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

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

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

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

Here is the abstract, in full:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We see this often, but it is worth highlighting.

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

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

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

The article’s analytical foundations are circular self-citation

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

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

The smaller violations

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

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

What this adds up to

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

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

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

Which means Gender & Society has no standards at all. 

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

 

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Attacks on @AIPAC and @ADL show the playbook. Now is the time to combat the antisemites before their next targets.

The recent pressure on Democratic members of Congress to distance themselves from AIPAC is not the beginning of something. It is the end phase of something that has been running invisibly for years. By the time an elected official issues a careful statement about not accepting certain kinds of money, the decision has already been made upstream — in staff conversations, in coalition meetings, in the internal risk calculations of people who never appear in the news. The public distancing is the visible part. The actual event happened earlier, and mostly in private.

It is a template, the same mechanism that has already been used against the ADL, and it will be used against other mainstream Jewish organizations. 

Tracing the methods by which this became mainstream is essential in identifying the next time this method will be used. And it will be.  

The tactic works like this. A campaign does not attack its primary target directly, because the primary target is well-defended, well-funded, and capable of responding. It attacks the target's partners — the universities, legislators, nonprofits, and coalition members who have chosen to associate with the target over decades. The partners are told that their association is itself evidence of moral complicity. Since the partners have no independent investment in the target, they face an asymmetric calculation: the cost of defending an ally they did not create is high, and the cost of quietly distancing is low. Most choose to distance.

The accusation does not need to be true. It does not even need to be plausible. It needs only to generate enough reputational risk that defense becomes more expensive than dissociation. In game-theoretic terms, the tactic exploits the fact that truth is a public good — diffuse, hard to produce — while reputational risk is concentrated and immediate. Any rational institution will discard truth when the alternative appears to be caution. 

This is why "but the accusation is false" does not work. Pointing out the lie assumes that the partner institutions are trying to determine whether the accusation is true. They are not. They are trying to determine whether the accusation is worth responding to, and that calculation has almost nothing to do with its factual content.

These cascades follow a reliable sequence. First comes seeding, where a claim circulates at the margins — in activist channels, on social media, in small publications — and is repeated enough to become discussable even where it is not accepted. "They support genocide!" "They facilitate apartheid!" "They have been complicit in police brutality!" - all of these are absurd, and that absurdity is not relevant in combating it. This is hard to swallow but it is the way it works. 

Then comes normalization, where the claim migrates into more mainstream venues and institutions begin privately calculating the downside of association. 

Finally comes the cascade itself, where enough actors defect that the cost of not defecting exceeds the cost of joining, at which point the remaining holdouts cave in quickly, and then claim this is a moral position. 

By the time the cascade is visible — congressional statements, institutional announcements, media coverage of "reckonings" — the first two stages have been complete for months. The apparent suddenness is an illusion produced by the coordination mechanism: everyone was waiting for a safe moment to move, and once a few visible actors moved, the rest followed within days.

The uncomfortable implication is that the decisive phase is pre-public. It happens inside institutions, among people whose names you do not know, in conversations that leave no trace. By the time a university's administration is fielding formal complaints about a Jewish organization on campus, the framing that makes those complaints intelligible has already won inside the relevant staff culture. The administration is no longer deciding whether the accusation is true. It is deciding whether to defy its own internal environment, which most administrators will not do.

What makes these cascades so reliable is not that most people believe the accusations. It is that most people assume other people believe them. Inside an institution, the cost of saying "this claim seems unsubstantiated" is much higher than the cost of saying nothing, because silence is cheap and dissent is visible. So people who privately doubt remain silent, and their silence is read by others as agreement, and the illusion of consensus forms before anyone has actually agreed to anything.

This is the specific vulnerability that makes the tactic work. It is not that institutions are captured by activists, though that sometimes happens. It is that institutions cannot distinguish between genuine consensus and collective silence, and activists have learned that manufacturing the appearance of consensus is sufficient to produce most of its effects.

The corollary is important: cascades can be disrupted by a surprisingly small amount of visible dissent, if it happens early. One person in a staff meeting saying "I don't think we should make reputational decisions based on unverified claims" is worth more than a thousand op-eds later. The intervention has to occur before pluralistic ignorance crystallizes into apparent consensus. After that, the cost of dissent is too high for almost anyone to bear.

Early-stage dissent is difficult for a reason that compounds everything above. The moment an accusation is challenged — even with a neutral request for evidence — the tactic pivots. The accusers claim they are being silenced, that powerful forces are refusing to let them speak, that asking for specifics is itself a form of aggression. This converts any attempt to apply ordinary evidentiary standards into further evidence of the original accusation. Engage, and you have validated the narrative; decline to engage, and the claim stands.

This self-sealing structure is the reason factual rebuttal has become nearly useless. It is also the reason that institutions, once the pattern is recognized, refuse to engage at all. They have learned that there is no safe move on the board — which is exactly what the tactic is designed to produce.

It is successful because the framework was built to not allow any dissent.

Which means the only way to counter this is to attack the framework, not the accusations themselves.

Organizations must refuse the frame that conflates scrutiny with silencing. The cleanest formulation is procedural: you are free to make your claims; we are not obligated to act on claims that have not been verified. This separates speech from adjudication. It affirms expression while preserving decision-making standards. It is harder to accuse of "silencing" because no one is actually being prevented from speaking.

Most institutions cannot execute this move under pressure because they have not prepared for it. Under pressure, they conflate the two — either by acting on unverified claims to avoid appearing hostile to the complainants, or by trying to suppress the complaints to avoid the appearance of controversy. Both responses are losing moves. The winning move has to be pre-committed, before any specific campaign begins, and it has to be framed in terms of institutional integrity rather than defense of any particular partner.

In short, the institutions that partner with Jewish organizations need to think now about how their internal processes work. Because when those processes fail to defend their Jewish partners, the same playbook will be used to force them to do other things they aren't comfortable with. 

The question "Would you accept AIPAC money?" is the paradigm case of how mature this tactic has become. Every direct answer is a trap. "Yes" concedes implication. "No" sounds evasive or reads as admission that the association is shameful. Qualification reads as deflection. The question is not a question; it is a test whose only passing grade is to have already distanced yourself before being asked.

The question works because it smuggles in two premises that have not been argued: that the funding source is the morally relevant fact, and that association implies endorsement. Both premises, if applied consistently across the political landscape, would disqualify every elected official in the country, because virtually everyone accepts funding from interest groups. The premises are applied selectively because the goal is not consistent principle. The goal is to make association with specific organizations costly enough that rational politicians distance themselves.

The only response that does not fall into the trap is one that refuses the implied standard while still answering the literal question. Something like: Campaigns receive support from a wide range of groups; what matters is how I vote and what I advocate for, and my record speaks for itself. This answers the question, denies the premise, and redirects evaluation from association to conduct. It is not a winning answer in the sense of ending the attack, but  is a survivable answer, which is the most any legislator can hope for once the question has been asked in public.

Most legislators will not make this move, because it requires a confidence in their own record that most do not have, and a willingness to treat the question as adversarial rather than legitimate that most will not risk. The ones who cave are making optics decisions under conditions that have been engineered to make optics the only decision that matters. and legislators who care about optics more than principle may not be the best representatives anyway. 

The tactic is portable. It is not specific to AIPAC or to Israel. Any organization with broad legitimacy, many institutional partners, and narrative flexibility can be targeted — which describes most mainstream Jewish institutional infrastructure, but also describes many other kinds of organizations that have not yet been selected for campaigns. The selection is driven less by who deserves the treatment than by who currently looks available for it.

In fact, the Track AIPAC organization also opposes legislators who already don't accept AIPAC money — but do accept from J-Street, which they also consider "Israel lobby" even though their positions mirror those of the most anti-Israel lawmakers. 

Success does not sate the attackers; it makes them hungrier. 

The predictable next targets share a profile: they operate inside institutions where internal narrative formation happens quickly; they depend on partnerships rather than direct constituencies; they have limited ability to defend themselves without the defense itself becoming evidence of the original accusation. Hillel International fits this profile almost perfectly. So does the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America, B'nai Brith International, and most major campus-facing Jewish organizations. None of these will be attacked because of anything they have done. They will be attacked because they exist within institutional environments where the cascade mechanism can operate.

There is no rhetorical defense against this tactic. Every argument one can make within the frame is defeated by the frame itself. The only defense is structural, and it has to be installed before any specific crisis, in the form of institutional norms that treat dissociation-under-pressure as itself a reputational liability. The norm is simple: we do not alter partnerships or access based on external pressure alone; serious allegations are evaluated using consistent standards; requests for clarification are not treated as silencing. Create robust processes for challenging partnerships or funding sources and invite the challengers to use the proper procedures, like anyone else.  Partners who have adopted this norm in advance can survive pressure campaigns. Partners who have not will fold on schedule.

That is the real strategic question, and it cannot be answered during a crisis. It has to be answered now, before the next wave begins — which means before anyone knows who the next target will be. The institutions that are doing this work quietly, right now, are the ones that will still be standing in two years. The ones that are waiting to see what happens will discover, too late, that what was going to happen had already happened.

By the time you see the cascade, it is over. We've seen how it works, and this means we need to prepare now for the next ones that will use the same playbook. 

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04/18 Links: He dreamed of regime change; Endgame in Sight; Israel is not at war with Lebanon; Fetterman blasts his party for tolerating antisemitism; Melanie Phillips: An unholy silence

From Ian:

Martin Kramer: He dreamed of regime change

The Iran war has entered a new phase, a “double-sided ceasefire.” Eventually, we will learn the backstory, and it won’t look like anything we were led to believe while it was unfolding. Much of what seems true today will turn out to be false, and vice versa. If it weren’t always so, the world wouldn’t need historians like me.

In the meantime, I seek insights in the wisdom of mentors now gone. Bernard Lewis was one; I wrote about Lewis and Iran the other week. This time, I’ll consider Uri Lubrani (1926-2018), an Israeli diplomat and defense official.

Lubrani, who served the state from its founding, had the unusual distinction of being posted, time and again, to the epicenters of crisis. From 1967 to 1971, he served as ambassador to Ethiopia, which positioned him to play a crucial role in the emergency emigration of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991 (Operation Solomon). It was his greatest achievement.

But he was also known for serving as head of the Israeli mission to Iran (with ambassadorial rank) from 1973 to 1978. His claim to fame: he anticipated the rise of religious extremism and the Shah’s fall before anyone else did.

As early as 1975, he warned a US senator visiting Tehran that “the most serious problem that the Shah had domestically was from the religious elements who were hostile and very difficult for him to deal with.” The US diplomat who accompanied the senator later recalled: “I never heard anyone say that in the American embassy. I never heard any journalists say it or any Iranians say it. This was the first time that I heard that analysis.”

Lubrani remained ahead of the curve. In a June 1978 dispatch, he reported to Jerusalem that the Shah’s position was undergoing an “accelerated process of destabilization… a process from which there is no return and which will ultimately lead to his downfall and a drastic change in the form of government in Iran.” Again, he was alone. The State Department at the time estimated that the Shah had “an excellent chance to rule for a dozen or more years,” and the CIA held that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.” Lubrani emerged from the Iranian revolution as an acclaimed oracle.

I got to know him in the mid-1980s, when he ran an office for Lebanese affairs at the defense ministry. Israel was occupying much of South Lebanon and rubbing up against Hezbollah, Iran’s Shi‘ite proxy. I was beginning to work on Hezbollah myself, and we had much to discuss. Lubrani was also an old friend of Lewis, and I often found myself at dinner with both of them. I wish I’d taken notes.

Melanie Phillips: An unholy silence

Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has adopted a particularly odious attitude. Having said the Iran conflict was “not our war” and “not in our national interest,” he then tried to cast himself as a peacemaker by flying to Saudi Arabia purportedly to negotiate a ceasefire.

While the United States is bringing Iran economically to its knees by interdicting Iranian maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, thus brilliantly turning the regime’s ostensible trump card against it, Starmer is sending out invitations to a risible summit to “break” Iran’s control of the Strait.

Top of their deliberations will doubtless be what gifts to put into the party bags they’ll give the Iranians to take home with them.

Shockingly, Starmer thinks that Israel has no right to defend itself against Hezbollah in Lebanon. He told the House of Commons this week: “Israel’s strikes are wrong. They’re having devastating humanitarian consequences and pushing Lebanon into a crisis. The bombing should stop now.”

He thus presented Israel totally falsely as a wanton aggressor, ignoring the thousands of rockets that Hezbollah has been firing at Israeli civilians—with all the death and destruction they’ve caused--and that show no sign of stopping.

Starmer thinks diplomacy brings peace. But more than four decades of diplomacy with Iran have resulted in thousands of Jews, Americans and others around the world being murdered, killed and wounded; a terrorized and butchered Iranian people; and the world’s most lethal terrorist state coming to the very brink of arming itself with the nuclear bomb.

Like the pope, Starmer and his fellow European fainthearts make pious incantations of peace while leaving the targets of genocidal war to swing in the wind.

This culture of appeasement reflects the dismal fact that Britain and these European nations are now on a trajectory of cultural collapse, as their countries become steadily Islamized while they refuse to defend a historic identity they no longer respect or even recognize.

Accordingly, the pope’s position should cause the utmost dismay to all who understand the need to prevent Western civilization from disintegrating.

Since religion is the moral scaffolding of a culture, it’s essential for the church to assert itself if the West is to be defended. For decades, the Church of England has tragically been instead at the forefront of civilizational decline. Now the Pope is sanctifying Europe’s surrender to Islam.

Trump’s crude and sometimes preposterous pronouncements dismay many. People’s real concern, however, should be for the survival of the civilization that only America’s president and the State of Israel are trying desperately to defend.

Endgame in Sight By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
Here's what I think is happening. The U.S. and Israel won the opening military phase of this war. The U.S. is now winning the economic phase. What’s left of the Iranian regime is cracking under the massive economic stress of the blockade. With the U.S. Navy still interdicting Iranian shipping, the regime may yet break altogether.

Iranian leaders are trying simultaneously to get some economic breathing room and save face by linking their actions to the Israel–Lebanon cease-fire. Trump, irked by the anti-Jewish right’s claims that he’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s puppet, is trying to shut them up with a little social media bluster. It would be wise to take the actual words of the cease-fire as the operative framework here. Trump hasn’t traveled this far, with Israel by the U.S.’s side in a successful war against Iran, just to tie the Jewish state’s hands against Iran’s proxy in Lebanon.

Neither the Iranian regime nor Trump wants to resume the fighting. The regime can’t afford to absorb more damage. For another president, that might mean it’s time to start dropping bombs again. But no other president, despite talking about it, has taken this fight nearly so far. He’s the only one that made the bold decision to wage this war, and he’s done so on his terms. Trump always wanted a short war, and, after a month and a half, he can just about taste victory.

I have my doubts about the details and projected timelines, but, hard as it is to imagine, I believe the president when he says the U.S. will get Iran to hand over its enriched uranium (everything that’s transpired since Operation Midnight Hammer in June was once hard to imagine). And that really would be the whole shebang—the clearest, most incontrovertible victory the U.S. has seen in decades.

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04/17 Links Pt2: Jabotinsky Was Right About Everything; What do the Democrats want from Israel?; How the Greens chose Gaza over the environment; Billy Corgan interviews David Draiman

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Jabotinsky Was Right About Everything (So Cheer Up!)

Jabotinsky believed the future State of Israel—he didn’t live to see it, but he knew it would come—had to produce more than Jaffa oranges; it had to build things the world needed. He was right: He presaged the emergence of “the start-up nation” by many decades.

His influential writings on Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism were eerily predictive of our current moment. His belief in the importance of persuading the general American public, and not just the government, of the justice of the Zionists’ cause has been likewise vindicated.

And these are just a few of the examples. There are more, because Jabotinsky was right about it all.

And that is one reason to feel less pessimistic about the still-very-concerning rise of Jewish anti-Zionism in our current post-October 7 moment. Jewish history leaves no doubt as to who will be vindicated and who will not: In the future, no one is going to say, “if only I’d listened to Peter Beinart.”

And so the self-humiliation ritual that Ezra Klein put himself through at the New York Times over the past week—in which he defended anti-American anti-Semite Hasan Piker’s inclusion in Democratic Party politics, only to have Piker reaffirm his Jew-hatred and his fanatical worship of those who murder American civilians—evinces outrage that melts into pity. We’ll send you a postcard from the future, Ezra.

Judaism is indestructible, which is why the destruction of the holy temple, at a time when it was the center and anchor of the religious aspect of Jewish peoplehood, still has millions of Jews around to mourn it. The best future anti-Zionists can hope for is to be a memory, to have been something that we vaguely recall.

Where do the Jews who aren’t anti-Zionist but who are easily cowed by anti-Zionists fall in this equation? They are ripe for an education. The Jews did not keep their status as the eternal people by voting against bulldozers for Israel, as several Jewish Democratic senators did this week. They seem to have forgotten that, just as they themselves will soon be forgotten.

When Jabotinsky was demobilized after the war, he recounted telling his fellow Jewish Legionnaires the following:

“Far away, in your home, you will one day read glorious news, of a free Jewish life in a free Jewish country—of factories and universities, of farms and theaters, perhaps of MPs and ministers. … Then you shall stand up, walk to the mirror, and look yourself proudly in the face … and salute yourself—for ’tis you who have made it.”

That was in 1918, 30 years before the rebirth of the State of Israel. Some people have an easier time seeing the future than others. It’s usually those who have a better grasp on the past.

Jonathan Tobin: What do the Democrats want from Israel?

Indeed, liberal writer Jonathan Chait was not far off the mark when he wrote in The Atlantic of the fear that Democratic officeholders have of a party base that has fallen under the spell of anti-Israel hatemongers like podcaster Hasan Piker.

Republicans may have their own problem with a similar antisemitic set, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones and enablers like Megyn Kelly. But Democrats who don’t wish to bend the knee to their intersectional left-wing base are in a very different position than the GOP. The leader of the Republicans—Trump—had no problem kicking them out of the party and his MAGA movement for the offense of opposing the war on Iran and alliance with Israel. He did so not only because he isn’t the type to take orders from someone like Carlson, who is more of a Mar-a-Lago court jester than a policy adviser. He could do so with impunity, secure in the knowledge that whatever inroads the Israel-bashers and Jew-haters have made among young voters, the overwhelming majority of his supporters approve of his stances.

Senate Democrats, most of whom came into office pledging their undying support for the Jewish state, don’t have that luxury. Indeed, as Chait writes, they are on the verge of losing their party to the likes of Piker, as well as the academic, pop-culture and media elites who, as we’ve learned from their pushback against calls to isolate someone who hates America as well as Israel and the Jews, largely agree with him.

Chait’s proposed solution to the problem is to follow the path of the 40 Senate Democrats who are now on record backing a proposal that would disarm Israel in the middle of a war. He says they have choices. One is to abandon Israel and hold onto office. The other is to stick to the principles that got most of them elected in the first place—and be defeated in a future primary by an Israel-hating and antisemitic Democratic Socialist who will steer the party toward the hard left. It also means a Democratic Party in which members of the left-wing congressional “Squad” that includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), along with fellow Marxist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are no longer on the margins but in control.

They know he’s right because, as he put it, they can all read polls. And so, they are shifting their principles to accommodate the new ideological alignment toward people for whom one Jewish state on the planet is one too many. And if that means leaving Israel without the weapons and means to defend itself against its genocidal regional foes, that’s just too bad.

Were the Democrats who changed their votes in the last year to get in sync with the new fashionable antisemitic wing of their party—such as Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ruben Gallego (D-N.J.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—to admit to this, it would be disgraceful enough. But what’s truly awful about their stand is the disingenuous defenses of their position. They claim that they still support Israel, but think its democratically elected government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has engaged in reckless and needlessly brutal behavior by waging war on Iran, in addition to its terrorist allies in Gaza and Lebanon.

Missing from their hypocritical speeches is any mention of what they really expect from an Israeli government. Even Chait, who also claims to be a “liberal Zionist” disenchanted with Netanyahu but not Israel itself, had to acknowledge that the Jewish state has no current peace partner. At some point, even those who are willfully ignorant about events in the Middle East have to take notice of the fact that Palestinian Arabs don’t want a two-state solution, which liberal Americans still seem to think is the only answer to the conflict. Unlike them, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have decided to accept that Palestinians are saying “no” to any outcome other than the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of its people.

The atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, helped cement that viewpoint.

Jewish Democratic disillusionment deepens over party’s direction

The Democratic shift on Israel policy was on full, dramatic display on the Senate floor on Wednesday night as 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted for at least one of two resolutions to block U.S. shipments of bulldozers and bombs to Israel.

The votes left many pro-Israel Democrats shocked and disillusioned — exemplified in the muted statements, if any, on the vote from key pro-Israel groups — and is being seen by some as the marker of a new era of Democratic policy on Israel, in which critics of Israel are firmly in the party mainstream.

“It’s yet another data point that the bipartisan consensus [in support of Israel] is, at least at the moment, no longer,” a former Biden administration official told Jewish Insider on Thursday. “Democrats think it’s politically advantageous to take these votes that would have been completely out-of-bounds just two-and-a-half years ago. … It’s deeply concerning if you care about the relationship, if you care about the security of [Israel]. But that’s the state of play at the moment, I think until or unless there’s an event that changes the trajectory.”

Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, said the vote highlights the “progressive socialist wing” of the Democratic Party’s increasing takeover. “This is a calamity for the Democratic Party, if it will not be contained and stopped,” Foxman told JI. “What’s also disturbing to me is that this litmus test is being first administered to every Jewish candidate.”

He added that the votes send a terrible message to U.S. allies beyond Israel that the U.S. can’t be relied upon.

Pro-Israel Democrats who spoke to JI said the votes came about as a combination of several factors: They served as a proxy for the war in Iran that nearly all Democrats oppose, but also were a signal of opposition to Israel’s operations in Lebanon, settler attacks and settlement expansion in the West Bank, the war in Gaza and — to a substantial degree — the Democratic enmity that has been growing for years toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his government and his alignment with President Donald Trump and Republicans.

And lawmakers are also responding to the growing progressive pressure, fueled by two years of imagery from the war in Gaza, amplified by social media platforms that boosted antisemitic content, that has changed the politics around Israel in a “really dramatic way” in the Democratic Party, the former Biden administration official said.

“Those [resolutions], at this moment in time, were just a proxy for real discomfort with the direction of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship in this war, which is not the right reason to vote for these,” another former Biden administration official told JI. “I understand the [vote to block] bulldozers at this moment in time. [Withholding] the munitions — I think it’s really, really troubling.”

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04/17 Links Pt1: Trump says Iran agreed to stop funding Terrorists, will hand over uranium; Trump’s goals in Iran have always been clear; The Lebanon Cease-fire and the Long Game

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Lebanon Cease-fire and the Long Game

The cease-fire went into effect this evening and will have an initial time period of 10 days. According to the State Department, “This initial period may be extended by mutual agreement between Lebanon and Israel if progress is demonstrated in the negotiations and as Lebanon effectively demonstrates its ability to assert its sovereignty.”

In other words, Lebanon has to make tangible progress in disarming Hezbollah in order to earn the renewal of the cease-fire after 10 days. Then there’s this: “Israel shall preserve its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks. This shall not be impeded by the cessation of hostilities.”

Israel has a fair amount of freedom of action, then, during the 10-day period. While that is something of a concession from Beirut, in truth it mostly means that Israel will be available to help Lebanon move the needle against Hezbollah, which would then enable the extension of the cease-fire, which is what Lebanon wants anyway.

Finally, the statement says this: “Israel and Lebanon request that the United States facilitate further direct negotiations between the two countries with the objective of resolving all remaining issues, including demarcation of the international land boundary.”

That’s another way of saying Israel’s interests in South Lebanon are legitimate and—in contrast to Hezbollah—the IDF should not be considered a hostile occupier but rather an ally engaged in constructive efforts to restore Lebanese sovereignty.

For Israel, these terms offset much of the risk of pausing attacks on Hezbollah for 10 days. For the Lebanese, the text is an announcement that the existing government is capable of getting Israel to halt its attacks through the diplomatic process, undercutting Hezbollah’s claim that it must stay armed to protect Lebanon from Israel. For Netanyahu specifically, it virtually guarantees that, by election time, Israel will be in a stronger position against Hezbollah than it is now.

Douglas Murray: Trump’s goals in Iran have always been clear

Each time Trump ran for the presidency, a large part of his platform was that he would stop America getting involved in ‘stupid’ wars in the Middle East. Just as Obama had upped America’s drone programme, so Trump developed his own doctrine. The killing of the Iranian terror chief Qasem Soleimani in 2020 was perhaps the first time that Trump showed he could effectively take out an enemy of the United States and deter his opponent from any significant retaliatory strikes. Then earlier this year the US military on his orders carried out the daring raid on Caracas which brought the corrupt Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to face justice in New York. Trump’s critics complain that the success of that mission has led him to the hubris of Iran.

But if you listen to what the President, his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and others have said since the start of this mission, the confusion is on the part of his listeners, not of the administration. From the beginning Trump has made a number of justifications for the action. But the one non-negotiable has been that Iran must not be allowed nuclear weapons. Given that the Iranian side actually boasted to the US negotiating team that they were weeks away from nuclear breakout, it isn’t hard to understand why the US chose this moment to strike. The fact that the Iranians learned from Osirak and spread out their nuclear sites is why this intervention has taken longer than two minutes.

Nevertheless there is chaff being thrown in the air from all sides. Yes at the start Trump suggested to the Iranian people that they rise up and overthrow the regime of the mullahs if they could. But the killing of tens of thousands of people by the religious militias in January has obviously had an effect. ‘Ha ha,’ say Trump’s critics. ‘You see – you tried regime change and failed. Now you will have to – once again – “put boots on the ground”.’ But the President is committed to doing no such thing.

Doubtless he would have liked to have seen the regime receive more opposition internally. But the hope that the Islamic Revolutionary government falls is the maximalist policy. The minimalist one is simply to ensure that for the foreseeable future Iran does not have any capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

I’m slightly surprised by some of the obfuscation and pretence of befuddlement that many national and international observers seem to be displaying in the face of this objective. ‘He hasn’t made it clear,’ they say again and again. But he has. The aim of Trump’s war in Iran is indeed to replay the Iraq intervention. But it is the intervention of 1981, not 2003.

Richard Kemp: Even Iran’s European appeasers now can’t deny the ayatollahs are losing

The regime has been brought to this point only by Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports, which has hit them with economic pressure to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a day. This is unsustainable for an already devastated economy. And Trump has made clear that, despite opening the Strait, the blockade will not be lifted until Tehran accepts his other demands.

This has left the European appeasers even further behind the curve than they were before. At the very moment Iran announced its decision, Starmer, Macron and other leaders were meeting in Paris to find a diplomatic solution to opening the Strait. They and their like have repeatedly argued that diplomacy is the only way to resolve the problem of Iran and yet again they have been proved completely wrong.

Those who are not blinded by an allergy to the use of military force to prevent threats have always known that. Decades of diplomacy with the ayatollahs have only ever resulted in them running rings round those who tried it. The threat has only increased, predictably.

Characteristically, the regime has tried to show some kind of defiance in the face of defeat, pretending that the opening of the Strait was their response to a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump has made it clear that the two actions are unconnected.

He also said today: “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again. It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!” Here he is being unduly optimistic. Whatever they may or may not have said to him, this regime will always need a heavy stick raised against it, with the clear political will to use it.

That will only work while the occupant of the White House maintains such a will, and we don’t know what we will see from his successor. That is why it is essential that, irrespective of any forthcoming agreement, work continues to remove the regime in Tehran during his term.

The prospects of that happening – at some point – just increased with Tehran displaying further weakness by today’s tacit acceptance of American hegemony.

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UNIFIL cooks the books on violations of 1701

UNIFIL has reported over 10,000 Israeli violations of Resolution 1701 since the November 2024 ceasefire. This number (or larger ones) are widely quoted as evidence of Israel not adhering to agreements.

How many Hezbollah violations has UNIFIL reported in the same period? 

Here is where things get interesting. 

The Israeli number is precise, cumulative, and built for headlines. UNIFIL's spokesperson delivered it to wire services around the one-year ceasefire mark: over 8,100 air violations, over 2,600 ground activities north of the Blue Line, over 1,000 firing trajectories. 

The Hezbollah-side number appears nowhere in a comparable form. It was not mentioned in the same press conference. 

The Secretary-General's periodic 1701 reports to the Security Council do classify Hezbollah-linked weapons south of the Litani as violations — the language is explicit. The reports provide counts: 194 caches discovered in one period, 225 by another, over 360 by late 2025. So it sounds like UNIFIL is impartially reporting violations to the UN.

That is not close to true when you look at what they consider to be a single "violation."

For Israel, a sortie gets counted by individual plane, not as a single event. Most of the violations were not Israeli jets but drones - yet a single drone flight over Lebanon can count as multiple violations. A drone loitering for hours, changing direction or altitude, gets broken into distinct trajectories — each one a separate entry in the ledger. One reconnaissance mission back and forth along the Blue Line can produce five or ten violations by itself.

Now compare how UNIFIL reports the weapons caches it finds out about. Every cache is counted once, whether it contains three old rifles or a thousand rockets. A shoebox of corroded AK magazines and a tunnel stocked with Kornet anti-tank missiles are both "one cache." 

Israeli violations are counted in the smallest possible units. Hezbollah violations are counted in the largest possible aggregates.

It gets worse. UNIFIL is only counting what it knows about directly or through the LAF. Yet Hezbollah freely brags that it misleads the Lebanese authorities by leaking outdated caches for them to blow up, keeping the real, active underground warehouses and the caches hidden in civilian houses along the border untouched. The commander who told NPR "we gave them empty boxes, or a few old items to go blow up" was describing exactly the material that fills UNIFIL's 360+ cache count. The one metric UNIFIL reports for Hezbollah compliance is the metric Hezbollah openly games.

100 violations in a single school

If UNIFIL counted Hezbollah violations the same way it counts Israeli violations, then every rifle, every grenade, every RPG, every rocket, every mortar round, every launcher, every IED, every Kornet would count as a separate violation of 1701 — because each one is. Hezbollah's pre-war arsenal south of the Litani was assessed in open sources at tens of thousands of rockets, thousands of anti-tank missiles, tens of thousands of RPGs and small arms, plus substantial quantities of mortars, grenades, and IEDs. The IDF has already seized over 85,000 weapons and military items from a partial sweep of roughly 30 villages. Combat Engineering Battalion 603A was reported  to have found and destroyed over 1,000 terror infrastructure sites, with "endless" weapons in only five weeks of operations.  Conservative totals of individual weapons south of the Litani — each one a 1701 violation — run well into the hundreds of thousands. If you count individual munitions and bullets, into the millions. Which is no more outrageous than counting a single drone patrolling the Blue Line as ten violations, as UNIFIL does.

And weapons are only half of it. Resolution 1701 prohibits "any armed personnel, assets or weapons" other than the LAF and UNIFIL in the area. Every armed Hezbollah fighter south of the Litani is a standalone violation, independent of what he is carrying. The Radwan Force alone was assessed at several thousand fighters forward-deployed in the south before the war, with total Hezbollah armed personnel in the area running considerably higher. Those are thousands more violations UNIFIL has never counted.

You will not find any press conference where UNIFIL says Hezbollah has violated 1701 hundreds of thousands of times.

UNIFIL cooks the books. It maximizes the count of Israeli violations and minimizes the count of Hezbollah violations, both in number and in kind. This is before accounting for its long documented history of turning a blind eye to what Hezbollah was actually building in southern Lebanon — eighteen years during which Hezbollah constructed an arsenal of tens of thousands of rockets and missiles, tunnels rivaling Gaza's, and Radwan Force infrastructure within meters of UNIFIL positions, and UNIFIL filed almost nothing. 

The post-ceasefire counting is not a departure from that record. It is its continuation by arithmetic.

The 10,000 figure circulating in the world's media is not evidence of Israeli misconduct. It is evidence of UNIFIL's bias - and uselessness.

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

 

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Does anyone believe antisemites when they are forced to apologize?

In 2024, outside a courthouse in South Africa, Mongezi Twala, a leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters political party addressed an angry crowd, saying, “Let us mobilise. We are mobilising our young battalions, our fire eaters, the fighters – they are coming and flocking to this court in numbers. You also do the same. It is going to start today when we cut the ugly throats of the Jews. We must cut the head of the snake today.” He then added that he wanted his message that “Palestine will be free” to go to “all the Jewish murderers”. 

Sounds pretty antisemitic to me.

The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) filed a civil complaint. Twala did everything he could to avoid being served, but finally the SAJBD was successful in serving him. If he would have lost, there would have been political pressure for him to resign for hate speech violations.

So Twala's lawyers approached the SAJBD in March and proposed that he issue an apology and attend some Holocaust education. 

The apology sounds like it was carefully drawn up by lawyers. It certainly doesn't sound like the same person who said that Jews' throats should be cut:

Upon reflection, I recognise that the language used in those statements was inappropriate and hurtful. I sincerely regret that my words caused pain and distress to members of the Jewish community and to others who value dignity, respect, and peaceful coexistence in our country. This experience has reminded me of the deep historical pain associated with antisemitism and the importance of speaking about such matters with care and responsibility, regardless of one’s political views. 

I mean, come on. No one speaks like that.

And if the apology was sincere, one would expect that it would be posted on Twala's social media pages. I couldn't find it anywhere outside the South African Jewish Report. 

The idea that a stilted apology is adequate after a literal threat to murder Jews is just bizarre. The SAJBD is touting this as a victory but I don't see how it is - if the only  place that the manufactured apology is visible is outside Twala's party and media, then what good does it do? His EFF party knows it is not sincere, and so does everyone else. 

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

 

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04/16 Links Pt2: The Holocaust began with words and then ordinary people normalising hate – the same pattern we see today; Israel Memorial Day 2026: 170 soldiers killed, 79 victims of terror

From Ian:

Lord Pickles: The Holocaust began with words and then ordinary people normalising hate – the same pattern we see today

This is the full text of a speech delivered by Lord Eric Pickles at Northwood and Ruislip Synagogue on Yom Hashoah, April 14, 2026

We gather this evening with solemnity and gravity, conscious that the Holocaust occupies a unique and terrible place in human history. On Yom HaShoah, you come together as a Jewish community – and with friends of the community – to honour the six million Jewish people murdered in the Shoah: lives extinguished not by chance, not as an accidental by‑product of war, but as the deliberate outcome of hatred, ideology, and systematic dehumanisation.

Six million can dull rather than sharpen understanding. Our task tonight is to resist that temptation – to remember that the Holocaust did not happen to a statistic, but to individual human beings: each with a name, a family, a profession, relationships, ambitions, and a future that was violently taken from them.

Yom HaShoah holds a particular moral weight because it is anchored not only in catastrophe, but in resistance. It falls on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews – starved, besieged, abandoned by the world – chose dignity over submission and moral courage over silence. The day’s full name: the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and of Heroism – reminds us that Jewish history in this period cannot be reduced to victimhood alone.

This day exists because memory matters. Memory hosts truth.

But memory on its own is not enough.

Yom HaShoah was never intended to be comfortable. It exists not to console us, but to confront us. It demands reflection not only on what happened, but on how it could happen; not only on the dead, but on the living; not only on history, but on ourselves.

Because the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It did not begin with death camps or mass murder. It began earlier, and far more quietly. It began with language that reframed human beings as problems to be managed. It began with laws and institutions that made exclusion appear reasonable, even necessary. And it began when ordinary people – people not unlike ourselves – chose not to stand up while standing up still seemed possible.

History rarely announces catastrophe.

History whispers long before it screams.

One of the greatest dangers facing Holocaust remembrance today is ritual without responsibility.

Ritual has its place. Ceremony can bind communities together in shared memory and collective mourning. When remembrance becomes routine, it risks losing its capacity to disturb, to challenge, and to warn.

The central lesson of the Holocaust is not simply that evil exists. Humanity has always known that. The deeper and more uncomfortable lesson is that evil flourishes when good people fail to act – when silence is reframed as prudence, caution mistaken for wisdom, and delay justified as restraint.

The Holocaust did not require universal hatred. It required acquiescence. It required millions of small decisions to comply, to adapt, to adjust expectations, and to wait for clarity that never came.

Jonathan Tobin: Neutrality in the fight against genocidal terror isn’t moral

Wars do solve some things
Still, that’s not the same thing as the pontiff actually being in the right on the underlying issue.

It is all well and good for Pope Leo to say he’s against all suffering, but in point of fact, he’s wrong about wars not solving anything. They may cause incalculable pain and are truly horrible. But wars have solved some problems. To take but one example from history in which the Vatican’s professed neutrality about conflicts didn’t cover it in glory, the defeat of Germany and its allies in the Second World War was the only way to defeat Nazism and end the Holocaust.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if a second Holocaust—the goal of Iran’s Islamist regime, as well as its Hamas and Hezbollah allies in Gaza and Lebanon, with respect to the state of Israel and its population—is to be avoided, it’s going to require more than papal sermons on the evil of wars.

And that is the focal point of the debate about the current Iran conflict, just as it was in the war against Hamas.

A just war
Calling for a permanent ceasefire may put a temporary end to the suffering caused by the conflict. And blasting warlike rhetoric from the combatants always makes those denouncing them seem morally superior. But if it means allowing Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah in their strongholds to rebuild and rearm—and to allow Tehran to resume its nuclear project, missile building and spreading terrorism around the globe—it is neither merciful nor just. Appeals to end the fighting while leaving jihadists in power—and capable of continuing their war on the West and non-Islamist civilization—are as inappropriate as they would have been for a ceasefire before the unconditional surrender of the Nazis in 1945.

The responsibility of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to prevent the mullahs in Tehran from persisting in their genocidal plotting and weapons building, which led directly to the horrors of Oct. 7. To merely denounce what happened on Oct. 7, as the pope did, is fine. But to oppose efforts to ensure that the murderers would be stopped from making good on their pledges to repeat those crimes over and over again, as he insinuated, isn’t an example of a higher morality. Treating murderers and those whose task it is to stop them as morally equivalent—and that’s what the pope and many other world leaders, especially in Western Europe, have done with respect to Hamas and Iran—is wrong, even if the motivation for such statements is rooted in an entirely laudable abhorrence of suffering.

Wars are awful and should be avoided if possible. But the battle against the Islamist terrorists running Iran, and their Hamas and Hezbollah minions whose Oct. 7 atrocities were just a trailer for what they wish to do to all Israelis, is a just one.

It is also impossible to separate the preaching against such just wars from the global surge of antisemitism that has spread since Oct. 7.

Vivian Bercovici: In Carney’s Canada, the law protects antisemites, not Jews

We cannot and should not be told by our government to build ever higher walls around our community centres, homes, schools, and synagogues. It is absurd, obscene and reminiscent of an era I would prefer not to invoke.

Canada’s organised Jewish community has always preferred a quiet approach to dealing with authorities. Even after the synagogue shootings, mainstream organisations were counselling cautious trust as we move forward. Perhaps this time, they said, the authorities and leadership will step up.

Days after the most recent attacks, Prime Minister Carney chose to spend time at an Iftar dinner in Ottawa, having a jolly old time working the room. He quite noticeably (and, one assumes, intentionally) has not met with any Jewish leaders since the shootings. He certainly has not been photographed glad-handing in rooms full of Canadian Jews. That omission is not an oversight.

Since being elected PM with a strong minority government on April 28, 2025 (as a result of a spate of “floor crossings” in the House and recent by-elections he now commands a parliamentary majority), Carney has not spoken with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu. He has, however, been a reliably harsh and frequent critic of Israeli policy and Netanyahu himself. Among his more notable remarks was one made during an interview with Bloomberg News in October, 2025. When asked if he would honour the more than dubious ICC warrant issued for Netanyahu’s arrest (should he set foot on Canadian soil), Carney unhesitatingly responded in the affirmative.

And he went further, gratuitously criticising Netanyahu, claiming that “the actions of Netanyahu’s government were explicitly designed to end any possibility of a Palestinian state in violation of the UN Charter and going against Canadian government policy of any political stripe since 1947.”

Carney could have easily ducked or finessed his response. Instead, he chose – deliberately – to lash out. He is, of course, entitled to criticise Israeli policy. What he appears not to grasp is that doing so with such zeal stokes and legitimises violent antisemitism in Canada.

The message to Canada’s Jews is not subtle – and nor are its implications.

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04/16 Links Pt1: What Victory Looks Like When Your Foe Won’t Surrender; Israel, Lebanon agree to 10-day truce; Outlawing Israeli Self-Defense; The Return of the Echo Chamber

From Ian:

Jonathan Schanzer: What Victory Looks Like When Your Foe Won’t Surrender

Trump’s problems in fighting Iran are tangible: a naval blockade, drone swarms, and missile attacks on allies. But the struggle can be distilled to one word: ideology. The wars at the beginning of this century were waged to defeat that ideology. We called it the “War on Terror.” And it was a war worthy of waging, even though the word “terror” was a politically correct euphemism for the true enemy, Islamic radicalism. But we gave up for lack of progress. From 2001 to 2021, the United States spent more than $8 trillion. We had the edge against our enemies in terms of firepower. However, we could not credibly declare victory no matter how many battles we won. And we could not win because the other side refused to lose.

Adherents to jihadism (who make up fewer than 20 percent of the world’s Muslim population) believe that their faith commands them to fight and that victory is inevitable, even if it takes decades. Indeed, they believe they are destined to win, or die trying. As the late, great Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis wrote back in 2006, “For people with this mindset, [Mutually Assured Destruction] is not a constraint; it is an inducement.”

This is the worldview of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. It is the worldview of Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, not to mention the Houthis in Yemen. Adherents to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic Revolution view the world this way, too.

When your enemy is the infidel, and your victory is ordained by Allah, your obligation is to keep fighting, even in defeat. Surrender is not an option. The Islamic Republic not only embraces this mindset; it portrays every challenge as a test of will that it must endure. Military losses or economic pain are spun as proof of martyrdom and sacrifice, to be answered with even greater confidence in the revolution.

But just because someone refuses to admit defeat doesn’t mean he is immune to it. The relentless Israeli–American assault on the assets of the regime is undeniably taking its toll. There is still a chance that the regime will collapse amid the demise of its top leaders, the destruction of its key military assets, and the voiding of its cash-generating businesses. If the regime survives all of that, it will still be contending with a population that is not soon to forget the slaughter of more than 30,000 patriots who were murdered for the crime of protesting against their oppressive regime. The Iranian rank and file will likely be aided by the Mossad, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies from countries that sustained attacks by the Islamic Republic over the course of this war. These countries have deep pockets and a grudge. The combined ability of these parties to provide weapons, cash, secure communications, and intelligence to the Iranian people could ultimately tip the scales and topple the regime.

The problem for Donald Trump is that such things take time. And, as we’ve seen, he fears that time will sink him deeper into this war, just as it has sunk America into almost every war it has fought since World War II.

One possible missed opportunity for Trump was to take a page out of the George H.W. Bush handbook. When the United States expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, Saddam Hussein’s regime was defeated militarily in just six weeks. However, the Iraqi government remained in place, and it was not forced to surrender unconditionally. The liberation of Kuwait was the aim, so Operation Desert Storm was deemed a success. What followed was a long-standing effort to isolate the Iraqi regime through a combination of diplomatic and economic pressure, along with UN measures to ensure disarmament and the enforcement of no-fly zones to protect the Iraqi population.

Such a scenario might have been thinkable at the outset of Operation Epic Fury. But the window for that closed when the regime began to wage its asymmetric war in the Persian Gulf. There was no way to leave and save face.

An unequivocal victory is still feasible, but that may be possible only by waging total war. Which is what Trump implied when he warned the regime that a failure to reach an equitable deal through diplomacy would result in Iran getting bombed “back to the stone age.” His words immediately elicited howls of disapproval from the international community, not to mention Trump’s political opponents, who declared such rhetoric out of bounds. But threats such as “a whole civilization will die” violate not a single law of war. Angry rhetoric does not constitute a crime. And in any event, due to the unlikely diplomatic intervention of Pakistan, a window for dialogue was opened.

The cease-fire that followed only 12 hours later was dramatic, but mostly because it was bound to fail. The Iranian regime sent emissaries to Islamabad to deliver one message: It will not capitulate. After 21 hours of fruitless talks, Trump and his chief negotiator, Vice President JD Vance, sensibly took no for an answer.

The next phase of Operation Epic Fury will be a hybrid campaign. The conventional strikes will continue as necessary when targets present themselves—although we have already been told that we may have reached a point of diminishing returns in this regard.

Concurrently, the U.S. will likely continue to wage the economic campaign during which the United States Navy is blocking Iranian tankers and those paying Iran bribes for its tankers to transit the Strait of Hormuz. The Air Force may knock out additional economic assets to deprive the regime of the ability to pay its loyalists. The handbook for sanctions and other financial tools honed since the George W. Bush administration is likely to be deployed, too. This will be a reprise of Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” campaign on steroids.

For Trump, this is now all about legacy and history. If waged wisely, Operation Epic Fury could bring down America’s most determined Middle Eastern foe. It can also help redefine military victory in the modern era. There will be no white flags, no papers signed on a battleship, no suicides in a bunker. We will have to content ourselves with knowing we set the world on a new course—even as, in the wake of a victory, there will almost certainly be an entire class of experts and political opponents who will continue to insist that the whole thing was a dead loss.

Why Iran's Rulers Are Not "Rational Actors"

If Iran's rulers were "rational actors," they wouldn't have wanted to repeat the experience of the 12-day war in June 2025.

Yet they're not. They are not peace-loving. They don't prefer compromise over conflict. Iran's rulers believe - literally - that they are on a mission from God.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's title was "Supreme Leader," implying that he was the divinely ordained guardian of Iran.

For nearly half a century, every American president pledged that Iran's theocrats would be prevented from acquiring the nuclear capabilities that could lead to the fulfillment of their grand ambition: "Death to America!" Yet no serious actions were ever taken.

If Mr. Trump had not struck when he did, then Tehran might have acquired nukes while continuing to build up an enormous arsenal of drones and missiles, leading to a war that future presidents could not win, or could win only at an exorbitant cost in blood and treasure.

This conflict was about degrading an American enemy's capabilities, not its intentions.

Their hatred of America, Israel and the West has not abated. They continue to believe it is their duty to wage jihad.

Saudi Arabia, the Abraham Accords, and Operation Roaring Lion

Saudi policy toward Israel will depend largely on how the war with Iran ends. Four main scenarios stand out, each affecting in different ways the likelihood that Saudi Arabia will join the Abraham Accords.

In a prolonged war with no clear outcome but continued regional erosion, Saudi Arabia is likely to remain cautious. Quiet coordination with the United States and Israel would still carry strategic value, but the public and regional costs of open normalization would stay high. Riyadh would likely deepen its hedging—expanding quiet security cooperation, investing more in regional alternatives, and holding back from a formal agreement.

In a stable ceasefire without a decisive outcome, the chances of gradual warming are likely highest. Riyadh could present the outcome as inconclusive while arguing that it opens a window to reshape the regional order. If this is coupled with some form of arrangement in Gaza and on the Palestinian track, phased normalization could again become a realistic option. This scenario comes closest to more optimistic assessments, which hold that the prospect of an agreement has not disappeared but now depends on effective mediation and the management of a new regional order. (Rothem, 2025; Ross, 2025).

If the conflict settles into a pattern of recurring rounds of fighting, Saudi policy is likely to remain deeply ambivalent. Strategically, the case for a regional alignment would continue to strengthen; politically, however, each new round would heighten public and Arab sensitivities and push back any move from quiet cooperation to open normalization. In this scenario, there would be growing strategic need for an alliance alongside limited political room to act.

In a scenario in which the Iranian regime is replaced, or at least significantly weakened, the picture would be more complex. On one hand, the immediate Iranian threat would recede, potentially easing the sense of urgency that has driven part of the logic for normalization. On the other, such a shift could open a window for a new regional order in which Saudi Arabia would seek to consolidate its gains, reinforce its position, and anchor itself in a U.S.-backed regional architecture. Thus, in this scenario, normalization would not necessarily accelerate immediately, but if a less threatening regional order takes shape, it could become politically easier for Riyadh, even if less strategically urgent.

The war therefore will not shape the Saudi approach to normalization in a single direction. Some scenarios increase the strategic case for normalization, others reduce its urgency, and still others widen the gap between strategic interest and political feasibility.

Conclusion
Before the war, the prospects for Saudi–Israeli normalization were improving even as the path toward it grew longer, however the war has changed the way the Saudis view the issue. Riyadh no longer sees normalization as a bilateral deal with Israel, but as part of a broader question: what regional order will emerge after the war, what will Saudi Arabia’s place be within the new order, and what alternative regional options will it have. As long as the outcome of the war remains uncertain, Saudi policy will stay gradual, cautious, and hedged. If, however, conditions begin to take shape for some form of regional settlement with a Palestinian track, and there is a clearer picture of the Iranian threat, the overall likelihood of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords may not only hold but increase. The prospects have improved; the path has lengthened; and the meaning of normalization has changed.Top of Form

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