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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Handle Your Out-of-Control Ivy

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

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

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

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

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

Antisemitism is returning – and the world is silent, again

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

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

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

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

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

That illusion came at a heavy cost to the world.

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Mandel: So You Want To Be a Bundist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Murray: The rise and fall of Tariq Ramadan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The West’s fifth column

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Was Achieved in the War Against Iran?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategies to stop antizionist abuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Three Things the Consensus Gets Wrong About the Iran War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Mandel: Unfrozen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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04/06 Links Pt2: The Jewish Passion for Freedom and Human Rights Was Hijacked by the West; Why Israeli Youth Remain Positive during War

From Ian:

Gerald M. Steinberg: The Jewish Passion for Freedom and Human Rights Was Hijacked by the West

Freedom and human rights are universal values, and Jews have often been at the forefront of these struggles, playing central roles in the creation of the modern human rights movement, forged in the shadow of the Holocaust. They built strong institutions tasked with implementing these principles. But now these institutions and their leaders have betrayed the moral force behind their creation. They stand for and reinforce hate and demonization directed at Israel.

Rene Cassin, a Jewish jurist from France, was a principal drafter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Raphael Lemkin (who coined the term "genocide") was a principal author of the Genocide Convention.

Peter Benenson, a journalist from a prominent Jewish and Zionist family in Britain, founded Amnesty International, turning it into a political superpower. Robert L. Bernstein, the head of Random House publishers, built Helsinki Watch to report on Soviet compliance with the human rights components of the U.S.-Soviet detente known as the Helsinki Accords. The organization expanded into Human Rights Watch. Bernard Kouchner, a French Jew, helped found Doctors Without Borders.

When the founders of all three institutions retired, their legacy and moral principles were abandoned. The new leaders were anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israel ideologues for whom the rhetoric of human rights was a convenient political weapon. They went from false claims against Israel of "war crimes" to the poisonous accusation of "genocide" - a heinous form of Holocaust inversion. In 2009, Bernstein began to denounce the organization he created - Human Rights Watch - for turning Israel into a pariah state.

The hostile takeover of the principles of freedom and human rights, and the institutions that claim to embody them, has done tremendous damage, not only to the Jewish people but also to the moral values themselves.

A Jew Among Jews By Abe Greenwald

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During Passover, the Free Press published a beautiful piece by Olivia Reingold titled “I Am an October 8 Jew.” In it, she describes how, after October 7, she began to reclaim the Jewish heritage she had all but abandoned as a child. Eventually, Reingold would find herself moved to tears during a recent Shabbat service, “a day that used to mean nothing to me, except more time to scroll online or work.”

I can’t say that I’m an October 8 Jew, as I was devoted to the cause well before then. But something about my Judaism has also changed since October 7.

I’ve long been a passionate Zionist, and I’ve felt that I owe everything to God. While I am a devoted believer, however, I’m a very negligent observer. Having come fully to embrace my Judaism only in adulthood, I’ve done slightly more than the bare minimum to maintain a personal sense of Jewish tradition.

Beginning a few decades ago, I went about kosher eating in my own way (and I’ve got my biblical justifications for it). I wrap tefillin in phases, the way others might go to the gym, slack off, and then resume. I pore over the Hebrew Bible regularly but in no regimented fashion. I tread lightly and humbly into the Talmud.

All of which is to say, I have cobbled together my own version of observance and continue to fine-tune it. Many Jews do the same.

Judaism, as I came to it, was about my relationship with my God, my place in history, and my inheritance. A lot of “my” was involved in this, but somehow “my people” barely came up.

October 7 changed me in this important respect. Before that day, I had never felt much of an ongoing obligation to my fellow Jews around the world. Of course, whenever I heard news of threatened or assaulted Jews, the bonds of history and faith would take hold. But they would once again recede. I didn’t think a great deal about how my actions or words affected the Jews of Australia, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

Betrayal of the Kurds shows why Jews depend on Israel

This is why Jews need the state of Israel. It is a lesson delivered by the Holocaust and by every atrocity and injustice meted out to the powerless ever since. Israel must hold. And its situation is precarious. It is tiny and vastly outnumbered by its enemies. Around 15km wide at its narrowest point, the country has no strategic depth, nowhere for it to retreat to in the event of a military defeat.

So Israel must fight to survive. It can never rest or become complacent. It must be powerful.

But it must also be smart. Tactical brilliance must be accompanied by the kind of strategic and political foresight that has been unforgivably absent for far too long.

And central to this is finding an accommodation, not just with Iran – when the pathologically murderous Islamic Republic is finally gone – but with another of the world’s stateless people: the Palestinians. Right now, there is no leadership – on either side – to make this possible. But Israel cannot abandon peace, not just because it is a moral imperative, but because it is a strategic one.

It is here that my mind returns to a line from, of all things, the TV series The Wire. Gang leader Avon Barksdale is standing by the hospital bed of a comatose friend, talking to his nephew D’Angelo Barksdale about the inescapable logic of “the game” – the brutal ​​system in which they all live. “The thing is, you only gotta fuck up once. Be a little slow, be a little late, just once,” he says. “And how you ain’t gon’ never be slow? Never be late?”

From Rojava to Baltimore to Gaza and Tehran the point is the same: to survive in “the game” – be it drug dealing or the far more brutal world of geopolitics – being strong is unignorably necessary. But it is not sufficient. Avon knows that his only future is jail or death.

Thankfully, Israel’s options are broader. But it must internalise Avon’s words – because no one wins every war forever. At some point, you will be slow, you will be late. You must defeat your enemies. But you must also make peace with them – or you will never find peace yourself.

US Court of Appeals affirms $655.5 million judgement against PLO, Palestinian Authority

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has reinstated a $655.5 million judgement against the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority for supporting terrorist attacks and making payments to the perpetrators.

In a March 30 decision, the three-judge panel reversed its previous decision to throw out the case following a 2025 Supreme Court decision in a similar suit and the passage of a 2019 federal law designed to enable the victims of terrorism to pursue civil court cases against the perpetrators.

The plaintiffs in the case, Waldman v. Palestine Liberation Org, are a group of U.S. citizens injured during terrorist attacks in Israel or the estates and survivors of victims killed in those attacks.

In 2004, they filed suit against the PLO and PA under the Anti-Terrorism Act. After a seven-week trial, a jury returned a verdict in their favor, and the district court judge entered a judgement against the Palestinian organizations for nearly $656 million.

In the succeeding two decades, the plaintiffs have largely been stymied on appeal, with the PA and PLO successfully arguing that the courts lacked jurisdiction.

In 2025, the Supreme Court decided in Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization to reverse and remand the 2nd Circuit’s most recent decision to toss out the Waldman case and clarified the jurisdictional question.

The 2nd Circuit’s new decision granted the plaintiffs’ motion to affirm the district court’s original judgement in light of the Supreme Court decision.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry welcomed the ruling on Monday.

“A major step in holding the Palestinian authority accountable for its long-lasting terror support—financially and legally,” it stated.

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04/06 Links Pt1: Myths of the Iran War; 5 Men Now Running Iran; Iran rejects Pakistan-mediated truce deal; Russia provided Iran with list of Israeli energy targets

From Ian:

Myths of the Iran War

One myth related to the war is that if enriched uranium remains in Iran, the war has failed. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran possesses 441 kg. of uranium enriched up to 60%. Israel and the U.S. never intended to deploy thousands of troops deep inside Iran to seize nuclear facilities. Absent a comprehensive agreement to remove the uranium as part of a deal, the approach is to monitor suspected sites and, if necessary, act against them from the air.

In any case, Iran's enrichment facilities have been completely disabled, and it is doubtful they can be restored to operation anytime soon. Moreover, Iran has yet to achieve a breakthrough that would allow it to build an actual weapon system. Over the past year, many of the senior scientists involved in these efforts have been killed. Without the ability to develop a weapon, the uranium Iran possesses has no practical significance.

The claim that Trump was misled by Israel reflects a misunderstanding of U.S. decision-making culture. American presidents formulate policy based solely on their country's interests. The decisive consideration guiding the White House is what serves the American people. The notion that a U.S. president makes critical national security decisions based on assessments presented by Israeli leaders or Mossad officials runs counter to longstanding American practice.

Another myth is that it is possible to decisively defeat Hamas, Iran, Hizbullah or the Houthis once and for all. There is no way to guarantee that even a clear military defeat will end an adversary's motivation to pursue its objectives, recognizing that capabilities can be rebuilt. Phrases such as "once and for all" amount to speculation.

Even after Israel's decisive victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, when its military defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, within a few years, Egypt launched the War of Attrition and in 1973, together with Syria, carried out a large-scale surprise attack against Israel. So victories may have an expiration date. As we repeated at the Passover Seder, in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us.

Winners and Losers in the Iran War

Iran, Israel, and the U.S. have not achieved the goals they set for themselves in their current war. On the Iranian side, the late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had hoped that by adopting the "Samson option," he would provoke a brief regional war with limited damage to his Islamic Republic because he would step in and offer another of his "heroic flexibility" tricks before things got out of hand. His "heroic flexibility" was designed to come after the first wave of attacks by Israeli and American bombers targeting part of Iran's military infrastructure.

However, as he wasn't there to do his part, Israel and the U.S. had to go for a second wave of bombings and then a third - this time targeting Iran's industrial infrastructure on a scale not known since World War II. Its weapons industry has been decimated, and its vast nuclear project put back by years if not decades.

Worse still, Iran's unprovoked ballistic missile and drone attacks on neighboring countries in no way involved in this war may have done lasting damage to the largely tolerant, not to say benevolent, attitude that many of them had of Iran even under the mullahs.

The outside world has been divided between those who, because they hate Trump or Netanyahu or even America and Israel as a whole, designate the mullahs as victors, and those who, translating their hatred of the Iranian regime into a wish for Iran's destruction as a nation-state, declare Trump and Netanyahu as winners.

Anti-U.S. and anti-Israel circles exaggerate the effect of Tehran's tactic of inflicting economic pain on the world by playing fast and loose with oil exports via the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting overall trade in a chunk of the region. That in turn intensifies the effects of the mullahs' mischief-making.

The U.S. and Israel may lose the Iranian people as one of the few nations known for their positive view of both countries. The theme of "you came and destroyed our industrial, economic and scientific infrastructure, but left our torturers in place" is gaining currency among Iranians both at home and abroad.

There is little doubt that although the Khomeinist regime is badly mauled, the biggest loser in this war will be the Iranian people. The war has destroyed thousands of jobs in Iran. A people facing mass unemployment and shortages of food, water and medicine would not be immediately ready for another attempt at regime change.

Telegraph Editorial: Iran Is Not a War of Choice

The U.S. and its enemies have learned from the last two decades that nuclear deterrence works. The ability of the West to intervene in the defense of Ukraine has been hampered by the existence of Russia's nuclear arsenal.

North Korea watched Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi disassemble his nuclear and chemical weapons programs in 2003, subsequently allowing NATO aircraft to topple his regime as the people he had tormented rose up against him. North Korean state media stated that "powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasured sword for frustrating outsiders' aggression."

This same logic has underlaid Israel's approach to regional proliferation for decades. The Begin doctrine laid out after Israel's 1981 airstrike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor set out precisely why Israel would strike the al-Kibar site in Syria in 2007; it also explained why it struck Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025.

By achieving the full suite of capabilities necessary for a functioning nuclear deterrent - capabilities that it seemed well on the road to attaining - the Iranian regime hoped to build a nuclear shield. A regime built on a fundamentalist belief system devoted to the destruction of the West was not pursuing these weapons as a pathway to moderation.

Instead, a nation sponsoring terrorist militias, launching drone and missile strikes at its neighbors, attempting to hold the global economy to ransom by shutting the flow of trade through the Strait of Hormuz, was seeking to become effectively untouchable militarily.

While the 2025 airstrikes set back Tehran's nuclear program, it was clear early this year that efforts to rebuild its capabilities were well underway. The history of Iran's nuclear ambitions is of diplomacy, time and again, falling short. Faced with the necessity of putting a permanent end to them, it is hard to argue that Israel or America had any other choice.

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04/05 Links: A War of Psychological Attrition; Iran Has Miscalculated Disastrously; The North Korea Lesson for Iran; Why Islamists and progressives have so much in common

From Ian:

A War of Psychological Attrition

In physical terms, the damage Iran is inflicting on the Americans, the Gulf states or Israel is minimal.

By contrast, Iran is sustaining extremely heavy blows. Its economy was already shattered before the campaign began. Its military capabilities are being stripped away hour by hour.

That means the pace at which it is harming Israel and other countries in the region is negligible compared with what it had planned.

Unlike Iran, those countries are, by and large, continuing to function, while the disruption to daily life caused by missiles and drones remains relatively limited.

Iran is trying to create the impression that the cost of the war is unbearable.

But what is worse: gasoline at $4 a gallon, or Iran with an arsenal of intercontinental nuclear missiles?

What poses a greater threat to the world: a short-term recession, or a deranged regime operating an ocean of drones in the Strait of Hormuz, terrorist cells across the planet, and seeking to impose Shiite belief on humanity by force?

Iran knows the West's weak points, its short-sightedness, short patience, and short-time horizon.

In Tehran they know that in the West, people will talk about one American aircraft being shot down a thousand times more than they will about dozens of Iranian aircraft destroyed, hundreds of missiles intercepted and thousands of drones thwarted.

That is the asymmetric psychological war they are hoping to win.

Col. (ret.) Richard Kemp: Iran Has Miscalculated Disastrously

The ayatollahs never expected to find themselves in a sustained, direct, high-intensity war with the U.S. and Israel. Their thinking had been based on gaining ascendancy in the Middle East by proxy groups and ultimately by nuclear weapons.

The rulers of Iran spent billions of dollars building a series of terrorist networks that would do their dirty work for them. Yet Hizbullah, Hamas, and the Houthis have been very severely handled by Israel (and in the case of the Houthis, the U.S.) since Oct. 7, 2023, and their combined contribution to the defense of Iran over the last few weeks has consequently been strategically negligible.

In the minds of the ayatollahs, attacking their Arab neighbors would lead the Gulf states to pressure Trump to call off the war. It had the opposite effect. Behind the scenes, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have reportedly urged the president to keep attacking until the job is done. Iran's strategy has instead consolidated opposition to Tehran.

Another strategic miscalculation has been the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. As a global economic attack, it reinforces the narrative that Iran is a worldwide threat. Both China and India have been significantly impacted, despite Tehran's selective permission for some ships and cargoes to pass through the strait.

Additionally, the regime is probably inflicting greater harm on its own economy. It depends on the strait for the import of food and other essentials, and for its own oil exports.

WSJ Editorial: The North Korea Lesson for Iran

President Trump decided to use military force to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon after diplomacy failed. This was a risky choice. But the U.S. experience with North Korea suggests the alternatives were even riskier. That history shows the limits of nuclear diplomacy with a determined foe, as well as what happens when the U.S. puts conflict-avoidance above all else.

During the Clinton Administration, North Korea denied International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors access to camouflaged nuclear sites and announced it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Clinton threatened sanctions. The U.S. military drew up plans for strikes on nuclear installations, and Defense Secretary Bill Perry presented a plan for a large military buildup in the region. Clinton deployed Patriot missile-defense systems to South Korea.

Former President Jimmy Carter informed the Clinton Administration that he intended to visit North Korea and try to defuse the situation. Clinton decided to let Carter proceed as a private citizen. Carter feared conflict above all and even opposed sanctions. He went beyond what he had been authorized by Clinton to discuss and announced a tentative agreement on CNN. The press and foreign-policy establishment hailed nuclear peace in our time.

Military options came off the table and Clinton embraced the deal, which became the 1994 Agreed Framework. For a time the deal seemed to work. Yet weaponization research continued on the sly. The regime's intent to build a bomb never changed. In 2002, North Korea reneged on the Agreed Framework and expelled inspectors. The George W. Bush Administration employed threats, sanctions and diplomacy but ultimately ruled out the use of force. In 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.

After that, U.S. military options became riskier. North Korea is now believed to possess 50 warheads, and it tests ICBMs that will one day be able to reach the continental U.S. The lesson is that U.S. presidents waited too long to stop North Korea. The risks of war were always said to be too high, it was never a good time, and there was always another diplomatic option to exhaust. North Korea is now a nuclear power.

Iran's radical regime will not have a nuclear program when the current Iran conflict ends. This has made the world a safer place.

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04/04 Links: Trump: Tehran has 48 hours to open the Strait of Hormuz; USAF rescue missing F-15E crew member; Francesca Albanese and the Perversion of Academia; ICC votes to discipline Karim Khan

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: World leaders should be grateful the US is doing what’s necessary in Iran

This is their war even more than it is the United States’ war. Iranian missiles threaten British interests even more than they threaten the US. And Iran’s terrorist proxies are even more active in Europe and the UK than they have been in America.

It’s just that the UK, Europeans and others don’t have the military power or the political will to do anything against that threat. They hoped that one day the US would take this problem off their hands. Because otherwise they’d have sat on those same hands as the ayatollah got ever-closer to the bomb.

Critics of President Trump at home point to the rising price of gas. And that is certainly a concern. But the price will come down as America’s objectives are achieved. And while a month of high gas prices is a concern it is much less of a concern than the price of gas if the Revolutionary Islamic Government in Iran started throwing nuclear weapons around.

Consider how they lashed out at every single one of their Arab neighbors after America’s first strikes on Tehran. This is how they behaved with missiles and drones. Imagine how they would react if they were nuclear.

Meantime some critics of American policy have pointed out how North Korea was allowed to develop nuclear weapons. But that program is a signal lesson to the civilized world as much as it is to dictators. North Korea was able to develop its nuclear program because they were constantly threatening South Korea with an attack by conventional weapons if their unconventional capability was attacked. So they got away with it.

The Iranians hoped they could pull off the same trick. But after the destruction of their armies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria there was a window — this past month — to stop similar blackmail from Iran.

Of course the Iranian regime has lashed out — aiming missiles at Qatari energy facilities and Saudi airports. They have also — interestingly for an “Islamic” regime — sent missiles that have nearly hit the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It would be quite an epitaph for the radical Mullahs if they struck that.

Yet the region has managed to suffer through this. All in the knowledge that American and Israeli pilots are stopping a much greater threat ever emanating from Iran.

And that will be the end of the war.

This war does not need to end up with anyone being bogged down. It doesn’t need the dreaded “boots on the ground” that Western powers seem to have become so fearful of.

Another couple of weeks and the Iranian regime will not be able to threaten anyone again for the foreseeable future. Perhaps a little further along the road the regime itself will fall. That will be in the hands of the Iranian people.

But for the time being the pilots of the US Air Force are doing noble work on behalf of the whole world. And not just for this generation but for the generations to come. We should be proud of them.

John Spencer: What Would Sun Tzu Say About War with Iran?

Throughout the war, Sun Tzu would have returned to a simple measure of success, not only what was destroyed, but what was achieved. If the enemy’s decisions change, the strategy has worked. If they do not, then tactical success may prove insufficient.

That is why The Art of War endures. It is not a guide to battle. It is a framework for thinking about war as a contest of wills, shaped by political purpose, constrained by cost, and decided not by destruction, but by decisions.

Sun Tzu would also have recognized the political constraints that shape the use of force and the importance of perception beyond the battlefield. He warned that “there is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare” and that the use of the military must remain tied to the interests of the state, not drift into objectives that expand beyond what was originally intended. He placed extraordinary importance on information, writing that foreknowledge must be obtained and used to shape outcomes, a principle that today extends to the information domain and the perceptions of both enemy leadership and the population.

Sun Tzu also understood the role of threat, not as a matter of rhetoric, but as a function of perception and pressure. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” and that requires shaping the enemy’s understanding of what continued fighting will bring. But he also warned against excess. “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” The purpose of pressure is not to eliminate all options, but to shape them, and to shape how they are understood. In this context, that means applying enough force to influence decision-making while preserving a path toward a political outcome aligned with stated objectives.

That matters in this context. If the regime were to collapse as a result of the war, the outcomes associated with regime change could occur, but that would be distinct from making regime change the stated political objective. If the objective shifts, or is perceived to shift, from forcing a change in behavior to regime change requiring large-scale ground forces, it risks repeating patterns seen in past wars, where limited objectives expanded into nation building and protracted counterinsurgency campaigns against enemies able to adapt, disperse, and find sanctuary. Those conditions favor the defender, extend time, and erode political cohesion.

Sun Tzu’s warning is clear. Strategy must remain aligned to political purpose, and that purpose must remain disciplined, or the advantages gained early in a campaign can be lost over time.

IDF commando KIA in Southern Lebanon, another critically wounded

An Israel Defense Forces soldier was killed overnight Friday in southeastern Lebanon, the Israeli military said.

He was named as Sgt. Maj. Guy Ludar, 21, a member of the Maglan reconnaissance unit of the IDF Commando Brigade, from Yuvalim in the Lower Galilee.

Another commando from the Maglan unit was critically wounded, the IDF said.

Their families were notified.

According to Ynet, Ludar was killed by “friendly” fire during a nighttime operation to arrest a Hezbollah helper in the village of Shebaa, north of Mount Hermon.

An IDF soldier from another force believed he detected two terrorists and opened fire.

The report noted that the building where the suspect was believed to be was not detonated in advance because Shebaa is predominantly a Sunni village, whose residents are not typically affiliated with the Iranian-backed Shi’ite terrorist group.

The IDF opened a probe into the incident.

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04/01 Links Pt2: Do not look away from the rising fires of Jew hatred; Three arrested inc. Pakistani teenager over Golders Green firebomb attack; Herzog: ‘Spirit of our people’ has always prevailed

From Ian:

Do not look away from the rising fires of Jew hatred

Can we all agree this is madness? How can it be that, as a child here, it almost never crossed my mind not to be openly and fearlessly Jewish, and yet I now wait in trepidation for the day one of my young children returns home from school or an outing, asking me to explain Jew hatred?

In just the past few weeks, a branch of Gail’s bakery in Archway was vandalised because it was founded by an Israeli Jew (who is no longer involved in the business), and then the incident was belittled in the Guardian. A report into campus anti-Semitism revealed that one in five students would refuse to live with a Jewish peer. An inquiry had to be launched into anti-Semitism in schools. Meanwhile, down in Margate, an art exhibition titled ‘Drawings Against Genocide’ depicts Israelis and Israel Defence Forces soldiers as demons, murderers and baby-eaters. Artist Matthew Collings claims the work is not anti-Semitic, merely ‘anti-Zionist’. Thank goodness he cleared that up!

This is what we’re up against. Anti-Semitism has had a rebrand and, honestly, activists have done a fantastic PR job. Say whatever you like about the Jews and carry out as many petty acts of anti-Semitism as you please – as long as you take care to use today’s euphemisms of ‘anti-Zionism’ or ‘Israel criticism’, you’ll get away with it.

Despite all of this, I still believe that the vast majority of Britons are not anti-Semites, and that growing numbers are sickened by what they see. Unfortunately, too many of our non-Jewish neighbours are looking away when they should be staring into the flames, as we are forced to do.

The Jewish community does not have the privilege of looking away. While I can shield myself from terrifying video footage of anti-Semitic murder and destruction, I cannot avoid reckoning with the daily reality of life for Jews in Britain today.

This week, Jews celebrate the festival of Passover, when we recall how Moses led us to freedom from slavery in Egypt. It is one of our most important festivals. It celebrates the privilege of not just freedom itself, but also the ability to live freely as Jews. It is a message that has always resonated strongly with me. But this year I find myself asking: when does living with unease become living in fear? In the past, I always believed myself to be truly free, as a person, as a Jew. Today, I’m not so sure.

Seth Mandel: How the Jewish Community Can Fight Tokenism Without Self-Destructing

Since October 7, anti-Zionist politicians and political institutions have relied more than ever on a specific tactic to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism: putting liberal and leftist Jews front and center and using them, essentially, as human shields.

This puts the global Jewish community in a bind. How do we call out this rank tokenism without allowing the debate to descend into an intra-Jewish fight that leaves the politicians unscathed but the Jews further fragmented?

The answer is to focus most of our ire on those responsible for pitting the Jews against each other. Obviously, Jews who allow themselves to be used in this manner are not without agency and therefore their actions can and should be criticized—just without losing sight of the way political systems historically take advantage of Jewish infighting.

Sometimes, the institutions that deserve to come under withering rhetorical fire aren’t political in the classic sense. Take the media. A couple of months ago, I noticed something reading the stories about Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s trip to Australia after the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre.

The Guardian headlined its story: “Isaac Herzog’s four days in Australia left him ‘energised’. For the Jewish community, some saw solidarity while others felt ‘serious angst’.”

The article claimed the trip brought “significant disquiet within Australia’s Jewish community.”

Commenting in favor of Herzog’s visit were the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. The ECAJ is the umbrella organization of Australian Jewry that represents over 200 Jewish organizations. The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, which is listed as a territorial body of the ECAJ, oversees 55 such Jewish organizations.

The quotes from officers of these two organizations, therefore, can be reasonably said to represent Australian Jewry.

On the other side, being quoted against Herzog’s visit was… something called Jewish Voices of Inner Sydney. The leftist organization does not have much of a footprint and appears to have launched in 2024. Judging by its occasional forays into the public discourse, I can say with some confidence that it has a membership of at least 25 people. As of this writing, it has a whopping 126 followers on Facebook. It is a complete nonentity.

To say that it was unethical of the Guardian to frame its story this way based on some As-a-Jew garage band is to understate the point. The one person from this group the Guardian quotes hardly seems worth spending much time and energy on. The Guardian, on the other hand, is an influential tool of anti-Zionist agitation and ought to be subjected to heaps of scrutiny before anything it writes about Jews and Judaism are to be treated with a grain of seriousness or credibility.

The Guardian uses liberal Jews as human shields, and until it can prove that this has changed, it should be branded as such. Make the paper the primary target.

NYPost Editorial: This is a Democratic Party push to expel Jews from public life

The Democratic Party’s growing antisemitic wing is out to blacklist support for Israel, or at least the nation’s main pro-Israel lobbying and political action group, AIPAC.

Never mind that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spends far less than other interest groups: Climate-obsessed California billionaire Tom Steyer, a prime AIPAC-denouncer, has spent much more on campaign donations all by himself these last few years.

But such is the power of Democrats’ hard left that delegates to the Democratic National Committee’s April meeting will debate a resolution that first condemns “the growing influence of dark money and corporate-backed independent expenditures in Democratic elections” but then singles out only AIPAC as “undermining public trust in democratic institutions.”

But AIPAC isn’t “corporate-backed” or “dark money”: its SuperPAC donors, all successful American individuals, are completely open about who they are and what they support.

The same cannot be said about the real dark money spent on American politics, most of which — about $1.2 billion — supported Democrat candidates and issues in the last election cycle.

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04/01 Links Pt1: Trump claims Iran 'no longer a threat' in update on Operation Epic Fury; Iran's Danger Must Be Judged by "Unacceptable Risk," Not "Imminent Threat";

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Yes, This Is Your War, Too

But whatever the administration decides to do, what isn’t viable is for Americans and our allies to pretend that they can be indifferent to the outcome of the war. When someone like Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, says, “This is not our war,” the appropriate response is: Are you serious?

In June, Pistorius’s boss, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, acknowledged that Israel’s attack that month on Iran’s military and nuclear sites was “dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.” Has something changed in his government’s strategic calculus about the threat Iran poses, other than its overriding opposition to the Trump administration?

In January, the United Arab Emirates announced in no uncertain terms that it would not allow its airspace, territory or ports to be used for an attack on Iran. The declaration was a transparent effort to insulate the Emirates from Iranian reprisals. For its pains, Iran has since hit Abu Dhabi, Dubai and other Emirati targets, military and civilian, with at least 433 ballistic missiles, 19 cruise missiles and 1,977 drones.

Now the governments of Spain and Italy are replicating the Emirates’ strategy, barring the U.S. from using bases (and, in Madrid’s case, its airspace) for attacks on Iran. Do those governments think they’ll be spared Tehran’s furies should they one day come into range of Tehran’s missiles? For that matter — given Trump’s ambivalence about the war in Ukraine — do Europeans think the administration is more likely to support NATO in the event of a Russian attack when NATO has been so hostile to American efforts to defang Iran?

For Americans, especially those who often oppose the administration, the question is whether our distaste for this president should get the better of our strategic judgments about the threats Iran poses. In The Wall Street Journal recently, the lawyer David Boies, a prominent Democrat, noted that if Trump had failed to act, “his successor would have been left with an even more dangerous choice than his predecessors left him. Three or four years from now, the Iranian missiles now hitting Iran’s neighbors could be hitting Berlin or London, perhaps even New York or Washington.”

If Democrats can’t bring themselves to support Trump, they can at least support policies that will make the strategic choices for the next Democratic president easier rather than harder.

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” is a line widely attributed to Leon Trotsky. If that’s the case — and history tells us it is — shouldn’t you be interested in winning it, too?

Iran's Danger Must Be Judged by "Unacceptable Risk," Not "Imminent Threat"

Did Iran pose an imminent threat to the U.S.? "Imminence" is not a precise or objective term that presidents should employ only if intelligence experts endorse it. In national security affairs, it is almost always debatable. Besides, "imminence" is not the right concept for deciding whether and how to respond to a grave threat from abroad.

To grasp why it is not right, ask yourself: When did the Sep. 11 attack become imminent? When did the attack on Pearl Harbor? When did Russia's invasion of Ukraine? When did the Holocaust? When did the threat of British tyranny that justified the American Revolution? The concept of "imminence" offers no useful guidance for confronting complex threats of this kind.

Is a threat imminent when the enemy becomes hostile? Only after they perfect the means to attack us, or only after the enemy puts them in motion as part of an attack? Does it matter if the enemy appears unstable or ideologically fanatical? Does it matter if the enemy's means of attack are apocalyptic - nuclear weapons on long-range missiles, for example?

The relevant concept is unacceptable risk, not imminent threat. Presidents have the duty to decide whether a foreign threat poses risks that require a U.S. response. They have the responsibility to decide whether a threat is grave enough - and no means short of war can reduce the risk to an acceptable level - to make war necessary.

As a rule, only an imminent threat justifies police officers' use of deadly force. But is it sensible to import that concept into national security affairs today, when a country like Iran calls over decades for "Death to America," commits numerous murderous aggressions, and devotes enormous resources to developing terrorist proxy networks, nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles?

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