Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Arab Israelis in Israel’s war for survival (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

Shia missiles don’t differentiate between Sunni and Jew

Even the best safe room cannot save you from a direct hit by a missile carrying half a ton of explosives.

On the night the Iranian missile changed his life forever, Raja Khatib, a prominent Israeli-Arab attorney, was pulling up to his house.

The air-raid sirens were already blaring as he rushed to get to his family. And then the missile hit.

It feels almost obscene to write about that horrific night now, when Iran is once again launching missiles intended to destroy Israeli lives.

It was June 14^th, 2025, one day into the twelve-day war, when Israel and America severely damaged Iran’s almost-operational nuclear facilities and destroyed a large portion of its ballistic missile capability. But the 12 days of “Operation Rising Lion” did not remove the threat posed by the Iranian regime—to Israel, to the Middle East, or even to its own people.

The war was stopped early in the hope that a diplomatic deal could be reached. Many Israelis understood from experience that stopping too soon would necessitate returning later to finish the job.

Because there is no deal with an entity whose central goal is your destruction. Ideologues do not compromise on their ideology. To do so would be to reject their own identity.

At the time, the battle in Gaza was raging, and hostages still needed to be rescued.

And Iranian missiles did not differentiate between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs.

What do you say to a man who lost his wife, two of his three daughters, and his home in an instant? A man who built a house like a castle—strong and beautiful—but not strong enough to protect his family. His brother’s wife was killed in the attack as well.

We went to see the missile impact site and pay our respects to the Khatib family. We did not know them personally, but that does not matter. When something awful happens, showing up is the right thing to do.

Jews observe shivah—seven days of mourning after the burial. Muslims traditionally observe three days. Because Raja is so well known, he received visitors for four.

We saw no formal notice about where condolences were being received. The town they live in is large, but we knew it would not be too difficult to find the family.

At first, we were directed to Raja’s parents’ home. Inside, I found the women from his side of the family sitting together. They all turned to stare at me—the only Jew in the room—before pointing me toward his mother.

She hugged me twice. Everyone in the room showed pleasure at my expression of empathy for their sorrow.

One woman asked what they were probably all thinking.

“Why did you come? Did you come because of your position… or…?”

She wanted to understand how to place me—what role I occupied. Was I one of the many politicians coming to demonstrate that Jewish politicians care about Arabs too? A peacenik virtue signaling?

Jews and Arabs live side by side in Israel, and Raja works with many Jewish colleagues. But genuine friendships and deep mutual understanding between the sectors are not common. Our cultures, desires, and goals overlap in some places—but they are not identical.

And there is a significant difference between friendship between individuals and peace between Jews and Arabs as collective groups.

I told her simply that what happened was terrible, and coming was the right thing to do.

She seemed satisfied with that answer. But she appeared to assume I was a Jew dreaming of peace, so she began saying what Arabs often say in these situations:

“We just need to end all the wars. We all just want to live.”

Many Jews respond warmly to statements like this, hearing what they want to hear rather than what is actually being said.

It is not possible to “just end” a war with Hamas or Iran—both of which are openly committed to exterminating the Jews. The only way to “just end the war” would be to surrender. That was not, is not, an acceptable solution.

I smiled and replied: “Iranian missiles—Shia missiles—don’t differentiate between Sunnis and Jews. Israel will win this war and bring safety to all of us. You and me. Then we will be able to live well.”

My response startled her into silence. No one else in the room spoke.

Someone offered me a drink and suggested I sit with them, as is customary. I thanked them but declined, explaining that my husband was waiting outside and that we wanted to go pay our respects to Raja.

They directed us to where the men were receiving visitors, in the municipal building—a common arrangement when large crowds are expected.

We found the gathering easily and were received graciously.

Raja made a point of telling us how many Jews had come to offer condolences—colleagues, politicians, peaceniks, and activists (hoping the Arab population might vote in ways that could bring them political power).

I do not think he realized the full spectrum of motivations behind those visits. But the sheer mass of Jews who came comforted him, and that is a good thing.

Many of the Jewish visitors probably had little awareness of how hostile much of the town’s population is toward the Jewish state, how many residents participated in the riots of May 2021, or knew anything about the almost lynching of a Jewish driver stopped by the bloodthirsty mob. Only the intervention of a respected elder prevented the crowd from tearing him apart.

Did any of those visitors wonder how many Arab Israelis would come to comfort Jewish families torn apart by the war?

Probably not.

Some do, of course, when the victims are colleagues or long-time neighbors. But they do not arrive in large numbers to comfort strangers the way Jews often do.

And they generally do not assume that suffering under the same enemy will naturally produce bonds of peace.

Shared danger does not automatically create shared loyalty.

The divide between Sunni and Shia Islam began as a dispute over who should lead the Muslim world after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE. The disagreement hardened into a religious and political rivalry that still shapes the Middle East today.

Nearly 1,400 years is a long time to hold a grudge.

Sunni Muslims form the majority across the Muslim world, including Israel’s Arab population. Iran, however, is overwhelmingly Shia. Iran’s desire to assert dominance over the world by first destroying the Jewish State led it to cultivate a Sunni proxy in Gaza – Hamas.

That does not mean Shia and Sunni have suddenly become allies. It means they have temporarily cooperated to pursue a shared objective: destroying Israel.

Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews now face the same missile threat from Iran and from Iran’s Shia proxy in Lebanon—Hezbollah.

But that does not make Arabs and Jews allies. It simply means we share the same danger.

One of the most dangerous mistakes made about the Middle East is assuming that everyone thinks the same way.

Projecting our own motivations onto others—without taking the time to understand their worldview, goals, and ideology—is naïve at best. Often, it reflects arrogance. Worst of all, it leads to deadly miscalculations.

In Hebrew, there is a saying: “A person is shaped by the landscape of the place he comes from.”

The Middle Eastern mindset was shaped long before Islam, from the experiences of desert tribal life. The Western mindset emerged from the fusion of Jerusalem and Athens: biblical morality, justice, democracy, individual responsibility, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Two very different psychological frameworks.

The sands of the desert shift constantly, and yet the desert itself remains unchanged.

How can those focused on the here and now fully grasp a worldview built around eternity?

The people of the desert outwardly resemble people of the here and now—urban professionals with nice cars, Instagram accounts, and TikTok videos. That surface similarity tempts outsiders to assume that the internal motivations are the same.

They are not.

And today, in societies where many have attempted to replace God with secular ideologies—capitalism, communism, progressivism—the mindset of the desert people doesn’t register.

Without understanding that mindset, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to navigate the region—much less to win a war.

Israeli Jews knew it would be necessary to go back to Iran to finish the job. Israeli Arabs are still talking about their desire to stop the war to attain “quiet”.

But quiet is not victory. In the Middle East, quiet is the time to prepare for the next war.

To survive a conflict, you must understand what the fight is truly about. If you do not understand what your enemy actually believes and desires, you cannot defeat him. And if you try to build peace on comforting assumptions instead of reality, you will only guarantee the next war.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Jordan complains Al Aqsa is closed for the war. But the Kotel is closed, too.

The Jordanian Foreign Ministry issued a press release condemning Israel for closing Al Aqsa Mosque during the war, calling it " a clear violation of international law and international humanitarian law."

The official spokesman on behalf of the Ministry, Ambassador Fouad Al-Majali, confirmed that the absolute kingdom rejected and denial of this illegal and unjustified action, and for the Israeli authorities to continue its provocative actions in the Holy Al-Aqsa Mosque / Holy Holy Haram and towards the worshippers, stressing that Israel has no sovereignty over the occupied city of Jerusalem and its Islamic and Christian sanctities.

This is a lie. Even if you consider Israel to be an occupier of Jerusalem, it is responsible for to "ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety," under international law as codified in the Hague Regulations article 43.

Arab media is falsely claiming that Israel has no restrictions on Jews in Jerusalem. Palestine Today says "Jerusalemites confirm that these measures are applied only to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, while life continues normally in the rest of the city, including markets and public areas."

Again, a lie. Here is a screenshot of what the Kotel looks like today from its live camera.

Israel restricts all gatherings of more than 50 people unless they can easily reach a shelter quickly.

As much as the Jordanians and Palestinians pretend that Israel is discriminating against Muslims and Christians, the facts always show them to be liars.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Erdogan pretends to be against antisemitism. Turkish media disagrees.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia in remarks at an interfaith iftar dinner in Ankara.

“Just as Islamophobia is a crime against humanity, antisemitism is also a crime. It is an evil that cannot be considered reasonable or legitimate, ” he said.

Really? Because as I've noted many times, Turkish media is rabidly antisemitic, and I have never seen anyone complaining about it outside Turkish Jewish newspaprs.

Here are examples from just the past week:

Yeni Ankara on the history of the Jews:

In our previous article , we partially described the injustices and persecutions perpetrated by the Zionist Jews, who are cursed by Almighty God, throughout their 3600-year history , and the exiles they deserved .

TOO MUCH COMPASSION IS A DISEASE.

The Ottoman Empire took in Jews expelled from their countries , settling them in Thessaloniki , Vlora , Edirne , Izmir , and Istanbul . Of the 165,000 Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal , 90,000 were settled in Turkish lands .

Of course , this cursed people didn't stay quiet . The scourge of Sabbateanism was our price for our hospitality .

Until 1948 , Jews lived scattered across many parts of the world, primarily in European countries, Ottoman territories, North African countries, Russia , and Iran . However , due to their inherent disruptive nature and tendency to stir up trouble wherever they settled, they were constantly expelled .

Akit:

Milli Gazete:

Jews, despite being one of the oldest peoples in history, are not even as numerous as the Spanish Romani. Why is that?

Could it be that they don't consider anyone other than themselves to be human beings, and that they are driven by insatiable greed and a penchant for violence?

Today, the Jews who leave no stone unturned, no head on shoulders in Palestine, who oppress, destroy homes, leave children orphaned, women widowed, and condemn people to starvation, look at what they experienced in the past;

Haber7 published a list of the 40 richest Jews in the world, saying that they are the ones who keep Israel afloat.

Antisemitism is seen daily in major Turkish media. Erdogan doesn't say a word about that.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/10 Links Pt2: Forget ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s Islamism the West should be fighting; Is ISIS now part of the ‘progressive’ alliance?; Pro-Iran Al-Quds Day march in London CANCELLED

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Forget ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s Islamism the West should be fighting

The word ‘Islamophobia’ might be gone, but the tyrannical impulse is the same: to keep a beady eye on commentary about Islam. To ensure the masses’ rude blather on that religion is not too ‘intimidating’, too ‘stereotyping’, too far beyond the government-decreed bounds of ‘the public interest’. This is a blasphemy law by the backdoor. Once more, it is the policing of irreligious speech in the drag of anti-racism. For all the lip service the new definition pays to freedom of speech, the entire point of singling out Islam as uniquely deserving of government pity and attention is to circumscribe discussion. As shadow justice minister Nick Timothy says, this latest effort to lavish special protections on Islam is yet another ‘attack [on] our freedom to criticise, satirise and scrutinise ideas’.

The announcement of a bureaucratic offensive on ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ would be worrying at the best of times. That it has come now, at the outset of the Iran War, as we are witnessing explosions of Islamist intolerance, is mindblowingly reckless. The evidence of our eyes is that Britain and the West are afflicted with Islamism. With large numbers of people who feel a greater affinity with the anti-Semitic tyrants of Tehran than they do with the nations in which they live. Where’s the tsar for that, Keir Starmer?

Forget ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ – who will protect us from the anti-Western hosility of the Islamist mob? To weep showy tears over the ‘rise of hatred’ without mentioning the hatred for our own civilisation that courses through the veins of the Islamist movement and its suicidal allies on the bourgeois left is nothing short of insane. That we only ever hear chattering-class bleating about ‘hatred’ when the targets are Muslims is so striking. It confirms how catastrophically blind these people are to the hatred for our society. The hatred for our values. The hatred for our citizens, almost a hundred of whom have been slain by Islamists these past 20 years. The hatred for our working-class girls, who were raped by gangs disproportionately made up of Pakistani men, who called them ‘white slags’, as officialdom looked the other way. And the hatred for our Jewish compatriots, who remain the key victims of religious hate crime, many carried out by Islamists.

The Iran crisis has shone a harsh light on our moral troubles on the home front. In the US, the UK, Europe and Australia, people have openly wept for the ayatollah and prayed for the defeat of America and destruction of Israel. Now that is hatred. That is hostility. This week there was an explosion outside a synagogue in Liege, Belgium. We saw the allegedly ISIS-inspired hurling of a homemade bomb in New York City. The Iranians suspected of spying on Jewish institutions in London remain in custody. And you want us to fret over some muppet on the internet making a joke about the burqa? This is something worse than fiddling while Rome burns. It’s the throwing of petrol on to Rome’s flames. For in sanctifying Islam as the most put-upon religion, the ideology most deserving of special protection, the UK government risks inflaming the very cult of grievance that powers the Islamist mindset. They think they’re tackling hatred when in truth they’re inflaming it, giving ever greater licence to the anti-civilisational self-pity of the West’s Islamists.

What a betrayal this is of the good people of Iran who thirst for freedom. There they are praying for the demise of their Islamist oppressors while we shake our heads over mockery of Islam. There they are tearing off their hijabs while we worry about ‘hijabophobia’. So long as we fear ‘offending Islam’, we will be incapable of standing up for our own values or offering solidarity to those valiant warriors for liberty in the Islamic Republic.

Seth Mandel: Blaming Jews for Global Sadness

There are two primary points to consider here. The first is the subject of O’Neill’s column, which is that the cause of “Palestine” is not about helping Palestinians but about helping Sally Rooney—and the legions of likeminded bored-to-death Europeans—get out of bed in the morning.

Indeed, Rooney asked in her speech: “What else can make our lives endurable in times as dark as these? What else, in the face of such horror, can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves.”

To some people, the permanent war against the Jewish state is all there is.

But there’s a second point here, in addition to Sally Rooney’s personal cry for help. And that is the unbelievable irresponsibility of public figures portraying the war against the Jews as a war to rescue humanity and save the earth.

In addition to Rooney and Albanese, the conference included—according to its website—the notorious anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn and Omar Barghouti, the founder of the main BDS movement which seeks the destruction of Israel.

It was, in other words, a conference devoted to drumming up enthusiasm for globalizing the intifada. There have been such rallies against Jews throughout history—many of them, in fact—and not a single one has been about making the world a better place.

Although the conference bills itself as progressive, one can hear in Rooney’s spiel an echo of America’s right-wing “lost boys,” drifting into white nationalism as a demented form of group therapy.

Throughout history, Jews have been blamed for a very long list of maladies. Ennui is a new one, I think. Yet in an era rife with the self-pathologizing of emotional duress, it makes a certain kind of sense that we’re somehow now being blamed for sadness, boredom, restlessness, loneliness, and the guilt of the privileged.

All these things are real and, to judge by the public discourse, on the rise. But scapegoating Jews is not the cure. One can imagine a television ad in which hand-drawn clouds morph into words describing the symptoms of depression, as a voiceover recommends one consult one’s physician before taking anti-Semitism. The civilizational side effects, after all, are pretty rough.

And those civilizational side effects are precisely what the superstars of the People’s Congress for the Hague Group are threatening to bring down on everyone’s head. Rooney’s assertion that Israel is the great enemy of all the earth is the reason for the war in the Middle East in the first place. It is a battle cry that brings death and destruction to innocent people all over the world. And bored literary poster children have no right to make it their coping mechanism.

Seth Mandel: On Coexisting with Supporters of October 7

Essentially, October 7 became the kind of dividing line that made a lot of Jews understand history.

So it’s a useful question to ponder: How should we act? After all, not only must we maintain precisely the values we did before, but we also should work toward returning society to a place in which support for October 7 is brings public shame. What follows are a few guidelines.

First, Jews must not permit our own beliefs to be diluted by a society that makes excuses for pogroms. Nor should it temper our own criticism of October 7. Fact is, October 7 should be a red line for all civilizations, and it must remain a red line for us. We should not hesitate to state and restate that fact—that unqualified condemnation of that day is a basic human litmus test—even in front of those who justify Nazi barbarism. Especially in their presence, perhaps. We do not accommodate, out of misguided politesse, those who think our children deserved to be burned alive.

Second, and this goes for non-Jews just as much as for Jews: Use October 7 as a barometer for political, ideological and moral hypocrisy. Not because we’re looking for “gotcha” moments, but because it is impractical to remain unaware of who can be trusted in public life. We know, for example, that people who travel in the same circles as Duwaji and her husband Zohran Mamdani are not interested in protecting women from sexual assault, and that when they sign on to such campaigns it is because they are lying. We know that when they falsely accuse Israel of child murder it is because they support the murder of the children of Israel. Another example: The war began with Hamas carrying out the largest massacre at a music festival in recorded history. Musicians and artists who ignore this and instead parrot the propaganda of those who carried out the massacre do not believe in artistic expression; they only believe in dogmatic political expression. Indeed, they support regimes that would abolish the arts entirely.

Third, do not “trade” for condemnation of October 7. Do not dignify someone’s attempt to say “if you want me to condemn October 7, will you condemn [some random perceived crime they want you to falsely equate with October 7]?” October 7 is not something to be bartered away to some bad-faith ideological actor. October 7 is not an opening bid in some negotiation. Take it or leave it.

Finally: Punish people politically for their refusal to recognize the barbarousness of October 7. Just add it to any public figure’s civic record. This isn’t holding a grudge, it’s just more practical politics. People on the wrong side of October 7 are expecting to benefit from some sort of statute of limitations—or the limitations of human memory. Instead, let’s help them remember.

Is ISIS now part of the ‘progressive’ alliance?

In case anyone out there might still be under the impression that the violent fanaticism of the lefty culture warriors is abating, Saturday’s events should lay that to rest. Lang’s stunt was undoubtedly designed to cause maximum offence, but the cognitive dissonance of the counter-protesters and the media was truly something to behold. It was the most clear example yet of the theory that ‘words I don’t like’ are literally violence, but literal violence from ‘people I like’ is not violent at all.

One counter-protester, Walter Masterson, was in the middle of delivering a Kumbaya, we-love-everyone speech when one of the two attackers threw the first bomb. ‘We want everyone here to stay in New York. You don’t get to come from outside, and then tell everyone else…’, he was saying as Emir Balat – who had indeed come from outside New York – appeared behind him and, with a facial expression filled with rage and hate, appeared to hurl the nail bomb just above Masterson’s head, before running away.

Another video posted to X showed the attack from Lang’s perspective. As he stood there, annoying the counter-protesters, the bomb landed near him, prompting him and his supporters to run away. ‘Somebody threw a fucking bomb, bro!’, says one man. ‘That was a nail bomb!’, says another. Voices are heard thanking Jesus that the nail bomb did not go off. Eventually, someone calls out, ‘Somebody’s gotta get the goat’, and a female voice is heard saying, ‘Oh the goat!’.

The mayor’s immediate reaction was to condemn the ‘vile protest rooted in white supremacy’. New York governor Kathy Hochul blamed ‘both’ sides. Never mind that one side came armed only with a goat and a bad attitude, the other with multiple bombs and gave a statement to police that read in part: ‘I pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. Die in your rage you kufar.’ (sic)

Masterson, the now famous counterprotester, posted on X earlier this week: ‘I stand by [my speech]. As a born and raised New Yorker, everyone is welcome. Everyone except chief goat-fucker Jake Lang.’

So according to these truly thick white liberals with precisely zero self-preservation skills, coming to New York to chuck bombs at non-Muslims is just part of life in an open, tolerant city. If anything, it should be celebrated! However, coming to New York to loudly complain about Muslims wanting to bomb non-Muslims is an outrage of the highest order and will not be tolerated.

Good luck with that, ya dumb bastards!

03/10 Links Pt1: Fall of Iran an opportunity to uproot ‘Palestinianism’; The Iranian footballers show what real courage looks like

From Ian:

Missiles Over Levinsky

Every Iranian Israeli merchant I interviewed on Levinsky Street told of carrying pleasant associations of their or their parents’ homeland. Each expressed hope that the regime would fall. All looked forward to flying to a free Iran to visit.

Simnian told of living as a teenager with relatives in Los Angeles in the 1970s. He made friends with Iranian Jewish émigrés but spoke even more fondly of the Muslim, Christian, and Bahai Iranians he labored with.

“They’d tell me they loved the Jews and Israel,” he said. “I worked with them, sold to them. We ate together.” Asked how he sees Iranians’ revolt against the regime, which this winter has killed more than 30,000 of its citizens, Simnian said, “Set them free.”

“I think the population wants to be liberated from the dictatorial regime there,” he said. “The country has resources but gives money to its [anti-Israel] proxies, and people don’t have water. Why should such a country be in need?”

On the next street, Bijan Barchordari sat at a table outside his restaurant, Gourmet Sabzi, which he bills as serving “authentic Persian” meals.

Barchordari cited social factors—and a lack of weapons—to explain Iranians’ inability to depose the regime, despite their massive protests in January that resulted in the massacres of civilians. (Aghajani said 15,000 Jews still live in Iran, nearly all in Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan.)

“Iranians are the most normal people: very cultured, learned, with self-respect. That’s why they haven’t succeeded in overthrowing the regime. They’re not animals,” said Barchordari, a Tehran native who visited Israel as a backpacker in 1977 and stayed on when his parents reported the deteriorating situation back home.

Ninety minutes after the siren sounded, Levinsky Street seemed suddenly to have filled with pedestrians, and Barchordari would last 10 minutes in the interview before excusing himself to assist behind the counter as diners lined up. Two young Haredi men set up a folding table and asked passing males if they’d yet donned tefillin. Lovers held hands. Parents pushed baby carriages; in one woman’s carriage sat not an infant, but a puppy.

In Barchordari’s place at the table soon sat Hezi Fanian, born in Israel to parents who’d come in the 1950s from Yazd and Borujerd. He’s a singer, specializing in Persian, and some of the songs he’s written and recorded mean to bridge the divide between his ancestral lands. One such song is “Salaam” (Peace). Another is “From Tel Aviv to Tehran.”

He and two men in Iran—a composer and a singer—are collaborating on a love song they’ll be recording. They’ve spoken a lot in the past year, but Fanian said that their connection, and the recording, is in limbo, perhaps temporarily, following the regime’s cutting of internet access.

“I hope they’re both okay,” he said.

The song, he said, will be issued in the open. Fanian thinks that collaborating musically “could be a point of pride for them, because we’ve become a superpower.”

He added, “If [the regime in] Iran falls, it’ll be because of Israel and the United States.”

That’s a point each of the Iranian Israelis raised in my conversations with them. They said it not haughtily, but matter-of-factly: We are pounding the regime to eliminate its plans to destroy Israel with ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and, even better, we’d simultaneously be freeing the Iranian people from tyranny.

Fanian reached back 2,500 years to state that modern-day Jews are making good on an ancient debt from when the Persian king, Cyrus II, facilitated exiled Jews’ return to the land of Israel and the building of the Second Temple following the Babylonians’ destruction of the First Temple.

“I’m proud, as an Iranian and as a Jew,” he said, “that in my generation, we’re honored to repay the Iranians’ good deed that Cyrus did for us.”

Melanie Phillips: We Must Eliminate the Islamist Threat

In Israel, the public are having to run repeatedly into the shelters day and night under barrages of missiles and drones, including banned cluster bombs, from Iran and more barrages from its proxy army in Lebanon, Hizbullah. Most missiles are being intercepted, but the fragments that hurtle down from the sky can be as big as a bus, destroying houses and killing people.

The Gulf states, whose defenses are less sophisticated than Israel's, have been attacked by even heavier barrages of missiles from Iran. Despite this, both the Israelis and the Gulf rulers want the war waged by America and Israel to continue until the Iranian regime has been destroyed. The Gulf states - including Iran's erstwhile ally, Qatar - are astounded and outraged that Iran has turned on them.

The Israelis - who for more than four decades have been attacked by Iranian proxy terrorism and rockets, and have shuddered at the regime's steady advance towards nuclear capacity and mass-production of missiles designed to wipe them off the face of the earth - are united in support of the war.

There is little understanding in the West of the Tehran regime's particular kind of fanaticism. Its dominant members are Shia "Twelvers," who believe that an apocalypse will bring to earth the Shia messiah, the "Twelfth Imam." Anyone who thinks there can ever be any compromise with such fanatics is on a different planet.

The Iranian threat can never be totally neutralized unless the regime itself is brought down. This war could be seen as utterly reckless - unless the alternative is fully understood. Then it becomes utterly imperative, and essential that it is pursued until the Iranian Islamic regime is no more.

WSJ Editorial: Iran Isn't Winning This War

The reality inside Iran is that the U.S. and Israel continue to make progress. The regime loses more of its military each day, along with the ability to hurt its neighbors. At 10 days in, the war can hardly be considered prolonged.

The regime for now thinks it can outlast the U.S. News reports say Russian intelligence is helping Iran target U.S. forces and radars. That reinforces the point that the U.S. is fighting a larger axis.

The spike in oil prices due to the traffic stoppage in the Strait of Hormuz wasn't unexpected. While it will be costly for Iran, which relies on oil exports for its financing, the U.S. has ample oil and gas supplies. Mr. Trump is right that the disruption is a "small price to pay" for major security advances.

For now, the regime still has capabilities to destroy. It would make no sense to leave so many loose ends, from missiles and production facilities to nuclear sites at Pickaxe Mountain and the Isfahan tunnels. There is also little reason to leave standing any IRGC or Basij bases. Stopping now amid some short-term economic discomfort would be a victory for the mullahs. They can't be allowed to conclude that shutting down oil flows is their passport to survival now and in the future.

How the Iran War Ends

So far, air supremacy hasn't prevented Iran from putting massive political and economic pressure on Washington by choking off the Middle East's oil flow to the world. There are no signs yet of a popular rebellion capable of toppling the regime. And waves of attacks against Iran's strongholds and assets haven't yet enabled any surviving pragmatists to steer the regime away from its radical approach.

Yet the pessimism is likely premature. The lesson so far is that Iran's threat to America is both greater than many Iran doves understood and more difficult to address than many Iran hawks hoped.

Since World War II, U.S. presidents of both parties believed that preventing any hostile country from blackmailing the rest of the world by blocking exports from the Gulf was a vital national interest. This reality, not Israeli lobbying, has been the driving force behind American Middle East policy.

If Iran pressures the U.S. to end the war before it can break the blockade and cripple Tehran's ability to impose new blockades down the road, the mullahs will hold an acknowledged veto power over the ability of their Gulf neighbors to trade with the world. The Iranian regime could then threaten a global economic crisis at will and would build up the weapons and war chests that will make its position unassailable.

Something unusual is happening in Yemen. The Houthis — a movement whose official slogan includes "Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews" — are watching Iran take its heaviest blows in history and doing essentially nothing about it.

Why not?

At first I thought it was self-preservation. But Hezbollah, which has the same instinct, went all in, no doubt at Iran's behest.

The Houthis are saying that they are waiting for the right moment. On March 9th, speaking during his Ramadan lectures, Abdul Malik al-Houthi explained, "Regarding military escalation and action, our fingers are on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment should developments warrant it."

What is the right moment? For that, we need to understand a basic fact: for Iran, survival is victory.

Iran's strategic objective right now is not to defeat the United States militarily. It is to survive the campaign with enough institutional continuity, territorial control, and proxy infrastructure to reconstitute its threat posture over time — and to create enough economic and political pressure on the coalition to force a ceasefire before that threat posture is fully dismantled.

The oil weapon is central to that strategy.

The Strait of Hormuz closure has removed approximately 20 million barrels per day from global markets, roughly one-fifth of global oil consumption. There are partial mitigations available to make up some of this shortfall. Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE's Habshan-Fujairah pipeline to the Gulf of Oman can together bypass the strait for perhaps 6-9 million bpd under optimal conditions, though drone strikes have already targeted Fujairah infrastructure and a Saudi oil field has been hit. Global spare production capacity outside the Gulf adds perhaps 1.5-3 million bpd. Strategic petroleum reserve draws from the U.S. and IEA members provide perhaps 2-4 million bpd of cushion measured in weeks, not months. U.S.-led naval escorts could restore another 0.5-2 million bpd through carefully batched convoys, but commercial operators won't return at scale until the route is genuinely safe, not merely escorted, and insurers remain unwilling to write policies. Venezuela can only add about half a million bpd.

Add all of it up generously, and the world can cover perhaps 10-14 million bpd of the shortfall. The remaining 6-10 million bpd, sustained over weeks and months, will do what oil shocks have always done: drive inflation, strain supply chains, and create political pressure on governments whose populations feel it at the pump. Asia absorbs over 80% of Hormuz oil flows. South Korea, Japan, and India are not parties to this conflict. Their governments will not remain silent indefinitely. And in the United States, Brent crude at $90-100 per barrel will eventually be measured in polling numbers.

This is Iran's path to survival: economic attrition with the world pressuring the US to end the war as soon as possible.

Yet even the partial mitigation from the Saudi pipeline depends almost entirely on one assumption: that the Red Sea bypass route stays open.

The Houthis control the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. They have already demonstrated, over two years of operations, that they can make that corridor effectively impassable to commercial shipping through a sustained campaign of ballistic missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. During their previous campaign, the Houthis attacked 178 vessels, sinking four ships and killing nine sailors, forcing hundreds of commercial vessels to reroute around South Africa.

Right now, ships going across the Red Sea to the Suez Canal are still unimpeded. The Saudi pipeline is safe for now. But the Houthis can make the entire Red Sea too dangerous for shipping; insurers would bail as soon as there is one ballistic missile aimed at the Yanbu port that the Saudis use.

This is Iran's ace in the hole. Closing both the Straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb, and harassing the ships already in the Red Sea, is an oil shock that the world cannot absorb now.

If the Houthis enter now, they do so at the moment of maximum U.S. military attention and maximum carrier strike group presence. They would be struck hard, potentially decisively, while the political and military infrastructure to do so is fully in place. That is a bad trade, not just for the Houthis, but for Iran, which needs them intact for exactly the scenario described above.

The Houthis, kept intact and in reserve, are the instrument designed to execute the most important part of Iran's survival strategy at the critical moment.

The only question is timing. And here is where strategy must be considered more importantly than a literal interpretation of international law. Because there is no reason to wage the war in Iran's timetable.

The Houthi threat should be addressed now, while the carriers are in place, while the military and political infrastructure to address it is mobilized. Waiting until they shoot their first missile or drone is exactly what Iran wants the US to do - because Iran controls the timing to stay in power.

Airstrikes against Houthi military infrastructure — launch sites, missile and drone storage, command and control — conducted now, as part of the broader campaign posture, carry a fraction of the political and operational cost they would carry in four or six weeks, when justifying renewed escalation becomes exponentially harder. The targeting intelligence accumulated during Operation Prosperity Guardian and the August 2025 strikes is there. The assets are in the region. The narrative logic — these are Iran's proxies, this is a single integrated threat network — is defensible and accurate.

The Houthis have already demonstrated their willingness to act against global shipping when Iran requests it. That is not a theoretical future threat — it is an established behavioral pattern with a two-year track record. The question is not whether they will do it, but when Iran decides the moment is optimal.

The Houthis are not acting out of self preservation. Like Hezbollah, they are doing exactly what their Iranian masters tell them to do. Iran needed Hezbollah to open up a second front to Israel at the outset of the war, but they need the Houthis to be wait and maintain their full capabilities.

Waiting for that moment give Iran control of the most important single variable in the war's political sustainability: the oil price, and with it, the patience of every government in Asia and every voter in America watching their energy bills.

The Houthis are not standing down out of principle. They are being held in reserve as a weapon. The time to address a weapon is before it is fired, not after.

We know they would use it on request. They already did.

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

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Arabs don't know who to root for

Arabs who hate both Iranians and Jews have a conundrum: who do they want to win in the war?

Sunni Arabs hate Shiites. Almost all hate Jews. This is a tough problem.

Kuwait's Al Jarida has an op-ed, without answering. It says there are three agendas - the Iranian, the Zionist and the Christian evangelical agendas. It notes that Iran has suffered major setbacks but it doesn't think any of these are good for the Arab world, and warns that Arabs need to prepare, without offering detail/

Dr. Mu'tasim Al-Dabbas in Jordan's Ammon News is a bit more optimistic, thinking that the US and Zionists will win and go through their evil plans, but eventually there will be a world war where the Arabs will destroy them too.

After America eliminates the Iranian bogeyman within weeks, it will reveal its true face and assume the role of the wolf in place of Iran to fulfill the ambitions of global Zionism. The Arabs will then ask, "Why is your mouth so big, America?" as Little Red Riding Hood asked the wolf in the well-known story. America will answer, "So I can eat your oil with it."

America will seize control of all the region's oil resources to exert economic pressure on China. Israel will follow the same path, extending its influence from the Euphrates to the Nile. The Arabs will have no cards to play after the two wings of the Arab nation, Syria and Iraq, have been broken, and they are all scattered and divided. There is no joint Arab project to save their fate.

The Arabs will all say then, "We were devoured the day the white bull was devoured," referring to Gaza, which was a thorn in Israel's side.

In the future, God willing, after the axis of evil, Israel and America, reaches the height of their power and tyranny, and then invades the Kaaba, the world war will begin—and God knows best—the war of the end times between the Zionist-American axis of evil and soldiers chosen by God for the inevitable end of Israel.

In both cases, the Arabs are reduced to being bystanders in their own region, which is very shameful to them - they used to have Syria and Iraq as their powers and both are gone. (It is interesting that Egypt is not even mentioned in that analysis.

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

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03/09 Links Pt2: Is October 7 the Exemplar of the ‘Palestinian Cause?’ The Western Left Says Yes; Australian PM Will Grant Iranian Women’s Soccer Players Asylum

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Is October 7 the Exemplar of the ‘Palestinian Cause?’ The Western Left Says Yes

Duwaji and the Times both speak like any Western leftist about the conflict. But the larger question is whether they are correct. Is it true that, as the Times reports, the Palestinian cause is what Hamas and hundreds of other Gazans did on October 7?

Again, the Hamas apologists who brand child murder as “resistance” seem to think they’re helping the Palestinians somehow. But this euphemism game has exactly the opposite effect: In the public’s mind, it connects the Palestinians to the worst actions of their worst representatives.

Many people would support the “Palestinian cause” if it were defined as self-determination in the areas currently governed by Palestinian institutions. Fewer would support the “Palestinian cause” as the Times describes it: unfiltered bloodletting.

For example: Palestinians kidnapped a baby, then killed him with their own hands and mutilated his corpse to hide their work. Hamas soldiers then put the remains in a coffin and danced around with it in a public ceremony.

Is this the Palestinian cause, or is it an aberration? Is it the rule or the exception? The Palestinians’ so-called supporters in the West say it is the cause in its purest expression.

Jared Kushner, who represents the Trump administration, doesn’t believe that. Nor do most Israelis (and certainly they did not before October 7). Which is to say: The parties who are supposedly irredeemably biased against the Palestinians would never talk about them in the kind of harsh, dehumanizing terms that their champions use.

Which tells us much about these champions. Whatever the Palestinians might consider their “cause,” the pro-Palestine movement in the West lustily describes it as a nightmarish, phantasmagoric horror show. And they absolutely cannot get enough of it.

They might be wrong about the Palestinians—that is, Palestinians themselves may still believe in a cause with more noble ambitions. But we are not wrong about these Western activists: They have traded human decency for a life of fetishized and demented violence, especially against Jews. They have become something truly monstrous, and they want us all to know it.

The Architecture of Unseeing

How Ireland's Anti-Israel Obsession Became a Case Study in Collective Intellectual Dishonesty

I. The Mechanics of Collective Delusion
As used in popular psychology, “gaslighting” describes a form of coercive control whereby the perpetrator manipulates the victim into questioning his or her own sanity, memory, or perception of reality, adding up over time to a profound assault on that person’s sense of self. Most frequently noted in abusive domestic relationships, gaslighting is also prominent in the workplace, where targeted employees are manipulated into an alternate reality where they can do nothing right and are blamed for everything that goes wrong, which erodes their competency, confidence, and productivity.

Gaslighting can be traumatic on an individual level, but when scaled up from the personal to the political, it can become a powerful sociological weapon. Political polarization, now prevalent across the West, has metastasized into a system of collective gaslighting that ever more aggressively demands a culture of intellectual dishonesty, requires people to “unsee” what is plainly visible, and ultimately degrades the critical faculties and moral clarity of an entire society. The phenomenon has mutated far beyond differences of policy to become a clash of manufactured realities, to the point where belonging to a polarized tribe necessitates wholesale denial of factual evidence and observable truth.

Living in Ireland, I have become acutely aware of this dynamic as it has shaped our current obsessive discourse regarding Israel. Especially since October 7, 2023, this Middle Eastern conflict has become for the Irish an epistemological and ontological fracture that forces people to ignore history, marginalize a minority community, and court profound political and economic self-harm, all while claiming the moral high ground. What has unfolded in Ireland over the past two and a half years is not merely a foreign policy disagreement; it is the wholesale capture of a national consciousness by a single, simplifying narrative so totalizing in its grip that it has begun to corrode the very institutions (diplomatic, cultural, sporting, economic) upon which the country’s international standing rests.

What makes Ireland’s case particularly instructive, and particularly poignant, is the size of its Jewish community. Numbering around 2,500 to 3,000 people, Irish Jews have watched with growing alarm as a political consensus has hardened around them, transforming the country they call home into what Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs has characterized as one of the most hostile environments for Jewish life in Europe. That a nation of five million people, fond of proclaiming its historical empathy for the oppressed, could so comprehensively fail to see what it is doing to its own smallest minority is the central paradox of this post. It is a paradox sustained by the architecture of unseeing.

03/09 Links Pt1: Gulf states have a stark choice — and Trump must make them face it; Benny Morris: Iran’s Risky Gamble; NATO downs second Iranian missile over Turkey; Iran may be activating sleeper cells

From Ian:

"Revolutions Are Impossible Before They Happen and Inevitable After They Happen"

Prof. Ali M. Ansari, 58, is a historian at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, where he directs the Institute for Iranian Studies. He says, "I'm a firm believer in what Hannah Arendt says: Revolutions are impossible before they happen and inevitable after they happen."

Inside Iran, "the vast majority of people are struggling. The political system is hated. The economic system isn't delivering." Salaries "no longer meet the basic needs of life. There's an environmental crisis - they've drained the water table. And now, they have an international crisis."

"People tell me, 'Oh, but it's strong and stable.' Well, it can't be that strong and stable because people are rebelling every few years, and on a scale the regime deems existential." Regime supporters, whom Ansari pegs at 10-20% of the population, "are convinced they are going to defeat the U.S. in this war. They are not going to do it."

In January, "the regime carried out such a mass slaughter that it actually proved counterproductive. If they had suppressed it with, say, 'only' the 3,117 dead that they claim, it might have succeeded." But having killed "10,000, 15,000, 20,000 of your own in the random manner that they did, and shooting people in hospital beds, it creates an anger that is difficult to suppress."

Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-13), auditing bodies were dismantled and many state assets transferred to the IRGC. By one assessment, $800 billion in revenue went missing. "A lot of them in the IRGC made a lot of money and they don't want to lose it all." That's now a stronger motivation to fight than old revolutionary fervor.

When Iran's economy is in shambles, the reflex is to blame U.S. sanctions. "That doesn't explain why the Iranians have mismanaged their water. It doesn't tell you why, well before the real sanctions arrived in 2011-12, they were never able to get any foreign direct investment into the country....It's the corruption, the kleptocracy, the short-termism, the opaqueness, the lack of accountability, the uncertainty." Sanctions didn't befall Iran. They were a consequence of the regime's behavior.

Gulf states have a stark choice — and Trump must make them face it

Gulf leaders now face a stark choice, and Trump must frame it that way.

They can continue absorbing blows and hope Iran eventually runs out of missiles — or they can help shorten the war.

That means more than quiet coordination: It means building a formal, defense-focused regional security architecture that integrates air and missile defense with shared intelligence.

The Gulf states should have joined such a framework long ago.

In fact, the basic architecture already exists.

In 2024, when US CENTCOM guided an international defense effort to thwart Iran’s missile and drone attacks on Israel, multiple Arab states joined in.

Now, Washington should turn that ad-hoc cooperation into a permanent regional shield — linking Gulf radar networks, air defenses and early-warning systems with American and Israeli assets in the region.

That means real-time intelligence on Iranian launches, integrated air and missile defense coverage across Gulf airspace, and joint command centers capable of intercepting threats.

The payoff would be immediate.

It would turn today’s patchwork of national defenses into a single protective umbrella over the Gulf, freeing American forces now defending Gulf skies to focus on the source of the danger.

It would send Tehran a message that the Gulf is part of a coordinated security bloc that won’t be intimidated by missile terror.

And if Iran continues to rain missiles and drones on Gulf cities, those same states may decide that defense is not enough — and that helping shut down the launchers is the fastest way to restore security.

Some Gulf leaders will hesitate, worrying that overt alignment with Washington or Jerusalem will spark domestic backlash and paint a target on their backs.

But last week proves equivocation doesn’t buy immunity.

The choice here is between a short, decisive confrontation and a prolonged cycle of bombardment that erodes stability.

What do you think? Post a comment.

Trump should make this clear to his Arab partners: Iran has chosen to target you.

The path to security is not to distance yourself from Washington, but coordinated action that eliminates the common threat.

Mark Dubowitz: Israel Didn't Drag the U.S. into War with Iran - They Enabled Us to Fight It Smarter and Faster

A dangerous lie has taken hold in Washington: that Israel somehow pressured the U.S. into war with Iran. Both President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio have said this is wrong. Rubio said the U.S. faced "a threat that was untenable."

Iran has spent years building nuclear weapons, developing long-range ballistic missiles, and encircling Israel with a terror army stretching from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen. It has fired ballistic missiles directly at Israeli civilians. No Israeli government could ignore that. Jerusalem's decision to join a combined American-Israeli operation targeting Iran's missile and nuclear capabilities drew near-universal support across Israel's political spectrum. It was a national security imperative.

When Netanyahu met Trump at Mar-a-Lago last December, the president had already green-lighted an Israeli strike on Iran's missile infrastructure. When they met again at the White House, Washington knew exactly what was coming and decided to lead the war. The claim that Israel pressured the U.S. president into war is not just factually hollow - it veers dangerously close to antisemitic fringe narratives.

But the bigger point that keeps getting buried is that Iran's missiles and nuclear program and terror are America's problem. They are being fired right now at U.S. forces, American bases, our embassies, and our Gulf Arab allies. Iran is actively developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could one day reach the American homeland. Dismantling that regime's nuclear, missile, and terror infrastructure is core American national security.

Israel didn't drag us into this war. It enabled us to fight it smarter, faster, and at far less cost than we ever could have alone.

To Defend the Abraham Accords, Trump Must First Defend the UAE

The Trump administration needs to pay close attention: The UAE is not merely another Gulf monarchy, another energy partner. It is one of the clearest examples in the Arab world of a country that deliberately chose modernization over ideological stagnation and development over the old politics of grievance.... This choice is precisely what makes it so important — and precisely what makes it so threatening to the forces that thrive on disorder.

The UAE... demonstrated that sovereignty can be defended without fanaticism, and that prosperity can be built through peace rather than perpetual war. This is why attacks on the UAE are not merely attacks on a country. They are attacks on a model for peace.

President Donald Trump no doubt sees this with clarity: his extraordinary Abraham Accords remain one of the defining strategic achievements not only of the century but of history.

Defending the UAE, therefore, is entirely consistent with a hard-headed American strategy. America did not help broker the Abraham Accords only to watch their boldest Arab partner become an exposed target. A serious policy... requires seriousness: tighter intelligence coordination, stronger integrated air and missile defense, firmer deterrence against Iranian aggression and proxy warfare, and unmistakable public clarity that the United States forcefully stands by the states that choose peace over terror and an alliance with the US over revolutionary blackmail. That is not charity toward Abu Dhabi. It is a defense of American interests, and a regional balance that works in America's favor.

George Orwell invented the slogan "War is Peace" as a satire so extreme it could never be mistaken for sincere ideology. It was meant to be obviously, grotesquely absurd, the kind of thing only a totalitarian state would inscribe on its Ministry of Peace while waging permanent war.

He underestimated us.

On March 7, 2026, the Bronx Anti-War Coalition held a vigil in Manhattan - not for victims of war, but for Ayatollah Khamenei. A masked speaker chanted, to robotic responses: "We stand in full solidarity with the IRGC and the Islamic Revolution... They are materially destroying the Zionist entity and U.S. airbases and U.S. soldiers." He then called for Iran's missiles to "reply" to American drones.

This was an "anti-war" event.

They're not hiding their logic. Their own website states plainly that they "support the right to resist colonial imperialism by any means necessary, including armed struggle" and that they are "not a pacifist movement."

And they've solved the definitional problem. Their "Points of Unity" adopt a redefinition of peace itself: peace is not the absence of conflict but rather the achievement of liberation through "the defeat of global systems of oppression." By any means necessary.

Literally, war is peace.

Missiles shot at U.S. soldiers, Jewish civilians and hotels in the UAE are peace work. Vigils for theocratic supreme leaders are peace activism. "Death to Israel" and "Death to the USA" are peace slogans. War is peace: not as irony, not as critique, but as a genuine operating principle stated without embarrassment on a public website.

And while they enthusiastically claim to support people's revolutions, they can suddenly oppose them when they don't align with their support for radical Islamist states.

In January 2026, the same coalition published a piece in Workers World about the popular uprising in Iran. Their verdict: "Iran is not erupting. It's being attacked." Iranians who took to the streets - many of them young women risking their lives for the most basic freedoms - were recast as tools of "U.S./Israeli hybrid warfare." The piece declared there are "only two sides," and that "neutrality here is collaboration." The group that calls itself pro-revolution condemned an actual popular revolution because it was the wrong revolution, against the wrong government. They claim to "defend people's revolutions." They mean specific people, specific revolutions — ones that fit their philosophy. People wanting to be free of their oppressive regimes are simple redefined as "imperialists" and their murders are justified.

All they have to do is redefine reality.

This is the same move made with "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism." Repeat it enough and the repetition becomes the argument. Never mind that anti-Zionist protesters routinely march behind signs calling for the elimination of the Jewish state, celebrate the massacre of Jewish civilians, and recycle medieval blood libels with a thin geopolitical coating. The label "anti-Zionist" is meant to function as a prophylactic against the charge of antisemitism — to make the question of what's actually being said, and who's being targeted, inadmissible. The word does the work so the content doesn't have to be examined. It's the same mechanism: fix the vocabulary, and reality has to conform to it.

Orwell understood that totalitarianism required controlling language. What he perhaps didn't fully anticipate was that a free society could generate its own Ministry of Truth voluntarily, through activist organizations, sympathetic media, and the social enforcement of approved terminology. And they have their own mechanisms of enforcement to ensure that no one in their "coalition" dare disagree with their tenets.

The media, in attempting to be balanced, parrot the obvious lies and perversion of language as legitimate, which gives them more power. Nobody forced journalists to describe the Bronx Anti-War Coalition as "anti-war activists." Nobody compelled them to accept the "anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism" frame at face value. They did it because the labels were available and the scrutiny was uncomfortable.

The result is that "War is Peace" is no longer a warning etched on a dystopian government building. It's on a coalition website in the Bronx. It's in press releases. And enough people in media and politics treat it as a legitimate peace movement that the satire has become indistinguishable from the reality Orwell was trying to prevent.

He thought the absurdity would be its own refutation. He didn't anticipate that the absurdity would go beyond his imagination.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Parts 1 through 3 built the diagnostic and prescriptive framework. The West's episodic war theory is a category error. Revolutionary movements identified that error and built a doctrine around exploiting it. We need to handle adversarial reality considerably better than what international law currently provides.

The question is, what should international law look like, or does it even make sense?

The first thing to say clearly is this: international law is a procedural system, not a moral one. It is a coordination mechanism among sovereign states, designed to manage conflict, reduce escalation, and create predictable expectations of behavior. What it does not do, despite the moral language that constantly surrounds it, is adjudicate right and wrong.

Terms like "war crimes," "international justice," and "the rules-based order" carry enormous moral weight in public discourse. They imply that legal compliance tracks moral legitimacy and legal violation tracks moral culpability. But the system's enforcement depends almost entirely on political power and consent. Its institutions are manipulated by the states that fund them. Its definitions are negotiated by parties with interests in the outcomes.

The UN couldn't agree on a definition of terrorism because too many member states wanted their favored terror groups excluded. Syria used chemical weapons repeatedly while sitting on the Security Council. The International Criminal Court pursued Israeli commanders while Hamas leadership walked free. This is the system operating exactly as its political structure predicts.

In other words, there is a huge gap between what is legal and what is moral. Things that are legal (like Iran's ballistic missile program) can be immoral, and things that are moral (like the Osirak strike) may be considered illegal.

Updating international law cannot work. The problem isn't technical, it's structural. Any reform flexible enough to address the capability-threshold problem and the continuous-war doctrine is also flexible enough to be claimed by Russia against Ukraine, by China against Taiwan, by Iran against Israel. The universality that gives international law its legitimacy is precisely what makes it unreformable for this class of problem. You cannot write a rule that applies to everyone and have it apply only to good-faith actors.

The deeper issue is that universal legal systems have a scaling problem. A system that must govern hundreds of states with radically different traditions, threat environments, and political structures cannot be both universal and morally serious simultaneously. The attempt to make it both produces exactly what we have - universal enough to be hijacked, morally serious enough to weaponize as language, neither in practice.

The solution is not a better universal system. It is a different architecture entirely.

The proposed solution has two parts.

There needs to be a system where there is a basic set of laws that everyone can agree upon, like not targeting civilians, prohibiting weapons of mass civilian destruction, and not murdering prisoners of war. They are universal because they represent the floor below which no war doctrine can descend without forfeiting moral standing entirely, and every serious tradition knew this before any convention was signed.

But above that, each state publishes their own laws of war. Most states do this already - they have military manuals that go into detail as to what they can and cannot do. States must make these regulations and policies public and transparent, and they should be judged against them.

Pluralism is more realistic than universalism. Even today, there is a reason every country has its own published rules of war: there are always specific circumstances that apply to individual countries. It is the honest recognition that different states, different traditions, and different threat environments produce legitimately different doctrines - and that this diversity is preferable to a false universalism that the most ruthless actors exploit most effectively.

What makes pluralism workable rather than anarchic is transparency and self-accountability. Each state develops and publicly declares its own laws of war. Those declarations are public and criticizable. Each state is held accountable — by its allies, by its citizens, by history — against its own declared standards, not against a universal standard negotiated by parties with conflicting interests.

Voluntary treaties and signed conventions carry genuine moral obligation within this framework, because consent creates responsibility in a way that imposition does not. A state that signs the Chemical Weapons Convention and violates it is culpable in a way that a state operating outside a framework it never accepted is not.

If states voluntarily decide to be subject to rulings of the ICC, that is fine. But states that do not should not be penalized by than decision.

International law functions as a reference point — a repository of accumulated wisdom about how wars should be fought — not as a moral authority whose pronouncements supersede national survival. The ICRC can (and does) publish its own interpretation of the laws of armed conflict; it should be used as a reference but not as canon. Every state can specify which parts they disagree with and why.

You may ask, if states declare their own laws of war, what prevents a state from simply declaring chemical weapons, torture, or deliberate civilian targeting legitimate? Doesn't that dissolve the floor entirely?

Two mechanisms within the framework itself answer this, with no external enforcement required.

First: a declaration that violates the irreducible floor is itself a casus belli. This follows directly from the relational framework established in Part 3. Declared hostile intent combined with capability constitutes a state of war in Locke's sense. A state that publicly declares its intention to use weapons designed purely for mass civilian suffering has announced something about its relationship to every other state simultaneously. That declaration, combined with possession, already meets the threshold criteria. No tribunal is required, the transparency requirement enforces itself: your public doctrine has consequences you cannot later disclaim.

Second: states may include exception clauses in their own declared doctrines when dealing with enemies who themselves violate accepted rules. If observing a specific protection systematically disadvantages you against an enemy who deliberately exploits that protection as a weapon, you may relax that specific protection to the degree necessary to restore operational parity, but no further.

Hamas fires from hospitals, stores weapons in schools, and uses civilian infrastructure as deliberate military cover, meaning Israel's genuine commitment to protecting those sites becomes a tactical asset for Hamas, not a protection for civilians. In that specific context, the protection can be adjusted — not eliminated, but recalibrated to account for the systematic exploitation, with evidence, proportionality, and public justification.

An enemy that consistently uses white flags as deception reduces the operational presumption of surrender — not eliminates it, but adjusts the evidentiary threshold required before extending it.

This is not carte blanche for a nation to ignore accepted rules if their enemies do. If one side uses chemical weapons against civilians that does not mean the other side can do the same. But if one side weaponizes civilians or humanitarian symbols or religious sites, the other side can justify attacking them.

The exception clause invocation is never self-executing. It must be publicly justified — against the adversary's own declared doctrine, demonstrated behavior, and the specific operational disadvantage being created. The evidentiary burden is high, visible, and applied to the specific protection being adjusted, not to the laws of war generally. The claim is either sustained by the record or exposed as false by it.

This framework gives precise, evidence-based, proportionate adjustment to specific protections that have been systematically converted into weapons — and it requires you to show your work publicly.

This is not perfect. It can still be abused. Catching deception is not easy. But we have that situation today as well. The advantage here is not to treat international law as a moral system when it can be used for immoral purposes. A nation that hides its crimes invites others to demand answers - or suffer consequences. Transparency helps a great deal here.

Iran's revolutionary doctrine is public. It declares permanent hostility toward Israel and the United States as a founding constitutional principle, endorses proxy warfare, deliberately targets civilians through those proxies, and has consistently pursued weapons of mass destruction as instruments of that struggle. Judged against its own declared standards, Iran has placed itself outside the irreducible floor. The declaration is its own condemnation.

Israel's military doctrine is public, detailed, and rigorously applied. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality relative to military objectives, warnings before strikes where operationally possible, and investigation of alleged violations. Israel has a functioning military legal system that has prosecuted soldiers for violations of its own standards. Judged against its own declared doctrine, Israel's conduct reflects genuine structural commitment to fighting within a serious ethical framework under conditions deliberately engineered to make that commitment costly.

These are not morally equivalent positions. The current system treats them as if they are. An honest framework makes the difference visible and lets the record speak.

There is no institutional solution to a world containing genuinely malign actors with veto power. The existing system's pretense that institutions solve this problem is precisely what revolutionary movements have spent decades exploiting.

Right now, the international law system has been politicized and hijacked. Strong states do whatever they want anyway, and terrorist states hide behind the law.

A theory of law must be based on reality. The only way this can happen is if the malign actors are forced to be transparent about their policies and others can act accordingly.

Law is not morality. But morality must govern what laws we build - and anticipate how they will be perverted by those who treat them as weapons rather than obligations

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)