Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

01/27 Links Pt2: Herzog: Denying Jewish self-determination is antisemitism; Bondi Chabad rabbi: Antisemitism must not become what defines us; Meet the Proud Nazi Spawn Raising Money for Democrats

From Ian:

Ceremonies held worldwide to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Candles flickered at dawn Tuesday at the vast Holocaust memorial in Berlin as people across Europe and beyond paused to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, reflecting on Nazi Germany’s murder of millions of people and its attempt to completely wipe out Jewish life on the continent.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed across the world on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet forces of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps. The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration.

At the memorial site of Auschwitz, in an area that was under German occupation during World War II, former prisoners laid flowers and wreaths at the Execution Wall, where German forces murdered thousands of people, most of them Poles. Later in the day Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki will join survivors for a remembrance ceremony at Birkenau, the vast site nearby where Jews were transported from across Europe to be exterminated in gas chambers.

Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and others.

Commemorations on the anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, were also taking place across Europe on Tuesday, as well as at the United Nations.

Germany, the nation that inflicted war and genocide on its neighbors, is holding a commemoration in the Bundestag, the parliament, on Wednesday.

Candles burned and white roses were placed at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honors the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. The vast site in the heart of the capital underlines Germany’s remorse.

Herzog: Denying Jewish self-determination is antisemitism

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Tuesday marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by warning that antisemitism is once again spreading worldwide, and equated the denial of Jewish self-determination with hatred of Jews.

Speaking at the Second International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, Herzog said, “To deny the Jewish people—and only the Jewish people—the right to self-determination in their national home is antisemitism, even if you are the mayor of the city with the most Jews outside of Israel,” the latter being a reference to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Herzog linked his remarks to the return on Monday of the body of Israel Border Police Master Sgt. Ran Gvili from Gaza, calling it “a significant turning point.” He said, “For the first time since 2014, not a single Israeli citizen, living or dead, is being held as a human bargaining chip in Gaza.”

Reflecting on the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Herzog said the world is “failing to meet our vow” of “Never Again” as Jewish communities face rising hostility in cities around the world, from London to Sydney.

The conference was hosted by the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry, led by Minister Amichai Chikli, and attended by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and other international figures.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted the first day of the event on Monday, warning that antisemitism has reemerged as a global threat, and urging governments to confront it as an assault on “our common civilization.”

US envoy warns Jew-hatred ‘rages anew’ during UN Holocaust remembrance

Mike Waltz, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, warned that the global body, created in the aftermath of the Holocaust, “must do far more now to confront this ancient poison” of antisemitism “to fulfill its founding promise and to protect every people, including the Jewish people.”

Waltz spoke at the U.N.’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day observance on Tuesday, recalling the atrocities American soldiers discovered and documented while liberating Nazi concentration camps in World War II.

The vow of “Never Again” must be put into action, the U.S. envoy said.

Waltz added that antisemitism “rages anew,” citing sharply rising levels of Jew-hatred in the United States and around the world.

“This wave of hate has left synagogues under siege. Jewish students, once again, hiding their identity. Whole communities living in fear,” he said. “I mean, what, are we back in 1933? This is absurd, and we have to call it out.”

While commending the United Nations for holding the ceremony, Waltz decried the growing reality of “Holocaust denial, its distortion, its rehabilitation in these historic narratives of Nazi collaborators, its the manipulation of history right here at the U.N. and elsewhere.” He linked that phenomenon to recent acts of violence, including the Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre in Sydney on Dec. 14 and the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Elie Wiesel once hoped that antisemitism perished in Auschwitz, and sadly, he lived to see its horrific resurrection,” Waltz said. “We cannot wait for another liberation.”

Waltz emphasized the importance of education and commemoration as critical tools in combating antisemitism, calling for greater efforts to elevate the voices of Holocaust survivors.

“You did not become a lifelong victim. You move forward and educate the next generation so that this can never happen again,” he said, addressing survivors in attendance.

01/27 Links Pt1: The Hostage Crisis Is Over. So What Has the World Learned?; Netanyahu: Israeli soldiers lost their lives in Gaza due to Biden-era arms embargo; PIJ knowingly fired faulty rockets in Gaza, killing 'a thousand' Palestinians

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Hostage Crisis Is Over. So What Has the World Learned?

Much like Hamas’s strategy of operating from civilian homes, hostage-taking is part of what Palestinian terrorists see as Israel’s chief vulnerability: that it cares about the life and dignity of every individual. In other words, the conflict we see today is, zoomed out, a Palestinian war to exploit Israel’s humanity. Why anyone thinks a conflict that is set along these lines can or will be solved by turning artificial borders into official ones is beyond me. No one who kidnaps babies is interested in real estate.

And second: what Avera Mengistu’s story revealed. Apparently grief-stricken over the loss of his brother, and undergoing periodic mental-health treatment, the 28-year-old climbed over a border fence and into Gaza in 2014. He was returned in 2025.

Who holds a grief-stricken, mentally ill person hostage for a decade? Hamas does.

Nor is the danger of such aimless walking limited to Gaza. Here’s a headline from late December: “IDF escorts Israeli woman out of Palestinian West Bank town she entered.” There really wasn’t much more to the story. A military statement read: “After IDF troops scanned the area, the forces located the civilian and extracted her safely out of the village.”

When did headlines about Israelis having to be extracted from Palestinian neighborhoods become so dog-bites-man?

Here’s one from a week earlier: “Mentally ill Israeli extracted safely from Hebron overnight after wandering for hours.” Jews are only permitted in about 20 percent of Hebron. If one enters the other 80 percent, it makes headlines no matter what happens to them.

This one’s from less than two weeks ago: “Israeli and PA forces extract Jewish man seen wandering in West Bank city of Qalqilya.” Sounds dangerous; what happened? “An initial investigation has found that the man entered the city to go to a car repair shop.”

Another from late December: “Troops extract 2 Israelis who entered West Bank’s Area A near Hebron, Nablus.”

The case of Avera Mengistu highlights the fact that still, after all these decades of “peace” negotiations, the Judenrein nature of Palestinian Arab towns is simply accepted to the point where nearly every headline about an Israeli leaving such a town alive contains a version of the word “extraction.”

The October 7 hostage crisis is over. But has the world learned any of the lessons that have been on display since it began?

Jonathan Sacerdoti: How Israel did the impossible – and brought the hostages home

To outside observers, these goals sound impossible. But bringing back all the hostages was dismissed as impossible, too. Israel did it. These promises may sound arbitrary, idealistic, even performative, but to Israel, nothing is too dramatic. It is a country whose history has read like a thriller from its earliest days, whose survival has defied odds at every turn. A people whose annihilation has been attempted repeatedly by armies larger, better armed, and more numerous, often backed by far broader coalitions.

It is tempting to reach for biblical or spiritual explanations. Perhaps they have their place. Not everyone’s taste runs in that direction. What can be said, without mysticism, is that human beings united by purpose, driven by pain and fury, and threatened by brutality can achieve things that appear impossible from a distance.

Anyone in doubt can look at a map and trace a finger to that narrow sliver of land so many have sought to erase. It is still there. It does not get everything right. It argues, stumbles, fractures. Yet it persists, and it fights to defend its existence. Yesterday, it delivered on one impossible promise. The second now waits.

This is where the American role becomes decisive, and often misunderstood. The US initiative on Gaza should not be read as a naïve development plan or a humanitarian fantasy. Its headline promises of employment, reconstruction and futuristic redevelopment are not about realism. They are about framing.

Washington has placed a maximal, almost utopian offer on the table precisely because it expects it to fail. The point is to force a binary choice. Either Gaza, and Palestinians more generally, move decisively away from armed jihadist governance, towards demilitarisation and external oversight, or they absorb the consequences of continued war and isolation. The message is blunt: everything is being offered. Rejection transfers responsibility.

This strategy buys time. Even a temporary pause delays large-scale fighting, reduces Israeli casualties, and allows further consolidation of the diplomatic case against Hamas. It exposes bad faith. It drains sympathy. It reframes the conflict as one of Palestinian political choice rather than Israeli obstruction. Or so the US may hope.

Governance proposals emerging from Washington reflect this pragmatism. There is no search for a morally pure Palestinian leadership. Any figure with local standing will carry factional history. The aim is a technocratic authority operationally reliant on external backing, financially constrained, and removable if it drifts towards Hamas. Disarmament is the price of reconstruction. According to the agreements signed at least, there is no flexibility on that point. Israel will wish to hold the US to that promise.

Demilitarisation remains the true red line. If Hamas refuses, the strategy should shift. Opening the border with Egypt functions as a pressure valve: population movement reduces Hamas’s ability to embed itself behind civilians. Israel gains greater freedom of action, with fewer civilian entanglements and clearer international justification.

More broadly, Gaza itself is not the central strategic theatre. Iran remains the core concern, with Turkey hovering uneasily on the edge of hostility and opportunism. The American military posture signals as much to Tehran as to Gaza. That many European states have chosen to stand on the sidelines and scoff at President Trump’s plans, even as atrocities unfold elsewhere in the region, only underscores how marginal they have become.

What is clear is this: Israel has delivered on one impossible promise. The second is now being tested, under harsher conditions, with fewer illusions. Whether demilitarisation can be achieved will determine not only Gaza’s future, but the credibility of every promise made since October.

History offers no guarantees. It rarely does. But it does record moments when nations, bound by pain, pressure, and purpose, achieved what seemed implausible. Israel has reached such a moment again. What follows will not be symbolic. It will be decisive.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day: The moral link between Kristallnacht and October 7

International Holocaust Remembrance Day arrives this year with the return yesterday of the Ron Gvili's body from Gaza, fulfilling one major goal of the Gaza war.

IHRD is often hijacked to make offensive analogies between how Jews were persecuted by the Nazis and how Israel is acting when it defends itself. But there is a real analogy that we can make between the October 7 pogrom and the pogrom that was in many ways the beginning for the Holocaust: Kristallnacht.

Kristallnacht is often remembered visually: shattered glass, burning synagogues, smashed shops. But the psychology behind it and in the days afterwards is startlingly familiar to what we've seen since October 7.

The Nazi regime justified the pogrom by pointing to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish teenager whose family had been expelled by the Germans. It was an excuse, not a reason.

Similarly, Hamas pretended the October 7 massacrewas a reaction to Israeli crimes, notwithstanding that more goods were coming into Gaza than before Hamas took over the enclave. The attack was planned, the justification was an excuse.

In both cases, the attacks were not isolated events. They were planned as the sparks for what came afterwards - the collective blame of Jews, the inversion of history and the weaponization of the fact that attacks on Jews prompts more antisemitic acts, not less.

Here is a news story describing how the Nazis blamed the Jews collectively for their own victimhood - and used Kristallnacht itself as an excuse to punish the entire Jewish community, forcing Jews to pay to clean up the debris from destroyed synagogues and confiscating their insurance claims.

Jewish suffering was no longer treated as morally relevant. It was treated as self-caused. Germany was reframed as the victim. Jews were reframed as the problem. The violence was not denied; it was morally laundered.

The violence of Kristallnacht itself was only the beginning of the persecution.

On October 7, Hamas planned and executed a mass atrocity. But Hamas had planned not only a kinetic attack, but a propaganda war as well. The inversion of the Jews from victims to criminals happened within hours of the attack - just as in Germany in November 1938.

The killings were explained as “resistance.” The victims were dehumanized into "settlers" and "occupiers" and "oppressors." The crime was reframed as consequence. Responsibility was shifted from the perpetrators to the existence of Jews themselves.

Attacking Jews was correctly understood by both the Nazis and the Islamists as the most reliable way to increase antisemitism, not decrease it.

After October 7, Jews worldwide were harassed, attacked, and told to answer for crimes they did not commit. Synagogues were vandalized. Jewish students were threatened. Jewish mourning was treated as propaganda. Jewish fear was dismissed as manipulation.

The brief world sympathy for Israel evaporated - just as Hamas knew it would. And guess who else made the same observation after Kristallnacht?

Joseph Goebbels mocked the world for its protests, saying that if they love Jews so much, let them allow Jews to immigrate. he predicted that the protests would die down - and he was right.

Both the Nazis and Hamas know that they can rely on latent antisemitism to support their aims worldwide. They both knew that they could count on Jewish victimhood not counting outside performative gestures. And they both had control of their media to shape what the world would see.

If Holocaust memory is to mean anything, it must train us to recognize the moment when violence against Jews becomes morally invisible, when Jews are no longer allowed to be victims, only causes.

That moment has come before. And we have seen where it leads.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Human Rights Watch issued a report condemning Palestinian suicide bombings during the height of the second intifada in November 2002. HRW created a bizarrely high bar for evidence of PA payments to terrorists, essentially discounting anything less than a signed letter from Arafat authorizing such payments directly to someone he provably knew was a murderer.

Even so, HRW was clear: "Under international law, those who assist, aid, or abet crimes against humanity are individually responsible for the resulting crimes."

But that was the last time the supposed human rights organization addressed the issue. Even after 2004, when the PA officially created the Palestinian Authority Martyrs' Fund, HRW did not say a word.

That's over 23 years since HRW even mentioned it.

But even that is infinitely better than Amnesty International. Amnesty has never written a word about "pay for slay."

While both groups are keen to condemn any evidence of money that might help Israel fight Hamas, or might help a Jew live in Judea, when it comes to direct financial incentives to murder Jews, these "human rights organizations" are completely silent.

Palestinian Media Watch has proven just this week that the Palestinian Authority has never stopped pay for slay, even as they have insistred that they no longer do that.

Recipients of Palestinian Authority terror stipends residing in Jordan reported over the last three hours that their monthly payments had been deposited into their bank accounts. According to multiple firsthand accounts, the sums transferred were identical to those received previously, suggesting that the payment scale remains unchanged. Reports further indicate that dozens of transfers were processed through recognized banking institutions.

As bad as these NGOs are in what they say and their obsessive hate for Israel, often the real story is what they choose not to condemn. And the biggest incentive for Palestinians to attack Jewish civilians does not merit a negative word from HRW and Amnesty.

They must not think that Jews should have any human rights.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/26 Links Pt2: Don’t mourn the Holocaust while supporting the genocide of living Jews; NYTs becomes megaphone for NGO propaganda in Gaza

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Plot Against the Holocaust

Why? Because you cannot have both the “Israeli genocide” and the “Nazi genocide”; they are incompatible and can’t coexist within a single category. So it appears enlightened Westerners are choosing the former and dispensing with the latter.

Accusing Israel of genocide is not merely an attempt to isolate the Jewish state diplomatically; it is part of an effort to erase the Holocaust from history.

Educators who want to continue marking the Holocaust are facing increasingly vicious resistance. Olivia Marks-Woldman, CEO of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, told the Telegraph that some teachers say they feel unprepared for what to do if (increasingly, when) attendees try to make the lesson about Israel’s supposed crimes. “But then there are people with their own agenda who want to use HMD to attack the memory of the Holocaust,” Marks-Woldman said. “We have had people write to us saying they will only commemorate HMD on certain conditions, for example, if we put out a letter condemning Netanyahu.”

Marks-Woldman told the Telegraph that Holocaust education “should not be conditional on anything.” Which is exactly right, of course. Unfortunately, in some sick sense, anti-Zionists agree: They are essentially pushing to retain Holocaust education as long as it is made entirely about Jewish crimes. When someone says “Holocaust,” these sociopaths want people to think Gaza.

It would be naïve to think this isn’t already progressing here in the U.S. as well. First, because it’s the exact same movement running with the exact same propaganda. Second, because according to some reports, it’s already happening.

The Jewish Journal reports that at UC-Irvine, the student government prepared a resolution for Holocaust Memorial Day. Jewish groups joined the others in backing the resolution, which originally said: “the world continues to witness a troubling rise in antisemitism, Holocaust denial, hate speech, and violence, both globally and within local communities, which reinforces the urgent need for education, historical understanding, and active resistance to all forms of discrimination.”

The student government apparently removed the Jewish sponsors and the particularist Jewish details, essentially confiscating the Holocaust from its victims. “What was originally a thoughtfully crafted Holocaust remembrance statement was fundamentally altered by ASUCI senators questioning established history, erasing Jewish authorship, and ignoring Jewish student voices,” one UC junior told the Journal.

Unless this trend is reversed, Holocaust Remembrance Day may soon have nothing to do with the actual Holocaust at all.

Jonathan Tobin: Don’t mourn the Holocaust while supporting the genocide of living Jews

The cost of universalizing
The universalization of the Holocaust and the way students are taught a slimmed-down summary of this chapter of history—in brief lessons crammed into the school year—has had unforeseen consequences. It has led to something that survivors, whose numbers are fewer and fewer every year, never envisioned when they began the campaign to spread knowledge of their experiences.

The Holocaust has become a metaphor for anything that people dislike. The predilection to treat anyone with whom we strongly disagree as if they were Hitler is not just a product of the hyperpartisan tone of 21st-century politics or the extreme polarization of the Donald Trump era. It is also the result of the way it has been universalized to the point where many, if not most, ordinary people think it was just a bad thing that happened a long time ago—not the specific result of millennia of Jew-hatred and the powerlessness of nearly an entire people.

Equally unfortunate is the way much of the educational establishment has embraced toxic leftist ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism. So-called “progressive” teachings have largely captured primary, secondary and higher education to the point where a generation of Americans has been indoctrinated into believing not merely in concepts that exacerbate racial divisions, but ones that promote the idea that Jews and Israelis are “white” oppressors.

This movement produced the pro-Hamas campus mobs that have targeted Jewish students for intimidation, discrimination and violence since Oct. 7 at universities around the world. Participants are shockingly ignorant of the history of the Middle East, even as they chant slogans endorsing Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”). What they have also done is to appropriate the word genocide, which Holocaust survivor and lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined to describe the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people.

Their claim that Israel’s just war of self-defense against Hamas terrorists is “genocide” is a blatant lie. If applied to any other conflict, it would mean that every war that has ever been fought, including the one waged by the Allies against the Nazis, would be considered genocide. That not only drains the word of its actual meaning. It is, like the libelous efforts to smear Jews as Nazis, a classic trope of antisemitism.

Yet many on the political left, which has embraced this lie about Israel, are also prepared to join in mourning the Holocaust. Some, including that small minority of Jews who, for distorted reasons of their own, join in these antisemitic denunciations of Israelis and their supporters, even claim that they are inspired by the history of the Shoah to speak out against Israel now. Some even support efforts to eradicate the Jewish state—a result that could only be accomplished by the sort of genocidal war that Hamas and its allies are waging.

Our answer to them and others who are either silent about the misappropriation of the Holocaust or join in the blood libels against living Jews while lamenting the fate of dead Jews must be unequivocal.

Prioritize the defense of living Jews
We must tell those, like Walz, who misappropriate the memory of the Six Million, or utter such falsehoods about genocide, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others on the intersectional left wing of the Democratic Party, that Holocaust commemorations should be off-limits to them.

The same applies to global organizations like the United Nations, which in 2005 voted to establish International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. These agencies that claim to speak for human rights and justice for all countries in the world have become cesspools of antisemitism and engines of the war against the Jewish state.

For too long, too many members of the Jewish community have treated the promotion of Holocaust education or ceremonies honoring the dead as more important than efforts to defend the living.

It’s also true that, as important as teaching young Jews about the Shoah is, it must be linked to learning about the importance of Israel, as well as the life-affirming nature of their heritage and faith.

Above all, we must stop allowing the memory of what happened 80 years ago on Europe’s soil to be used by those who support or are neutral about those seeking to carry on the Nazi project of Jewish genocide. The failure to call an end to this misuse of Jewish history will only contribute to more tragedy.

‘I understand antisemitism because I was born in Russia’

Today Tabarovksy is the world’s leading expert in Soviet anti-Zionism but for a considerable time, in America, where Jews did not expect antisemitism to come from the left, her ideas were not taken as seriously as they should have been.

“I did acquire a following for the endless articles I was pumping out, but many people didn’t really understand how things I was warning about were relevant to them.

“I felt like a Cassandra,” she says, referring to the Greek figure whose prophesies were not believed.

“But the truth is that the antisemitism that has exploded across the world since October 7 is exactly as I predicted. I warned that any time a society is taken over by anti-Zionist ideology, you can be sure that antisemitic outcomes will follow.

“Jews who grew up in the USSR could now tell you this. Once the institutions become anti-Zionist, all Jews become suspect. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Zionist or not. They don’t even understand what Zionists are. When they speak about Zionists they mean Jews.

“We have an exceptionally well-documented history of Soviet Jews being discriminated against under an anti-Zionist regime and that is exactly what is happening to American Jews now. It’s crashing all around them, and it’s devastating to see.”

01/26 Links Pt1: IDF recovers remains of final hostage Ran Gvili; What the final Israeli hostage’s return really means; Kanye West apologises to Jews

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: What the final Israeli hostage’s return really means

Israel soon responded in a campaign to rescue the captives and ensure Hamas could never do this again, ideally by wiping out the barbarians, root and branch.

Every sane nation should’ve cheered that mission — yet many instead compounded the pain, turning on Israel as antisemitism surged around the globe.

Yet ending Hamas’ existence should still be the guiding principle as Trump and his Board of Peace work to secure a true, long-term end to hostilities in Gaza, and maybe beyond.

At the least, the terrorists must lose their arms and any political or administrative power.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump agreed to give Hamas until March to lay down its weapons, with the prez threatening “hell to pay” if it didn’t.

Yet several of its leaders have vowed never to disarm, and the group has been jockeying for some continued political role in Gaza.

What do you think? Post a comment.

Gvili’s return ends a chapter, but clearly the full story of the Oct. 7 massacre won’t truly be over until, as Bibi has put it, Gaza can never again threaten Israel.

Pray that day comes soon.

David Horovitz: With Ran Gvili’s return, Israel’s leadership fulfills sacred obligation to the nation it failed on Oct. 7

Formally, the recovery of Gvili’s body completes the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s broader peace plan for Gaza, and ushers in the next phases, under which Hamas is supposed to relinquish its weapons, the Strip is to be demilitarized, the IDF is to gradually withdraw, and a new, non-threatening Gaza is to be eventually constructed.

Most imminently, Ali Shaath, the former Palestinian Authority deputy minister appointed to head the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, announced on Thursday that the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt would open within days in both directions. And Netanyahu, who is deeply wary that any such concession will be abused by the still potent Hamas, reluctantly went along, to the fury of his far-right coalition partners. His office on Sunday night conditioned reopening the crossing on the completion of the search for Gvili’s body — a condition now successfully met.

Hamas, it should not require stressing, has not wavered from its goal of eliminating Israel. Rather, it evidently concluded that releasing, first, all 20 remaining living hostages and now, finally, the last of the 28 deceased hostages, has paved the best path to avoiding ongoing, potentially intensified US-backed Israeli military pressure. Still controlling almost half of Gaza, it believes it is creating conditions under which it will be able to fudge the issue of what exactly becomes of its arms, rebuild its personnel and resources, continue to benefit from the support of a world full of Israel-haters and fools, await more conducive US leadership, and resume its “resistance” to the Jewish state.

Israel had two clear goals for a war it had no choice but to fight against Gaza’s terrorist government in the terrible aftermath of October 7: destroy Hamas, and get all the hostages back.

The first goal is not completed; the war in its current form is over, but Hamas is not destroyed.

But the second, mercifully, has now been accomplished. Israel’s political and military leadership has cleared a critical hurdle in rebuilding its relationship with the citizenry it so catastrophically failed to protect 843 days ago. The hostages have been returned. To the very last one.

In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of Silver Blaze," a key piece of evidence comes from the watchdog failing to make a sound. "The dog that didn't bark" became a well-known meme.

Often the real story is what doesn't happen. And yesterday, when a neo-Nazi ranted about Jews during an Australia Day rally, there was a notable noise not heard in the video.

The fact that the hate speech laws were pushed by the Jewish lobby groups in Australia. They, they are behind it all! They're behind it all. The Jews are our greatest enemy to this nation. They always have been an enemy of western civilisation. And for thousands of years Christians and Anglos, the white man, has known that the Jew is our greatest enemy. Free Joel Davis. Hail White Australia. And hail Thomas Sewell."

The police arrested the man.

The crowd can be heard cheering when he makes his antisemitic statements.

And not one boo is heard.

The organizers distanced themselves from the neo-Nazi comments, but they didn't remove the (multiple) speakers who uttered them. The crowd might not all have cheered but none seemed too disturbed.

Everyone in the mainstream right sand left claims to be against blatant antisemitism, but when it is staring them in the face from their own "side," they don't seem to get too worked up about it.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The European Journal of International Relations just published a paper on the geopolitical imagination surrounding hydroponic farming in the mid-20th century.

On its face, this should be an innocuous historical inquiry into agricultural technology and state planning. Instead, it offers a case study in how contemporary ideological frameworks are retrofitted onto the past - and how citations are misused to make arguments that the sources themselves do not support.

The paper examines three cases: hydroponics as imagined by the U.S. Army, by Zionist agronomists, and by British Commonwealth development planners. In theory, this comparative structure should encourage nuance. In practice, only one case is treated as morally self-evident.

The authors write:

“For Zionist agronomists, hydroponics was mobilized to bolster settler-colonial designs on Palestinian arid lands....[T]he Zionist agronomist Selig Soskin promoted hydroponics as a new means to bolster settler colonialism in Palestine, arguing this technology would allow Israel to support a larger population, become an agricultural exporter and spearhead a revolution in intensive farming techniques across semi-arid regions....For Soskin, hydroponics promised to expand possibilities to settle Palestine, by increasing crop yields, feeding into settler homesteading, and enabling occupation of further lands.

These quotes embed a false political theory - “settler colonialism” - as a premise rather than a conclusion, and then relies on the modern moral valence of words like settlement, occupation, Palestinian and colonial to carry the reader to an implied judgment.

No displacement is demonstrated. No Arab communities are shown to have been removed to make way for hydroponic installations. The labels do the work the evidence does not.

What the sources actually describe is something far more prosaic: an attempt to make marginal, arid, and usually state-owned land under British and Ottoman laws agriculturally productive through intensification. But the authors call it "Palestinian" land to imply it was owned by Arabs.

Selig Soskin is the Zionist agronomist at the center of the paper’s argument. The authors repeatedly invoke his use of the term Lebensraum, clearly aware of its Nazi resonance today. But when you read Soskin’s own text, the move becomes transparent.

In a 1940 Palestine Post article (that the authors give the wrong date for), Soskin explicitly defines Lebensraum as “vital space” — the amount of land required for human existence. He uses the term generically, in line with interwar demographic and agricultural discourse, and specifically to argue that hydroponics could reduce pressure on land by intensifying production. In other words, his argument runs in the opposite direction of territorial conquest. The paper does not make this distinction clear. It allows the modern association of the word to do the rhetorical work.

That slippage is already problematic. But the most serious issue comes later, when the authors cite a 1962 B’nai B’rith Messenger column by Phineas J. Biron.

They write:

“Ironically, however, in later years, as Israel hosted the 1960 Rehovot conference … an editorial noted that despite hydroponics’ advances, Israel’s territory still did not ‘present much Lebensraum’ (Biron, 1962).”

That is not what the Biron article says.

The Biron column, titled “Strictly Confidential”, is a general meditation on global population growth, Malthusian anxieties, and long-term human survival. It discusses science writers like Ritchie Calder, demographic projections, and the pressures facing many countries. Israel appears briefly, in a single sentence, as one example among many.

The reference to Lebensraum has nothing to do with hydroponics. It has nothing to do with the Rehovot conference. It is a generic observation about territorial carrying capacity in the face of future population growth.

By re-anchoring that sentence to hydroponics and to Zionist agricultural policy, the paper makes the Biron article say something it does not say. This is not a matter of interpretation or theoretical disagreement. It is a contextual misrepresentation. And it is exactly the sort of thing peer review is supposed to catch.

When a paper relies on loaded language, semantic drift, and repurposed citations to sustain its argument, we ahve a problem with academic scholarship.

Hydroponic farming is environmentally efficient. It allows food production in deserts and other marginal environments. It has been promoted by militaries, by colonial powers, by post-colonial development planners, and by modern climate activists. Treating its use by Zionist agronomists as uniquely sinister, while similar uses elsewhere are described in neutral or even benevolent terms, tells us more about the framework being applied than about the history being examined.

The real story here is the widening gap between academic language and intellectual honesty - and how easily an anti-Zionist political narrative can be sustained when few readers bother to check the footnotes.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/25 Links: How the Shoah’s moral power is weaponised against Jews – and why Western leaders must fight it; US obtained 'smoking gun' evidence against Iran with Israeli help

From Ian:

Simon Sebag Montefiore: How the Shoah’s moral power is weaponised against Jews – and why Western leaders must fight it

This is the text of a speech delivered at the Holocaust Education Trust, warning that the distortion and inversion of the Holocaust is enabling a resurgence of antisemitism, with grave consequences for democratic societies

Much of the damage has already been done by Holocaust inversion to the vocabulary and architecture of international human rights and law – often by the very supranational organisations and "humanitarian” NGOs themselves. How now will we describe the murder of Herero people, the Armenians in the First World War, the Holocaust itself, the Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur genocides? But of course this is not truly about them; it is about the sins of the West itself and the damage to the West is part of the aim of this ideology.

The events of this week in Iran reveal that damage so clearly: only on Thursday did the UN Security Council hold a session at which the dissident Masih Alinejad – whom the Iranian dictator thrice tried to assassinate – reprimanded the disgraceful Secretary-General Guteres: “The United Nations has failed to respond. The Secretary-General himself has not spoken publicly against the massacre unfolding in Iran. Silence at this moment sends a signal. Sends a message to the killers of young protesters. I strongly believe that the regime in Iran heard the clear message from the Secretary-General. I think the members of this body have forgotten the privilege and responsibility of sitting in this room. Secretary-General, why are you afraid of the Islamic Republic? Millions of innocent and unarmed protesters have been silenced with bullets, mass arrest, prison and a total communications blackout!” Later she demanded to know: “Where is the left now? Where are the “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-war” activists when the Islamic Republic is killing innocent Iranians?” The respected Iranian Yale lecturer Arash Azizi – himself a proud Marxist – reflects “you would have thought leftists would understand the killing of Iranians on the streets fighting against a brutal capitalist regime. But unfortunately they don’t. The Western leftist movements hate the West. They hate their own societies.”

The Iranians have exposed the real nature of this movement and its real cynicism and wicked humbug.

Eighty years after the Holocaust, all of this makes the mission of Holocaust education personified by our host Holocaust Education Trust and its admirable chief Karen Pollock urgent, and the requirement to get the teaching right, essential. As our trajectory since 1945 lengthens to today, it is clear now the Holocaust was not the apocalyptic end of anti-Jewishness that we thought but just a colossal spasm in the middle of a continuum which spans the Crusades, the blood libels, Khmelnitsky massacre, the pogroms, the Russian Civil War (we often forget 200,000 Jews were murdered during these two years), the Shoah itself and then today October 7, the Yom Kippur murders in Manchester, the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia – and whatever horrors come next.

The necessity for politicians to speak more clearly is especially important. The use of anti-racist jargon is obligatory and it remains essential but instead of becoming a shield against anti-Jewish racism and hate, it has become a protection, a Get Out of Jail Card for racists and ideologues themselves. It is admirable that our leaders here in Britain stand against antisemitism and racism and seek to protect Jewish community life that is already overshadowed by threat and security measures. It is admirable our security services daily defeat diabolic murderous plots.

But the key is not to allow the adoption of this jargon by malignant actors mask poisonous ideology and excuse intolerant bullying and dangerous hate, not to allow it to work against its underlying values and intentions. Since the words have become with time and overuse and universal declamation, devalued, leaders need to say what antisemitism, what racism they are standing against and part of that is the rejection of egregious and harmful Holocaust inversion.

Be braver in promoting what the words really mean and what their spirit is against. Be braver in retaking the institutions that have been captured by ideologues who are enforcing malign ideas and intolerant conformity. Get back to teaching what the Holocaust was – and what it wasn’t. As the hatred shapeshifts our leaders must shapeshift with it.

Lastly one vital thing: an important part of education is to celebrate Judaism. Jewish history must not only be a chronicle of massacres and struggles. Jewish history is also joyful and remarkable and fascinating in all its richness that embraces Judea, Babylon, Egypt in ancient times to the vibrant communities of Andalusia, Constantinople, Morocco, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Alexandria and the amazing world of European Jewishness, the worlds of Ladino and Yiddish and now those of America and Israel and Europe. There is much to celebrate: Jewish art, culture, humour, films, poetry.

The Holocaust started with words that made it possible to dehumanise people thanks to their religion, race or identity then it moved to witch hunts, laws, boycotts, deportations and finally killing.

The words, the history, the education of the Holocaust are more than ever the mark of a civilised society.

Josh Hammer: Case against Israel cheapens the word 'genocide'

In reality, South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel is riddled with flaws. It is also pushing to redefine a term that been held sacrosanct since the end of World War II.

The term "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor who in 1944 strived for its incorporation into modern international law. That occurred in 1948 via the UN Genocide Convention.

The prohibition on genocide is considered a jus cogens norm — that is, a non-derogable rule accepted by all of the first-world community with no exceptions. The definition of "genocide" requires no law degree to understand, and it should never, ever be politicized.

For a genocide to take place under Geneva, there must be acts committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." The phrase "intent" here is of paramount importance.

South Africa’s pending case before the ICJ alleges Israeli intent to destroy the Palestinian-Arab population of Gaza. Israel, by contrast, (correctly) maintains that its recent actions in Gaza have been a just and proper military response to the war of annihilationist jihad and unspeakable atrocities launched against it by the Hamas terrorist organization on Oct. 7, 2023.

Israel’s "intent" is to free Gaza from Hamas, to return hostages abducted and held by Hamas, and to ensure Hamas has no future role in Gaza and cannot undertake another October 7-style massacre. It repeatedly offered to end the war if Hamas laid down its arms and released all hostages.

Hamas, on the other hand, has shown a complete disregard for human life and has openly stated that its sacrifice of Gazan civilians is a cynical strategic necessity to turn public opinion against Israel. It has for years embedded military infrastructure within Gazan civilian infrastructure — schools, hospitals, UN facilities, mosques, and children’s bedrooms. Israel has waged a defensive campaign in one of the most complex operational environments of any modern war.

Will the Mossad have to operate in the West again?

So, the question is no longer theoretical: If Western states cannot – or will not – protect their Jewish citizens, who will?

The Mossad was born not simply to operate where security collapses or states abdicate their duties but also to carry the sovereign obligation of safeguarding the minority it has sworn to protect – a minority that history has taught cannot outsource its survival.

The West can still confront antisemitism as the civilizational disease it has always been, or continue sacrificing Jews on the altar of moral cowardice. But history is unforgiving to those who mistake appeasement for virtue.

If Western states cannot, or will not, protect their Jewish citizens, who will?

With forces and groups in the West that do not hide their intentions – and states that even share their belligerence against Jews – if the Mossad ever has to operate again in the West, it will be because Europe has abandoned the Jews – once again.

Amnesty's insane obsession with Israel continues

Amnesty's obsession with Israel continues, and it is even worse than you think.

Here is my estimate of the number of tweets Amnesty released (not counting specific Amnesty branches like UK and USA) on specific countries in 2025 - I counted about 110 posts against Israel compared to 6 on Sudan, 6 on Hamas, 10 on Myanmar and 18 on Russia/Ukraine.

But even that doesn't tell the whole story, because the anti-Israel tweets had far more graphic elements, often with blatant lies.

Amnesty's obsession can be seen in every dimension. In 2025, Amnesty wrote 137 press releases in the "war crimes" category - and about 40% of them were about Israel, triple the number on Russia/Ukraine.

Amnesty's hate for the Jewish state can possibly be seen from last week better than anything else.

On the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amnesty International issued a press release saying:

[Amnesty International’s Secretary General] Agnès Callamard will be attending the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos throughout its duration from 19 to 23 January. She will be available for media interviews on a range of human rights issues, including:

Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza
The USA’s military action in Venezuela, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and the conflicts in Sudan, DRC and Myanmar
The importance of revindicating and revitalizing multilateralism
The need for global tax and debt reform and universal social protection
The urgent need for a full, fast, fair and funded fossil fuel phase-out
The need to massively scale up climate finance, including to address loss and damage
Big Tech, corporate accountability and the risks of deregulation
How to limit the harmful impact of artificial intelligence on human rights, including the right to a healthy environment

This is a list of Amnesty's priorities: Saying Israel is committing genocide months after the ceasefire is by far the top issue, while five wars and armed actions that are ongoing or more recent are lumped together as #2, and various political issues round out the rest.

Note what isn't there: Iran's crackdown on protesters, killing thousands.

Amnesty had issued press releases on that topic before Davos, calling it a massacre. Yet it does not rate as a topic for Amnesty to even mention at Davos.

Amnesty's top priority is to slander Israel - even at an economic forum!

There is no way to justify this one-sided, crazed hate as "human rights." The only explanation that makes any sense is deep rooted antisemitism where Jews are considered the worst people in the world, with the Jewish state as their avatar.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Arab media has been discussing a series of articles in the Hebrew religious magazine "B'Kehilla" where a reporter went to Lebanon using a Spanish passport and visited Jewish shrines as well as the Hezbollah "jihad museum."

The reporter, Yitzchak Horowitz, was driven around central and southern Lebanon by "Ali," a Lebanese man. At one point, deep in Hezbollah territory in the south, Horowitz expressed concern that Israel might accidentally target Ali's car. Ali answered back with this story:

"My uncle Abbas is the head of our village. He grows bananas and has no connection to Hezbollah. He was driving on the main road that leads to the village with another car in front of him. Suddenly he receives a phone call. And on the line is a voice speaking Arabic with a foreign accent. "I am from Israeli intelligence," the voice says. "You are asked to get off the road at the next turn if you don't want your head to bleed." So he panics and gets off the road, and after a few seconds he sees a missile land on the vehicle he was driving behind. The vehicle caught fire and whoever was there was a senior Hezbollah official. They murdered him. So you see, not only do they know who to bomb, they also know how to call the neighbors on the road and tell them to get out."

The Arab media is upset, saying that this is an attempt to beautify the IDF which of course is known to target women and children, so no one should believe this story.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/24 Links: The West’s silence on Iran is the latest warning of Islamists’ growing power; America has thrown the Kurds to the Syrian wolves; Israel’s tech sector soars to $111 billion in 2025 deals

From Ian:

Qanta Ahmed: The West’s silence on Iran is the latest warning of Islamists’ growing power

The fact that the Iranian regime calls itself Islamic is awkward for Western progressives, especially if they are unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. Never mind that the main victims of Tehran’s terror are vulnerable Muslims. The fear of Islamophobia instils a silence that only serves to protect the Ayatollah and his dictatorship.

Western progressives are similarly compromised by critical race theory – indoctrination integral to woke ideology. Palestinian victimhood is lionised above all other struggles, partly because their so-called “oppressors” (Israelis) are erroneously deemed to be white. Thus, Islamist anti-Semitism merges seamlessly with virulent far-Left anti-Semitism under the banner of “anti-Zionist anti-racism”. When Islamists murder Muslims in Iran, Iranians are not accorded such “prestige” victimhood.

There is also the small matter of money. There is a growing body of evidence that many pro-Palestinian protests were not spontaneous outpourings of support for the cause, but systematically organised and richly financed.

Research from data analysts at the Network Contagion Research Institute, affiliated to Rutgers University, found evidence of Chinese links to certain groups, and concluded: “While nominally focused on Israel, the current protests [organised by these groups] can be better understood as a well-funded initiative driving a revolutionary, anti-government, and anti-capitalist agenda, with the leading organisations serving as versatile tools for foreign entities hostile to the US”.

With Iran, the money in the West appears to be on the regime’s side. Extraordinary investigative research by journalist Asra Nomani for the Pearl Project has identified a network of allegedly pro-Iranian groups, encompassing “socialist revolutionaries, Islamist activists, foreign-influenced nonprofits and even political operatives from Democratic groups”, what she has dubbed the “woke army”.

Nomani also describes this as the Red-Green alliance – a merging of socialism, even communism, with Islamism, seeking to pull apart the fabric of American society. She testified to the US Senate judiciary committee on March 5 2025, urging these organisations to be registered as foreign agents because many of them promote the propaganda of foreign regimes. I can’t be alone in thinking that any protest in the US in support of the Ayatollah should automatically be considered suspect.

As the US president continues to weigh the most significant foreign policy decision in a decade, Iranians are forced to endure a double tragedy. The first is that their country, once a shining example of civilisation in the Islamic world, continues to struggle under the yoke of Islamist tyrants bent on exporting their twisted ideology everywhere. The second is that the very people in the West who claim to care most about the oppressed of the world have nothing to say about the brave people of Iran.

We should all hope that the Iranian regime can be brought to its knees. But even then, we will still be left with the hypocrisy and corruption of our own societies.

Alan Baker: Human-rights inversion: Are Israelis not entitled to the same protections?

International human rights discourse has become deeply distorted by disproportionately targeting Israel while ignoring or minimizing severe human rights abuses occurring elsewhere in the world.

Political bias, media narratives, international institutions and activist movements selectively apply charged terms such as genocide, apartheid, starvation and disproportionate force exclusively to Israel.

This approach denies Israelis the same human rights protections afforded to others and transforms universal humanitarian principles into politicized tools.

Accusations leveled against Israel are legally flawed, historically misapplied and dismissive of Israel’s security concerns, democratic character and efforts under international humanitarian law, while overlooking terrorism, hostage-taking and the use of civilians as human shields by armed groups.

The Western ideological and indoctrination machinery appears to be working overtime. Daily, we are witnessing a mass-phenomenon of deliberately one-sided accusations being leveled solely against Israel, alleging human rights violations against Palestinians.

Openly slanted social media platforms, once-reputable international media outlets, politically biased United Nations bodies and human rights committees, politically pressured and influenced national and international leaders and parliamentarians, fomented university students and academic staff, and clearly ignorant show-biz celebrities, all unthinkingly accuse Israel of such crimes as genocide, apartheid, discrimination, cruelty and disproportionate military actions.

Curiously, all these “paragons of international virtue” appear to be selectively blind as to the human rights of everyone in the world except Palestinians. They ignore:
The plight of millions of Iranian citizens being arbitrarily subjected, in real time, to daily brutal subjugation and the wholesale murder of thousands of them.
The systematic butchering of tens of thousands of civilians from non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur and El Fasher in Sudan in 2025.
The extremely high 2025 civilian death toll and injuries in the Ukraine-Russia war.
Systematic violence and state repression in Myanmar against the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities.
Mass atrocities in Nigeria in attacks by the Boko Haram and other extremist groups.
Massacres of Christians in churches and hospitals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The intentional civilian targeting and extra-judicial killings in Tanzania by security forces during election-related unrest.

This hypocrisy and double standards by those claiming to protect universal human rights is glaring. They audaciously and undisguisedly ignore, and even deny, Israel’s human rights and protections and those of its citizens, those same rights that they so insistently and emotionally claim for Palestinians.

Andrew Fox: America has thrown the Kurds to the Syrian wolves

The Kurds are familiar with this pattern. They have been betrayed by the West many times before. First, by allowing Turkey to breach the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which created Kurdistan, then by looking the other way when Saddam Hussein carried out the ethnic cleansing of Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah once warned them not to ‘bet on the Americans’ because Washington would ‘sell you out’ when it suited. He was right.

Turkey, meanwhile, is the obvious winner. Sharaa has emerged as a close ally of Ankara, whose overriding goal has always been to crush Kurdish autonomy on its border.

America’s indifference to the fate of Syria’s Kurds is not just a betrayal – it is also a profound strategic mistake. The threat of ISIS has not vanished. If anything, with jihadists firmly in control in Damascus, it has increased.

As Kurdish control and ability to guard the ISIS prisoner camps collapses, the US military has begun transferring ISIS detainees from Syria to Iraq, starting with 150 men and with warnings that up to 7,000 could be moved. There are already problems. Sources report that approximately 1,500 Islamic State detainees escaped from Shaddadi prison – abandoned by Kurdish forces in the teeth of the Syrian army. US officials have provided much lower estimates of around 200, with many reportedly recaptured. The precise number is less important than the fact that no one can guarantee this will not happen again on a larger scale.

Then there is al-Hol, which Syrian government forces also took control of this week. It holds around 40,000 people of various nationalities, mostly relatives and suspected affiliates of ISIS fighters, in conditions long described as a breeding ground for extremism.

All of this is unfolding under a Syrian president whose past should worry the West. Sharaa is a former jihadist commander who once led al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the al-Nusra Front.

Damascus refers to decrees about Kurdish rights and recognition, including steps towards citizenship and cultural protections, but paper promises are worthless if Kurdish self-rule is crushed. Pro-government voices are already spreading the claim that the Kurds are merely recent ‘arrivals’ with no distinct claims to nationhood.

This is the strategic cost of Trump’s approach. By prioritising short-term gains over long-term moral principles, Washington continues to reinforce the same lesson: you can be useful, brave and pro-Western, yet still be discarded as soon as you become inconvenient. This does not bring stability to the region. Instead, it fuels radicalisation. From the Kurds to the Ukrainians to European members of NATO, the message is the same: the US is not a reliable ally. This has tremendous security implications for us all.

If the West wants to stop the next ISIS wave, it needs to stop treating the Kurds as expendable. That means enforceable guarantees for Kurdish-majority areas, and a recognition of the right to statehood they deserve.

Abandoning the people who fought jihadism on the ground is not ‘stability’. What we are seeing from the US in its relations with Syrian jihadists is a down payment on the next catastrophe.

01/23 Links Pt2: Don’t Legitimize ‘Anti-Zionism.’ Defeat It; The infantile Israelophobia of Ms Rachel; Shul Runnings: Israeli bobsleigh team makes Olympic history

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Don’t Legitimize ‘Anti-Zionism.’ Defeat It

I admit I winced when I read that last line. I had just been reading the Guardian’s coverage of Australia’s efforts to crack down on incitement. Initially the bill, set forth by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party, was reportedly far too restrictive of plain speech to the point of being unsalvageable. But Liberal Party MPs were able to “gut” the overreach and pare down the bill.

Still, the Guardian made sure to quote the Jewish Council of Australia, a progressive group called upon to As-a-Jew the issue into oblivion. The legislation, they said, represented “an attempt to slander and intimidate hundreds of 1000s of Australians who have been protesting against Israel’s genocide and egregious human rights abuses.”

Of course, a publication like the Guardian would quote an organization like this, despite anti-Israel lunacy being a distinct minority opinion among Jews. It’s useful to them. But besides the political tokenization angle, it’s also a reminder that the Jewish community contains within it organizations whose entire purpose appears to be to enable state suppression of Jewish rights and Jewish security.

The Jewish Council of Australia, it turns out, was founded in the spring of 2024—meaning it was launched after the October 7 attacks in order to join the global anti-Israel pile-on.

The Jewish community has an obligation to battle, not coddle, the anti-Zionism within its ranks. It has the same obligation to mount a full-scale fight against anti-Zionism in mainstream discourse. The movement of anti-Jewish assault shutting down Jewish shops and restaurants calls its worldview anti-Zionism. So the proper response is clear: That which calls itself anti-Zionism must be defeated.

How the Internet Fell for a Supposed Condemnation of Christian Zionism

Despite the unanswered questions, or perhaps because of them, a fight soon erupted. Evangelical Christian Zionists defended their theology. “It’s hard for me to understand why every one who takes on the moniker ‘Christian’ would not also be a Zionist,” wrote US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

Meanwhile, Catholic critics of Israel promoted the statement on X, declaring that the top Catholic figure in the Holy Land, Latin patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, had definitively rejected Christian Zionism.

Unfortunately for them, he did nothing of the sort.

Pizzaballa is a fluent Hebrew speaker who is well regarded by Jewish leaders. Though he is not afraid to speak out about pressures on Christians in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, he is not looking to make headlines attacking the Jewish state or Zionism.

What’s more, breaking with its usual practice, the Latin Patriarchate did not publish the Christian Zionism statement or share it on social media. Pizzaballa’s name does not appear on the statement. Neither does his signature.

Custodia Terrae Sancte, a Catholic body that oversees Christian sites in the Holy Land, removed the statement from its website as well.

Even more tellingly, when asked if the Patriarchate supports the statement, an official from the Patriarchate said only, “No comment.”

So how and why did a statement go out that ostensibly speaks in the Latin Patriarch’s name?

Many assume that since Pizzaballa is part of the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches group, he must have personally signed off on the statement. But the group doesn’t work in such an orderly fashion. The group’s secretariat sends out a draft, and says that if there are no objections by a certain time—last week it was 5 p.m.—then it will assume that all the church leaders agree with the statement.

Needless to say, if a patriarch is traveling that day, the first time he sees a message may be when it is published.

The main impetus for the statement, according to sources from two churches, is a fight led by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate against a group of Israeli Christians calling themselves the Israeli Christian Voice and the Eagles of Christ Movement.

The movement leader, Ihab Shilyan, was a career officer in the IDF and actively encourages young Christians to enlist as well. He was recently welcomed at Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s annual reception for Christian leaders, and has met multiple times with Huckabee.

It is no coincidence that last Saturday’s statement was posted on the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate website and shared with local journalists by a figure closely affiliated with the Greek Orthodox Church. The leader of Israeli Christian Voice boasted in response to the statement: “It appears that my meetings with senior and influential figures … have placed significant pressure on vested interests.”

What some touted as a clear rejection of Christian Zionism by the top Catholic official in the Holy Land was instead an episode in which one church rather disingenuously used a joint forum to drag other institutions into its fight. Far from expressing a unified Christian voice, the statement undermined the shaky trust between the historical churches in Jerusalem.

Why are the celebrities I used to love suddenly so anti, well… me?

So why have these stars all jumped on the bandwagon? “Different actor/ activists have different motivations,” says Jeremy. “Some are animated by prejudice against Jews (hi, Roger!), but fortunately I don’t think that’s many of them. And while it’s possible some performers are paid, others are terribly vulnerable to the anti-Zionism hate movement because, as an actor, you have to need to be “seen” and the publicity can help your career. Add to that the charge you get when the major news organisation asks you your opinions about world affairs, and anti-Zionism is positively addictive.”

For me, it’s the hypocrisy that grates. That old double standard of holding Israel (hence, Jews, and hence me) to a far higher standard than any other country or ethnicity. It’s been said many times before, but where are these performers on China, Sudan, North Korea, Iran?

The Iran case is particularly topical. Iranian stand-up comic Omid Djalili is – quite rightly – being feted by the mainstream press as a voice of the uprising in that country. Where were the corresponding Israeli voices in autumn 2023?

Of course, there are some pro-Israeli (hence, pro-Jewish, and pro-me) voices: Gal Gadot, Jerry Seinfeld, Pink, Jamie Lee Curtis – all of these have stood up in support. But all these actors are Jewish – or have Jewish heritage – and so it’s somehow less meaningful. There’s an irony in how Jews historically have always stood up for civil rights causes, but when the table are turned, no-one seems to stand up for us.

With hope in my heart, I started to Google. Tom Cruise? Nope, he supported his agent when she was sacked for anti-Israel commentary. Paul Mescal participated in the Cinema for Gaza auction, donating items to raise funds for Palestinian humanitarian aid. Brad Pitt is a producer on pro-Gaza film, The Voice of Hind Rajab.

There is, perhaps, a silver lining in the post. Jeremy feels there may be a backlash down the line. “Despite what Sam Goldwyn once said, there is such a thing as bad publicity,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some actors have done long-term damage to their careers and legacy as they cross the line between responsible empathy into antisemitism.”

That aside, there are signs of hope. Quentin Tarantino recently gave an interview where he declared he would "die a Zionist". And just today, I came across an X post of actress Sydney Sweeney posing with released hostages, Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or.

As a final word, we probably should remember those who have said nothing at all. There is, after all, no constitutional duty to proclaim ones political alignments. It’s a small field, but let’s keep our fingers crossed for Leonardo di Caprio, Zendaya, and Taylor Swift. As long as Taylor is (implicitly) on our team, we should be ok.