ajorities did not consider several forms of anti-Jewish targeting antisemitic, including boycotting Jewish-owned businesses because of their perceived Israel tie (54%) and protesting outside Jewish houses of worship (54%). More than half (55%) did not identify the statement that Jews have too much influence on the economy as antisemitic. 

This means that Canadian students don't even know blatant antisemitism when they see it.

This is a result of constant anti-Israel messaging combined with the false assertion that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism. When you combine those two as facts, then every antisemitic act can be coded to be anti-Zionist.

For example, for the synagogue question, I'm sure that the answer given would be that they considered synagogues to be Zionist institutions and therefore open to protest. The wording of the first question, "boycotting Jewish-owned businesses because of their perceived Israel tie ," shows that perceptions of being pro-Israel is enough to justify targeting Jewish businesses. 

And the last question, which is one of the most classic antisemitic tropes, isn't even recognized as antisemitic? Keep in mind that Jews are only 1% of the Canadian population, and most Canadians don't think that saying Jews have too much influence on the economy is anti-Jewish???

The survey is not only finding increased antisemitism. It is documenting the mainlining of antisemitism as if it is normal thinking. And that may be even worse. 

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

 

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Jerusalem Cafe gaining sympathetic coverage for Shabbat hours is really a front for Jews for Jesus

Haaretz recently wrote about Haredi protests outside a Jerusalem coffee shop open on Shabbat, and about the secular Jews who are supporting it, framing it as yet another example of ultra-Orthodox Jews trying to impose their will on the seculars.

But what they didn't say is that the coffee shop is owned by Jews for Jesus and is meant to convert Jews to Christianity. And its secular supporters don't realize this either.

"I came from Tel Aviv. The secular embrace here makes me feel amazing," said one of them, Anat, as she waited in line. "There's a sense of awakening, and a feeling that we won't quietly surrender to the ultra-Orthodox and religious takeover."

"It starts with the prohibiting you from buying coffee on Shabbat and will continue with sleeves that are meant to hide exposed shoulders. I'm raising three daughters here, and I worry about their individual freedom 20 years from now," she said.

To be sure, the Jews for Jesus connection does not seem to be the main issue that is animating the haredim. There are other coffee shops open on Shabbat in Jerusalem that do not get protests. The problem is that the coffee shop opened very close to an Orthodox neighborhood, as Jewlicious explains. 

The alleyway where Café Basimta is located abuts the largely religious Nachlaot neighborhood, and is just two blocks away from where an Orthodox neighborhood lies. The Haredim acquiesce to the non-kosher businesses in the downtown area that are open on Shabbat, as well as those on a side street on the other side of Nachlaot. But they feel that this new café is just a little too close for comfort and, in their minds, it violates an unwritten agreement on the secular/religious status quo in the city.

The owner of the coffee shop, Yoel Ben David, was born to a Scottish Christian father and a Moroccan Jewish mother. He was raised in the Caribbean, England, and Paris. He and his wife seem to have dabbled with Breslov Hasidism for a time; he claims that he grew peyot and wore tzitzit before magically reading Isaiah 53 and finding Jesus.  He has an MA in Jewish Ministry and Leadership. He has been the head of Jerusalem's branch of Jews for  Jesus and he trains the other missionaries there on how to reach Israeli Jews. 

Indeed, the cafe was always meant for converting Jews. In his request for prayers, Yoel asks for "J4J Jerusalem Coffee Shop permits/approvals and evangelism effort."  Jews for Jesus itself refers to Basimta as "our beautiful new coffee shop in Jerusalem!" 

Jews for Jesus owns other cafes throughout Israel for the same purpose. Interestingly, their Tel Aviv cafe is closed on Shabbat. 

It is entirely possible that the Jerusalem Shabbat hours was meant to get the cafe in the newspapers and use that to spread the Gospel. "Jews for Jesus CEO Aaron Abramson knew the decision to open a coffee shop in Jerusalem with Saturday business hours would cause a stir among the city’s ultra-Orthodox," Christianity Today reported.  That is not respect - that is planning. 

A hint that the Shabbat controversy was the intention all along comes from a 2008 article Ben David co-wrote:

Occurrences of persecution and hostility to the Christian mission in Israel actually broadcast and magnify the Gospel. For example, as a result of hostilities to the Jews for Jesus evangelistic campaigns in the greater Tel-Aviv region in May 2008, we were able to preach the Gospel on national television.

There is no such thing as bad publicity, and opening a cafe next to a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem on Shabbat is a surefire way to get the Haredim upset - and to get the secular Jews to feel sympathetic to the cafe. The same article makes clear that secular Israelis are the target; people who do not know enough about Judaism to argue. So Ben David tells interviewers that he is supporting the freedom of secular Jews in Israel when in fact he is trying to convert them. 

Some Israeli supporters of the cafe change their tune when they learn the truth. JTA reports that Hapoel Jerusalem soccer team planned to give Basimta free advertising  on their uniforms to support their freedom to open on Shabbat, but changed their minds when they found out the cafe was a front for Jews for Jesus. 

“Our original intention was simply to support a small business that was being denied its freedom of operation, and we still believe in that principle,” club spokesperson Matan Avrina told JTA. “However, we also realized that this specific story is more complex than we initially knew.”

(h/t Avi)

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

 

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08/09 Links: Has "Never Again" Blinded Us?; The Ethical Case for Finishing the War Against Iran; 25 years ago, the Sbarro bombing opened a wound in Israel that still hasn’t healed

From Ian:

Has "Never Again" Blinded Us?

I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors - barely survivors - who stepped out of the camps into a world emptied of everyone they had ever loved. In the last three years, atrocities beyond imagination have been inflicted on us. Again and again we have watched parents bury their children. They tried to erase our entire nation. They tried to kill our faith and everything we bring to the world. And yet we rose again. We flourished, and we carried our dead forward by naming our sons and daughters after them and by making the world a better place.

"Never Again" rests on a hope. We believed the world would learn, that no one could confront the piles of shoes, the children's faces, the naked corpses, and remain unchanged. But only those who already felt some bond to Jews were capable of caring. Millions did not. Billions did not. The world walked through our museums and remained largely unmoved, or moved only briefly, never long enough to restrain antisemitism.

We wanted to believe morality could be taught. But not for the Jewish question. Pain does not create affinity; affinity must already exist for empathy to take root. And without that affinity, without some prior sense of connection to Jews as a living people, whatever response we think we see is not empathy, it is a grimace.

We spent decades in the belief that if we exposed everything, if we spared nothing, truth itself would end antisemitism. It would compel compassion. It never did. Antisemitism was not waiting for enlightenment. It was waiting for permission. For years now, the world has behaved as if there were a statute of limitations on the moral freeze that followed the Holocaust, as if the restraint purchased by our six million dead had quietly expired. After the Oct. 7 pogrom, there was no pause in Jew-hatred, not even for one day.

Antisemitism does not respond to evidence. It does not submit to reason. Hitler did not murder Jews because of what they believed, how they lived, or what they owned. He murdered the poor and the rich, the pious and the secular, the assimilated and the insular, the newborn and the elderly. There was no argument that could have saved them. There never is.

The rubicon of antisemitism crossed in the West - Israel will face new dangers, too

The current wave of antisemitism will – and already is – fundamentally altering Jewish life in the countries with the largest communities outside of Israel: the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Germany.

Almost three years since October 7, and the wave of antisemitism is not receding; it is becoming more pervasive and more commonplace. In the US, for example, one in three individuals said they were targets of antisemitism, and over half of Jews have changed their behavior out of fear of antisemitism, according to a recent survey.

The antisemitism genie will not go back into the bottle on its own. Political and social polarization, the convergence of left-wing and right-wing hatred, hostility toward Jews in academia, greater proclivity towards antisemitism among younger adults, well-funded Israel-defamation campaigns by state actors, and growing immigration from Arab countries with high rates of religious extremism – all signal that we have likely crossed a point of no return.

This doesn’t bode ill only for Jews in the West; there are major repercussions for Israel as well. Foremost, its strategic alliance with the United States is in jeopardy, as public sentiment turns increasingly anti-Israel and somewhat anti-Jewish. Israel will need to reassess its strategic situation and act.

First, Israel must continue to pursue military self-sufficiency. It must have the capacity to fight an extended war without dependency on the US (or any other country) for arms, munitions, and spare parts. After all, a future American president may simply refuse to provide them.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Israel’s new situation to the ancient isolationist Greek city-state of Sparta, which successfully fought its wars alone. The analogy was useful but flawed: in a global world, Israel should not aspire to Spartan isolation.

Rather, Israel should redouble efforts to build robust alliances with non-Western countries that don’t fall along the trend-lines of rising antisemitism – including India, former Soviet Republics, countries in South America, the Far East, and Africa, including moderate Muslim nations.

Among Western allies, Israel should foster mechanisms of co-dependence, so that there will be a real cost for such countries should they choose to abandon their partnerships with Israel.

Israel Is Making Plans for a Post-America Middle East

Israeli Consul General in New York Ofir Akunis says what worries him most is not the bouts of conflict in the Middle East. It's a drift in American politics that could one day spell the end of the historic U.S.-Israel alliance. Citing recent electoral victories by candidates espousing criticism of Israel, Akunis argued that "the reality is that some people here, for sure, prefer the ayatollahs rather than the American administration....To prefer your enemies rather than your political opponents, this is something new."

While it was his "hope that the United States of America will always be with us, we will need to prepare ourselves to be more independent than we used to be," given the trends he was witnessing.

It's not just Iran and its predominantly Shiite Muslim Axis of Resistance that Israel sees on its threat radar. An emerging "quartet" comprising the leading Sunni Muslim powers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan is also viewed with deep suspicion. "The ayatollahs are still in Iran. So, we need to solve this problem, and then we'll talk about the next challenge," Akunis said.

It's those in the West who direct their outrage not toward Iran but Israel that he blames most. "Those people do not say even one word about the ayatollahs, not even one word about their slogan 'Death to America,' and not even one word about the Iran massacre [of civilians]. What is it? Gaza, Gaza, Gaza."

"I can give you an answer about Gaza. Gaza can be like the Emirates, or Bahrain, or Singapore of the Middle East. No Hamas? Gaza can be prosperous. By the way, like in Lebanon. No Hizbullah? Lebanon can be prosperous."

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Ontario Halves Arson Stats By Redefining 'Arson' To Exclude Antisemitic Attacks (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Toronto, August 9 - Canada's largest metropolitan area has seen a dramatic reduction in the incidence of criminal incendiary acts since law enforcement authorities from that category any such act directed at Jews or Jewish institutions, provincial officials announced today.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Solicitor General reported that Greater Toronto Area arson statistics dropped 52 percent in the first half of 2026 after a quiet policy adjustment that reclassifies fires at synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher restaurants, and private Jewish residences as “ideologically motivated property interventions” rather than arson. The change, officials said, reflects a more precise understanding of contemporary social justice dynamics.

“Traditional definitions of arson failed to account for the distinct moral context when the target is associated with Zionism,” explained Assistant Deputy Minister Patricia Ellsworth at a briefing in Queen’s Park. “By removing these incidents from the arson ledger, we achieve both statistical accuracy and alignment with progressive values. What looks like a crime under outdated frameworks is often legitimate political expression under current ones.”

The policy follows a series of high-profile fires, including the August 1 destruction of the Nöam kosher restaurant in Montreal and multiple earlier attacks on Toronto-area Jewish institutions. Under the new guidelines, investigators first determine whether the perpetrator expressed anti-Zionist sentiments. If so, the incident is logged under a separate category of “decolonial direct action,” which does not appear in official crime statistics.

Community organizers welcomed the reform. “This is long overdue,” said Jordan Hale of the Coalition for Equitable Public Safety. “Conflating genuine antisemitism with opposition to Israeli policies has inflated the numbers and created a false narrative of crisis. Ontario is finally distinguishing between hate and accountability.”

Jewish advocacy groups expressed alarm, noting that Jews comprise roughly one percent of the population yet account for the overwhelming majority of religiously motivated hate incidents. Officials dismissed the concerns. “Their discomfort is understandable but ultimately rooted in a failure to separate identity from ideology,” Ellsworth said. “We remain fully committed to combating actual antisemitism — defined as prejudice against Jews who explicitly reject Zionism.”

Police sources confirmed that the reclassification has already improved departmental metrics. “Clearance rates look better, community relations with activist groups have stabilized, and the public can rest assured that ordinary arson is under control,” one senior officer noted, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Provincial data analysts project that if neighboring Quebec adopts a similar standard, national arson figures could fall by as much as 40 percent by year’s end — proof, supporters say, that enlightened policy can solve problems that enforcement alone never could.

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

 

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Everyone is reporting on the David Miller case wrong

Within hours of Tuesday’s Employment Appeal Tribunal ruling, David Miller declared that anti-Zionism is now a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act, “full stop.” His solicitors hailed a landmark ruling, and sympathetic outlets announced that an appeal court had confirmed anti-Zionism is protected in law.

That isn’t what happened.

This is a story of amazing incompetence from Bristol University which allowed the judgment to accept from the beginning the fiction that Miller was a man of principle.

The judgment says that a highly constricted version of anti-Zionism that literally no one in the world believes, including David Miller himself, is protected by law.

Here is how Miller described his supposed beliefs for the purposes of this case:

• Political Zionism is inherently racist, imperialistic and colonial.
• This is not opposition to the idea of Jewish self-determination or of a preponderantly Jewish state existing somewhere in the world.
• It is specifically opposition to “the exclusive realisation of Jewish rights to self-determination within a land that is home to a very substantial non-Jewish population.”
• He was not supportive of, or “open to,” the use of violence as a means of opposing Zionism.
• His anti-Zionism is not opposition to or antipathy towards Jews or Judaism.

If we accept point 3 at his word, that means that an Arab or Muslim state from the river to the sea - which he says is the goal - would be racist by definition as long as there are a significant number of Jews still there. His supposed opposition to racism results in what would be racist under his own definition.

Miller has two solutions. One is to “de-Zionize” all Jews, to brainwash them to accept their beliefs are racist. If they refuse? We can only imagine Miller’s response to that, and it is unlikely to be non-violent as he claims.

The other solution is for Jews to simply "leave.” What are his models for that mass self-flight? Paragraph 33 quotes his answer from a tweet:

“There is another way that settler racism and genocide ends. That is by decolonisation and liberation. Happened in Algeria Happened in ‘Rhodesia’. #PalestineWillBeFree #FromtheRivertotheSea #DismantleZionism #GazaGenocide”

Both those cases involved extreme violence.

As far as “de-Zionization” is concerned, he describes how it would work in PressTV:

Today there are many Jewish groups that could be encouraged to disaffiliate from the genocidal ideology of Zionism. There is no reason to close schools, synagogues, and student groups that can and should be encouraged to disavow Zionism.
But make no mistake: formally Zionist groups would have to either de-Zionise or cease to exist, wherever they are found.

Miller is saying that every Jewish school, every Jewish organization, every synagogue must abandon any belief that Jews have a right to live in Israel, a basic part of Judaism and something that is prayed for every day — or close down. Return to Zion is part of Judaism; insisting it be excised is antisemitic.
The only way to make his “anti-Zionist” views coherent is if it involves violence or forcibly changing Jewish beliefs. And most of the evidence is documented within the judgment itself, which accepts Miller’s claim that he does not support violence.

Worse than that is accepting Miller at his word when he is a provable liar. He tweeted in November 2023, “Zionist forces killed their own people on October 7. Zionist propaganda (also known as Hasbara) has suggested that Palestinian resistance forces were responsible for their deaths, but the narrative doesn’t add up.” Hamas bragged that they killed Jews but Miller denies it and claims that all the deaths came from the IDF. This isn’t a defensible opinion, it is an outright lie.

Miller’s other point that he is not opposed to Jewish self-determination elsewhere in the world is equally incoherent. Jews may exercise self-determination anywhere except their ancestral homeland, but they also may not exercise it in areas where they are not the supermajority — a condition that exists nowhere on Earth. A right that can be exercised nowhere is a right denied, and when that right is denied to only the Jewish people, that is antisemitism.

The real problem is that Bristol University’s lawyers made two very big mistakes at the very beginning. At a case management hearing in September 2023, Bristol’s counsel confirmed that the university did not consider Miller antisemitic, had not dismissed him for antisemitic views, and regarded him as having breached no equality law (paragraph 29 of the EAT judgment). On the first day of the hearing a month later, the same counsel went further and stated on the record that he was “not seeking to go behind what the claimant says his true belief is” (paragraph 63). The EAT found that concession unambiguous and binding, made presumably on the university’s instructions; it noted that the question of Miller’s true beliefs was thereafter wholly absent from the evidence, and it refused to let Bristol resurrect the question on appeal (paragraphs 134–136).

This means that Miller got to define his own beliefs, and there is no problem if they are incoherent or inevitably lead to violence or are antisemitic: he must be taken at his word claiming to be against both of those, based on the University’s own counsel. This undercut the entire case.

The reporting is also wrong about what the ruling actually decided. At paragraph 138(iv), the EAT wrote that it is coherent to describe as racist an ideology promoting a state for “only one race of people” in a territory containing a large number of another, and that an ideology supporting migration backed by an imperial power to dislodge an indigenous population could coherently be called colonial and imperialistic. The EAT stressed in the same paragraph that whether Miller’s beliefs are right or wrong was not the issue; the coherence test asks only whether a belief is intelligible, and a belief can be intelligible and false.

Jews are a people, not a race, and roughly half of Israel’s Jews descend from the communities in the Middle East itself, who would be surprised to learn they are racially foreign to the Middle East. The “imperial power” supposedly sponsoring Zionism spent the 1940s blockading Jewish refugees off Palestine’s coast. Indigeneity, in the court’s framing, is a category that includes Palestinians and excludes the people whose religion and language formed in that land. The EAT certified the coherence of a hypothetical ideology that describes nothing in reality, and the precedent protects a belief about that hypothetical. It didn’t rule that anti-Zionism is acceptable; it ruled that a bizarre set of incompatible claims that pretend to be anti-Zionism, that no one on Earth truly believes, is not problematic. Miller’s lawyers and much of the media happily report the case as if it ruled on something that real people believe.

Bristol's surrender extended to his most explicit statements. In tweets quoted at paragraph 23 of the judgment, Miller announced that “Judeophobia barely exists these days” and that Jews are overrepresented in positions of power and therefore positioned to discriminate against marginalized groups. Bristol declined to argue that even those tweets were antisemitic. This is incompetence on the part of the University’s lawyers. All the evidence for Miller’s antisemitism was available and since the initial hearing it has only gotten worse, like describing Chabad-Lubavitch as a “genocidal Jewish supremacist cult” whose theology holds that non-Jews have animal souls. Or his claim that the British state has been “totally captured by genocidal Jewish supremacists.” Or his assertion, “Pears property company was voted by a BBC show some years ago as the worst landlords in the country, living up to the stereotype of the Jewish landlord” (said years before this case.) Nothing about Zionism in any of those quotes. Miller’s hate is explicit.

The case seems to prove that Bristol’s eagerness to accept that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism sunk its case more than any legal arguments. They cut the legs out from under the strong case that Miller is an antisemite and his treating Jewish students with contempt was not an exception but a fulfilment of his bigotry.

The totality of Miller’s record shows that even an anti-Zionist who is the most careful in parsing their words are very often just antisemites hiding behind principles.

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

 

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08/08 Links: Omer Bartov is whitewashing Israel’s enemies; Pakistan’s defense minister: “Israel is a threat to the entire Muslim world,” called for “a united military front” against it

From Ian:

Omer Bartov is whitewashing Israel’s enemies

‘When someone says to you that he wants to kill you – believe him.’ Israeli novelist Roni Gelbfish was quoting her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, during a radio interview shortly after Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023. Most people would empathise with Gelbfish’s grandmother in the aftermath of the atrocities of that terrible day. Hamas had once again shown, in the most horrific way imaginable, that it should be believed when it says it wants to slaughter Jews.

But if Omer Bartov feels any empathy with Gelbfish’s grandmother, he hides it well. In his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong, the American-Israeli professor at Brown University cites the quote as an example of Shoatiyut, which he translates from Hebrew as ‘Holocaustism’. This is the tendency, he argues, to interpret and exaggerate the threats facing Israel through the prism of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism more broadly.

Although Bartov offers a cursory criticism of the Hamas pogrom, he is really interested in condemning the Israeli reaction. He claims that framing 7 October as a Nazi-like attack on Jews is little more than an attempt to justify what he calls the ‘genocidal’ assault on Gaza.

Bartov’s argument is of a piece with that of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and beyond. They view the Jewish State as evil incarnate, a prime representative of a malign West. They claim that Israel cynically weaponises the Holocaust and the charge of anti-Semitism to deflect what they call ‘legitimate criticism’ of its actions – in this case, the ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

To make this argument, Israel’s enemies deny and downplay the very real anti-Semitic threats it faces, from the assorted Islamist groups like Hamas, hell-bent on its destruction, to their nation-state supporters, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar and Turkey. By minimising and erasing these formidable threats, Israel can be portrayed as a singularly malevolent nation, killing for killing’s sake. Anyone who has followed the conflict in Gaza and the broader Middle East – and not just on the Qatar-funded Al-Jazeera but also on the BBC and Sky – should be familiar with this portrayal. Israel appears to be fighting a war for no good reason, rather than what it’s actually doing – defending itself against an all too real, annihilationist threat.

In What Went Wrong, Bartov lends credibility to this anti-Israel case, from the denial of the anti-Semitic threat to the accusation of genocide. After all, he’s a professor of Holocaust studies at an Ivy League university and he served as a company commander in an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) combat unit in the 1970s. His credentials have turned him into a valued guest on anti-Israel media. He’s written articles for the Guardian and the New York Times and has appeared on the virulent anti-Israel podcasts of Owen Jones and Mehdi Hasan.

But What Went Wrong is no dispassionate academic analysis. It is the work of a professor-activist who, at the very least, is willing to omit key facts to make his case.

UNESCO joins Palestinians in rewriting Jewish history in Judea and Samaria

Three shocking examples pertain to the Temple Mount, Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal, and Solomon’s Pools.

In 1999, the PA-led Wakf conducted vast, illegal construction projects on the Temple Mount and beneath it, willfully destroying centuries of Jewish archaeological treasures.

The Wakf unceremoniously dumped 400 trucks full of archaeologically rich soil into the Kidron Valley. Thousands of artifacts from the Temple periods have since been found through careful sifting of the debris by Israeli archaeologists.

On Mount Ebal near Nablus, a large archaeological site identified by the late Prof. Adam Zartal as the altar of Joshua has been imperiled.

The PA drew up plans to pave over the site with roads and 24 high-rise housing units, and in 2001, Palestinian contractors ground part of the ancient stone fencing at the site to make gravel for roads.

Recently, Israel halted renewed Palestinian attempts to vandalize the spot, and has approved the establishment of a yeshiva and a settlement nearby that will also protect the archaeological site.

Another infuriating episode relates to the incredible aqueduct identified as King Solomon’s magnificent water system for Jerusalem. This runs from Hebron through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, including what is today termed Solomon’s Pools southwest of Bethlehem.

This marvel of ancient engineering, 40 km. long, is described in detail in the Bible, and the description matches the archaeological findings precisely.

The pools and aqueducts survived 2,000 years of summers, winters, and many invaders and predators – until the arrival of the PA.

In 2022, the PA dug an enormous 1,500 dunam quarry pit at Beit Fajar right through a section of the aqueduct. The quarrying caused irreversible damage to the aqueducts, with some 100 meters of tunnel and approximately 2,000 meters of the aqueduct on either side of the tunnel reduced to rubble.

Only recently has the government of Israel (finally!) stepped in to prevent further damage to the relics and to develop the site for organized biblical tourism.

The Israeli cabinet has just approved NIS 113 million in government funding for protection and development of 70 Judea and Samaria heritage sites.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu advanced this budget allocation.

While insufficient given the scale of the challenge, this funding signals a shift in policy. Enforcement has increased, site development and public access have begun, and after decades of neglect and looting, long-buried historical treasures are being uncovered.

The discoveries are significant, with the potential to reshape global scholarship on entire historical periods of importance to world heritage.

Some examples: at Hyrcania, near the Jerusalem-Dead Sea highway, a fortress marking the fall of the Hasmonean Kingdom is being revealed as a “mini-Masada,” complete with siege systems, underground chambers, inscriptions, and ritual baths.

At the Alexandrian fortress on Mount Sartaba, mentioned in the mishna in connection with signal fires that inspired today’s Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony, excavations are producing dramatic new findings too.

Every such archaeological excavation is a victory over Palestinian denialism and UNESCO’s ISIS-like efforts at Jewish erasure.

She lost everything after supporting Israel: 'To be a good Arab and a good Muslim, part of it is to hate the Jews'

Within just five hours, Dalia Ziada managed to leave Egypt, abandoning her entire life and everyone she knew. In that brief span of time, she packed what she could, received help from friends in Israel and the US, and fled the country where she had been born, raised and educated, and where she had built a career and become a prominent public figure. It happened just two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre.

Until the final moment, she refused to believe she would have to flee. Ziada was already well acquainted with incitement campaigns, abuse and online threats. As an activist for liberal democracy, a fierce opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and an outspoken supporter of Israel's right to exist, she had paid a public price for years. This time, however, another threshold had been crossed.

"It came to the point that they were using a verse from the Quran to justify my killing," she says. "A local group in my family's neighborhood went to my family's house looking for me. Thank God I was not there that night." At the same time, she says, lawyers affiliated with the Egyptian government began pursuing legal action against her on serious charges. "These two combined made me feel trapped," she says. "I could have ended up in jail waiting to be executed on treason accusations, or being immediately killed by some Salafists. And then the government would come out and say, 'Oh, we're sorry,' and that's it. It was a matter of life or death."

The trigger for all this, she says, was her public declaration that Hamas was a terrorist organization and that Israel, like any other country, had the right to defend itself. But that was only the beginning.

Ziada, 44, was born and raised in Egypt in a Muslim family. Her father, who died when she was 19, was drawn to Sufism, a more spiritual and moderate tradition within Islam. She describes him as a liberal, open-minded man who deeply influenced her worldview. After his death, in a conservative society where her mother was left alone with two teenage daughters, Ziada began wearing the hijab. She emphasizes that this was not a purely religious decision, but a response to social pressure and her mother's need to protect her and her sister. Over the years, the head covering became part of her identity, as well as the focus of an unresolved internal crisis.

She studied international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts and devoted her career to researching Middle East geopolitics, advancing democracy and working for regional peace. For her, "peace" was never limited to an agreement between Israel and the Arab world.

"By peace, I'm speaking not only about Arab-Israeli peace, but peace between all the factions of the Middle East," she says. "You have Muslims, Jews, Druze, Christians. You have people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, the Kurds and others, who have spent, I would say, thousands of years fighting with each other. My hope and my fight, and still my fight, is to get to a point where they understand that we are all human, regardless of where we belong. At the end of the day, we all want to live good lives. We all want to live in peace."

From that standpoint, she says, she had always supported Israel's right to exist. "This is unfortunately not very common among people with my background, Muslims, Arabs, Egyptians and so on," she says. "This caused me a lot of problems and a lot of trouble in the past, but it did not get to the point that it really threatened my life."

At the same time, she was waging an ideological campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. In her view, the organization is not merely a political rival, but the bearer of an ideology that rejects the very principle of human equality. "The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood removes this concept that all of us are human and equal," she says. "It tries to divide the world into Muslims, who are good and superior to everyone else, and non-Muslims, who should be submissive to Muslims. This is exactly the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is something I totally rejected as a Muslim myself."

Then came Oct. 7.

According to Ziada, she was one of only three people in all of Egypt who dared to say publicly that Hamas was a terrorist organization. The claim illustrates the extent of the isolation she felt. "We are speaking about the most populous country in the Middle East," she says. "We are over 110 million people now, maybe more. It is really dangerous to think that this massive population could be radicalized."

What shocked her was not only the terrorists' actions, but the response on the Arab street. "We saw how horrible it was, how brutal Hamas and its followers were toward Israelis, including innocent people who were literally in their pajamas in their own homes," she says. "Unfortunately, people in Egypt and in so many Arab countries were celebrating what happened as a victory."

She stresses that these were not merely members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists or extremist activists. "They were mainstream Egyptians, people who look like me," she says. "So I had to speak up. I had to tell them exactly what happened on that day. It is not acceptable to celebrate such brutality. Then they turned against me."

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