06/21 Links: A Judge's Verdict on Israel; JNS Summit: Melanie Phillips Gives Chilling Warning on Islam!; IDF killed PIJ terrorist who kidnaped 12 y.o. hostage Yagil Yaakov

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: A Judge's Verdict on Israel

REVIEW: 'Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law' by Roy K. Altman

Countries exist, and whether they're the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus or China, no one doubts their basic right to continue their existence—unless it is Israel. Roy Altman, a young federal judge in Miami, has been lecturing about Israel widely on campuses since October 7. Israel on Trial distills his rebuttals of the six claims he has most often encountered that aim to undermine and delegitimize the presently constituted Jewish state.

I'm pleased to say Judge Altman is a friend, and kindly praises my work in his book—but I will risk my other friendships by recommending this book as absolutely indispensable equipment for any college student in America today.

The first three claims challenge Israel's creation or existence, claiming it is a "settler colonial project," illegitimately founded, and displacing what should be a Palestinian state. The other three focus on Israel's supposed conduct. Israel cruelly occupied Gaza before Oct. 7, 2023, one claim goes. This lets Hamas sympathizers, especially on campus, present that attack as more like a plucky prison break than an attempt to destroy Israel. Then there are the invocations of seldom-used international criminal law concepts of genocide and the even more obscure crime of apartheid.

Altman's answers to these critiques draw broadly from law and history. He provides excellent distillations of the abundant archaeological evidence for Jews' indigeneity in the Land of Israel. He also shows how this has not impeded their willingness to make repeated territorial concessions in the name of peace. Altman details six occasions on which the Jews agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state, only to have the Arabs reject it. His longest and most thorough chapter shows that "if anyone has colonized the Land of Israel, it has been [a] succession of Muslim armies." This is particularly important to recount now, as arguments challenging the authenticity of Jewish historical claims have started to sprout up on the political right, transmogrified into crank theories about how today's Jews are not the real Jews (a pet theme of Tucker Carlson's).

Many have heard of Israeli "settlers" living in the supposedly Arab city of Hebron, but do not know about the Arab ban on Jewish entrance into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron—800 years ago. They have heard of "Palestinian rights," but not Napoleon's proclamation recognizing Jews as the "rightful heirs of Palestine." Altman's quick tour through history is crucial for a generation that, at best, knows about the past from podcasts and social media.

One place Altman falters is in describing Gaza and the West Bank as having been occupied before Israeli troops left in 2005. He makes the remark in passing, as his discussion focuses on rebutting the unprecedent proposition that Israel has since then occupied Gaza without physically occupying it, a unique doctrine invented for Israel. But Israel's presence before 2005 was not an occupation either, because these areas were both part of the League of Nations’'Mandate for Palestine, also known as the British Mandate, formed after the collapse of the previous sovereign, the Ottoman Empire. As the successor state to the Mandate, Israel inherited its borders under the international law doctrine of uti possidetis juris (Latin for "as you possess under law")—the same rule that accounts for Jordan's odd borders, the Kurds' statelessness, and Syria's boiling melting pot.

Altman analyzes the accusations with a legal methodology, closely examining the evidence presented for each—and marshaling the facts to the contrary. But unlike in a courtroom, Israel's "acquittal" is not enough. The accusations are so sensational and passionately made that many neutral observers would conclude that even if they are off the mark, Israel must be guilty of some lesser included offense. Proof is not necessarily the point of these criticisms as much as creating a taint. Dreyfus's acquittal surely did not convince his accusers that he was entirely honorable.

Altman points out that the Palestinians' claims all mirror those of the Jews. The Jews' indigeneity in the Land of Israel has served as a paradigm for a people connected to a particular land. The Palestinians present themselves as the genuine natives. The word "ghetto" was invented to describe the tiny, crowded areas in European cities where Jews were permitted to live—and, therefore, Gaza becomes the world's largest open-air prison.

Why the genocide libel is central to the propaganda war against Israel and Jews

The Gaza war may have ended, but the genocide libel marches on. That libel, the false accusation that Israel and Diaspora Jews perpetrate genocide against others, allows anti-Zionists to invert the Holocaust, erasing Jews’ Holocaust victimhood and bestowing it upon Palestinians. And given this libel’s ubiquity, it’s worth understanding the libel’s origins, why it was amplified and went viral after Oct. 7, 2023, and why some Gazans dubbed themselves “Holocaust survivors” on social media as combat ceased.

The genocide libel is a central plank in “the propaganda war against Israel, which has become one of the most organized and sophisticated narrative campaigns in modern geopolitics,” said Faran Jeffery, director general of operations at the U.K.-based Midstone Centre for International Affairs. It focuses on “framing Israel … as a moral aberration.”

This propaganda war builds upon decades-old Soviet anti-Zionism. While the postwar West marginalized Nazi-style antisemitism, anti-Zionism evaded that strong taboo with thinly disguised libels about Israel and “Zionists.” Leveraging that loophole, the contemporary Western Left has recycled the extensive Soviet playbook, and its emphasis is clearly on efficacy over accuracy.

Professor Gunther Jikeli, associate director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, wrote, “If we apply the accepted legal definition of genocide, the accusation is simply untrue — and constitutes a form of defamation and demonization of a country. Second, it has a direct impact on Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere: Jews face constant suspicion of supporting an ‘evil’ state.”

Lest this prompt cognitive dissonance, anti-Zionism offers a preemptive remedy. “Anyone who senses that hostility toward Jews might be racist risks feeling a kind of moral contamination — becoming, in that sense, ‘like a Nazi,’” said Adam Louis-Klein, founder of the Movement Against Antizionism. With Nazism still widely considered objectionable, “that guilt must be instantly inverted and projected onto the object of hatred itself. Thus, a core feature of anti-Zionist ideology is to depict ‘Zionists’ as ‘racists’ and ‘Nazis,’ while Palestinians are recoded as the ‘Jews’ or ‘Holocaust survivors.’”

Pierre Rehov: Trump's Iran 'Deal'

The 14-point text is unambiguous on the point the White House is most eager to fog. It commits the United States, "with regional partners," to develop a "plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran" -- $3 billion of which has, according to the unsurpassed journalist, Lee Smith, already been sent to Iran through by way of the United Arab Emirates. The president has called reports of that figure "fake news" and insisted nobody is putting up "ten cents." The clause nevertheless sits prominently in the document he signed.

Only one question really matters: what does the agreement, if honored by Iran, deliver? It leaves enriched uranium inside Iran, concedes a right to enrichment that was recently a red line, permits the Iranian ballistic-missile program Trump now defends supposedly because other countries have missiles too, and pours reconstruction money into an economy whose ruling institution is the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

An interim framework can easily be a device for extracting one concrete concession -- opening the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz -- while the other clauses quietly expire.

Trump has repeated that if the deal collapses he will return to force – but who will do that after he is no longer president?

Each Israeli reprisal can trigger an Iranian walkout, and each walkout hands Washington a legal pretext to resume the war it paused. If Trump, however, is reluctant to use force against Iran again now, why should anyone think that he would be more inclined to use it later?

Without a united opposition to inherit power and without an army to seize Tehran, talk of liberation is a consolation, not a strategy. The war degraded the regime; it did not remove it -- and nothing in this agreement will. In fact, the MOU promises to enrich the IRGC again so that it can tighten its hold on the Iranian people even more viciously.

So the memorandum sits there, looking like the clumsiest concession an American administration has made to a sworn enemy in a generation...

The regime in Tehran, which has waited out many American presidents and means to wait out another, is betting they are bluffing about everything except the check.

Iran: Did Trump Cave In?

[Iran] continues to execute opponents, confiscate the assets of critics, organize mass arrests across the nation, and funnel funds to proxies in the region.

The only change that has happened is that in the past few days it has raised a claim to the exclusive ownership of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Majlis of which Ghalibaf is speaker has passed at least three laws forbidding any negotiations with the American "Great Satan".

The Majlis also put a $50 million price on the US president's head.

What we have so far is a 60-day extension of a shaky ceasefire with a list of desiderata to haggle over.

Will the projected 60-days of talks produce anything resembling peace and stability in the region as many pray for? The outright answer I could give is a firm no.

Gorbachev and Deng could achieve a change of course because the USSR and the People's Republic of China had a deeply-rooted party structure plus highly centralized armed forces.

Neither of those two conditions exists in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is a hodgepodge of political, economic and military baronies pulling in different directions while regarding the maintenance of the status quo as essential for their survival. Imagine a kaleidoscope that if turned this way or that produces different visuals and colors but remains fundamentally the same.

The tactic Tehran will use is clear: drag out the talks until we see the back of Trump and Netanyahu, as we did with six other US presidents and as many Israeli premiers.

If it actually happens, the 60-day stint may establish a roadmap pointing to several desired goals. The next phase would be labeled "confidence building easers" followed by a third named "modalities of implementation" -- in other words, a roadmap to lead Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner up the garden path.

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How Everyone Becomes a Target: When philosophy becomes a license to kill

This was a guest post I wrote on Kile B. Jones' Substack, The Inverted World. He in turn wrote a guest post on my Substack on the same topic from a psychiological perspective.

A federal indictment, a tenuous network of victims, and the philosophy that turns a portfolio dispute into a license to kill.

On June 10, a federal grand jury in Detroit unsealed a sixty-three-page indictment charging eight people with an eighteen-month campaign of violence: jars of butyric acid hurled through the windows of family homes, nails scattered in a driveway, houses marked with the inverted red triangle that Hamas uses to designate targets for death, a vow by one defendant to become a woman's physician and poison her slowly, and a plan to follow another target home and "burn it down."

Kile B. Jones has assembled the full documentary record; the defendants are presumed innocent of every count.

The perpetrators were University of Michigan students and recent students at that, several of them honors students, one a medical student, operating within the TAHRIR Coalition — the umbrella of dozens of campus organizations led by Michigan's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The indictment alleges that the coalition's own social-media accounts broadcast the threats, that its lead student group was asked for "money for autonomous actions," and that the cell's targets matched the coalition's published demands. And whom did they attack? They seem to have little in common. The university president and chief investment officer, who declined to divest the endowment. The personal injury law firm that employs a regent. The provost. A campus police officer who had policed the protests. A fellow student suspected of talking to the FBI. And the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit — a communal charity with no role in university governance, no control over the endowment, no connection to the decision the campaign was ostensibly about — defaced on the first anniversary of October 7.

The targets share no obvious thread. A car-accident lawyer, a refugee cop, a charity, a classmate: what list contains all of these, and why? The conventional answer is that hatred overwhelmed them, that the violence was a breakdown of reason. The evidence points the other way. In the very exchange where he discussed poisoning a patient, one defendant explained that he wanted to act because it was "the only way to clear my conscience." Not to silence his conscience — to clear it.

The violence was the discharge of his moral sense, not its suppression.

These students experienced themselves, throughout, as the few with the seriousness to do what was required. Their philosophy didn’t just allow violence against families of regents who still invested in Israel as a small percentage of the entire endowment. It demanded it.

Step one: a theory of who is guilty. The first move is to replace acts with positions. Ordinary moral and legal reasoning assigns guilt for what a person did: you are culpable for your conduct, and innocent where you did not act.

The framework these students absorbed assigns guilt for where a person sits. In the structure of oppression, culpability flows from your location — your identity, your institution, your associations — rather than from anything you chose to do. A regent who votes against divestment is guilty; but so, in principle, is anyone the structure places on the wrong side, whether or not they lifted a finger. This is originally derived from Marx, down through Maoist and Soviet class theory, filtered down to today.

People aren’t guilty for what they do, they are guilty for what positions they occupy in the class system. In recent years this idea has extended to anyone who is perceived as being “privileged.” (Which always seems to exclude the ones who are deciding who is privileged.) When you extract humans from the decision of who is guilty, you have erased any concept of personal responsibility — not only on the victim side but on every side. This is a coherent and fundamentally immoral philosophical position, and it is very popular. But the TAHRIR folks made it even worse.

Step two: "directly or indirectly" The second move is the one that removes every limit, and it appears in the indictment in the conspirators' own operating language. The targets, the document states, were those believed to support Israel "directly or indirectly."

The enemy isn’t Zionists; it is anyone perceived as not being anti-Zionist enough. That can include literally everyone. For example, when Hamas and Fatah argue with each other, they each accuse the other one of being Zionist.

The endowment holds shares in firms that do business in Israel: that is a real, traceable relationship, however attenuated by the time it reaches a regent's vote. But "indirectly" has no boundary at all, because indirect connection is transitive and the chain never terminates. If the regent is complicit through the endowment, then the firm that employs the regent is complicit through the regent, and the charity that shares his community is complicit through that, and the officer who guards the people who manage the building is complicit through the institution, and onward without any principle that says stop here.

Once indirect association counts, the boundary of the guilty category is no longer fixed by anything. It is set by whoever is drawing the connections, and it can be drawn to include anyone. This is not a slippery-slope worry about where the logic might go. It is a description of where the documented attacks already went. The best way to see it is to map the actual targets that were attacked (not just threatened,) and count the steps from the center of their universe, Israel. The gray chain is the institutional one, and even it stretches thin. Israel, then firms with Israeli business, then the endowment that holds those firms, then the board of regents that governs the endowment, then one individual regent who sits on that board, then the personal-injury law firm that employs him: by the time the campaign reaches the firm it actually attacked, it is five links from the source, and not one of those links is about anything the law firm did.

The university branch is no tighter — endowment, university, and then a fellow student or a campus police officer, each reached by membership or employment rather than by any decision about Israel. (The officer is the one partial exception worth conceding: campus police broke up the encampment, so the cell may have had a grievance against him as police, independent of Israel entirely — which, if anything, means the "supporting Israel" rationale was a pretext even by their own logic.) The amber chain is stranger and more telling. The Jewish Federation has no organizational link to Israel whatsoever — no shares, no governance, no employment.

Its path to the center runs Israel, then Zionists, then Jews, then the Federation: three steps, each one a substitution of categories rather than a real relationship. A state becomes an ideology, an ideology becomes an ethnicity, an ethnicity becomes a particular charity that happens to be Jewish. The Federation sits the same distance from the center as the board of regents — three rings out — but the board got there through three organizational facts and the Federation got there through three acts of redefinition. That is the Protocols logic rendered as a network diagram: by the final step, "connected to Israel" has come to mean "is Jewish," and the map shows the exact rung where the meaning was swapped. We’ve seen this logic before.

Bristol professor David Miller maps these elaborate diagrams of his fevered imagination of complicity that invariably land on Jews. Students for Justice in Palestine came under fire in 2022 for mapping out institutions in Massachusetts under the same guilt-by-position logic that ended up reaching every Hillel in New England, the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston and the Jewish Arts Collaborative. What the picture demonstrates is that "directly or indirectly" has already done its work. The people these students actually attacked were, by the campaign's own theory of connection, three to five links removed from the thing they were angry about. The arbitrariness is not a future risk. It is the documented present.

Step three: the license to kill the nodes A map of the guilty is not yet a reason to hurt anyone. Positional guilt plus "indirectly" tells you who is on the wrong side, and draws the side as wide as you like, but on its own it justifies a boycott, a denunciation, a divestment demand — not acid through a window. The final element is what converts a node on a diagram into a body. That element is Frantz Fanon's doctrine of redemptive violence. The Wretched of the Earth argued that violence by the colonized against the colonizer is a cleansing, recreating act rather than a regrettable necessity — the means by which the oppressed remake themselves into free agents. This is the doctrine that lets a medical student describe planned poisoning as the way to "clear my conscience."

Within the Fanonist frame, the violence is not the abandonment of his morality; it is its fulfillment. Restraint would be the failure. Fanon was describing an armed colonial settler and the colonized subject shooting back. His colonizer was a person with a gun and a farm on expropriated land, an active agent of a violent occupation. Nothing on the Michigan map is close to that. But when Fanonism is combined with the never ending mapping of who is bad, we arrive at a situation where literally anyone who is perceived as being on the wrong side of history — defined by what position they are in, not what they do — they are subject to being murdered in the name of justice.

That’s how you get to young people saying that their conscience cannot stand it if they don’t attack the families of the people they perceive as being four or five degrees separated from Israel.

That is the combination, and it is the whole of it. Positional guilt supplies the brush. "Indirectly" makes the brush infinitely wide. The map shows the brush has already painted a car-accident lawyer and a Jewish charity. And their flavor of Fanonism hands anyone holding the brush a license to kill whatever it has painted, for the killer's own moral redemption. Each element is survivable alone. A theory of structural complicity, by itself, produces seminar papers.

Fanon, by himself, applied to actual colonial war, produces a contestable but bounded argument. It is the multiplication that has no edge: an unlimited target set crossed with a therapeutic license to destroy its members. Everyone is a node The logic never ends. If the law firm is a legitimate target for employing a regent, then so is any company the endowment invests in, and so is anyone who works for that company, and so is any student who accepts a scholarship funded by it or a job offer from it. Each is connected to Israel by exactly the kind of indirect link the framework has already ruled sufficient, and each is therefore paintable, and therefore — under Fanon — killable for the satisfaction of the one who decides it.

The same logic that placed a refugee cop on the list places the sophomore who took the internship. There is no node the framework excludes, because the only thing required to become a node is a connection, and the framework has defined connection so that everyone has one. This is where the philosophy, not the temperament, is the danger. It has no brakes. Nothing in this philosophy says that the person who bought a lamp from a garage sale by the cousin of a manager who once hired an Israeli security guard is not equally guilty. A moral framework with no internal brakes will, given enough sincere adherents, eventually produce followers who sincerely think that braking is immoral and everyone they do not like must be hounded, harassed and attacked. It would be comforting to treat the inductees as an aberration.

The harder truth is that they are a faithful execution. They took published philosophies literally, strung them together, followed where they lead, and were stopped not by anything in the philosophy but by the FBI. There were other components here — the vanguardism that produced the cell structure by imitating militant movements of the 1960s, the genocide-emergency framing that set the tempo, the long-falsified Third-Worldist romance that the academy keeps teaching with its body count edited out. Each deserves its own accounting. But they are accelerants on top of the core mechanism. The mechanism is simple enough to state in a sentence, and damning enough to end on: give people a theory that makes everyone guilty by association and then makes killing the guilty an act of self-purification, and the only question left is who among them will be sincere enough to act on it.

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

 

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Islamic Jihad keeps releasing new "martyrs" who were not named in the Gaza Ministry of Health lists

There are two ways to make it look like most of those killed in a war are civilians.

One is to say or imply that dead militants are civilian.

The other is not to count the dead militants.

Islamic Jihad has been steadily releasing lists of its "martyrs" over the past few months. Based on the sample I looked at, none of them were listed by the Ministry of Health.

Most of those listed are not grunts - they are commanders and platoon leaders. It would be reasonable to assume that they are releasing the leaders' names first, to mourn the major figures first. 

The batch released on Saturday included 18 "group commanders." 

On April 18, the batch included 18 "platoon commanders" and also several other major figures, like a sniper commander and a deputy commander for a battalion.

May 17 saw about 13 platoon commanders and commanders.

22 other commanders published on June 1. 

Only on June 13 did I see a list of people who were not "commanders."

That's about 100 militants - and zero civilians. All from Islamic Jihad, not Hamas. 

If the commanders were buried in tunnels, then it stands to reason that their groups were also killed.

The ratio of militants to civilians killed in Gaza keeps getting higher. 

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

 

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06/20 Links: In two days of Hezbollah's 'ceasefire', five IDF soldiers killed, 13 injured; How to Understand the Memorandum of Undoing; Hamas terrorist doubling as Al Jazeera photojournalist killed in Gaza

From Ian:

Ben-Dror Yemini: Trump has handed the keys to Iran, and Tehran is in control

There is logic to Iran’s moves. It wants to drive a wedge between the United States and Israel through its Hezbollah proxy. It is succeeding. And Israel faces a dilemma. An Israeli response to Hezbollah’s provocations is exactly what Iran wants. Failure to respond, on the other hand, could whet the appetite of Iran and Hezbollah.

In this situation, Israel needs a diplomatic arm to present Hezbollah’s repeated ceasefire violations. To exercise restraint, so it will be clear that this is a deliberate provocation. Only after it is clear who is violating the cease-fire, and only after the headlines stop saying “Israel bombs Lebanon” and instead say “Hezbollah violates ceasefire,” will Israel be able to respond. The problem is that Israel has no diplomatic arm. And the headlines about the bombings receive far greater prominence than Hezbollah’s violations.

Under the circumstances, the prime minister’s statement Saturday, that Israel is holding its fire, is the correct response. It is meant to put the ball back in Iran’s court. Not that this will cancel the surrender agreement. Far from it. Even the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and even the launch of ballistic missiles at Israel, will not move the United States.

Iran can torment it as much as it wants. Because the United States is deeply sunk in this agreement, and all the dubious explanations it has already offered for it amount to a total liquidation of assets. Oil prices, oh, the oil, Trump said. The global economy nearly entered a terrible crisis, he added. So now he is going to do something? It will not happen. “Even if I murder someone on Fifth Avenue,” Trump said in 2016, “they would still vote for me.” Now it is Iran. Even if it murders a few Americans, just because it feels like it, Trump will still bow his head and argue that it is Iran’s right.

We must hope the current crisis ends. But afterward, Israel must be pulled out of the terrible low point it has reached in the United States. Because without change, today’s problems will look like child’s play compared with tomorrow’s.

Lee Smith: Trump has fallen for the same false Iran promises as Obama

Opening door for Dems
It’s because of Donald Trump that Iran doesn’t have the bomb. Because of the president’s historic partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Iranian regime has been battered. But that doesn’t mean Trump won the war. Not yet, anyway.

Historical trends suggest that a Democrat will succeed Trump, but losing to Iran would virtually ensure it.

Then, Obama’s party will help rebuild the Iranians’ nuclear program, and all of Trump’s efforts, and all the battles won and sacrifices made by American armed forces to stop Iran, will amount to nothing because he didn’t win. Losing wars comes with serious consequences.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth made clear at the outset of the war that the central goal of the US government was to end Iran’s ability to project power beyond its own borders. Vance said in his briefing Friday that the United States has done that by eliminating Iran’s air force and navy.

But the fact that US allies are still under fire during the war that Trump chose and the cease-fire he imposed means the administration has failed to meet the very first benchmark it set for victory.

Perhaps, then, embarrassment was the source of the president’s anger, for when after America’s regional partners retaliated against attacks by Iran and its proxies during the cease-fire, the president chastised his friends.

Polls show that Trump voters still support his war aims. The catch is that it seems he no longer does. He says it’s always been his preference to take Kharg Island by force, but he chose against it because he didn’t think the American people had the stomach for it. But it’s the job of a wartime leader to steel the public and prepare them in the event American lives are lost.

The joint US-Israel campaign destroyed physical things that can’t be easily replaced, like nuclear facilities. Entering negotiations with Iran to secure physical things that yet remain — the remainder of the regime’s nuclear facilities and its stockpiled enriched uranium — is an acknowledgment that you are, at least at present, not capable of or willing to destroy or seize them.

Lost leverage
Shifting from war to talks tilts the balance of power in the other direction, away from the United States, which at war made no concessions, and toward Iran, to which Trump must now make concessions to make a deal.

And the deal, as Vance laid it out in his press briefing, only means surrender. No verification regime can hold Iran to the commitments he says Iran is willing to make. What happens when the Iranians invariably fail to uphold their pledges and then turn away inspectors? They typically do. They’ve never allowed inspectors access to military sites believed to house important parts of the nuclear weapons program.

And Trump’s decision to forgo military operations to achieve his aims means there is no mechanism to enforce any of the already feeble provisions Vance is promoting.

If Trump has already put aside force because he reckoned the cost for winning his objective was too dear, what reason does Iran have to fear that he’d return to tactics he discredited by abandoning them for negotiations after he failed to secure his aims through war?

The Iranians have the upper hand, and not because of any preternatural ability to negotiate for which they’re often, wrongly, credited. The plain truth is that what won’t be won by force cannot be taken through negotiations.

If Trump doesn’t get Iran right, there will be no time left for absolution or apologies. If he loses this war, generations of Americans will pay the price for a defeat that the 47th president of the United States brought on himself.

And future historians of the period are unlikely to have any clearer understanding of why than we do now.

How to Understand the Memorandum of Undoing

It took less than four months for a war of absolute demands to collapse into an agreement of postponed decisions. During the conflict, President Trump declared that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and later warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” By June 17, the U.S. and Iran had signed an interim memorandum declaring an immediate and permanent end to military operations while opening a sixty-day window to negotiate a final agreement. The sixty-day limit governs the initial negotiation period, not the duration of the ceasefire.

The U.S. President signed it at Versailles, of all places, hosted by the French President he had mocked throughout the war, down to the jab that his wife “treats him extremely badly.” That Macron hosted him anyway tells you how eager Europe was to contain the conflict.

But nothing sat as strangely as the Vice President’s language. He wanted Iran to “behave like a normal country,” to rejoin the international community, to become, he hoped, “successful.” Touching language, if the same administration had not, weeks earlier, warned California law enforcement of unverified reporting that Iran had allegedly aspired to attack the state using drones, and if Iran had not, before the June 2025 U.S. strikes, messaged the President threatening “sleeper-cell terror inside the U.S.” if he attacked. Iran went, in the space of a season, from terror sponsor to fixer-upper.

Read against the administration’s own stated aims, the memorandum is a catalog of undoings. The MOU is, in the most literal sense, a Memorandum of Undoing: nearly everything the administration said the war was for. Every maximal promise the war made, the memorandum either narrowed, deferred, or abandoned, with the Vice President now granting that Iran, “like any state,” retains a right to self-defense and need not give up the missile capability the President had vowed to raze. A Memorandum of Undoing is, after all, the easiest kind of document to undo. And it came undone in pieces:

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06/19 Links Pt2: Mamdani calls AIPAC ‘monsters’; The Guardian’s ‘Nazification’ of Jews; Sally Rooney blames Israel and US for rise of fascism in Europe

From Ian:

The Guardian’s ‘Nazification’ of Jews

It ran under the headline: “From Goop to ‘Gwynocide’: why is Gwyneth Paltrow starring in a luxury Israeli real estate ad?” Beneath it appeared the following summary: “Paltrow went viral this week for her commercial for 51 Park – a building just miles from where Palestinians are being killed and displaced.”

Mahdawi's accusation of Paltrow's putative complicity in a (non-existent) genocide is based entirely on the fact that the commercial is for a building located "just miles" from where Palestinians are being killed:

“While the situation in the West Bank is terrible, it’s even worse in Gaza – which is only 50 or so miles away from the luxury pilates room at 51 Park,” she writes.

So, the logic would suggest, not only are all Israelis, even those living within pre-67 boundaries, guilty or complicit in genocide, but diaspora Jews – and, presumably, non-Jews – who visit, invest, or in any way associate with the state, within any borders, are genocidaire-adjacent.

Then, the Guardian columnist places an even large target on Israelis and Jews by evoking the Nazi analogy:

"Newborn babies are being gnawed on by rats in filthy camps in Gaza, while Paltrow shows off the wine rooms of a luxury tower development down the road,” Mahdawi writes. “It is some real The Zone of Interest stuff.”

The Zone of Interest is a film focusing on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who lived with their children in a home in the "Zone of Interest" next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

So, for at least the fifth time since October 7, 2023, Guardian editors have promoted one of the most morally grotesque and cruel forms of antisemitism – the attempted “Nazification” of Jews.

"There is a sadistic triumphalism in charging Jews with genocide", wrote Howard Jacobson, "as though those making it feel they have their man at last". The sadism, he added, "resides, specifically, in attacking Jews where their memories of pain are keenest...by making them now the torturer and not the tortured, their assailants wrest their anguish from them, not only stealing their past but trampling on it."

Of course, the only party in the war that is guilty of genocide is Hamas, whose desire to rid the world of the Jewish state is codified in its founding charter, and who live-streamed to the world on October 7 what barbarism inspired by Nazi-like hatred of Jews looks like.

Turning again to Jacobson, who wrote that "morality changed on 7 October. Black became white, evil good, ugliness, beauty, the victim the culprit" and that "it was Hamas’s genius to have seen something to its advantage in the declining status of the Jews in the conscience of the west.” It realised, he added, "how the drip, drip, drip of unremitting revilement in the western media and on western campuses had worn away their humanity".

It is undoubtedly true that, both before and after October 7, no mainstream British outlet has done more to inspire the "revilement" of Jews than the Guardian.

The useful idiocy of Zack Polanski

To push back, he’s doubled and tripled down on his AsAJew status. He can barely utter a sentence without spitting out ‘the genocide’. He has constantly demanded that the UK should end arms sales to Israel and investigate the country for war crimes. He has backed sporting and cultural boycotts of Israeli football teams and supported the monitoring of UK-Israeli dual nationals who served in the IDF, saying they could be responsible for war crimes.

He didn’t even speak out against the Green party’s ‘Zionism is racism’ motion, even though it would mean labelling his own family – most of whom are Zionists and a few of whom made Aliyah – racists.

But still it isn’t enough for those who are really in control. Et tu, Mothin Ali? Because, yes, it is Zack’s trusty deputy who is on manoeuvres. Who could have guessed?

According to an article in the Spectator, Mothin is backing a new, powerful Greens affiliate called the Global Majority Greens (GMG), which has accused Polanski and other senior Greens in a new report of creating a “hierarchy of racism” with allegations of antisemitism taken more seriously than other complaints.

The report, which will be presented at the Green Party AGM later this month, accuses Zack of only “performing anti-racism” and condemns a “serious governance problem inseparable from institutional racism”. The problem is that too many Muslim members have been suspended for antisemitism. Apparently, that is racist because it “demonises migrants and Muslims”.

And even though Zack has really done everything he possibly could to disassociate himself from his own previous Zionism, it is not enough. It never would be. Because Zionism isn’t the problem.

It was inevitable that the Red/Green/Islamist alliance that now makes up the Greens would eventually break up. Their agendas are too separate, even if they can agree on hating Israel and the need for revolution. This glue won’t hold forever, as Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party found when the far left fell out with conservative Islamists on the issue of trans rights.

Perhaps the Greens lasted just a little bit longer because they are an older, more established party; but the cracks are emerging.

So the battle for the Greens is on. Now we will see whether the party’s newfound popularity is genuinely the Zack effect (and I don’t doubt that some of it is) and how much it is sheer entryism from the hard left and Islamists.

I imagine that Zack will fight this, but he is already bloodied by the growing body of scandals surrounding him. How much longer can he last?

You do have to wonder how he really thought that a Jewish man with a history of Zionism could survive as leader of a party obsessed with Israel. Idiot.

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06/19 Links Pt1: 4 IDF soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah attack; Melanie Phillips: Trump’s surrender; ‘Unconditional support’ for Israel doesn’t exist; Vance Drops the Pretense; How Doha captured the ICC

From Ian:

Melanie Phillip: Trump’s surrender

Trump signed the agreement because he found himself in a trap from which all escape options were bad. But that was because he had refused to accept Israel’s assessment that the Tehran regime needed to be brought down and that it would take a year of attrition to do so.

Having embarked on a different, shorter war, he then proceeded to undermine Israel’s carefully thought-out plan for victory, calling off its most decisive attacks at the last moment.

Looking for an off-ramp from the war to avoid political or economic collapse is rational, if regrettable. Dressing up a tactical retreat as victory to obscure the disaster caused by Trump’s own incompetence is also rational, if deplorable.

But the enormity of his capitulation to Iran, the ludicrous absurdity of his remarks and the venom against his great ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggest that something else is at work here.

It was always assumed that Trump would be careful never to go down in history as a second Barack Obama, replicating the former president’s disastrous 2015 Iran deal; nor would he ever tolerate being thought of as a sucker.

But what if Trump’s chronic narcissism makes him unable to see that’s what he’s actually become? We know from long experience that he often frames events to correspond with what he wants them to be, rather than what they actually are. What if, accordingly, he really has turned surrender into victory against Iran in his mind? What if he really believes that America has won this war?

There are possibly even darker explanations for this debacle. There are the financial connections between Iran’s ally Qatar and people in the Trump administration—not to mention the $1 trillion that Qatar has now pledged to invest in the United States, in addition to the vast sums with which it has already bought up America.

And in Tablet last April, Lee Smith suggested that the Iranian regime’s “echo chamber” influence operation in Washington, D.C., to sell Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal was actively working once again during the current war to safeguard Iran’s nuclear program. This time, however, it had a man on the inside of the Trump administration: Vice President JD Vance.

Israel now faces a hideous choice between abandoning its military defense against Hezbollah’s unceasing attacks—another Israeli soldier was killed in Lebanon this week, and several others were injured—or risking the vindictive wrath of Trump.

The longtime opponents of this war may be gloating, but America’s national interest demanded—and still demands—that the Iranian regime be neutralized.

Iran’s war against the West hasn’t ended. Trump’s surrender has produced a crisis not just for Israel but America as well.

Rowan Dean: Peace offering

Last week the world looked on in horror at the footage of a beautiful young 21-year-old girl, Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, being callously tossed to her death at a Brazilian bungee jump, as the safety rope lay uselessly unattached to one side. To add to the tragedy, it has also been reported that Maria was still alive when a nurse got to her, but she died shortly afterwards.

It’s hard not to draw a comparison with the other horror show this week, as President Donald Trump and his sidekick J.D. Vance announced a so-called ‘peace deal’ with Iran, or rather a ‘memorandum of understanding’, that appears to throw Israeli Prime Minister and the security of Israel off a cliff, with no safety rope.

This betrayal of Israel comes as a profound shock to all those who supported Mr Trump’s war against Iran not only in the hope that it would defang the world’s most evil regime, but would also provide the impetus for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their murderous and oppressive government.

This magazine believes it was a mistake for the Americans to halt the bombing campaign at the very point where the Iranian regime was at its most vulnerable. It is impossible to know what may have been, but any student of military history knows that when you are winning against a bloodthirsty foe, the wisest course of action is to finish off your enemy when they are down. Giving them the opportunity to re-build, re-organise and ultimately fight another day is a very grave error.

‘Unconditional support’ for Israel doesn’t exist

It has become axiomatic, on both the Left and the Right, to claim that America has always given Israel “unconditional support.” Tucker Carlson has said as much. So has Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), among many, many others.

But there’s a problem with this narrative: It’s not true. And one only needs to read a history book to find out why.

As historians such as Walter Russell Mead have documented, America has long had a special relationship with Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. America has become, over time, Israel’s greatest ally.

But it is historically inaccurate to portray that support as either unwavering or one-sided.

The United States was the first nation to recognize the State of Israel. President Harry Truman, defying many of his advisers, supported U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, which called to create two states out of British-ruled Mandate Palestine.

Zionist leaders in pre-state Israel supported Resolution 181, although it fell far short of the territories promised to them after World War I. By contrast, Arab states rejected the proposal and chose war instead.

In Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, five Arab armies and multiple militias, some led by former Nazi officers and collaborators, massed to destroy the fledgling Jewish state.

Israel won by the skin of its teeth, losing as much as 1% of its population. Israelis fought and bled for their freedom. And they did so on their own.

Many of those who fought and died were Holocaust survivors, some fresh off the boats from Displaced Persons camps in Europe.

They did not use American arms. The Israelis relied on a hodgepodge of weapons, many from the Czech Republic.

In fact, the U.S. government instituted an arms embargo and prosecuted those who violated it. By its very nature, the arms embargo favored the Arab states, who had an overwhelming numerical advantage.

Transjordan, known today as Jordan, even fielded British-led and trained troops, meaning that, mere years after World War II, some British officers were quite literally on the same side as the Nazi officers who were advising Syria and other Arab nations.

Opposition to the world’s sole Jewish state can make for strange bedfellows.

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Israeli flag at Kalamazoo Pride event called "harmful" by organizers

On June 6, a Pride festival was held in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A Jewish couple volunteered at the beer tent. Michelle Zukowski-Serlin, 64, of Comstock Township, wore a dress that featured the Star of David, while her husband, Troy Zukowski-Serlin, 62, wore a hat with the Israeli flag on it.

Days later, OutFront Kalamazoo issued a statement calling the Israeli flag a "harmful symbol" and said it had received complaints from "community members who were hurt, distressed, or angered by the presence of Israeli flags." It announced that it would "begin actively reviewing our policies and procedures to better address situations where political symbolism may create an unsafe or exclusionary environment."

How, exactly, does an Israeli flag create an unsafe or exclusionary environment? Were the Zionists harassing Palestinians? Did they insist that keffiyehs be banned for their association with terror attacks? They did neither. The only exclusionary action in this incident came from the people who want the Jews to hide away part of their self-image, and OutFront calling the Israeli flag "exclusionary" inverts the truth.

To see this clearly,  one can imagine the festival included a large number of vegetarians and vegans, and a food booth selling hot dogs. Many vegetarians are offended by the sight and smell of meat, and a good number of animal rights activists consider slaughterhouses to be literal sites of genocide. They are truly hurt by the presence of people selling and eating animal products. The pain is real.

Do they have the right to demand that the booths be banned?

Of course not. It is not a vegan festival. It is a Pride festival, and anyone who wants to celebrate pride should be welcome, because this is not a place for disunity. 

So what makes the Israeli flag different from the hot dogs? If anything the hot dogs are worse, because they are not mere symbols of harm — they are the actual remains of dead animals.

Once anyone who is offended holds a veto over the speech, clothing, or conduct of others, it does not take long for people to feign hurt to clear the space of those they dislike, and to recruit like-minded others to complain alongside them. The organizers said there were over a hundred complaints about the couple's clothing, yet Michelle reported seeing very little hostility in person. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether a hundred complaints were organized in minutes on some anti-Israel WhatsApp group. A harm standard rewards exactly that, because it turns the size of the mob into the measure of the harm.

This is a freedom-of-expression issue, and no one is talking about it. That it can happen at all in America is the real problem, not some arbitrary rule about harmful symbols.

So what kind of policy could OutFront Kalamazoo write that would be ethical, consistent, and protective of all its attendees? The standard cannot be the harm someone feels, because feelings are unfalsifiable and the most easily organized feeling wins. 

The standard has to be conduct of the attendees, not their feelings. Telling people to leave, to change their clothing, to remove their signs is exclusionary conduct. 

The exception is when the speech or symbols themselves are exclusionary. A sign saying "Support Palestine" is fine, one that says "Down with Zionism" is not. A swastika or a Klan hood are, by their nature, exclusionary because they say that they do not want Jews or Blacks to be there, by their leaders' own admission. Those declare that the space is not shared. A symbol that merely expresses who its bearer is, and asks nothing of anyone else, is the festival working as intended. The hot dog targets no one. The keffiyeh targets no one. The Israeli flag targets no one. Each is a person saying "I am here as myself," which is the entire purpose of a Pride festival.

By that rule the vegan keeps his convictions and the carnivore keeps his booth. By that same rule Michelle and Troy belonged at that beer tent, and the people who wanted them gone were the only ones in Kalamazoo actually breaking the rule.

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

 

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06/18 Links Pt2: Jewish leaders mark America’s 250th with open letter; The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism; Hillary Clinton: No alternative to Trump’s Gaza plan

From Ian:

‘The single best diaspora experience’: Jewish leaders mark America’s 250th with open letter

As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, American Jewish leaders have signed an open letter expressing gratitude to a nation “unlike so many others through Jewish history [that] did not merely tolerate Jewish life, but made possible its flourishing,” while also highlighting Jewish contributions to the country’s founding.

“From the earliest days of the American experiment, Jews were drawn to the promise of a nation founded not on bloodline, monarchy, or established religion, but on liberty, covenant, and the dignity of the individual,” the letter reads. “Having known the weight of persecution and exclusion, Jews recognized in America’s founding ideals something rare in human history: the possibility of belonging without surrendering our identity.”

The letter continues, “Here, Jewish immigrants arrived with little and built lives of dignity. Here, Jewish communities established synagogues, schools, charities, businesses, and institutions of civic life. Here, Jews rose not because success was guaranteed, but because freedom made striving possible.”

The letter was spearheaded by David Bernstein, CEO of the North American Values Institute, and Phil Darivoff, chairman emeritus of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, to increase American Jewish involvement in America 250 celebrations.

“America 250 is an opportunity to express gratitude to America, the country that’s been the single best diaspora experience that Jews have ever had,” Bernstein told Jewish Insider. “American Jews have been an integral part of this country and its story from the very beginning and we want to remind our fellow Americans of that.”

“It’s also an opportunity to ensure that America lives up to its founding ideal,” continued Bernstein. He asserted that America’s core civic values, such as freedom of conscience and the rule of law, “are the best defense against antisemitism,” which reached historic levels in America following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.

“It’s incumbent on the American Jewish community to double down on those values, both because they protect us and because they allow America to live up to its highest potential,” said Bernstein.

The letter also acknowledges America’s shortcomings, noting, “America has not always lived up to its own ideals. Its history is marked by acts and periods of injustice, exclusion and failures that wounded many communities, including at times our own.”

It concludes with a call to action for American Jews.

Adam Louis-Klein: The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state, just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an endless trial of elimination.

Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in intent, demanding the erasure of a national group that is protected under international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups, including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.

The left’s internationalism—once the calling card of progress—has hardened into hostility to Israel, across academia, NGOs, mainstream-media outlets, and the United Nations. The constant accusations that circulate across these networks of authority are not normal critiques of a state, but claims that cast Israel as the exemplar of the three great sins of the postwar international order—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—a “rogue state” said to violate the very fabric of the world.

The progressive case against anti-Zionism recognizes the freedom of Israelis to choose the nature of the society they want to live under. It recognizes that Israel may be becoming more like other Middle Eastern countries—that its increased religiosity in recent years is partially driven by the Mizrahi segment of its population, those who were expelled from other countries in the region. And it seeks to extend to Israel the same allowance that progressives extend to other nations in the region, an acknowledgment that societies can differ from secular Western ideals.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement and the planting of settlements in the West Bank, changes within Israeli society have alienated many American Jews, as well as secular, left-wing Israelis. Religiosity and nationalism have fused, displacing cosmopolitanism. The language of leftist universalism now seems ever more remote from Israel’s reality.

But the left must adhere to its own standards, irrespective of changes within Israel. It needs to acknowledge the harms caused by anti-Zionism—the forced exodus of Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East, the cultural erasure of Jews under the Soviet Union, and the anti-Jewish violence and purging happening in the West today. And it needs to address them.

The brokenness that anti-Zionism sees in the world, as a vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel—the system that Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, claimed is “the enemy of humanity”—is a brokenness that anti-Zionism brings into the world. The oppressive system is anti-Zionism itself. It’s a brokenness that, it just so happens, Jewish tradition tasks the Jewish people—and all of humanity—to repair.

Jewish Statehood and American Tribal Law

The United States pursued a one-state solution to the American-Indian conflict between 1887 and 1934. Treaty promises were ignored. Tribal governments were dismissed. Territorial boundaries were erased. Native peoples were no longer classified as members of foreign nations and instead given allotments of land to build private farms and ranches. Many of their children were placed in federal boarding schools where they were taught to assimilate into the culture of the newly unified nation. Known by historians as the Allotment Era in U.S.-Native American relations, these assimilationist policies were championed in part by idealistic reformers who believed that Indian poverty would be alleviated when native peoples abandoned tribal ways for the universalist principles of American citizenship. Their intention was good; their one-state experiment, a tragedy.

The project of “civilizing” native children in boarding schools became notoriously abusive. Many allotted lands proved unfit for small-scale agriculture while others required costly equipment most families could not afford. Thousands of impoverished Indians were left with no choice but to sell their property or lose it through foreclosure. Tribal landholdings plummeted from nearly 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres by the time the allotment policy was repealed in 1934. It was a loss whose “devastation and trauma to tribal communities…cannot be overstated,” to quote the textbook Mastering Native American Law.

It was into this climate of anti-tribal reform, now largely forgotten, that Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State first entered the public debate in the United States. Various reform rabbis and Jewish intellectuals, who had absorbed the anti-tribal zeitgeist, opposed Herzl’s “tribal” assumptions. Prominent among them was the distinguished philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen who in 1919 published an influential essay in The New Republic entitled “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?”

Cohen argued that Zionism and Americanism are irreconcilable. “A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily mean a state founded on a peculiar religion, a tribal religion, and a mystic belief in a peculiar soil,” he wrote, “whereas liberal America has traditionally stood for separation of Church and State, the free mixing of races, and the fact that men can change their habitation and language and still advance the process of civilization.” When Cohen reissued the essay in his 1945 book The Faith of a Liberal, he likened Zionism to Nazi Aryanism, declaring that “tribalism is a creed that leads to grief and massacre.”

Against Herzl, Cohen insisted that “the Jewish problem is one that must be settled in each country separately” through assimilation and individual freedom. He maintained that as the world’s nations became ever more liberal, antisemitism would wither away. Though global Jewry’s faith in such promises mostly evaporated after the traumas of the Holocaust and the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, Cohen’s portrayal of Zionism as inherently illiberal and backward nevertheless reverberated down the decades, giving birth in our time to a school of anti-Israel thinkers whom this paper calls anti-tribalists.

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06/18 Links Pt1: The Ceasefire Neither Ends nor Eases the Iranian Threat; Florida man planned mass shooting at AIPAC office; Germany foiled Hamas Oct. 7 anniversary plot

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Hamas weaponized our desire for quiet; now Israel must learn it can't afford innocence

The newly exposed Hamas files have forced Israel to confront one of the most painful truths of the October 7 massacre: Hamas caught Israel off guard by studying it, feeding it the signals it wanted to see, and turning its wish for quiet into part of the battlefield.

Yonah Jeremy Bob’s exclusive report in The Jerusalem Post, based on documents provided by the Military Intelligence Directorate to the Meir Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Research Institute, shows a calculated deception effort that began long before the massacre.

A Hamas document from September 2022 addressed the need to build a “strategic deception” plan for a surprise attack. Another, from September 25, 2023, shortly before the invasion, described calibrated border pressure, mediated demands, and the use of Jewish festivals as tactical opportunities.

That is the horror of these documents. They show planning, patience, and confidence.

Hamas understood that Israel had come to see Gaza through a management doctrine: More work permits. More Qatari money. More indirect messages through mediators. More rounds in which Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired, and Hamas sat on the sidelines.

Quiet became evidence. Restraint became analysis. Economic distress became deterrence.

The documents suggest Hamas understood all of this and weaponized it. This deepens Israel’s self-indictment. A serious country expects enemies to lie. Terrorist organizations deceive. Intelligence exists because hostile actors conceal intentions, simulate routine, and exploit assumptions.

The question is why so many warnings, patterns, drills, border incidents, and signals were forced into a theory that said Hamas wanted calm more than war.

The answer begins with the old “conceptzia,” the preconceived notion that the enemy is deterred because our logic says he should be.

Israel has known this failure before. In 1973, it believed Egypt and Syria would refrain from launching war under conditions Israel considered irrational.

In 2023, it believed Hamas would prioritize its rule, its money, and its economic arrangements over a catastrophic confrontation. Hamas read that arrogance and built a trap around it.

The Saudi-normalization context makes the lesson wider. Hamas saw a regional order forming that could push the Palestinian issue aside and strengthen Israel’s place in the Middle East. It chose mass violence to blow up diplomacy.

Mark Levin: The US-Iran MoU is a dangerous gamble

The nuclear issue
Item 8 states that Iran “reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons” and that the fate of enriched uranium and other nuclear-related issues will be resolved later.

Shouldn’t that have been the first issue addressed?

The agreement offers relief and concessions immediately, while postponing the most critical details about permanently dismantling Iran’s nuclear program and eliminating its enriched uranium stockpiles.

Now there is talk of merely degrading the uranium. At best, this provision amounts to little more than a slogan.

Item 9 prevents us from strengthening our regional military posture or imposing new sanctions while negotiations continue, surrendering even more leverage.

Item 10 immediately grants waivers for Iranian crude oil exports, petroleum products, banking, insurance and transportation services.

In other words, the Iranian regime is back in business before any final agreement is reached. Billions of dollars will begin flowing into Tehran immediately.

Item 11 releases frozen Iranian assets and restricted funds.

Again, billions more flow directly to the regime before it has demonstrated any meaningful change in behavior.

What’s missing
Notably absent from the agreement are several critical issues.

First, there is not a word about Iran’s ballistic missile program, the regime’s most destructive conventional weapon and one capable of killing tens of thousands of people. This omission is a grave concession.

Second, there is nothing addressing Iran’s support for terrorism and terrorist organizations. I have no illusion that Tehran’s sponsorship of terrorism will end under this arrangement.

Third, there is no mention of the Iranian people, whom we once promised to support. They appear to have been abandoned.

Fourth, there is no discussion of reparations owed by the regime to the United States, Israel or Arab states for the devastation caused by its missile attacks.

During the next 60 days, this MoU requires serious changes—if not outright abandonment.

Bret Stephens: The Ceasefire Neither Ends nor Eases the Iranian Threat

Iran's military leaders have greeted the ceasefire agreement with President Trump as a triumph, crowing that "through the imposition of their divine and iron will" they had "humiliated American and Zionist enemies."

Today, Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hizbullah, Hamas and the Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is worthless. The leadership rules an unhappy population that would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow.

Americans who supported the war believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests. This ceasefire neither ends nor eases that threat. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran - the naval blockade of its ports - before there's any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office.

Trump's Iran Deal Isn't Perfect. It Doesn't Need to Be.

Notions that the U.S. should have held out for more upfront nuclear concessions from Iran gets things backward. The U.S. and the world need shipping to resume through the Strait of Hormuz. They do not need a nuclear agreement with Iran, and Mr. Trump should not make negotiating one a priority in his postwar Iran policy.

For all the operational capability demonstrated by the U.S. military over the course of this conflict, there is no painting the preliminary outcome as a resounding American victory. Food and energy costs have spiked; U.S. military resources have been depleted; America's alliances in the Middle East and Europe have suffered. Nor was the war a win for the Iranian regime, whose conventional military capability is diminished, economy crippled and leadership demolished.

These results obscure an important detail: the U.S. has significantly reduced the nuclear threat posed by Iran. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, Iran's nuclear program was advanced enough that it was capable of producing sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon within a matter of days, and a small arsenal's worth within just weeks.

Today, Iran's nuclear program is arguably the weakest it's been since the early 2000s. To produce a nuclear weapon, Iran would need to reconstitute its infrastructure, which is believed to have been largely destroyed, while facing the prospect of additional strikes as it tried to rebuild.

Much of the global economic pressure that has been building as a result of this war will dissipate once the Strait of Hormuz reopens, but Iran's economy will remain in tatters. Whatever agreement Washington and Tehran reach, an Iranian regime determined to dominate its region and control its people through force will be unfriendly to American interests and its regional partners.

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To hyphenate or not to hyphenate - is the wrong question

Earlier this week on my Substack I promised a follow-up on whether to write “anti-Zionism” or “antizionism.” The follow-up grew into something much larger.)

In the 1870s Wilhelm Marr needed a better word. “Jew-hatred” — Judenhass — named the thing too plainly, carried the stink of the mob and the medieval church, and marked its holder as a relic. So he reached for a clinical substitute built from Greek and Latin, founded a League of Antisemites, and gave the world “anti-Semitism.” It was the same hatred masquerading as a legitimate, even scientific position. Many Europeans could now profess anti-Semitism the way they might profess a position on tariffs, as the considered conclusion of a serious person rather than the reflex of a bigot.

A century later the heirs of that hatred needed the same favor in reverse. While the term never took hold in English speaking countries as anything but prejudice, the Holocaust had made “anti-Semitism” toxic, a prejudice a respectable person could not own in public. So the hatred required a new address, a category that sounded like a stance rather than a sickness.

It found one in opposition to the Jewish state.

“Anti-Zionism” arrived already dressed for the part. It named a real object, Zionism, and opposition to an object reads as politics, the proper business of citizens. The maneuver was Marr’s maneuver run a second time: take the same animus and move it into whatever vocabulary the age treats as legitimate. Marr fled religion for science. His heirs fled the post-war horror of “anti-semitism” for the safety of “politics.”

The move succeeded by construction rather than accident.

In the first decades after 1948, irrational hatred of Israel was understood, by the ordinary person and by the chancelleries alike, as the old hatred wearing a flag. The American Council for Judaism opposed Zionism on principle and remained marginal, a curiosity rather than a movement. When Arab spokesmen insisted they bore no grudge against Jews and quarreled only with Zionists, the disclaimer was received as the propaganda everyone knew it to be — the Arab League boycott of those years targeted Jewish-owned firms worldwide, not only Israeli ones. The line between a legitimate critic and an eliminationist was visible to the naked eye, and almost no one mistook one for the other.

Moscow started erasing that line. During the mid-1960s negotiations over the international convention against racial discrimination, the US and Israel tried to include antisemitism as something to be condemned; the Soviet Union refused to allow that unless Zionism was condemned alongside it, along with Naziism and apartheid. In the end, the ICERD condemned neither to avoid the conflict, but the seed was planted to separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism. After 1967 Moscow intensified the campaign, recasting Israel as the moral heir of the persecutor it had so recently escaped. The rhetoric matured into United Nations Resolution 3379 in 1975, which declared Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination, and which the General Assembly passed on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The resolution was repealed in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, but the association lived on. The equation migrated out of the Soviet bloc and into the academy and the human-rights NGO, where it shed its Cold War accent and acquired the idiom of decolonization. There the hatred completed its costume change: from a sickness one had to deny, to a politics one could defend, to a virtue one could parade.

That migration is the campaign whose half-success we now live inside. The modern anti-Zionist no longer denies the charge of hatred in the embarrassed tone of the 1950s Arab diplomat. He preempts it. Every article carries the disclaimer, every placard the mantra — “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” — repeated with a discipline that would impress any marketing department, and a growing share of the audience has come to believe it. The bolder ones complete the inversion the Soviets drafted and announce that Zionism is the true bigotry, that the Jews who insist on a state are the racists. The Big Lie method works. The line that once stood in plain view, between the man who criticizes Israel and the man who wants it gone, has been deliberately smudged until much of the public can no longer find it.

The question is, how do we restore that line?

There are three options. Each has a real advantage and a real cost, but they are not mutually exclusive.

The first is to call the hatred by its name and say plainly that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. The advantage is that it is true, and true at the root, because the thing that animates the obsessive hatred of the one Jewish state is the same thing that animated the obsessive hatred of the Jew next door for two thousand years. The cost is that the enemy has spent sixty years inoculating the public against exactly this sentence. He hears “that is antisemitic,” reaches for the prepared rebuttal, and the exchange collapses into a meta-argument about whether the accuser is weaponizing the term — which is itself the victory, since the oxygen meant to counter the hatred gets spent instead on the accusation.When a bigot denies his bigotry, the level of proof needed to refute him is quite high, and this ends up moving the argument into a distraction.

The second is to defend Zionism as the moral and legitimate thing it is, and to turn the enemy’s own word against him. This is my preference, because it concedes nothing. The whole force of “anti-Zionism” as a shelter depends on Zionism being a fair target, an ideology one may decently oppose; the moment Zionism is restored to what it is — the national liberation movement of an indigenous people returning home — opposition to it stands revealed as opposition to that people’s existence, which is the hatred under a thin coat. The cost is that the coat has been painted on for decades. “Zionist” has been so thoroughly poisoned that to defend Zionism is to fight uphill against a meaning the enemy has spent a half-century manufacturing. This battle is also hard. The battle cannot be abandoned, because to abandon it is to concede the enemy’s central premise that Zionism is the kind of thing a good person opposes.

Here my own definition of antisemitism does its sharpest work, because it locates Zionism where it belongs, inside Judaism rather than beside it. Zionism is an expression of Jewishness no less central than religion, culture, or descent — the longing for return is woven through the liturgy and the calendar millennia before it became a political program — and an attack on it is therefore an attack on an aspect of the Jewish whole. Most Jews today do not keep kosher, yet a campaign to ban shechita is recognized as antisemitic without difficulty, because the prevalence of a practice has never been the measure of whether hatred of it targets Jews. Zionism stands in the same relation to Jewish identity, and hostility to it is antisemitic on the same logic, whatever the proportion of Jews who happen to be Zionists or live in Israel.

The line falls between criticism that means to repair and criticism that means to wound. Honest critique aimed at improving the thing is legitimate for both — the agunah problem, the plight of the woman chained to a dead marriage, is a serious criticism of Jewish law made by people who love the law and want it mended, and criticism of an Israeli policy by people who want Israel to be better stands on exactly the same footing. Sharansky’s three Ds mark where repair ends and hatred begins: demonization, delegitimization, and the double standard. The agunah critic trips none of them. The campaign against the Jewish state trips all three.

The political costume fails the same test that exposes the welfare argument against shechita. When a European parliament bans Jewish ritual slaughter on grounds of animal welfare while leaving hunting untouched, the welfare concern is revealed as pretext by what it declines to prohibit; the principle is selectively applied to land precisely on the Jewish practice. That selectivity is Sharansky’s double standard in miniature, and anti-Zionism dressed as principled politics performs the identical sleight on a global scale. The professed concern for human rights, self-determination, and the rest finds its single uncompromising application in the one Jewish state, and the selectivity gives the game away. Any move that admits anti-Zionism as legitimate political expression is as disingenuous as crediting the hunting enthusiast with tender feelings for the welfare of animals.

The third way is to change the playing field. “Anti-Zionism” is now a loaded term because the haters have made Zionism a loaded term. This new fight intends to change the nomenclature to “antizionism,” closed and unhyphenated, as the scholars and activists now naming it have done, because the closed form makes it easier to show that what wears the mask of politics is hatred underneath. Anti-Zionism is indeed a hate movement but the haters who apply that term to themselves deny it; by calling it “antizionism” the haters cannot counter it because they don’t accept that term for themselves. The fighters against antizionism are able to create their own definition that can bring the stigma back to “anti-Zionism” since the words are pronounced the same.

This is where the lexical comparison to antisemitism is relevant. Using the older term “anti-Semitism” opened up accusers to the spurious charge that Arabs are Semites (or Jews are not Semites) and therefore they cannot be considered anti-Semites. It was an attempt to distract from the actual meaning of the word and unhyphenating it showed that it is its own word, unrelated to semitism. “Antizionism” does the same - it separates the word from Zionism itself and moves the argument away from endless discussions about the minutiae of the history of Zionism and into a new territory, where it is much more clearly a term of bigotry.

The cost of this move is that it implicitly concedes the pro-Zionism argument. Those who use “antizionism” are not defending Zionism, they are calling out a hate movement. Moreover, to name antizionism as its own distinct thing concedes, by the grammar of the move, that it might be something other than antisemitism — which may hand these modern antisemites a victory

This is why my own old instinct ran the other way. Years ago I coined “misoziony” — hate of Israel built from the Greek root for hatred — to point out that this is just as irrational as traditional antisemitism is. Misoziony is no more moral than racism or misogyny. The verdict is built in to its own body. The term never spread, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it was right: my blog was too small to mint vocabulary, the prefix means nothing to an English ear, and no one was sure how to pronounce it. The lesson is not that coinage fails but that naming is hard for reasons orthogonal to truth, and that the word which already owns the public’s stigma will always start the race far ahead of the word that must build its own. (”Israelophobia” falls at the same hurdle and one more, because the dominant emotion is hatred and not fear, so the word mislabels the thing at its root.)

Set the three side by side and you see that they all have pluses and minuses. Calling it antisemitism is the truth-claim, but it bounces when the targets deny it. Shifting to “antizionism” is the tactical entry, but it implicitly concedes the war over the morality of Zionism when it stands alone. The defense of Zionism alone is the most comprehensive and least possible of the three, an impractical one in today’s environment.

But it isn’t a menu where you must pick one. Each strategy has its place, depending on the audience and the medium.

I will continue to use the term “anti-Zionism” because I defend Zionism as much as I denounce anti-Zionists as antisemites. I refuse to concede that battle.

Others, like the ICSA and Movement Against Antizionism, see antizionism as its own pathology disconnected from Zionism. They are not wrong: Antizionists use Zionism as a bogeyman to direct their hate of Jewish national rights, and since these groups’ tactics are to go on the offensive, “antizionism” works well for them. Defending Zionism, for them, is a distraction from their missions.

My only disagreement is that the term “antizionism” may also implicitly cede the other argument, that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. By studying it or fighting it as its own phenomenon, it can be seen as admitting that antizionism is unrelated to the world’s oldest hate, not merely a new flavor. If we can agree that antizionism is in fact a straight line descendant of the entire catalog of other antisemitisms, then we are on the same page. This is not a question of tactics - it would be a distraction for these organizations to expand their missions to fighting antisemitism, and there are plenty of others who (claim to) do that. I just want to make sure that the new antisemites who claim to only hate a political movement are still, in the end, recognized as antisemites, across the board, from all of us fighting the good fight, even if that is not where the argument is made.

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

 

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