NPR is Hezbollah PR

NPR has an interview with a Hezbollah commander that reveals things that NPR doesn't want its readers to realize.

This Israeli invasion has reignited a long-running conflict that was supposed to have paused with a November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, in which Lebanon's Army promised to disarm Hezbollah in the country's south. The United Nations says Israel violated that ceasefire thousands of times between late 2024 and early this year, with continued airstrikes that have killed more than 100 civilians.

While Hezbollah held its fire during that period, Jihad says they never disarmed. He says they pointed Lebanese soldiers to disused, defunct or damaged old stockpiles they no longer needed, and let them confiscate those. But Hezbollah's real arsenal was largely untouched, he says.

"They didn't confiscate anything! We gave them empty boxes, or a few old items to go blow up," he explains.

The 2024 ceasefire agreement explicitly demanded that Hezbollah give up its weapons and presence south of the Litani River, to be enforced by the Lebanese Armed Forces. This interview shows that this never happened - Hezbollah didn't leave, it rebuilt its arms in the south, and it fooled the LAF by giving it useless locations to pretend to disarm. The entire structure of the ceasefire depended on the idea that Hezbollah would no longer function as an armed force in southern Lebanon.

Moreover, the interview shows that Hezbollah never intended to adhere to the agreement. It always intended to flout it.

Any agreement with Hezbollah is worthless by their own admission. 

Real journalists would highlight that fact. Instead, the commander and Hezbollah is portrayed as somewhat heroic, steadfastly refusing to disarm. 

The article says Israel violated the 2024  ceasefire, not Hezbollah - ignoring their own reporting! Israel's actions were to enforce the agreement that Hezbollah brazenly ignored and the LAF was too incompetent to enforce itself.

The result is a distorted picture of reality. Readers come away with the impression that the ceasefire was primarily being violated by one side, while the other is portrayed as adapting, surviving, or reorganizing. The facts and the framing are from entirely different worlds. 

NPR further fails when it describes Hezbollah's actions during the current war. The commander acknowledges being responsible for shooting thousands of rockets into Israel, which we know aims at civilian areas. NPR doesn't care. Instead of pushback, it humanizes Hezbollah, saying that it even employs people to make sandwiches for terrorists. It's a social service program!

NPR frames the commander hiding in civilian areas along with his colleagues who were killed as "sheltering," not human shielding. It refers to his fellow terrorists he was hiding with as mere "people" to make them sound like civilian victims of random Israeli bombings rather than the military objectives they were. 

Journalism does not require taking sides, but it does require recognizing when a source is describing behavior that is clearly illegal. Here, the implications are embedded in the interview itself, yet they are left uninterpreted.

When an outlet like NPR presents those statements without drawing the obvious conclusions, it is not simply a matter of emphasis or framing. It is a breakdown in the basic function of reporting, which is to help the reader understand what the facts mean.

The facts are all there. NPR twists them to support terrorists and damn the nation defending itself from them.

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

04/12 Links: Trump orders blockade of Strait of Hormuz; Defending Israel in an Age of Madness; A Palestinian Constitution of Contradictions: Democracy in Form, Exclusion in Substance

From Ian:

Amb. Michael Oren: Defending Israel in an Age of Madness

For the past 50 years, in capacities both official and voluntary, I have spent most of my time defending the State of Israel.

Standing up for Israel became especially daunting after Oct. 7, 2023, when the victims of a verifiable genocide were baselessly accused of perpetrating one.

Conspiracy theories once considered fringe had become mainstream, and age-old antisemitic tropes had resurfaced in a presumption of Jewish wickedness.

America's national derangement is virtually insurmountable for the defenders of Israel.

Though readily disproven, Israel's guilt for annihilating an entire people is today accepted by more than half of the general public.

Many favor Palestinian anti-American terrorists over America's only dependable, democratic, military ally.

For many decades, advocates for Israel and Zionism wielded the weapon of truth. We produced volumes of "myths and facts" about the conflict. But how should we react when rampant unreason is infused with antisemitism?

In this new, twisted American universe, Oct. 7 was a false flag operation in which Israel massacred and kidnapped its own people as a pretext for occupying Gaza, and ZAKA volunteers staged the rape scenes at the Nova Festival.

Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, the terrorist who drove his car into a Michigan synagogue, was portrayed by NPR as a gentle, otherwise law-abiding citizen with genuine grievances. The New York Times eulogized Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who butchered his own people.

Amid such bedlam, try to advance a logical argument about why Israelis, threatened by a regime sworn to annihilate us and industriously producing the means of doing so, might not want to sit passively until it strikes.

The classic antisemitic canard of the cunning Jew winding the unwitting gentile around his crooked finger has been embraced by most of the American press.

Yet we must continue to battle the madness - even if we can only dent it here and there.

We can reinforce those who remain moored in morality and believe in the need to defeat evil in the world.

Israel Today Faces Far Fewer Threats than It Did Before

After the ceasefire in Iran, Israel today faces far fewer significant threats than it did before. Iran, in turn, is considerably weaker than it was. While not all of the war's aims were achieved, enough was accomplished to significantly improve Israel's strategic position and security. The inability to remove all the enriched uranium or bring a conclusive end to the rule of the clerical regime in Tehran does not mean that the war has not fundamentally changed the regional reality. It has.

The War of Independence did not end with all of Israel's aspirations fulfilled. Before the war, the Jews did not have a state; afterward, they did. Some 6,000 people - out of a Jewish population of roughly 600,000 - were killed. There was no peace, only armistice agreements. The economy was in shambles. Yet the fundamental reality had changed.

Before Oct. 7, Iran was steadily advancing toward nuclear capability, building ballistic missiles at a fast clip, actively preparing and prepping its proxies for Israel's destruction. Today, Hizbullah and Hamas - the tentacles of the Iranian octopus - have been cut back sharply and the head of the octopus is stunned and battered. Is it a complete victory? No. But is it significant? Unquestionably.

Those arguing that nothing was achieved are, in effect, arguing that Iran will rebuild and rearm, resting on the flawed assumption that Israel will simply sit back and allow that to happen. But Israel has changed. The key lesson of Oct. 7 is that it is no longer possible to assume that those who openly declare their intent to destroy you will ultimately be restrained by your power. They will not, because their calculus is often shaped by ideological, religious, even messianic factors that lie outside conventional logic.

As a result, Israel's doctrine has shifted to actively preventing the enemy from building capabilities. Some argue that the war will only intensify Iran's drive for a nuclear program. That may be so. But Israel and the U.S. have a strong incentive to prevent Iran from doing so. Iran can rebuild its nuclear and military capacities only if they allow it. It is reasonable to assume that they will not.

Iran's claim of victory despite its tremendous losses is reminiscent of Egypt's victory claim after the 1973 Yom Kippur War - a war in which, by most objective military measures, Egypt lost.

Nobody in Israel Dreamed the Americans Would Join the Attack on Iran

Aryeh Deri interviewed by Amit Segal (Israel Hayom)

Shas party chairman Aryeh Deri, after Prime Minister Netanyahu, is the most veteran player on the Israeli political field, with experience across cabinets and governments for 38 years. He sat in the Security Cabinet sessions related to the Iran war.

Q: Did we win?

Deri: "Yes."

Q: A decisive victory?

Deri: "I don't understand the phrase 'decisive victory.' Did we go into this campaign facing a grave threat to the Jewish people, and thank God we pushed back that threat in a very significant way? Clearly yes."

"What did we want to stop all these years? Just the nuclear weapons story. We never dreamed we could strike inside Iran. So we started with Operation Rising Lion [June 2025], when our planes flew through Iranian skies and caused enormous damage and halted the race to nuclear weapons. That's true - they didn't eliminate everything, because the nuclear material was deep underground. But we neutralized most of their scientists, struck heavily at the entire weapons industry, and pushed them back months or years."

"They were already at a stage where they were starting to move their missile industry and their weapons industry underground, too. Within a few months, we would not have been able to do anything. Everyone talks about nuclear weapons, but the ballistic threat is no less dangerous - in some ways even greater - because you don't use nuclear weapons quickly, but ballistic missiles? Freely." "The IDF chief of staff and the Mossad director...asked...that the Americans give their consent and provide protection. Nobody dreamed the Americans would join the attack....I never dreamed the Americans would go with us for 38 days and drop close to 20,000 munitions there....I tell you again with full responsibility - Netanyahu did not say to Trump and to the American administration anything that, God forbid, we didn't believe to be true."

"The goal was to create conditions for the regime's fall, and I think we created those conditions. That's actually why I think the ceasefire is a blessing - there's a greater chance the regime will fall from within. Iran begged for a ceasefire."

Q: Aren't you worried about a growing sense in America that we dragged them into a war that wasn't theirs?

Deri: "That has nothing to do with Iran. We have a problem with the Democrats, and somewhat with some Republicans, too. But precisely because of that, this period with Trump in power is a major opportunity for Israel to cement its regional standing. In the end, the Americans - whatever administration - will understand that their real ally is us."

Who is Peter Magyar, the man who ended Orban's reign?

Orban portrayed Magyar as an envoy of the Brussels-based EU establishment and as a Ukrainian agent, to the point that at times it seemed his real rival was Volodymyr Zelenskyy rather than Magyar. Orban and his allies repeatedly claimed that Magyar would drag Hungary into the war in Ukraine, an issue that worries Hungarians in part because of the country's energy dependence on Russia. In the final stretch of the campaign, pro-government media circulated allegations that Magyar used drugs, prompting him to travel to Vienna for tests at an independent laboratory to disprove them. Earlier, in February, Magyar announced that Orbán's associates were planning to publish a secretly filmed sex tape of him.

Magyar's rise changed the face of the opposition. Left-wing and center-left parties withdrew from the race one after another so as not to split the anti-Orban vote and to give Magyar a chance. The election effectively became a contest between right and right. The scale of the victory is critical: a two-thirds majority in parliament would allow Magyar to amend the constitution shaped by Orbán over 16 years in power, while a narrow majority would leave his hands tied against state institutions Orbán has filled with his own loyalists.

Magyar's victory is expected to shift the balance of power in the European Union. Russia will lose one of its main assets on the continent. For years, Orban served as an almost automatic blocker of sanctions on Moscow and aid to Ukraine, and with Magyar's victory that automatic veto is expected to disappear. Magyar has promised pragmatic relations with Moscow, while at the same time reducing Hungary's energy dependence on Russia and aligning with EU positions.

The election is also especially critical for Israel. Under Orban, Hungary was Israel's closest friend in the European Union and repeatedly blocked anti-Israel initiatives in Brussels. Magyar, by contrast, maintained deliberate ambiguity throughout the campaign on anything related to Israel, and in Jerusalem the assumption is that even if he is not hostile, he will not clash with the European Union on Israel's behalf.

Read More

Jewish anti-Zionists want to censor Zionist books - by falsely claiming THEY are being silenced

Forty-two Jewish authors have written an open letter to the Jewish Book Council accusing it of "bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices" — which is a sophisticated way of saying that a Jewish literary institution is reflecting the views of most Jews.

The JTA story reports that the letter claims the JBC has "narrowed its vision to a Zionist approach to Jewish culture" and that this bias is "not only exclusionary but harmful, contributing to the dehumanization of Palestinians and advancing a system of cultural apartheid." These are strong words. 

One might reasonably ask: which specific Zionist books are doing this dehumanizing and promoting cultural apartheid? 

The letter doesn't name a single one. Because they do not exist.

This is the heart of the fraud. Since October 7, 2023, a substantial body of literature has emerged bearing witness to the Hamas massacres — Israel's National Library tracked 169 books and related publications on the topic by September 2024 alone, with hundreds more in Hebrew by 2025, and at least 29 English-language titles available as of late 2025. These works document survivor testimonies, hostage accounts, military analysis, poetry, and children's books. They center Israeli and Jewish trauma. I searched for reviews or controversies linking any of these titles to the dehumanization of Palestinians and found nothing, because the accusation has no grounding in actual content. The signatories level a charge of collective moral crime against an entire body of literature they apparently cannot be bothered to indict with a single quotation.

What the accusation does rest on is the assumption that Zionism is, by definition, racism — and therefore any Jewish author who holds Zionist views is, again by definition, dehumanizing Palestinians. The signatories don't argue this openly, because it would reveal them as the bigots they are. They simply assert it, treating "Zionist author" and "dehumanizer of Palestinians" as synonyms requiring no further demonstration. This is prejudice operating under cover of progressive vocabulary.

To them, Israel defending itself is an unspeakable crime and one that must never be portrayed as anything other than naked racism and dehumanization.

Their letter is actually worse. The authors complain that "the JBC has been disproportionately vocal about anti-Semitism while neglecting other issues of cultural concern to Jews." Excuse me? A Jewish literary institution is being accused of paying too much attention to Jew-hatred. At a time of record levels of antisemitism in the West.  During the same period we saw a historic global surge in antisemitism following October 7 — harassment of Jewish students, vandalism of synagogues, assaults on visibly Jewish people — these authors' grievance is that the premier Jewish literary organization was too focused on attacks on Jews. One struggles to imagine what level of antisemitism they would consider proportionate enough to warrant the JBC's concern. 

Their demand is that the JBC speak for all Jews — except when speaking for Jews means defending Jews.

One searches the letter in vain for which distinctly Jewish cultural concerns are "neglected" by JBC. The JBC covers Jewish cookbooks, Jewish history, Yiddish culture, Jews in America, Jews in politics, the Holocaust — the full range of Jewish civilization. Which suggests that "neglecting other issues of cultural concern to Jews" is simply a euphemism for "not using its platform to actively oppose Israel."

The signatories present themselves as a silenced minority struggling for representation in an institution that has shut them out. There's just one problem: several of them have been honored by the JBC itself. None have been penalized for their extreme, anomalous political positions. Buried in their own letter is the admission that many of them "refrained from submitting our books for consideration" or "declined to engage" with JBC programs. They self-censored and then accused the JBC of marginalizing them. They chose not to participate, and now complain about not being represented. 

This is the literary equivalent of not showing up to vote and then claiming the election was rigged against them.

The deeper irony is in what the authors are actually demanding. They want the JBC to explicitly state that "criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic," to redesign its antisemitism reporting tool around their preferred definition, and to create programming that centers "non- and anti-Zionist voices." They frame this as a call for diversity.  The vast majority of American Jews identify as Zionist to some degree, which means a Jewish literary institution that reflects Zionist perspectives is representing its community. Demanding that it de-center Zionism is a demand that the institution treat the mainstream Jewish worldview as a fringe position requiring correction.

That is the only censorship being discussed here - a naked demand to silence Zionist voices by calling them "dehumanizing" and "cultural apartheid." This is not an argument - it is a demand for compliance, a threat to label mainstream Jewish authors as racists unless they knuckle under to the new McCarthyists.

This is the same playbook used against PEN America, which caved — replacing its leadership and retracting a statement of solidarity with an Israeli comedian whose shows had been canceled — after months of similar pressure. The leading organization supporting freedom of speech was forced to retract support of freedom of speech. The JBC is the next target. The goal is institutional capture: forcing Jewish organizations to adopt, as their official posture, a stance that most of their constituents reject.

When an opponent's mere presence on an award list constitutes a human rights violation, the demand is not for a seat at the table. It is for everyone else to leave.

The Jewish Book Council has silenced no one. These authors are free to publish, submit, speak, and apparently write extensively for Literary Hub about their grievances. What the JBC should say — clearly and without apology — is this: submit your work, and if it meets our standards for literary excellence, we will promote it. We are a literary institution, not a political one, and we have no intention of becoming one. Instead, the JBC's CEO described the letter as representing a "difference in expectations" — a response so conciliatory it practically invites the next round of pressure. PEN America was also diplomatic, right up until it replaced its leadership and retracted statements defending free expression. Diplomatic accommodation is not a defense against institutional capture. It is the first step toward it.

These hypocrites shouldn't be coddled. They should — they must — be called out for what they are. The JBC has a rare opportunity to make a strong statement about real freedom of speech and to expose how these anti-Zionist authors are trying to subvert it. This is the time to stand up for real principles and not to knuckle under to pressure from those who want to silence their political opponents by any means necessary.

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

France falsely calls Israeli attacks on Lebanon "disproportionate"

Brussels Signal reports:

France’s foreign ministry has said the European Union’s association agreement with Israel could be reopened for discussion in light of what it calls “disproportionate” Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

Speaking today, Pascal Confavreux, spokesperson for the ministry, stated that given the gravity of yesterday’s events in Lebanon and the situation in the West Bank: “One cannot exclude that the discussion on the suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement will reopen, in addition to national sanctions.”

He added that while Israel has the right to defend itself, its actions are “not only unacceptable but also disproportionate and lead de facto to an impasse”. 

The word "disproportionate" has a specific legal meaning. 

The IHL formulation of the rule of proportionality requires a balancing of the foreseeable civilian harm and the expected military advantage based on the knowledge available to the military commander at the time prior to the initiation of an attack. 

To determine if an attack is disproportionate, one must know what the military value of the attack is and balance it against civilian harm. 

France has no idea what Israel's targets were. So it cannot possibly know whether the attacks were disproportionate. Using that language in this context is wrong.

Now, a few days after the attack, what do we know?

Lebanese officials claim tat over 300 people were killed. Israel claims that it killed 180 Hezbollah fighters and also aimed at other Hezbollah military assets.

A 3:2 ratio of militants to civilians, in an urban area, would never be considered disproportionate when done by any other army. In history. 

Israel is not saying that there were any mistakes. It confirms the airstrikes - most done in a single ten minute period over wide parts of Lebanon. The IDF has lots of lawyers who look at the legality of every individual strike before it happens. In other words, the IDF knew what its targets were, what the likely civilian casualties would be, and decided that the military advantage outweighed the expected civilian losses under international law, knowing all those facts.

France knows none of this.

The irony is that France has a history of airstrikes killing civilians for no apparent military reason. In 2021’s Operation Barkhane in Mali, France claimed to target a jihadist gathering but ended up killing 19 civilians in a wedding party. In 2011, French led airstrikes with NATO in Libya killed civilians on several occasions with no known military reason for the strikes, yet France maintains to this day that they were all valid miliary targets - and therefore proportionate despite the dozens of civilians killed.

It is not willing to give the same benefit of the doubt to Israel that it insists the world give to France, even though Israel’s intelligence on targets is from all evidence orders of magnitude better than France’s has been in its recent conflicts. 

Words matter. Assuming Israel's tally of terrorists killed in accurate, France's use of the term "disproportionate" is objectively wrong. And even without that tally, France is irresponsible for using that term without knowing the intended targets and their military value.

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

04/11 Links: What Would It Have Cost For Israel To Maintain Its Popularity?; How to Handle Your Out-of-Control Ivy; BBC calls terrorists resistance fighters in Iran coverage

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: What Would It Have Cost For Israel To Maintain Its Popularity?

So: What could Israel have done at this moment to prevent its continuing fall in U.S. public opinion? We have our answer: not hit back.

Well, sure, some people say, Israel could have carried out airstrikes without a ground invasion. But first of all, that wouldn’t have worked either, since the accusations of “genocide” began while Israel was still trying to capture or expel the remnants of the invading Palestinian forces. Israel carries out airstrikes in Lebanon and gets accused of genocide there, too. The accusation is held at the ready and fired at Israel the second it does something in response.

Second, the idea that Israel shouldn’t go in after the hostages is genuinely insane, not to mention the fact that Israel absolutely had to strike back hard and that Western leaders agreed from the outset that taking out Hamas was a legitimate goal.

But let’s go back to the hostages. Americans were among those taken by Hamas, and the American public was punishing Israel for going in to find them?

Now, it’s true that along the way, various media figures falsely reported claims of a famine in Gaza, of intentional starvation, of genocide, and whatever else they could think of. There’s no question this hurt Israel’s standing, but since Israel didn’t do those things, it is necessarily limited in what it could have done to prevent people lying about it.

Either way, the underlying point seems to be clear here: Israel could have stopped or slowed its popularity slide in the U.S. had it been willing to let Iran and its proxies get away with Nazi levels of violence against Jews.

Are there things Israel can do at the margins to improve its public image? Absolutely, and those will be enumerated and debated as this discussion continues. But I can’t shake the feeling that marginal effects have been the only ones on the table outside of Israel doing something suicidal.

How to Handle Your Out-of-Control Ivy

That video of congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, grilling college presidents about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university policies—and the college presidents responding that it depended on the context—has been viewed more than a billion times, making it what the jacket copy of her new book calls "the most-watched congressional hearing in history."

The performance propelled Stefanik to new prominence but not yet into a different job. She was reportedly considered—how seriously is unclear—to be President Donald Trump's 2024 running mate. Trump eventually did nominate her to be the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, a cabinet position, but then in March 2025 Trump pulled the nomination. Stefanik entered the 2026 race for governor of New York—and then announced she was suspending that campaign and also not running for reelection to Congress.

Making a success as a nonfiction writer may be even longer odds than winning election as governor of New York as a Trump Republican. Yet on the basis of her debut performance, Stefanik just might have a promising future ahead of her as an author. Poisoned Ivies is the best book yet on how the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel reverberated on American campuses.

The right-wing jeremiad against decadent universities is a genre with a long history. The conventional list starts with William F. Buckley Jr.'s 1951 God and Man at Yale and continues through Allan Bloom's 1987 The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, and Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. You could take it back even further, to Irving Babbitt's 1908 Literature and the American College: "The function of the college … should be to insist on the idea of quality."

Unlike Buckley and D'Souza, who came at it as students, or Bloom and Babbitt, who were professors, Stefanik brings the perspective of a politician. With that hearing questioning Harvard's Claudine Gay and Penn's Liz Magill, who both subsequently resigned, she "reset the course of American higher education" and changed the perception of Ivy League institutions. "Instead of bastions of knowledge and vibrant institutional life, they are considered hotbeds of radical ideology, groundless elitism, intellectual laziness, and anti-American hatred," she writes.

Antisemitism is returning – and the world is silent, again

At the center of this danger stands Iran, a regime built on extreme religious ideology and ambitions of regional hegemony. Like Germany in the 1930s, this represents a combination of a totalitarian worldview and a drive to obtain destructive power. Iran operates through regional proxies and promotes a long-term strategy to destabilize the Middle East and beyond. The threat is not only external. It advances gradually and at times almost imperceptibly.

The connection between radical ideologies within Europe and actors such as Iran is not always direct, but it exists at the level of influence and consciousness. When extreme ideas spread, they create an environment in which it becomes easier to undermine stability, weaken trust in institutions, and empower hostile forces.

Just as many in Europe in the 1940s did not believe that the destruction of Jews on such a massive scale was possible, there are those today who struggle to believe that open threats against Israel and the West could be realized. Yet history has already proven that when declared evil is not stopped in time, it becomes reality.

The conclusion is clear. The West must wake up and distinguish between pluralism and indifference, between tolerance and surrender to ideologies that seek to exploit freedom in order to undermine it. The world once again faces a test. Will it choose to learn from the past, or repeat the mistake and hope for a different outcome?

Chamberlain believed he was buying time. In reality, he was buying an illusion.

That illusion came at a heavy cost to the world.

This time, everything is visible, everything is documented, and everything is being said openly. Iran declares its intention to destroy Israel, while leaders in France, the United Kingdom, and Spain roll their eyes and claim it is not their war.

Those who choose to close their eyes today will not be able to claim tomorrow that they did not know. The choice is not between war and peace, but between clarity and illusion, between responsibility and indifference.

The question is no longer what will happen, but who will bear responsibility when it does.

Read More

04/10 Links Pt2: Simon Schama: With parts of London ‘no-go zones,’ Jews have lost basic civil rights; So You Want To Be a Bundist; The rise and fall of Tariq Ramadan; What Do You Mean by “Jewish State”?; Eliot Engel dies at 79

From Ian:

Historian Simon Schama: With parts of London ‘no-go zones,’ Jews have lost basic civil rights

As a “little Jewish boy” growing up in postwar Britain, Simon Schama says he never felt physically unsafe walking the streets wearing a kippa. Nor, he says, were guards routinely posted at the door of the local synagogue.

But, notes the acclaimed historian, that’s not the experience of Jewish children in Britain today. Instead, he says, it is the most difficult time for young Jews to be growing up since the end of World War II.

“It’s really painful that little kids, for example, Hasmonean or Jewish Free School kids, have to hide their uniforms,” Schama tells The Times of Israel. “The sense of a fearful loss not just of self-esteem, but basic civil rights. Nobody goes around tearing hijabs off Muslim women, and I’m very glad they don’t. But this is a dreadful time just [in terms of] feeling you have equal rights to the rest of the multicultural population.”

Parts of central London’s West End, says Schama, have become “no-go” areas, with Jews wearing a kippa or a Star of David facing the risk of “being screamed at.”

Schama’s comments came during a week when Britain’s Jewish community — already experiencing near-record levels of antisemitic incidents — was further shaken by an arson attack on four ambulances belonging to a Jewish-run volunteer organization in the heavily Jewish north London neighborhood of Golders Green.

A renowned art historian, as well as a scholar of British, French, and Jewish history, Schama is clearly put off by an anti-Israel exhibition in Margate, on the south coast of England, that made headlines that same week.

“Disgusting, horrible, mad, kind of bad Julius Streicher cartoons of Jews eating babies,” says Schama. “The really worrying thing is, of course, how these extreme, murderous, grotesque things have become absolutely… part of Generation Z’s repartee.”

All of this is far removed from the world in which Schama grew up.

“My father thought, after the Holocaust, there was nothing to fear in Britain,” he recalls. “Both my parents, and their generation, and indeed mine growing up, thought somehow of British life and Jewish life being a kind of almost perfect cultural fit.”

Despite being a Labour supporter, like many British Jews at the time, Schama’s father “worshiped Churchill both as a Zionist and for the war,” he says. Schama recalls the pride with which his father later told him about the speech by William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered in the House of Lords in March 1943, denouncing Allied procrastination and inaction in the face of the Nazis’ mass slaughter of European Jewry. “We stand at the bar of history, humanity, and God,” the archbishop declared.

“My father was moved by that,” says Schama. “The sense that the head of the Church of England would be the one person to say, ‘Don’t look away, don’t do nothing,’ struck him as a symptom of the benevolence and the fit between British history and Jewish history.”

Schama, who is currently working on the third volume of his trilogy “The Story of the Jews,” rejects the idea that Jews do not have a long-term future in Britain, as well as comparisons with the 1930s. There is no “horrible, intimidating, crazed popular antisemitism” backed and encouraged by the state, as was the case in Nazi Germany. Britain’s King Charles III meets members of the community during a visit to Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Crumpsall, north Manchester, on October 20, 2025. (Chris Jackson / POOL / AFP)

And, he says, there continue to be “moments of fantastic hope” for the community. By coincidence, on the day of the Golders Green arson attack, it was announced that King Charles is to become a patron of the Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism and protects Jewish synagogues, schools, and other institutions.

“It was an incredible thing that the king accepted the patronage [of the CST]; that’s exactly what was needed,” Schama says.

Seth Mandel: So You Want To Be a Bundist

Equal collective rights for all nations within the state. That the advocates of this system didn’t call it “nationalism” is mostly irrelevant. Jewish autonomy as envisioned by Medem and others on the Jewish left would essentially mean the following, in practice: Jewish governing bodies running what they called cultural affairs and institutions. This included education.

In a world built around the ideas of Medem-like autonomists, either Yiddish schools would be publicly funded or Jewish governing bodies would be given the power to tax all the Jews, and only the Jews, to pay for these and other institutions.

Bundist theorists weren’t assimilationist—Medem himself seems to have conceived of assimilation as a nefarious capitalist plot of some sort. Jewish autonomy was a mainstream idea among Jewish leftists just as much as it was among those who eventually became known as “rightist.” Socialist Jewish writers and thinkers envisioned a sort of Zionism-lite—with the key difference being that it would apply in the Diaspora.

Let me simplify this. If I were to live under Jabotinsky’s idea of Jewish autonomy, I would be governed by Jews in the Land of Israel—if I chose to move there. But under Medem’s idea, I would be governed by Jews in America (though also by a secular national government). Rather than pay synagogue dues to the shul of my choice, I’d most likely be paying an annual Jew tax.

The triumph of Zionism over Bundism maximized Jewish freedom. But it also had the same effect on Jewish security. We’ll never know if the Holocaust would have happened as it happened had there been a State of Israel at the time. Instead, the Holocaust happened during the time of the Bundists. That isn’t to blame them, obviously, for what happened. It is merely to say that Bundism wasn’t a plan for Jewish survival.

Nor was it universalist and assimilationist, two terms that ironically describe the Bund’s biggest modern-day fans. If it was “anti-nationalist,” it was a very funny sort of anti-nationalist. I’ll close with Medem’s own words, translated by Lucy Dawidowicz and published in COMMENTARY in 1950:

“When did I clearly and definitely feel myself to be a Jew? I cannot say, but at the beginning of 1901, when I was arrested for clandestine political activity, the police gave me a form to fill in. In the column ‘Nationality,’ I wrote ‘Jew’.”

Douglas Murray: The rise and fall of Tariq Ramadan

This was how I first encountered him in the 2000s. I had helped arrange an English publication of Caroline Fourest’s Frère Tariq, in which the French journalist devastatingly showed how Ramadan spoke out of both sides of his mouth. To Islamic audiences he preached one message, to western audiences he told another.

On the rare occasions he was put on the spot, Ramadan was evasive. In a French TV debate in 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy – not then president – tried to get him to condemn the Islamic teaching that a woman should be stoned to death for adultery. The most he could say was he thought there should be a ‘moratorium’ on stoning for such a crime.

Ordinarily such talk would go down badly. But at around this time the situation in Europe was getting worse. After the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, Ramadan was one of the Muslims appointed to the UK government’s counter-extremism taskforce. A number of us were sharply critical of this, but nothing seemed able to stop Ramadan´s remorseless rise. In television studios and debating chambers across many countries he and I debated and argued against each other for years. I once called him ‘my closest enemy’. He always came across to me as both fraudulent and cunning.

In 2005 he was made a professor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and held a teaching position at the university right up until the first sexual assault allegations were made against him more than a decade later.

Why he should ever have been given such a position at Oxford was itself a mystery. One of the people who put him forward for the role once admitted to me that he had no knowledge of Ramadan’s academic history, nor his Islamist track record. So why was he appointed to St Antony’s? The college had always been known as the ‘spook college’. Was it a sign that parts of the Establishment had found a way to embed and elevate Ramadan? As the years went on, and no allegation or misstep seemed to touch him, that certainly became my own suspicion.

As the relationship between Europe and its Muslims came under an ever-greater spotlight it was in the interests of officials, like those in the Blair government, to promote ‘moderate’ Muslim voices – whether they were actually moderate or not. Ramadan fitted a bill. One explanation as to why (until recently) no criticism or exposé of him ever landed is that he was simply too important to certain people.

When the Obama administration came into office in the US, Ramadan had an almost equally gilded ride. Past travel bans relating to his alleged funding of terrorist-linked groups and connections to extremists were forgotten.

From Athens to Oxford, whenever I encountered him I could never understand the entitled, arrogant attitude he projected as he mouthed evasive platitudes. It was as though he knew he was always going to be fine. Life was good to Tariq.

All of this has come to an end due to something I suppose not many people could foresee. But, as I say, the more striking thing about Ramadan is not his fall, but his rise.

He will doubtless appeal the French verdict. But I would be surprised if we hear much from him again. The accounts of his victims tell us too much about him. But the supply and demand problem that created him says an awful lot about us, too.

Read More

04/10 Links Pt1: The West’s fifth column; Iran war is huge success for Israel - but it is not a victory, yet; How the war struck Iran’s architecture of repression

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The West’s fifth column

It’s been chilling to witness a media and political class—mainly on the left, but also on the right—from the start, willing America and Israel to lose this war. The ceasefire terms have thus been spun as a catastrophic defeat: “the disastrous defining act” of Trump’s presidency.

The stupendous military and intelligence achievements of Israel and America have been brushed aside. The decimation of Iran’s military power is dismissed as merely “tactical” gains with no strategic achievement.

Above all, this Greek chorus of doom (echoed by numerous Israeli commentators on the left, for whom the defeat of Iran is of far less importance than the defeat of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu) assumes the war is now over, ignoring the negotiation that has yet to play out.

It’s hard to see how that negotiation can end in a deal at all. Trump’s terms require Iran’s total surrender. Iran’s published terms require its total victory. The area for compromise between these two maximalist positions is nonexistent.

As ever, reading Trump’s mind is a mug’s game. We can’t yet tell whether he’s being played for a sucker by a regime which—by Trump’s own account—has never won a war but never lost a negotiation; or whether he’s delivering a masterclass in geopolitical chess.

The concern is that he’s negotiating at all with religious fanatics, whose infernal agenda is totally non-negotiable and for whom negotiation merely demonstrates their opponent’s weak-minded refusal to go the military distance.

Maybe Trump is using these negotiations as a strategic feint. The suspicion is, however, that he believes that every conflict can be resolved through a deal. If so, that’s a disastrous category error. Iran has always wrong-footed negotiators because they believe that, like everyone else in the world, the regime is susceptible to appeals to personal or national self-interest.

Not so. The fanatics of Tehran would sacrifice the entire population of Iran if needs be, and they regard their own likely deaths as sanctified by the goal of producing Armageddon and the return to earth of the Shia messiah.

Government approves a record 34 new settlements, as it acts to deepen hold on West Bank

The security cabinet approved the establishment of 34 new West Bank settlements in a meeting two weeks ago, The Times of Israel has confirmed.

The approval of the new settlements — brand new settlements as well as illegal ones retroactively legalized — constitutes the largest number of settlements approved by any government at one time, the Peace Now organization said.

Security cabinet meetings and their decisions are classified, and there has been no official confirmation of the decision to approve the 34 new settlements by the government.

According to the i24 News site, which first reported the story earlier Thursday, some of the slated new settlements are located in areas of the northern West Bank isolated from other Israeli settlements but deep among Palestinian population centers, albeit still within Area C of the territory where Israel has full control.

The security cabinet decision brings the total number of settlements approved by the current government to 103 since it took office in 2022.

This amounts to a 78 percent increase in the total number of government-approved settlements in the three and a half years of the current government’s tenure, said Peace Now, which strongly opposes the settlement movement.

By comparison, only six new settlements were formally approved by Israel in the 30 years between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the establishment of the current government.

Only a handful of the 103 newly approved settlements have received approval through the Civil Administration’s planning processes, meaning that they have yet to be fully authorized.

PFLP-linked NGO closes Palestinian branch, citing Israel's red tape

The watchdog NGO Monitor delved deeper into DCIP’s ties to the PFLP. It found that several of DCIP’s board members are also PFLP members.

An example is Mahmoud Jiddah, who was elected to the DCIP board in May 2012, but was imprisoned by Israel for 17 years for carrying out grenade attacks against Israeli civilians in Jerusalem in 1968.

Another was Hassan Abed Aljawad, board member up to 2018, who has represented the PFLP at public events.

Shawan Jabarin, who was convicted in 1985 for recruiting members for the PFLP and arranging PFLP training outside Israel, was on the DCI-P’s board of directors from 2007 to 2014.

The former coordinator of DCI-P’s community mobilization unit, Hashem Abu Mari, was killed during a violent confrontation in Beit Ummar in 2014. Following his death, he was hailed by the PFLP as a “leader,” which issued an official mourning announcement. The PFLP announcement praised his work for DCI-P, stating “he was in the ranks of the national liberation struggle and the PFLP from an early age.”

In June 2018, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) succeeded in preventing DCIP from receiving foreign-currency donations via bank transfers from Citibank and Arab Bank PLC. It wrote to Citibank and to Arab Bank in May 2018, highlighting DCIP’s links to the PFLP, and requested that Citibank and Arab Bank withdraw their banking services.

Caroline Turner, director of UKLFI, said at the time that she was “extremely pleased that we are succeeding in shutting down the transfer of donations to this terror-linked NGO”.

Following the announcement of DCIP’s closure, NGO Monitor released a statement saying, “For decades, DCI-P defended terrorists under the guise of protecting children, and played a central role in systematically promoting heinous false accusations against Israel by portraying teens involved in terror attacks – child soldiers – as innocent victims.”

“The damage from DCI-P’s false allegations will take many years to undo,” it concluded.

Read More

Anti-Israel activists are ventriloquists, Palestinians are their dummies

A new flotilla is coming!

The Global Sumud Flotilla announced a new fleet of ramshackle boats set to sail to Gaza with some packages of Band-Aids that they will call "critical medical supplies." 

The Spring 2026 Mission

In response to a direct call from Palestinians in Gaza, the Global Sumud Flotilla is preparing to mobilize again, on land and at sea, with thousands of participants, more than a hundred boats, hundreds of trucks, and expanded goals.

When you click on the link claiming that this is a "direct call from Palestinians in Gaza" you are taken to a press release by the Palestinian NGO Network.

PNGO says that this wasn't their idea. The very headline linked says "PNGO Commends Efforts of Solidarity Activists Participating in the new Global Sumud Flotilla to Break the Siege on Gaza."

Those "Palestinians in Gaza" didn't call for the flotilla. They say they support the flotilla organized by outsiders.

The "pro-Palestinian" outsiders explicitly lie by claiming that they are speaking for Palestinians, when in fact they are ventriloquists using Palestinians as their literal dummies.

We've seen this show before. The entire BDS movement was created by anti-Israel activists who insist, to this day, that it was a response to a call by "Palestinian civil society." This is a lie on two levels - their definition of "Palestinian civil society" is mostly made up of groups outside "Palestine" and even hardcore anti-Israel activists admit that BDS was organized way before the supposed "call" by Palestinians.  

Ordinary Palestinians eat Israeli foods prominently displayed in their supermarkets. There is no boycott.

These activists don't give a damn about Palestinians. They don't give money to NGOs that actually bring food and aid into Gaza. They don't write op-eds about Egyptian restrictions on the Gaza border.

But they are happy to use Palestinians as pawns for their own purposes. 

And we can see it in real time in the Global Sumud Flotilla.

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

Top Pakistan official spouts pure antisemitism. Media ignores that part.

Pakistan's Defense Minister Khawaja  Asif tweeted:

Israel is evil and a curse for humanity, while peace talks are underway in Islamabad, genocide is being committed in Lebanon. Innocent citizens are being killed by Israel, first Gaza, then Iran and now Lebanon, bloodletting continues unabated. I hope and pray people who created this cancerous state on Palestinian land to get rid of European jews burn in hell.

There is coverage of this story, mostly about how Pakistan can portray itself as an honest mediator between Iran and Israel when this is the position of its officials.

But no one, outside Israel, seems willing point out the classic, no-doubt-about-it antisemitism within this tweet.

The idea that Europe created Israel as a means to get rid of its Jews is a classic antisemitic meme popular among the far-Right. These are the people who make charts showing all the countries Jews have been expelled from over the centuries and pretend that this is proof that Jews, as a group, must deserve it. 

There is no way to claim that Asif's words are mere "anti-Zionism." 

But the progressive Left and Western Muslims insist that Muslims aren't antisemitic, not reporting survey after survey showing they are. So the media which wants to please those groups (or is aligned with those groups) simply ignore the blatant antisemitism spouted by a top Pakistani official - because it doesn't fi their narrative.

It isn't like they can deny what he said. So they just hope you don't look at his full words and understand what he is saying.

(As I was composing this post on Thursday night, Asif removed the tweet.)

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

04/09 Links: Murray: We must crush Iran now so it can’t come back and spread terror; The war in numbers: 650 Iranian missiles fired, 24 killed, and 10,800 Israeli strikes; Yoo: Iran's Flagrant Assault on the Rules of War

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: We must crush Iran now so it can’t come back and spread terror

There is a reason why the Middle East suffers from so many conflicts.

Why have there been so many wars in Gaza? Why has Lebanon been in a state of war for almost five decades? Why has the whole region, from Yemen to Cyprus had to put up with Iranian interference for 47 years?

Because while the Mullahs and their proxies are thinking about the end-times we are stuck worrying about the midterms. It is this short-term thinking that has lead the West and its allies to keep stopping hostilities just before the point of total victory.

The present ceasefire looks likely to lead to a return of the pre-war status quo. Which means a return not to peace but to war. If the ceasefire lines stop where they are, Iran will help Hezbollah rebuild its stockpiles in Lebanon. The regime in Tehran will rebuild its other terror proxies in the region.And the Iranian regime will continue its decades-long project to develop nuclear weapons.

President Trump has the ability not just to disrupt but to destroy this cycle. He may be the only person in this era of history who can. It is not as though there is any leadership from any other democracy.

The president may not be able to make the regime in Iran fall. But he has the ability to bring it to its knees. And then to leave them on their knees until time, and events, can take their own course on them.

As another sage once put it, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” To which I might add that any job worth starting is worth finishing well.

John Yoo: Iran's Flagrant Assault on the Rules of War

Iran's response to the war launched by the U.S. and Israel provides a reason beyond pure American self-interest to end the rule of the ayatollahs. Tehran broadened the conflict by attacking civilians in neighboring countries uninvolved in the war. A regime that launches systematic warfare against civilians violates the core rules of civilized warfare. The U.S. and Israel would do the world enormous good by ending a regime that flouts our common moral norms in such a flagrant and destructive manner.

Iran has launched missiles and drones at Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan - nations that had committed no aggression against Iran and posed no threat of attack against Iran. It also attacked neutral vessels in the Persian Gulf and prevented them from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. and Israel have sought to conduct the war with the highest regard for minimizing civilian casualties. Compared to this, Iran has struck major civilian targets in neighboring countries, including residential buildings, airports, utilities, and ports. Iran hit the Aramco complex at Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, the Ras Laffan LNG facility in Qatar, oil and gas facilities in the UAE, and a water desalination plant in Bahrain, none of which are American military assets.

It fired missiles at the Old City of Jerusalem, landing fragments 1,200 meters from the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It struck residential areas in Dimona and Arad, wounding over a hundred civilians, including children. It has fired more than 350 ballistic missiles at Israel, half carrying cluster munitions designed to scatter explosive bomblets in civilian neighborhoods.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world's most important shipping lanes and a waterway governed by the international law of the sea, which guarantees free passage to all neutral nations. Tehran's disruption of the Strait is pure economic blackmail against the rest of the world. Iran effectively attacks the rest of the world by targeting purely civilian ships.

The rules of war are not complicated. Militaries may strike military targets. Militaries may not deliberately target civilians or threaten the commerce of neutral nations. Iran has crossed those lines repeatedly. Tehran's flouting of all the rules of morality in war explains why the U.S. and Israel were right to confront the Islamic Republic now, rather than wait for its threat to gain in strength in the future, potentially wielding nuclear weapons.

Jonathan Spyer: The Winners and Losers of the Iran Ceasefire Deal

The announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran resolves none of the issues which caused the conflict. From Israel's point of view, the Iranian regime has been significantly weakened in its capacities in a number of key areas. At the same time, its intentions remain unchanged. This means that the long war is set to continue.

Israel wants to use the entrance of Hizbullah into the war on March 4 as an opportunity to establish a buffer zone north of the border, inside Lebanon, to put the residents of Israel's border communities out of range of Hizbullah's anti-tank missiles and free of the constant danger of an Oct. 7-style ground incursion. This process is not yet completed and five IDF divisions are currently in Lebanon engaged against Hizbullah south of the Litani River.

For Israel, a lull in operations against Iran with Lebanon still an active front would enable air power to be deployed in greater force against Hizbullah. From Israel's point of view, the ceasefire with Iran does not extend to Lebanon.

The essential components of the regional strategic picture remain in place. Iran remains an aggressive and dangerous power, with the ambition of expelling the U.S. from the region, dominating the Gulf states, and destroying Israel. The U.S., Israel, and the Gulf states remain determined to resist Iranian ambitions. The events of the last five weeks represent a round in this ongoing struggle. Israel and the U.S. have demonstrated their vast conventional military advantage over the Iranians. They have also not yet demonstrated the capacity to turn that advantage into a strategy able to bring the struggle to a successful strategic conclusion by toppling the Tehran regime - the only way that this will end.

What Was Achieved in the War Against Iran?

I suggest that anyone swept up in the euphoria of claims that Israel's war in Iran was a failure should look at the information and analysis coming from American sources.

It is hard to believe that such a large-scale operation, in which, according to the Israel Air Force, target destruction rates were 10 to 20 times greater than in the 12-day war in June 2025, is being portrayed by talking heads as a failure.

By any measure, this was the most successful military operation since the IDF and the Israel Air Force began conducting such operations.

Israel and the U.S. achieved the objective of destroying every production cycle, every component, and every plant and laboratory connected to Iran's nuclear project.

Security needs mean neutralizing the nuclear threat and reducing missile-launch capabilities.

The Iranians could have raced ahead and built a missile wall that would deter Israel and the U.S. from taking military action against them, as North Korea did in its time.

That parallel missile and nuclear race was cut short. This is an enormous success.

Trump and Netanyahu acted against the trend that had prevailed in the U.S. and Israel over the past 35 years. They chose military action, and they succeeded.

The precedent set by this dual alliance, combined with demonstrated military superiority, carries enormous significance.

Read More

04/07 Links Pt2: Iron Dome and the ‘America First’ Left; David Schwimmer: Wireless ‘Disgraced Itself’ by Booking Kanye, Calls Rapper a ‘Hate-Mongering Bigot’

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Iron Dome and the ‘America First’ Left

The problem is that it isn’t true that Iron Dome is none of our concern. The America First left is thus living a lie—the very same lie that America First rightists tell themselves. The Horseshoe Theory strikes again.

There are two kinds of benefits that Iron Dome funding brings to America: direct and indirect. An example of an indirect benefit: It is an immensely cost-effective way to prevent escalation in the Middle East, since it allows Israel to absorb rocket attacks that would otherwise necessitate an overwhelming military response. And preventing escalation in the Middle East saves American lives.

One theory behind funding Iron Dome, then, is: It is good to save American lives.

But the indirectness of that particular benefit opens space for naysayers to claim otherwise (though it would be surprising if they actually believed such claims). So if that were where the argument ended, AOC and Khanna and others could claim some kind of “both sides” stalemate in which two legitimate but unprovable claims must coexist.

But it does not end there. In fact, it begins there.

As one Congressional Research Service report on Iron Dome explains succinctly: “In March 2014, the United States and Israeli governments signed a coproduction agreement to enable components of the Iron Dome system to be manufactured in the United States, while also providing the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) with full access to what had been proprietary Iron Dome technology.”

Let’s take the first part first, because it’s so simple even an anti-Zionist could understand it. For about a decade, Raytheon’s plant in Arizona was the critical core of Iron Dome parts production in America. In November 2025, a new plant in Arkansas came online, moving even more of the process from Israel to America. Now, the manufacture of missile components for Iron Dome interceptors is mostly an American process. In other words, just like much of what is called “aid” to Israel, the money is spent on the U.S. economy and in fortifying American manufacturing. Along with the new Arkansas facility, Reuters reports, Raytheon received a $1.25 billion contract to supply Israel.

American jobs, American money, American manufacturing—if these are unimportant to Iron Dome’s critics, they should say so. Ignoring them entirely is an act of profound bad faith.

Meanwhile, access to the missile-defense technology is its own return-on-investment, since the U.S. gets to see data from the tech’s deployment in wartime scenarios. So: Iran fires missiles at Israel, and the U.S. sees what works and what doesn’t without its own civilians being the live targets.

Which is why, in the end, opposition to Iron Dome in the U.S. generally takes an ideological, and not a mathematical or practical, primary basis. One cannot argue that there are no benefits to the U.S.; one can only argue that those benefits—investment in the U.S. economy, job creation, a steady boost to domestic manufacturing, and of course lives saved—aren’t meaningful.

From first intercept to 10,000 combat intercepts: Iron Dome turns 15-analysis

On April 7, 2011 at 6.20PM I was in the southern city of Sderot when the incoming siren blared. Hamas had fired a Grad missile towards the city of Ashkelon. Running to the safe room, I heard a sound that was different than a rocket slamming into the ground-it was the first interception by the now famous Iron Dome missile defense system.

Air defense soldiers gave the call sign “Alpha”- the signal for a successful first intercept of a rocket toward Israel. That interception, 15 years ago today, has changed the face of active defense around the world- especially here in Israel where it fundamentally redefined Israel’s defensive doctrine and its ability to counter rocket threats.

The system has logged more than 10,000 combat intercepts and sustained success rates exceeding 90%.

“Over the past 15 years, the system has changed the face of the battlefield and shielded Israel’s civilians from relentless threats coming from multiple adversaries. Iron Dome is a first-order strategic asset and a central pillar of Israel’s national defense doctrine,” said Prof. Yuval Steinitz, Chairman, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

Hilla Haddad Chmelnik was on the Iron Dome’s development team during her service in the Israel Air Force and recalled her first encounter with the system.

“I met Iron Dome a year before it became operational. It was in advanced development of the first interceptor batteries. I was in the Air Force, at the test range, and Rafael and MAFAT came to the Air Force to make it operational with an acceptance test. We had to think: how do we check the system and make sure it works well?”

The primary contractor for the development of the Iron Dome is Rafael Advanced Defense System. The MMR radar is developed by ELTA, a subsidiary of the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and the command and control system is developed by mPrest.

Its development was completed in roughly two and a half years, an exceptional engineering feat by any international standard.

“It immediately became a different kind of project, a sort of paperless project, because it was developed so fast. It was extraordinary because it required a whole new way of thinking about how an interception system works. It changed the way we test systems,” she told Defense & Tech by The Jerusalem Post.

The first test of the system took place in February 2011 and two months later the first interception took place.

“The interception happened an hour before my wedding in Herzliya,” Haddad Chmelnik recalled. “It was a double celebration. It was amazing.”

Strategies to stop antizionist abuse

The most effective and powerful analogies are always the simplest and easiest to picture.

And during an empowering 90-minute presentation at Sydney’s Dover Heights Synagogue late last month on how to identify, and fight back against, the dangerous tsunami of antizionism that’s enabling the spread of hatred against Jews, Josh Dabelstein – the Australian chapter coordinator of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) – delivered an absolute beauty.

At the event organised by the Zionist Council of NSW, Dabelstein, who has a unique and deep knowledge of antizionism because he was once an antizionist himself, relayed to the audience of more than 100 this most potent of paragraphs:

“If we think about the highway to Jew hate, one lane is antijudaism, the middle lane is antisemitism and the other lane is antizionism. We [society and the law] blocked those first two lanes. That doesn’t mean that there are still people swerving all over the road. Some people do just hate Jews, right? But the one lane that allows them through today and emboldens them, provides them a permission structure and allows society to really spread all of this stuff, is antizionism.”

To understand why Dabelstein considers antizionism the single greatest threat facing Jews in the Diaspora today, it helps to understand how MAAZ frames the history of Jew hatred as a whole. At his Dover Heights shule address, he explained how those “three lanes on a highway” are related, but also quite distinct, with each associated with different “permission structures”, meaning they utilise a system of language, beliefs and authorities that makes the harm that the protagonists cause feel justified and allows people to adopt positions they once would have vehemently rejected.

Antijudaism, the oldest form, targeted Jews through religion – which is now illegal. Antisemitism targets Jews through race and ethnicity – which is also now illegal.

But antizionism – the dominant form today – targets Jews through demonising the Jewish state – disguising the hate as political criticism, or for social justice. Josh Dabelstein speaking at the event, presented by the Zionist Council of NSW.

In each case, he argued, the hatred operates not by engaging honestly with its stated target – Judaism, Semitism or Zionism – but by inventing a phantom proxy and loading it with libels.

“They take all the things that they hate and they shove them in that word.”

In the antizionist era, today’s libels – genocide, apartheid, colonialism – are directed at the Jewish state, are repeated ad nauseam and, Dabelstein said, “are elevated to fact status through pseudo-academia and institutional adoption.”

The conspiracy theories have shifted accordingly: Israel’s President Isaac Herzog is likened to Hitler during his recent Australian visit; and stigmatising Jews is now “simply achieved through misusing the word Zionist”.

What makes all forms of Jew hatred dangerous, Dabelstein said, is precisely that each presents as fashionable in the context they arise, before eventually being revealed as violent systems that produce violent ends.

While antizionism presents itself as anti-colonial, anti-racist and humanitarian, the violence it invites is moralised the same way it was in medieval and Nazi Europe.

Read More

04/07 Links Pt1: Trump: US To Enter Two-Week Ceasefire if Islamic Republic Allows opening of the Strait of Hormuz,’; 1 attacker killed in gun battle with police outside Israeli consulate in Istanbul

From Ian:

Three Things the Consensus Gets Wrong About the Iran War

First, the war has not, despite what many claim, trashed America’s alliances. NATO was battered by Donald Trump well before the war began, and not least by his egregious threats to wrest Greenland from Denmark. No doubt, some of our European allies have bristled at this war and in some cases refused to assist with it. Not all, though: German bases are important for the air bridge to the Middle East. In a moment of candor during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last June, Chancellor Friedrich Merz allowed that the fight against Iran was “dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.” He understood, in other words, that Iran poses a challenge to European security that Europe chooses not to address on its own. “We are also victims of this regime,” he said.

More to the point: The United States is actually working very closely with a group of allies, just not the Europeans. Israel, of course, is actively engaged in the war, employing an air force twice as large and more than twice as capable of conducting this kind of campaign than the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force. The Gulf states are providing basing, and some Asian nations have been quietly supportive. Several hundred Ukrainian drone experts, who have behind them the most advanced military industry of its kind anywhere, are sharing what they’ve learned. If the Trump administration could only see Ukraine as a powerful partner rather than a charity case, even more could be done. A new partnership, joining Gulf finance with Ukrainian military technology, appears to be emerging from this war, to the advantage of the United States.

Second, the common claim that the war is a boon for Russia and China is exaggerated. Will it provide a short-term boost for Russian oil earnings? Probably, although it will be offset by the spectacular success the Ukrainians are having in hitting its petrochemical industry and its ability to export. Russia has profoundly deformed its backward economy, and now appears to be getting the worst of it on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the prospect that Ukrainian military innovation might be powered by Saudi and Emirati money cannot be a happy one for Moscow.

China, for its part, might indeed be licking its chops at the idea of the United States depleting its stocks of expensive interceptor missiles in this war. If governments choose to attack because they think they know exactly how many exotic munitions their opponents have in their warehouses, then China might well invade Taiwan. But, by and large, that is not how governments decide to launch global wars. Rather, they look at a host of considerations, including the nature of their opponents. In this case, the Chinese will see a president quite willing to wage an unpopular war and employ extreme violence. That president possesses a remarkably capable armed force, and is willing to spend the money ($1.5 trillion in the latest budget) to build an even larger and considerably more modernized one. Sober Chinese analysts, moreover, will have some appreciation of how the United States and its armed forces have a history of innovating and adapting when the pressure is on.

And finally, there are people who argue that Iran has been turned into a great power by this war. But being subjected to tens of thousands of precision air strikes; having your senior leadership assassinated, your air defenses almost entirely destroyed, your navy virtually annihilated; and losing crucial parts of your industrial infrastructure do not make you stronger. Can Iran keep the Strait of Hormuz closed? For now, yes. Perpetually? That is harder to believe. Ukraine has been able to keep its grain corridor in the Black Sea open despite Russian attacks; the U.S. Navy, ill-prepared as it was for the mine-clearing mission that it should have anticipated, is no doubt working full-time on solving what is essentially a tactical problem, albeit one with strategic implications.

Iran’s leaders and their sympathizers may declare that survival means that Iran wins this war, but that is, on the face of it, preposterous. The regime has profoundly alienated its neighbors by lashing out at them, brought the two most powerful air forces in the Middle East into intimate cooperation against it, and suffered new blows to its already impoverished economy. Is Iran’s new leadership—the members of whom have not fallen to Israeli bombs, that is—inclined to take an even harder line than its predecessors? Possibly. But the pictures published this week of the niece and grandniece of Qassem Soleimani—the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force killed in Trump’s first term—who have been living the good life in the United States, should trigger the thought that the elite leadership of Iran might be less pure and hard than one might think. And even committed ideologues have their breaking point; Heinrich Himmler was as hard-core as they come, yet attempted open negotiations with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services in 1945.

There is so much that we do not know—including which targets have been hit, what damage has been done, and to what effect. But when we see things like the extraordinary rescue of the aircrew of the F-15E shot down over Iran, we need to remember that the military organizations pounding Iran are extremely formidable. That does not guarantee success. But it should make us, at the very least, thoughtful about where this war may go.

Seth Mandel: Unfrozen

Iran’s ability to open and close the strait at will is similar to its attacks on regional energy infrastructure, its demonstration of missile-firing capabilities that threaten Europe, and its use of cluster munitions against Israeli civilians. All three made the West adjust its war aims to prevent Iran from being able to hold the region and near-abroad hostage in the future. To this list we can add a pre-existing goal—the destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program—and the recent fixation on the Strait of Hormuz, which seems to have overtaken the others (except for the nuclear threat) in Trump’s mind.

There are two ways of looking at this, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first is that Trump backed himself into this corner by showing his sensitivity to oil prices without having put into place a strategy to preempt Iran’s ability to flip that switch. The second is that Trump’s fixation on the strait is a post-hoc realization that Iran must be divested from its leverage over the shipping lanes.

A cease-fire without a mechanism for enforcing the opening of the strait would make it what Trump seems to really want to avoid: a frozen conflict.

Take Gaza. The cease-fire between Israel and the remnants of Hamas may turn into its own new status quo, which would be less than ideal. But it is far superior to the state of the frozen conflict that was in place on October 7, 2023. If the Israel-Hamas war ends here, then Gaza’s genocidal and barbaric government has paid a permanent price for its aggression.

Likewise, Trump has been surprisingly hawkish on Lebanon, at times more so than Israel, regarding Hezbollah. As it currently stands, either Lebanon will disarm Hezbollah or much of “Hezbollahland” in South Lebanon will remain open space. Israel has proposed the following deal: If Israelis can return to their homes in the north without fear of quickly being displaced again by rocket storms from Lebanon, then the residents of South Lebanon will be welcome to return to their own homes. Lebanon has thus far rejected these terms. Trump, at the moment, is backing Israel’s position—in part, surely, because Israel has proposed a permanent peace rather than a return to the frozen conflict.

Trump’s penchant for finality can be seen in his approach to Venezuela as well. The decision to greenlight the capture of Nicolas Maduro was a bold one, but it was not done in the name of Venezuelan democracy. It was an attempt to permanently alter the relationship between Washington and Caracas. If the remnants of the Maduro regime are willing to play ball with Trump, they’ll stick around. That’ll mean the end of what Trump saw as the Venezuelan tail wagging the American dog.

This template cannot be applied at will—there will be no “Venezuelan option” in Iran, and lord knows what Trump even thinks he is accomplishing in the Russia-Ukraine war. It isn’t a doctrine, or an -ism. But the president does seem to have a preference for avoiding the “pause” button if a status quo can be radically and permanently changed in America’s favor.

Jonathan Tobin: Unlike Israel, many of America’s NATO allies aren’t really allies

Other countries will cheer or jeer from the sidelines, but Israel not only has a powerful military but is willing to use it, along with its unmatched intelligence capabilities and operations, to fight a war alongside America. And it is doing so with the knowledge that Trump could end the war before the Jewish state has achieved the objectives that Netanyahu has set.

Contrary to the largely antisemitic myth that the world’s most powerful man in charge of a superpower was dragged into a war by the prime minister of a country the size of New Jersey with a mere 10 million people, this war was America’s idea. And it is being fought to protect America’s interests as well as Israel’s. Stopping nuclear and missile threats—and the world’s largest state sponsor of terror—isn’t a favor to Israel. It’s vital for the security of the Middle East, which affects the economies of all, as has been shown in Iran’s stranglehold of the Strait of Hormuz and international shipping.

A clear look at the events of the last two months doesn’t just show Israel’s value as an ally, even though there is no pact of alliance between Washington and Jerusalem as there is with America’s 31 NATO allies, which the United States is obligated to defend under that treaty’s Article V provision. It has also done invaluable damage to what remains of American support for the belief that the alliance is vital to the country’s defense.

Israel has friendly relations with other countries, including some in Europe. And it has strong security ties with key regional nations like Saudi Arabia, even though they remain under the table rather than out in the open. But it has only one genuine ally. There are no plausible alternatives, even when Washington is run by those who are lukewarm or worse about the relationship, as under the administrations led by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

NATO may yet be revived at some point in the future. Even now, it still serves some use, if only to help ensure that Russia’s troublemaking can be contained. But the stark truth of 2026 is that it has largely become a vestige of the past that has outlived much of its usefulness.

At the same time, the idea that Washington’s affection for Israel is a hindrance to the pursuit of U.S. national interests or makes it difficult for it to make friends in the Middle East has been conclusively exploded by recent events.

It is the alliance with Israel that is the one irreplaceable asset for American foreign policy and security needs in the region. And one is hard-pressed to think of another such reliable ally elsewhere with both the military assets—and the willingness to use them in a difficult fight— and common values of democracy. It’s high time that American pundits and politicians, whether seduced by antisemitic tropes and arguments or wallowing in hatred for Trump, stop speaking of Israel as an American problem and start acknowledging this reality.

Read More