From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
The myth of Masafer Yatta
The reality of Masafer Yatta, however, is radically different. The area was never under Palestinian Arab control. The only people with any legal or historical claim to it are the Jews.
In the 1920s, the Jews alone were promised a homeland by the League of Nations throughout what is now Israel, the disputed territories and the Gaza Strip—a binding treaty obligation that has never been abrogated.
In 1999, Arabs illegally erected homes in Masafer Yatta but failed to obtain building permits from Israel’s civil administration. This violated the Israel and Arab agreed-upon Oslo Accords that gave Israel full control over this area.
In 2022, Israel’s High Court ruled that these homes must be demolished. As a result, the residents moved into nearby alternative dwellings. Many of these condemned structures, however, remained in place in order to provide the illusion of a permanent Arab presence.
None of these facts, of course, was mentioned in the film because they would instantly destroy the lie of helpless Arabs victimized by cruel Israeli oppression.
Masafer Yatta has produced numerous terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians. Moreover, with the connivance or backing of NGOs such as B’Tselem and Amnesty, its activists harass Jews living in the area by trespassing, damaging property and provoking fights that they film and post online with titles like “settler violence” and “Jewish supremacy.”
In 2021, during a violent incident in Masafer Yatta, an Israeli Defense Forces officer filmed a young Arab setting fire to Arab structures and shouting: “The Jews did it.”
The Jewish Voice reported that this young Arab was none other than the future Oscar-winner Basel Adra, whom it described as a B’Tselem activist and “a known provocateur in the Hebron mountains.” In a succession of contradictory claims, Adra later denied that he had committed arson.
The mythology that has developed around Masafa Yatta is one of many lies that have shaped support for the Palestinian cause throughout the West, investing it with the status of a heroic fight for justice. Obscenely, this big lie has come to define the claim by Western “progressives” to moral and centrist attitudes.
Seth Mandel:
A BBC Scandal Exposes the Sham Industry of Anti-Zionist Documentaries
The BBC thus had not only produced a Hamas propaganda film but sanitized the murderous Jew-hatred expressed by Palestinians throughout.
And that is why Shah, the BBC chair, was in front of a government panel expressing his deep regret on Tuesday. The government is letting the BBC take the lead on the investigation, but it is making clear that this is a uniquely shameful tale of BBC infamy.
The earlier Channel 4 program won news awards, including an international Emmy. It turned out that Channel 4 has known the family’s identity since last summer, further casting doubt on the BBC’s already-farfetched attempts to play dumb or claim to have been manipulated.
There are two important lessons here. First, as has become fairly clear by now, a great deal of the “journalism” on the war is being done by members of terrorist organizations fighting in that war. The BBC’s documentary was, perhaps, the worst such example. But it was an example nonetheless. Mainstream international media have corrupted their tradecraft in their desire to enable Hamas’s genocidal cause against Israel.
Second, the fact that this keeps happening is a reminder that in order to paint Israel as a convincing villain, news must be fabricated. Documentaries are perfect vehicles for such audience manipulation, of course. This is was part of the reason the Oscars award to No Other Land on Sunday night was so divisive: As Jonathan Sacerdoti and others have meticulously pointed out, the film’s narrative bears almost no relation to the reality of its subject. It’s agitprop produced to legitimize baldly illegal Palestinian land grabs.
One should consider the following: If Israel were truly the evil oppressor its critics make it out to be, why would all this documentary evidence have to be manufactured and distorted?
Seth Mandel:
Gal Gadot and the Controversial Jewish Practice of Merely Existing
One doesn’t have to be a Hollywood insider to understand immediately that this theory is insane. Zegler is vocally anti-Israel in the current conflict and has courted controversy by taking her lemming-like social-media activity to great lengths: After the trailer for her own upcoming movie received spiteful backlash online because of Gadot’s participation in the film, Zegler signaled her agreement with the trolls. All of which is to say: Had Zegler been scheduled to present an award to an anti-Israel film, she would have crawled over hot coals to do so, not traded categories quietly for the sake of avoiding some imagined discomfort on Gadot’s part.
Now, it happens to be the case that Gadot is a class act, in stark contrast to many of her peers, and she would’ve presented whatever award the Academy asked her to. So whoever invented this rumor had an axe to grind. And who was that, anyway? According to Newsweek, the source of the rumor was Jen Perelman, a progressive congressional candidate in previous cycles whose entire political persona has been constructed out of obsessive anti-Zionist rage.
So, yes, Gadot is completely correct to have said last night that just being an Israeli Jew is considered controversial. Apparently there were a number of social-media users who, prior to the Oscars, expressed their wish that Gadot would have to present the award to the Palestinian director. Why? Because she is a Jewish Israeli, and they think it would have made her uncomfortable.
But that’s quite the admission in itself: People want Gal Gadot to be made to feel uncomfortable in public. It gives them great pleasure to imagine it. Why? Because she is a Jewish Israeli. That’s it—a number of Oscars viewers simply wanted to see someone make a Jew feel bad. When that didn’t happen, these folks imagined that the reason it didn’t happen was due to a Jewish conspiracy.
Gadot is handling all this with aplomb, but it is an ominous sign for society that it’s happening at all.
From Ian:
Free all hostages, eradicate Hamas: There’s no other solution
Continuing a gradual release of the remaining hostages is a mistake because no human being can survive in the underground concentration camps of Hamas for much longer. The conditions of Ohad Ben Ami, Or Levy and Eli Sharabi, the three living hostages released recently, speak for themselves: they seemed to have come out of Auschwitz. This should not be tolerated.
As explained by Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh for the Gatestone Institute, the hostages could have been released a long time ago if the Biden administration had exerted enough pressure on Qatar to use its good relations with the Islamist group to force it to do so.
Biden could have pressured Doha by threatening to withdraw United States forces from Qatar. He could have threatened to impose economic sanctions on Qatar or designate it as a “state sponsor” of terrorism if it did not pressure Hamas to release the hostages. After all, Hamas is blacklisted by the United States and the European Union, and it’s no secret that Qatar is its main supporter in the Middle East. Hamas would have found it hard to say no to its major political and financial patrons and backers.
Qatar is no neutral mediator, and it is pursuing Hamas’s interests in the region. It’s obvious that the terror organization’s current interest is to survive the war, and, so far, it seems to be working. Its next step will be to remain in control of Gaza, and that’s exactly what will happen if Israel accepts the conditions for Phase 2.
The situation is confusing with the Trump administration declaring that it wants all the hostages released, while, at the same time, stating that Hamas must be destroyed and Gazans deported. Hamas will never release all the hostages without reassurance that it will survive and remain in Gaza.
Now would be the right time to put an end to the ceasefire deal and force Hamas to release every single hostage remaining in captivity by enforcing real pressure on Qatar, taking over Gaza with the military, and eradicating it once and for all, while simultaneously arresting and prosecuting its leaders abroad.
With the end of the first phase, the situation is now stalled. New terms proposed by U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steven Witkoff call for a temporary ceasefire during Ramadan and Passover. On the first day of such an agreement, half of the living and dead hostages would be released. At the end of the framework, if an agreement is reached, the remaining hostages would all be freed at one time.
Israel’s position remains the same. Hamas must be eradicated before a deal to end the war can take place. As of now, Hamas has rejected Witkoff’s proposal and Israel has responded by cutting aid supplies to Gaza. Additionally, the leaders of Arab countries have met in Cairo to discuss the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. The world now waits to see if there will be any further breakthroughs in negotiations or if the fighting will resume.
Khaled Abu Toameh:
Rebuilding Gaza is Pointless Unless Hamas is Eradicated
The establishment of a new government in the Gaza Strip while Hamas maintains its military capabilities there unfortunately will not work. Hamas's presence during reconstruction will only result in the emergence of the Lebanon model: Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy terror group, simply created a terrorist state-within-a-state.
Worse, having a new government that would oversee reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in the Gaza Strip while Hamas is still there would exempt the Palestinian terrorist group from its responsibilities towards Gaza's residents. The new government would not be able to stop Hamas from rearming, regrouping, and preparing more attacks against Israel -- as Hamas has unremittingly vowed to do.
The new government would be busy rebuilding homes and skyscrapers and delivering humanitarian aid, while Hamas and the other terror groups would have all the time in the world to rebuild tunnels and manufacture weapons.
Hamas never cared about the well-being of the Palestinians under its rule in the Gaza Strip. The terrorist group could have built schools, universities, and hospitals. Instead, it chose to invest millions of dollars in building a vast network of tunnels to attack Israel, smuggle and hide weapons, and torture Israeli hostages.
The reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and the resumption of humanitarian aid should be conditioned on the removal of Hamas from power and disarming of all of Gaza's terror groups.
Hamas should be completely excluded from any plan to rebuild the Gaza Strip because all it cares about is pursuing its Jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel and murder as many Jews as possible.
Palestinians are Hamas, and Hamas are Palestinians
Even Palestinians who don’t support Hamas very much support their ideology and methods. Indeed, a survey by researchers at Oxford University found that 98% of Gazans said they were religious and almost as many said they viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as religious, not political—exactly as Hamas. Furthermore, polls show that Palestinians in Gaza, and Judea and Samaria, broadly support terrorism as a means to end the “occupation” and achieve independence, just like Hamas. These polls also reveal that more than half of Palestinians want Israel to be replaced by a single Palestinian state governed under Islamic law—just like Hamas.
Palestinians broadly support the Oct. 7 massacre. The December 2023 poll by PCPSR showed that 72% of Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to launch the Oct. 7 attacks. The effects of war since then have eroded Palestinians’ support for this decision, yet the September 2024 poll showed that 54% of Palestinians still supported it.
Palestinians enthusiastically participate in Hamas’s atrocities against Israel. In fact, an Israel Defense Forces’ assessment released in August 2024 revealed that more than 2,000 Palestinians who invaded Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7 were not Hamas members—many were mere “civilian” terrorists. Palestinian civilians went into a maniacal frenzy when hostages were kidnapped into Gaza, surrounding the vehicles used to carry them and shouting “Death to the Jews.” Similarly, more than a year later, Palestinian “civilians” cheered and jeered as Hamas mockingly paraded hostages before their release.
When the coffins of the Bibas children, who were murdered with the terrorists’ bare hands, were paraded before civilian mobs through the streets of Gaza, it wasn’t just Hamas presiding, but members and supporters of other Palestinian factions, including the PLO’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Furthermore, some hostages were held in civilian homes, including female soldiers, who were used as slaves, and forced to cook and clean for Palestinian families. Albag, for example, was forced to clean toilets for a family and cook food that she was forbidden to eat. She subsisted on scraps and was only allowed to shower after 37 days.
Palestinian civilians also gladly assisted Hamas during the war by hiding their terrorist infrastructure in civilian buildings—schools, hospitals, mosques, playgrounds and even in children’s bedrooms.
Progressives cannot deny that Hamas and the Palestinian public are virtually indistinguishable. No matter how well-meaning, progressives cannot deny that the Palestinians elected Hamas to govern them. They cannot deny the research that shows broad support among Palestinians for Hamas, their ideology and their methods, or the research that reveals overwhelming Palestinian support for the atrocities of Oct. 7. Finally, they cannot deny that even as Hamas’s popularity fades, Palestinian civilians continue to support its goals, ideology and methods.
Those who assert that Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people are either fooling themselves or trying to gaslight you, contrary to all factual evidence.
From Ian:
Gil Troy:
Fearless Zionism: American Jews need to reshape their view of Israel
As American Jews mourn the younger generation’s supposed alienation from Israel, many blame Bibi rather than their decisions to raise their kids on tikkun olam/social justice diets that Poisoned Ivy League Progressives distorted and turned against Israel.
“What do you expect?” many ask. “Jews born after 2000 have only known an Israel defined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and right-wing, religious fanatics.”
This formulation foolishly defines Israel, our forever-homeland, by its often-unstable governments. Living in a polarized nation that’s zig-zagged from Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s America to Donald Trump’s America, they don’t always judge their country by its leaders.
Defining Israel in partisan terms ignores what over 900,000 young Jews have discovered on Birthright and other Israel experiences: that the Jewish connection to Israel is eternal and existential.
Even many who haven’t visited Israel – yet! – have been shaped by their Birthright buddies’ identity revelations. Seeing Israel, feeling it, tasting it – and meeting Israelis – reframes the conversation. I understand why Palestinians try to make every conversation about “the conflict” into their agenda. But why do so many Jews fall into that same trap?
Framing Jews’ relationship with Israel in identity terms as existential transcends Left and Right. It’s not a pro-Netanyahu or pro-Trump move: It’s simply the Zionist way.
Zionism is broad-based enough to welcome a kaleidoscope of opinions. Zionism goes far beyond today’s headlines, emphasizing that Jews are a people as well as a religion; that we are tied to one particular homeland; and that we have the right to establish and now develop a state on that homeland.
In less partisan times, with less angry leaders and a less hostile world, many would recognize Zionism’s spacious, welcoming tent for all kinds of Diaspora Jews. Similarly, Israel includes a stunning array of Jews, from ultra-Orthodox to hyper-modern, from conservative capitalists to Peace Now socialists.
Gerald M. Steinberg:
Review: Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments
by Kenneth Roth
Roth’s cursory discussion of antisemitism, in which his defensiveness is very pronounced, highlights the fact that this issue is largely ignored by HRW and most institutions claiming to promote human rights. “The charge of antisemitism is often bandied about to silence critics of Israeli repression, including me—I was also accused of being a ‘Jew hater’” (p. 200). As in previous statements and social media posts, he blames the victim, proclaiming that Israel’s actions are the cause of any resurgence of hostility to Jews, particularly following the October 7 slaughter. “In the minds of some partisans, the idea that a state designed as a haven for Jews could stimulate harm against Jews is inadmissible” (p. 205). Roth’s response to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s denunciation of this position replaces the evidence with a blanket rejection of the conclusion that HRW’s relentless criticism, including accusations of “apartheid,” feed the violent Jew-hatred sweeping across university campuses. Roth also attacks the consensus definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, composed after the infamous hate-filled NGO Forum of the UN’s 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, in which HRW played a central part and which constitutes another example in Roth’s distorted history.
Notably, but consistent with the rest of the book, Roth makes no mention of the “eyewitness testimony” of Danielle Haas, a senior editor at HRW from 2010 until October 2023, who became a whistleblower. Not easily dismissed as a “troll,” Haas exposed the “years of politicization … shattered professionalism, abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness,” and the ways in which HRW “surrendered its duty to stand for the human rights of all.” Countering claims of careful fact-checking, she wrote about the violation of “basic editorial standards related to rigor, balance, and collegiality,” and summarized “the constellation of my experiences over years … as feeling a lot like antisemitism … ”Footnote7 Anonymous HRW staff members, both Jewish and non-Jewish, told her that “for years, they had raised concerns with managers and in wider discussion forums about antisemitism and methodological problems related to Israel work, only to face hostility at worst, inaction and indifference at best.”Footnote8 Haas also condemned HRW’s response to the Hamas massacre, which invoked “the ‘context’ of ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’ before blood was even dry on bedroom walls,” and, based on Roth’s practice, “could easily be construed as blaming the victim.” Regarding the 2021 “apartheid” campaign, Haas observes that HRW staff (i.e., Roth and others) knew the 217-page pseudo-research report filled with legal-sounding jargon and propaganda “would rarely be read in full,” and was designed to give ammunition to anti-Israel campaigners “including Hamas supporters … who now bandy about the term with appalling ease.” This is as much of an indictment of the journalists and other consumers who turned HRW’s press release into major headlines as it is of the organization’s manipulative practices.
In summary, a more accurate title for Roth’s magnum opus would be “Wronging Rights,” and while he may have hoped to have the last word in establishing his legacy and silencing the “trolls” and “extreme partisans,” the criticism will continue. Beyond the specific treatment of Israel, Roth demonstrates that the human rights advocacy based on morality and political neutrality that he claims to have championed for thirty years is a myth.
Kassy Akiva:
DA Backs Away From Deal To Keep Scott Hayes From Going To Trial For Shooting Anti-Israel Attacker
Scott Hayes, 48, says he will likely have to go to trial for shooting an anti-Israel man who tackled him after a district attorney backed away from finalizing a disposition to resolve the case outside the courtroom.
Hayes was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and released on a $5,000 bail on September 13 after he shot Caleb Gannon, who charged through traffic and tackled Hayes in Newton, Massachusetts. Hayes pleaded not guilty and said shooting Gannon in the stomach was an act of self-defense.
“I am demanding a trial because the district attorney’s office continues to miss deadlines, go back on agreements, and play with my life,” Hayes said. “If they think they have a strong case — which they don’t — I’ll see you in court.”
Hayes, who lost his job over the incident, spent the last few months working out terms with the office of Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan. According to Hayes, Ryan’s office and Hayes’ legal team worked out terms for a “pretrial probation” (PTB) with no admission of liability, which would suspend Hayes’ license to carry during the period and require him to complete a de-escalation course and stay away from Gannon.
The point of contention is whether Hayes should stay out of Newton, the town where Gannon resides. Hayes believes that the condition is unnecessary, and that he should not have to stay out of the major Boston suburb, where he has many friends. The two sides were supposed to argue to a judge on Tuesday, until Hayes’ lawyer was informed that the DA’s office cancelled the hearing.
Ryan’s office ignored requests about the reason for the cancellation of the meeting on Tuesday and instead said the case hearing is scheduled for March 20.
Immediately after his release on bail, Hayes was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor, which flagged him several times for violating the stay-out-of-Newton order each time he traveled on the Mass Pike (I-90) for doctor appointments, as the highway runs through Newton. In October, a judge removed the ankle monitor requirement and his restrictions from being in Newton.
“It’s absurd that they want to now restrict me from Newton while I have been free to travel there for five months without any incidents,” Hayes told The Daily Wire.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Egypt Tells Trump to Pound Sand
Despite presumably having watched the way Donald Trump has responded recently to world leaders who question or challenge him, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has decided to poke the U.S. president in the eye and see what happens.
The much-ballyhooed Arab Plan for postwar Gaza has been released, and it is unimpressive even by the standards of past pan-Arab peace proposals. Perhaps even deliberately so.
Trump’s plan for Gaza—the Riviera on the Med—called for the evacuation of civilians from the enclave so it could be properly cleared and rebuilt. Trump doesn’t seem to care much whether the Palestinians come back after it’s done, though Israeli officials are careful to endorse only voluntary emigration.
Egypt is a solution to this riddle, but it would rather be a problem.
For starters, Egypt could have provided Gazan civilians with a place to go during the war, when Israel was forced to hunt Hamas monsters hiding among those civilians in designated humanitarian zones within Gaza. Sisi chose not to, because his country only wants the few Gazans who can afford to pay through the nose for their freedom.
We can go back further and point out that the war itself didn’t have to happen and that Egypt could very well have prevented it. Cairo had stopped policing the smuggling routes between Egypt and Gaza in the area of Rafah, a town that is split between the two jurisdictions. Those smuggling routes enabled Hamas to resupply and reinforce its army, as well as secure a near-monopoly on certain goods on the Gaza market. Money and manpower, in other words, care of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
We could keep going back even further—Egypt allows no path to citizenship for the original Palestinian refugees or their descendants, and has washed its hands of any stewardship over Gaza, which was once part of its territory—but the record is fairly consistent: Cairo has been, and continues to be, an impediment to a solution to the Palestinian element of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Unless Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff is able to negotiate, with the help of Israeli pressure, a continuation of the ceasefire plan, there will be another round of war in Gaza—probably more intense than anything over the previous 16 months. In that case, Egypt will once again have the chance to play a constructive role by allowing temporary Palestinian resettlement so that Israel can end Hamas once and for all. Egypt will again refuse, and then it will again complain about Israel and the lack of a two-state solution.
When Egypt Favored Resettling Gazans in Its Borders
In Cairo yesterday, a summit of Arab leaders adopted an Egyptian proposal for the future of Gaza, which includes a six-month period during which a “non-factional” Palestinian government will administer the Strip, after which the Palestinian Authority will take over. It does not, however, suggest how Hamas will be forced out of power. Hussain Abdul-Hussain calls the plan “dissociated from reality.” Worse still, he writes, it “defers disarming Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other militias until after the creation of a Palestinian state.”
The impetus for the summit wasn’t so much the actual situation in Gaza as the need to provide an alternative to Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population prior to reconstruction. While Arab states have objected to plans to move large numbers of Palestinians outside the Strip, and Egypt most vociferously, this was not always the case. Abdul-Hussain explains:
In 1953, Egypt and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) signed onto a plan to resettle 120,000 Arab refugees from Gaza. . . . At the cost of $200 million ($2.4 billion in 2025 dollars), the Egyptian town of Qantara, east of Suez and 130 miles southwest of Gaza, would become the refugees’ new home. Egypt would divert water from the Nile to allow agriculture and a self-sustaining economy.
Palestinians in Gaza (then ruled by Egypt) protested and rioted to voice their opposition to the plan, staging what is now called the “March intifada.” Egypt, then ruled by Gamal Abdel Nasser,
promised to “end the Sinai relocation project,” but quickly broke its promise. The Nasser regime instead undertook mass arrests and threw its Communist and Muslim Brotherhood leaders into prison, where they remained until July 1957.
Nasser eventually pulled out of the relocation plan for two reasons. First, he was frustrated with the Eisenhower administration for withdrawing its funding of the Aswan Dam. Second, he feared communists on the left and Islamists on the right might use the issue to outflank him. As a result of such domestic machinations, 120,000 Arabs remained stuck in a resourceless strip instead of relocating to an economically viable spot, less than 150 miles to the south.
17-year-old Israeli dies of injuries from Feb. 27 terror car-ramming
An Israeli teenager has died of injuries sustained during a Feb. 27 terrorist car-ramming attack at a bus stop east of Caesarea, local authorities said on Wednesday.
In a Facebook post, the Pardes Hanna-Karkur Municipality named the slain victim as Yahli Gur, 17, a resident of the town located north of Netanya.
Gur studied at a high school in the city of Harish, east of Pardes Hanna-Karkur.
“On behalf of Harish’s residents, I embrace and send condolences to her family at this difficult time. All of Harish grieves with you,” the city’s mayor, Yitzhak Keshet, said in a statement.
Twelve other people were wounded, including two seriously, in Thursday’s vehicular assault at the Karkur Junction, according to medical officials.
Israel Police spokesperson Aryeh Doron told Channel 12 that “after carrying out the car ramming at the bus stop, the terrorist drove another few hundred meters, hitting an officer and his car.” He was shot and killed at the scene, Doron added.
The terrorist was identified by authorities as a 53-year-old Palestinian from the Jenin area in nearby northern Samaria who was illegally residing in the Jewish state while married to an Arab citizen.
The Hamas terrorist organization hailed the attack, saying in an official statement that the vehicular assault was a “natural, heroic response to the brutal aggression and ongoing crimes” committed by Jerusalem.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Columbia’s Choice: Hamasnik Anarchy or Taxpayer Cash
The biggest myth regarding the campus anti-Semitism crisis is that it’s about speech. It is a self-serving myth: Institutions and activists that want to disregard their abuse of Jewish students will fall back on the claim that any attempt to hold them accountable for their actions is actually an attack on free speech.
Columbia University is learning what happens when that disingenuous trick starts to backfire: Students and professors take it as a license to do whatever they want, people end up in the hospital, and the government steps in to say this cannot continue to be done on their dime.
The Biden administration was fearful of standing up to the Hamas youth groups on campus. The Trump administration is happy to do so. Thus we have the announcement that three government agencies—Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration—will be reviewing federal contracts and grants with Columbia totaling around $5 billion.
Crucially, the announcement clearly avoids the penalizing of mere speech:
“Americans have watched in horror for more than a year now, as Jewish students have been assaulted and harassed on elite university campuses,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations, depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled. Institutions that receive federal funds have a responsibility to protect all students from discrimination. Columbia’s apparent failure to uphold their end of this basic agreement raises very serious questions about the institution’s fitness to continue doing business with the United States government.”
Assault isn’t speech. Harassment, the definitions of which are laid out in these schools’ policy handbooks, doesn’t include “criticism of Israeli government policy,” as activists and well-meaning but foolish free-speech groups routinely claim. At Harvard, for example, “such aggression must be sufficiently severe or pervasive, and objectively offensive, that it creates a work, educational, or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive and denies the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution’s programs and activities. Unless sufficiently severe or pervasive, a single act typically would not constitute bullying.”
Last, discrimination is also not speech. I wrote about one such prominent example last week: George Washington University’s professional psychology program penalized Jewish students for their religious background and Israeli students on the basis of their national origin, a textbook Title VI civil-rights violation.
Rise of the antisemitic psychologists
In February, the western world was shocked when a TikTok video exposed two Australian nurses, Ahmad “Rashad” Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, openly reviling Jews and Israelis, insinuating they would not only refuse to treat, but might actually kill — or have killed — an Israeli patient that presented at their hospital. The duo have rightfully been banned from practice anywhere in Australia, but that will not soothe Australian Jews’ fear that this loose-lipped pair are the tip of an iceberg constituted of less self-sabotaging, but equally hateful fellow travellers.
In a previous era, it was well understood in the healing professions that practitioners must never bring their personal biases to the workplace. That is no longer the case. Nobody in the medical community is encouraging nurses to kill Israeli patients, to be sure, but in professional mental-health circles dominated by far-left ideology, discrimination against Jewish students, practitioners and patients is well tolerated, and sometimes encouraged. In short, the domain of mental health, including social work, has become a psychological minefield for North American Jews.
For example, at a November psychology conference in Philadelphia, Villanova University Counseling Center director Nathalie Edmond gave a presentation on “dismantling oppression” featuring a slide show, including one titled “the colonized mind,” which positioned Zionism as equivalent to “internalized racism,” “homophobia” and “rape culture.” Social media pushback came fast and furious, but no heads rolled.
This anecdote captures the spirit of the movement to exclude therapists who identify as Zionists — that is, people who believe Israel has a right to self-determination as a nation-state — from the therapy community. In March 2024, the Facebook group Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists endorsed a blacklist of “therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” justifying it as a strategy to preclude the promotion of “White supremacy via Zionism.” A responsive flashback to Nazi Germany is not an over-reaction. One “shocked and scared, but not surprised” blacklisted therapist, Michelle Magida, founded a private Jewish therapist Facebook page.
As psychiatrist Sally Satel notes in a Free Press article on the subject, two issues arise from the story. The first, trying to prevent clinicians who support the existence of Israel, or are simply Jewish, from treating patients “constitutes a grave breach of professional ethics.”
The second is the “alarming” trend in psychotherapy — she calls it “critical social justice therapy” — to insist on psychotherapy as “foremost, a political rather than a clinical enterprise.” Under this rubric, therapists with the “wrong” politics are not trustworthy with patients. As for patients with the same “wrong” convictions, correction of their error should be the focus of treatment.
This Sovietization of psychotherapy is a cross-border phenomenon, and so is a heavy antisemitic presence in therapy associations. The American Psychological Association (APA), the largest psychological association in the world, is considered a hotbed of antisemitism by many observers. A just-published Open Letter “demanding accountability” from APA, replete with evidence, signed by 3,556 “Psychologists against Antisemitism,” notes that “(w)hile APA has issued statements in solidarity with Ukraine and apologized to People of Color for perpetuating racism, it has remained inactive regarding the 500% spike in attacks against Jews, who represent only 2% of the population yet experience over half of all religion-based hate crimes according to FBI statistics.”
Michael Rapaport:
A Message to My Haters up North
I’ve seen a lot of hate in the past 513 days. Two months after Hamas’s massacre, anti-Israel groups launched a social media campaign to discourage people from attending my show in Sacramento. In January last year, my show in Portland, Oregon, was protested, too. Six months after that, a Chicago venue canceled my act over “safety concerns.” And the day after hooligans chased Jewish soccer fans through the streets of Amsterdam in November 2024, hundreds turned up to demonstrate against my gig in Lakeview, Illinois—a Chicago suburb heavily populated with Jews.
I’m not alone. Many of my fellow Jewish performers are facing this kind of abuse right now simply because we support the existence of a Jewish state.
But on Friday morning, I woke up to the craziest campaign against me yet.
When I checked my social media feed, I saw that Heather McPherson, who is in the Canadian Parliament and a member of the New Democratic Party, was not just attacking me, but calling on her government to deny my entry into the country.
“New Democrats are alarmed that American personality Michael Rapaport is scheduled to perform in Canada,” she posted.
“Rapaport, who has a significant criminal history, also has a long history of racist and Islamophobic speech, and of inciting violence and supporting terrorism. We are witnessing an alarming increase in Islamophobia in Canada and globally. All Canadians deserve to feel safe in our communities.”
At the end, she once again urged Justin Trudeau’s party to take action against me, saying: “New Democrats are calling on the Liberal government to deny entry to Michael Rapaport.”
Now, I’ve got no beef with Ms. McPherson. I’ve never met her or even heard of her, which is something I have in common with most people. But I guess what ticked her off is that I’m headed to Canada this week to perform five stand-up shows in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital city, which McPherson represents.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Could Hamas Possibly Make This Any Clearer?
There is one clear goal regarding postwar Gaza: The absence of Hamas. That absence could be brought about by the terror government’s total defeat in the battlespace or by its surrender, in which it would hand over all governing institutions to an approved non-Hamas entity after returning the remaining hostages.
The reason Hamas cannot be left in a position of political power in Gaza is that such an outcome would guarantee the resumption of war. Hamas has made clear, through its statements just as much as its behavior, that as long as it survives it will launch periodic wars of annihilation against Israel. In a region as confusing and volatile as the Middle East, this is one of the few things we know with certainty: Death, taxes, and Hamas trying to burn people alive.
No one disputes this, and no one is naïve to it. If you support leaving Hamas in Gaza, it means you are comfortable with the status quo of permanent war. Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist, and because of its foreign backing (Iran, Qatar, Turkey) it cannot easily be dislodged by rival parties, even if there were rival parties willing to take it on.
All of which makes Hamas’s overtures remarkably daft. The West wants Hamas out of government because it wants an end to the cycle of war. So Hamas… promises to stay out of government but asks only that it be allowed to remain for the sole purpose of waging war?
Egypt is trying to be accommodating, so it has proposed a middle ground: Hamas disbands as a party but Hamas members join a new joint governing committee with officials from the Palestinian Authority and—crucially—Hamas leaders turn over missiles and rockets to be guarded by a third party until the establishment of a Palestinian state. “But Hamas’s senior negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, categorically refused the proposal during a meeting with the head of Egyptian intelligence, Hassan Rashad, in February, Egyptian and Hamas officials said,” the Journal reports.
Again, the fact that Hamas officials are among the sources here takes a lot of the guesswork out of these negotiations. We don’t have to wonder if Hamas is aware of what’s being floated on its behalf. Hamas is part of the conversation. And it is saying very clearly that it exists for the sole purpose of total war against the Jews.
This is why Hamas’s presence makes it harder to raise financial contributions from any donor nation not named Qatar. It is a waste of money to build structures that Hamas will immediately rig with explosives.
The choice here, according to Hamas itself, is between Hamas and the possibility of a peaceful life for Palestinians. Those who are even considering choosing the former should stop lecturing Israel, the U.S., or anyone else about the welfare of the Palestinians.
The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel with Genocide
This essay concerns the post-October 7 accusation of genocide against Israel. Genocide is the crime of crimes. States committing genocide are viewed as permanently illegitimate. By itself a genocide accusation is not antisemitic. During the Cold War, the charge was leveled dozens of times by government officials, legal scholars, and activists against France, Portugal, Nigeria, China, Cambodia, the US, and other states.[1] Since the end of the Cold War, judicial proceedings for genocide have been carried out against officials from former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere both in ad hoc tribunals and at the International Criminal Court.[2]
Genocide accusations against Israel are different. First, Israel, unlike other states, has been charged with genocide throughout its existence.[3] The genocide accusation is tied to charges of racism, colonialism, and other accusations leveled against Israel since the 1960s.[4] Second, the speed and fury with which the accusations exploded after the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, are unusual in the annals of lawfare.[5] And yet regarding Israel’s 2023 war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, there has been not only a rush to judgment but an effort to redefine genocide itself so that the constitutive elements of the crime itself are lowered.
The genocide libel also deploys a range of antisemitic tropes. One is the linkage of genocide to violent passages in the Hebrew Bible, a linkage which plays on the theme of Jewish chosenness at the expense of others’ existence and which even claims that God is genocidal. Another is the whitewashing of Hamas’s own genocidal intent in lieu of tropes concerning the outsized Jewish thirst for vengeance in the form of disproportionate response.[6] A third is the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide.[7] A fourth is the attribution of special powers to the Israeli government by which it and its supporters have fooled western governments into believing that Israel’s actions are legitimate and that the history of the Israeli- Arab conflict is too complex for snap judgments.[8]
A fifth, and this is what makes the genocide libel particularly dangerous, is the association of all Jews with the crime. Jews worldwide are all in on it, either as Zionist enablers, as dishonest back-room lobbyists, or as community leaders who, we are told, “weaponize” the charge of antisemitism to silence the truth-tellers.[9] Other genocide charges over time have not targeted Hutus living in Belgium or Serbs living in Germany. But the genocide libel, fueled by everything from electoral campaigns to public demonstrations to social media, drives rage against Jews throughout the world.
In North America, Europe, and Australia, antisemitic incidents have been too numerous to count, ranging from physical threats against Jews in New York City, to a pre-planned pogrom in Amsterdam, to synagogue attacks stretching from Montreal to Melbourne.[10] And as the Conseil represéntatif des institutions juives de France [CRIF] noted in a January 2025 report concerning the nearly 1,600 antisemitic acts in France the previous year, “The hammering of the false genocide accusation, and its corollary of accusing Israel’s supporters of being ‘pro-genocide,’ have helped to demonize the image of Jews in France and justify hostile . . . behavior towards them.”[11]
My aim, though, is not to discuss why the genocide charge is antisemitic. Nor is it to point to the numerous instances of mass violence in Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere for which activists can never seem to summon the outrage. Nor is it, here anyway, to dismantle the South African genocide charges against Israel from December 2023 or the subsequent ruling of the International Court of Justice that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Rather my aim is to discuss some of the history of how the genocide accusation has been leveled at Israel and the Jews. By looking at the history, which began even before the genocide convention was completed, we can begin to deconstruct the charge itself, how it has been used against Israel over time, and the stunningly bad faith behind the genocide accusation.
Eugene Kontorovich:
International Law Is No Bar to Trump's Gaza Proposal
EU and UN officials who have insisted that President Trump's Gaza plan would violate international law are wrong. Gaza is one of the very few pieces of land not under the sovereignty of any nation in international law. A distinct Gaza came into being as a result of Egypt's invasion of Israel in 1948.
When Israel retook Gaza in 1967's Six-Day War, it had sovereign claims on it. These were based on Gaza's location within the boundaries of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the predecessor entity to Israel. As an experiment in "land for peace," Israel withdrew its entire civilian population and military presence in 2005. Since then, Gaza has been up for grabs.
Because Gaza isn't a state, it isn't subject to military occupation under the Fourth Geneva Convention, making the restrictions the treaty places on occupying powers irrelevant. The sovereignty gap makes a U.S. bid legally feasible. Israel, having taken parts of the territory in a war of clear self-defense, should be able to claim sovereignty over all or part of the territory, as it did in the Golan Heights.
The "right of self-determination" doesn't allow local ethnic groups to choose which country they are in - ask the Kurds, the Catalans or the Greenlanders. In any case, the Palestinian population has categorically rejected sovereignty unless it includes Jerusalem, which is Israeli sovereign territory, and is accompanied by the migration of millions of Arabs into the sovereign borders of Israel.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The Oscars and the Plight of the ‘Good Jew’
What’s interesting here is the assumption that Abraham’s involvement helped the film gain visibility not because he is good at his work but because he is a Jew and Hollywood supposedly still requires Jewish mascotry. Nor is it suggested that perhaps Abraham’s perspective as an Israeli is helpful to the story being told. The most telling of the complaints was also one of the more popular ones: that the Oscars victory heralds “normalization,” the idea that Jews and Arabs can work together or be friends.
The problem for these Palestinian activists, then, is simply: coexistence. Abraham helped make this documentary because, he says, he believes in coexistence. But he has badly misread his audience. Fans of an agitprop production like this aren’t in it for the coexistence, they’re in it for the resistance. To them, to get up on stage and suggest an equivalence between an innocent Israeli baby murdered in captivity and the Hamas terrorist responsible for that murder is offensive—to the Hamasnik.
“There is a different path,” Abraham said in his acceptance speech last night. That path, he said, is one of “national rights for both of our people.” Then he said something rather sad: “I have to say… the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path.”
In fact, the foreign policy of the United States has done the opposite. For half a decade now, U.S. policy has been structured around Arab-Israeli peace deals, expanding coexistence and mutual recognition in the region. But while numerous Arab polities have embraced this path, the Palestinians have not. This path has been open to the Palestinians for decades; an explicit offer of full “national rights for both… people” has been on the table for a quarter-century. But America cannot force the Palestinians to say yes to their own state.
No doubt Abraham’s phone has been ringing off the hook with industry insiders and peers and peace activists telling him how brave he is. Their admiration is not nothing—Abraham’s career depends on earning just this type of praise from just those types of people. He won’t get the whole world, but he might get his Wales. And a whole lot of resentment from the people he thinks he’s doing all of this for.
Deborah Lipstadt:
Why I Won’t Teach at Columbia
My decision to withdraw my name from consideration for a teaching post at Columbia is based on three calculations.
First, I am not convinced that the university is serious about taking the necessary and difficult measures that would create an atmosphere that allows for true inquiry.
Second, I fear that my presence would be used as a sop to convince the outside world that “Yes, we in the Columbia/Barnard orbit are fighting antisemitism. We even brought in the former Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.” I will not be used to provide cover for a completely unacceptable situation.
Third, I am not sure that I would be safe or even able to teach without being harassed. I do not flinch in the face of threats. But this is not a healthy or acceptable learning environment.
On too many university campuses, the inmates—and these may include administrators, student disrupters, and off-campus agitators as well as faculty members—are running the asylum. They are turning universities into parodies of true academic inquiry.
We are at a crisis point. Unless this situation is addressed forcefully and unequivocally, one of America’s great institutions, its system of higher education, could well collapse. There are many in this country—including those in significant positions of power—who would delight in seeing that happen. The failure to stand up to disrupters who are preventing other students from learning gives the opponents of higher education the very tools they need.
Meanwhile, absent direct and comprehensive action to protect Jewish students and the campus environment, I will not be teaching on Columbia’s campus.
How to Save Jewish Babies
When Jewish babies were kidnapped, the then-president of the United States planned a pier to bring aid to their captors. Kfir and Ariel were suffering unspeakably beneath Gaza, and the then-vice president said Israel could not move heaven and earth to get them back—she had looked at the maps, and it just wasn’t worth it. The Joe Biden administration and its USAID Director Samantha Power sent $2.1 billion in “emergency” supplies to Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza, openly funding our enemy’s war of extermination against us under the pretense of “evenhandedness.” And that was the reaction of our supposed best friend, while the rest of the planet from London to Beirut brayed for our blood and defamed us daily for fighting back.
The new U.S. president, himself disgusted by the humiliating procession of Jewish hostages and caskets, has stopped U.S. aid to our enemies and publicly released Israel from a deal designed to ensure our defeat. It’s time to end this desecration. Reports are that, with the hostages retrieved, Israel plans to resume the war and conquer the Strip in the coming month. We do not need anyone’s mercy. We are no longer powerless and need not pray over our children as if we were. We are free to fight our wars and win. We are free to be powerful. Our babies should sleep soundly at night because their “community” will use that power to defend them by any means necessary—if we can find the courage.
We have become more religious since Oct. 7, not less. I still sing for God’s blessing at bedtime. I pray my son will soon be the Jewish leader who embodies the lessons learned from this hideous episode: Stand up for your fellow Jew, and for all decent people. Do what you must to ensure that there are no more Oct. 7s, and for that matter no more Feb. 19s. We will no longer be tormented, and we will take proactive steps to ensure that. We cannot worry about what the world will say.
We cannot get bogged down worrying about the abstractions that somehow always conclude, “and the Jews should accept their fate.” International law didn’t save Kfir and Ariel. Neither did social justice, or human rights, or any of those high-minded concepts. And they never could. If anything, they served as cudgels to stop the Jews from using our power to save precious Jewish babies. We can only focus on doing what is necessary to defend ourselves, because no one else will do it for us.
I will still sing a lullaby for Kfir and Ariel, and the dozens of Jewish children whose spilled blood failed, once more, to arouse the world’s conscience. I know a song set to Deuteronomy 32:43, a verse that belongs on the lips of all who love God and hate evil.
“Rejoice, O nations, over His people, for the blood of his servants He will avenge; their vengeance he shall return upon His enemies, and atone for His people upon His land.”
From Ian:
Washington’s U-turn on Ukraine a ‘challenge’ for Israel, experts say
According to Chatham House senior fellow and former Knesset member Ksenia Svetlova, “what happened in the White House with Zelensky shows that the U.S. doesn’t have a constant policy or permanent allies. If there are no permanent allies, if Ukraine is thrown into the trash after all these years … no one is immune.”
According to Svetlova, the fact that the Biden administration froze some weapon shipments to Israel amid domestic political pressure shows that “there are no holy cows, not even Israel.”
“Even in the current term, Trump can change. If there are no constant interests or doctrines, that means anything can change. Israel must be prepared to become like Ukraine,” she said.
Emmanuel Navon, CEO of European pro-Israel organization ELNET and an international relations lecturer at Tel Aviv University, argued that while Trump could theoretically change his mind at any time, Israel is in a different situation because it has strong backing in Trump’s coalition of supporters.
“Ukraine is a place that most Americans don’t really care about, especially not Trump’s constituents,” Navon said. “Israel is important to evangelical voters. Trump cares about his voters and they care about Israel, not Ukraine.”
As for the cease-fire agreement that the Trump administration is trying to negotiate between Russia and Ukraine, Svetlova warned that Trump is “forcing an agreement without a security guarantee [for Ukraine] after three years of a war started by a violent neighbor … No defense will come of that.”
Yet, Svetlova said there is no comparison to the Trump administration’s involvement in Israel-Hamas cease-fire negotiations, where Israel has every advantage over Hamas – with the notable exception of the hostages.
Rather, Svetlova said, Trump’s approach to Ukraine could be a warning sign to Israel that he may push an Iran nuclear deal that is not sufficiently robust.
“It’s a matter of life and death for Israel,” she said. “The Saudis and Emiratis are in the same boat. [The countries] need to seriously discuss a policy not to cross Trump but also not to be a victim of this kind of coercion.”
The fact that Ukraine policy is creating a rift between the U.S. and Europe is also a problem for Israel when it comes to a coordinated response to the Iranian threat. The U.K., Germany and France are the only Western countries with the power to snap back all pre-2015 sanctions on Iran, an ability that expires in October.
Svetlova suggested that Israel plays a mediating role between the U.S. and Europe on Iran, pointing out that “sanctions will be much more effective if there is unity in the Western world on this. Any division is not good for us.”
Navon described European leaders as “completely horrified” at the Trump-Zelensky meeting.
Still, Navon said that there is an opportunity for Israel in the Trump administration’s confrontational attitude towards Europe, citing Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich last month: “He castigated the Europeans, but said that if you want America to have your back, you have to be more respectful of our common Western values based on Christianity.”
He noted that the European right sees Israel as “one of the pillars of Western civilization” defending those values.
“This is great for Israel because you have quite a few conservative parties in Europe who are open to this message and supportive of Israel,” Navon added. “Israel can use this rift between the U.S. and Europe to its advantage.”
Khaled Abu Toameh:
Why Arabs Don't Want To Receive Palestinian Ex-Prisoners
The Jordanians and Lebanese, for their part, have not forgotten how Palestinians sparked civil wars in their countries in the 70s and 80s.
[The Arab countries'] refusal to take in Palestinian prisoners probably arises from the fact that these countries actually do not care about the Palestinians and even consider them an ungrateful people and troublemakers. Many Arabs also seem to have lost faith in the Palestinians' ability to implement reform and end rampant financial and administrative corruption in their governing bodies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. Help us modern-minded, secular, liberal Muslims marginalize their influence by declaring what they are: a terrorist organization." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.
"In point of fact, nothing would be more pro-Muslim than the marginalization of the Muslim Brotherhood and its direct affiliates. Making the Muslim Brotherhood radioactive would allow the light to shine upon the most potent antagonists in Muslim communities: those who reject political Islamist groups and believe in liberty and the separation of mosque and state." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.
"Call on American Muslim leaders to take a position on the Muslim Brotherhood and its overarching theo-political ideology. I ask my fellow Muslims: Will they be the side of freedom, liberty, and modernity, or will they be on the side of tyranny of the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey's AKP, the Iranian Khomeinists, or Pakistan's Jamaat e-Islami?" — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.
"Develop foreign policy mechanisms to disincentivize Qatari and Turkish Government facilitation of the Brotherhood and ultimately think about suspending Turkey from NATO." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.
"And please stop engaging Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in government, media, and NGOs, and recognize their Islamist terrorist sympathies." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.
Such a designation would also make it far more difficult for the countries that support the Muslim Brotherhood, especially Turkey and Qatar, to keep on doing so. The Muslim Brotherhood has already been declared a terrorist organization by the governments of Austria, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Gaza standoff: Netanyahu and Hamas' high-stakes cease-fire gamble
Over the weekend, Israel and the U.S. announced that they had agreed upon a framework whereby the cease-fire would be extended for 50 days, and in exchange Hamas would release the remaining hostages, both living and dead, in two separate batches. Hamas so far appears to be rejecting the proposal. Ron Ben-Yishai explains the strategic logic at play, and why Gaza’s terrorist rulers may feel themselves under a new kind of pressure:
The main threat is the credible risk of an Israeli military operation to reoccupy Gaza. Five IDF divisions are already positioned around the Strip, ready for rapid deployment. . . . . Second, internal pressure within Gaza is mounting as civilians demand relief. In an effort to intensify this leverage, Israel announced this morning that it was halting humanitarian aid to Gaza so long as Hamas continues to reject the [new cease-fire] plan.
The third and strongest pressure point is U.S. support. President Donald Trump has shown no signs of losing interest in resolving the crisis.
Hamas, for now, is playing tough, banking on the assumption that Israel would avoid resuming large-scale military operations for fear of endangering the hostages. But recent statements from Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz suggest that if Hamas refuses the deal, Israel may be willing to take that risk.
From Ian:
Infantilising Palestinians, demonising Israelis
Humanity is certainly in short supply in Perfect Victims. In the chapter, ‘Tropes and Drones’, el-Kurd tells us again and again that his problem is not just with Israel, it is also with Jews. ‘The people seeking to expel us from our neighbourhood were Jewish’, he writes, ‘the bureaucrat issuing and revoking our blue ID cards was a Jew’, and ‘as for the soldiers who were frisking us to check those IDs… most of them [were] Jewish’.
El-Kurd fumes against the Palestinian notables who wrote a joint letter taking issue with Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s anti-Semitic comments in August 2023 – when he claimed that Hitler ‘fought’ the Jews because they dealt with ‘usury, money and so on’. El-Kurd claims that ‘defending ourselves, often preemptively, against the baseless charge of anti-Semitism’ is a mistake, a tactic that ‘elevates the history of Jewish suffering… above our present-day suffering’.
El-Kurd is convinced that Israel is illegitimate and that Israeli Jews are ‘colonisers’. Quoting Frantz Fanon, he says ‘the work of the colonised is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist’.
But Israelis are not colonisers. They are refugees from persecution in Europe up to 1945, and in the Arab world since 1948. Most were born in Israel. By characterising Jews as the ‘colonisers’, el-Kurd is lending a veneer of legitimacy to his vilification of an entire people.
El-Kurd refuses to be drawn on the future of the Jews because, he says, this can only ever mean the de-railing of the Palestinian cause. He protests that the ‘possibility of a second holocaust is given primacy over a holocaust happening in the present’ – that is, in Gaza.
It is certainly true that Israel has been fighting a deadly war with Hamas since October 2023. But it is not in any sense a ‘holocaust’. The victims of holocausts do not generally have their own armies, nor fire missiles at their persecutors. El-Kurd points to the ‘countless examples of annihilatory rhetoric’ by Israeli officials, but he could just as easily list the genocidal remarks made by Hamas spokesmen, like Osama Hamdan or Ghazi Hamad.
Moreover, Hamas ran riot in southern Israel for just 18 hours on 7 October 2023, and managed to kill 1,200 people, most of them Jews. Its organisational commitment to killing Jews goes back to its founding. After Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades attacked Sderot, Be’eri and other towns bordering on Gaza that awful day in 2023, Mohammed el-Kurd was excited. ‘Much of what is happening in occupied Palestine’, he tweeted on 8 October, ‘will be in future history books as an example of revolutionary struggle’. Like so many among the pro-Palestine crowd, el-Kurd has since downplayed the significance of the massacre, complaining that attention is always on 7 October, not on what came before.
El-Kurd claims that Palestinians are denied the ‘common humanity’ applied to others, and are therefore dehumanised. Yet he ignores the clear dehumanisation of Jews that made it possible for Hamas to slaughter families in their homes on 7 October. That is bad enough, but worse is the evasion of responsibility. It is galling to read him protest against ‘the ceaseless infantilisation of the dehumanised subject’, in reference to Palestinians, when he and his fellow anti-Israel campaigners have done the most to infantilise them. For el-Kurd, Hamas should not be held responsible for its actions – any discussion of its atrocities or brutality, he suggests, is a ‘distraction’. What he ignores is that until a leadership emerges that accepts it has a responsibility to make peace, and live alongside its Jewish neighbours, there is no future for Palestine.
El-Kurd concludes his work like a poet, more than an activist, writing ‘the world is changing because it must’. The world is changing, but not in the direction that Mohammed el-Kurd hopes. Hamas has brought disaster upon Gaza. And the prospect of a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians looks further away than ever.
How the UN turned Palestinians into permanent refugees
To illustrate the absurdity of what has been happening, take the case of Mohamed Anwar Hadid. His father fled Nazareth in 1948 because he ‘did not want the family to live under the Israeli occupation’. He ended up in California where he became a property developer building luxury mansions and hotels in Beverly Hills.
You might not have heard of Hadid. But you are likely to have heard of his daughters, supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid, both of whom are American-born citizens. Bella, who reputedly earns up to $20million a year, regularly posts anti-Israel sentiments on social media, and has been attending pro-Palestine rallies, chanting ‘From the river to the sea’. Amazingly, the two sisters, their father and other members of the Hadid family are all still registered as Palestinian refugees with UNRWA.
That’s not all. Under the auspices of the UN, people of Palestinian heritage the world over don’t just have a permanent refugee status, they also have a so-called right of return.
Over several decades, the ‘right of return’ has allowed successive Palestinian political leaders to continue a war against Israel by other means – by insisting on their right to return to land ‘occupied’ by Israel. No other group of refugees has been granted a similarly inalienable right of return.
For the Palestine Liberation Organisation, this right was the ‘foremost of Palestinian rights’. Hamas is equally attached to it. In 2018, it organised a massive protest along the border fences with Israel. The objective of this ‘great march of return’ was, according to Hamas’s then leader, Ismail Haniyeh, to ‘break the walls of the blockade, remove the occupation entity and return to all of Palestine’. No wonder novelist Amos Oz, the founder of Israel’s Peace Now movement, has argued that ‘the right of return is a euphemism for the liquidation of Israel’.
The twin issues of refugee status and the right of return have taken on enormous symbolic significance for Palestinians. They have also made, and will continue to make, any peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis inordinately difficult.
Now would be a good time to start reassessing Palestinians’ permanent refugee status and the right of return. That way we might finally start taking some of the heat out of this interminable conflict.
Yisrael Medad:
Will Palestinians in Gaza get up and go?
Ze’ev Jabotinsky began his 1923 “On the Iron Wall” essay by denying that he is “an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth.”
He insisted that “it is not true.” He did admit that, emotionally, his “attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations: polite indifference.”
A veteran of the campaign for equal rights for Jews in the Russian Empire, including autonomous national rights for all nationalities, he wished to see a parallel reality develop in the Mandate for Palestine. He believed that “there will always be two peoples in Palestine.”
Based on that belief, he added: “I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine,” and insisted that he would be prepared to take an oath, binding on future generations, “that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.” All that, however, was before the 1929 riots, those of 1936 to 1939, and all the wars since.
He set certain basic principles. There must be peace, and it needs to be obtained by peaceful means. There must be a Jewish majority in the future Jewish state. The Arabs need to agree that the Jews belong to their homeland. Responding to whether all this is possible, he wrote: “The answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs, but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.”
A century later, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, speaking at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in mid-February, said: “Why not give Gazans a choice? … Over the last couple of years … 150,000 Gazans left. … If people want to leave, if they want to emigrate, it’s their choice. And I think President [Donald] Trump’s plan is right on the dot.”
In other words, they should have freedom of movement and the right to emigrate.
Netanyahu could have added that some 70% of Palestinians in Gaza consider themselves “refugees.” As such, they are planning to move away from Gaza in any case. Of course, their desired destination is Israel—with the aim of eradicating the Jewish state, a purpose they adopted as a life’s mission since 1947 when they rejected that year’s U.N. Partition Plan in a not very peaceful manner.
Many of them continued to pursue their aim during the 1950s in the ranks of the fedayeen when they engaged in cross-border raids of theft, destruction and murder. A new phase of their “armed struggle” resumed after the Sinai Campaign with the founding of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. In 1987, Hamas was established, designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States and other countries.
From Ian:
Begin’s unpublished writings to be released on 33rd anniversary of his death
A collection of previously unseen documents, letters and articles written by former Prime Minister Menachem Begin will be made public next week, coinciding with the 33rd anniversary of his death.
Among the handwritten papers is a document outlining Begin’s views on human rights, the need for a constitution and the tension between the judiciary and the legislature.
In 1952, Begin wrote a 65-page paper titled A Personal View, A National View and Basic Principles. Due to austerity measures in the young state of Israel, he drafted it on discarded rolls of paper from a printing press.
“There is no justice without courts,” Begin wrote. “Justices are but flesh and blood and may make mistakes, be bribed or afraid, but the determinative role of the court in our society is not the human weaknesses of any particular judge but the ‘psychological position’ given to that institution and those who sit in judgment.” He argued that both the judiciary and authorities must uphold the courts’ complete independence.
Herzl Makov, CEO of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, described the documents as a reflection of Begin’s political philosophy and humility. “It is a sharp political analysis that distills Begin’s liberal-national worldview,” he said.
In the writings, Begin also addressed Israel’s territorial aspirations and the necessity of national might. He warned that Israel’s security depended on its power. “Anyone with eyes in his head knows that when we are strong, we will not be attacked by the Arabs, even without signed agreements. And if we are weak, our Arab enemies will rise to destroy us, even if such agreements are forged in diplomacy.”
Begin criticized Israel’s early leaders for conceding historical lands, lamenting that they agreed to establish the state without key biblical sites within its borders. “National leaders were found willing to sign, in the name of the people of Israel, that Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Nablus and all the good land east of the Jordan would not be ours. Is there a national-historic crime equal to this?”
Growing threat of US isolationism is a danger to the US-Israel alliance
Throughout history, political movements, even those not initially antisemitic, have often seen their most radical factions steer them toward antisemitism.
In recent years, segments of the American left have embraced militant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Marxist ideologies, and policies that exacerbate societal divisions.
This shift has, at times, fostered antisemitic sentiments as observed in rhetoric from certain college campuses, organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jewish Voice for Peace, national unions, civil rights groups, and members of the “Squad.”
For instance, a recent report from StopAntisemitism revealed that 72% of Jewish college students in the United States feel unwelcome, with over half having faced antisemitism.
The Republican Party has successfully positioned itself against many of these divisive issues, recognizing their danger to the American way of life and the direct opposition to liberal US values. The new administration has already made strides in addressing these social challenges and affirmed itself as a strong ally of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
However, the GOP has a blind spot for a Trojan horse gaining momentum within its ranks: a faction of “America First” isolationists who promote policies that, if unchecked, could threaten both America’s global standing and its allies, particularly Israel.
Defining themselves sometimes as “restrainers,” these figures advocate a philosophy of strengthening domestic affairs by rallying against most types of foreign aid and limiting military engagement abroad. While a measure of restraint in foreign policy is healthy, taken to an extreme, it risks weakening America’s global leadership and its commitment to strategic allies. The Jewish community must recognize this emerging threat and its potential to undermine the US-Israel alliance.
The United States cannot afford to completely retreat from the world stage without severe consequences for its own and global security.
History has shown that when America stands back, adversaries quickly fill the vacuum – whether in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, or Latin America. A disengaged America emboldens hostile regimes, undermines global stability, and endangers our interests and allies.
Turning away from Israel, as advocated by the America First isolationists, would send a dangerous message to other US allies: America is no longer a reliable partner.
The isolationist sentiment echoes past missteps, such as the US’s reluctance to confront the growing threats of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. If the US pulls back now, nations that rely on American support may be forced to seek alliances elsewhere, including with adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran.
John Aziz:
Why Zionism Is Not Colonialism
The claim that Zionism is a form of colonialism is at the heart of a lot of anti-Zionist narratives. The story goes that white, Western Jews decided to colonise Palestine, and displace the native Palestinian Arab population.
John Aziz's Blog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
One piece of historical evidence that often gets thrown around in these conversations and seems to have gone mega viral a few times recently is this headline from the New York Times, proclaiming that Zionists intended to colonise Palestine:
The implications of this accusation of colonisation is that colonisation is a horrible thing that must end as the arc of history bends further and further towards justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. In other words, the colonisers must give the land back to the previous owners, and return from whence they came.
But ownership of land, especially in a national sense, is a complex and fraught topic. Yes, it’s true that Palestinian Arabs were living in the land as a majority during the British Mandate between 1917-1947, and the Ottoman Empire during 1517-1917. But there were multiple earlier Jewish polities in the Holy Land across history, with the most recent independent Jewish entity ending with the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 136 AD, after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD following the first Jewish-Roman war.
The result of the Roman colonisation of the land was the enslavement and expulsion of many of the pre-existing indigenous Jewish population, who became scattered across the former Roman empire in Europe and the middle east. Similarly, the ancestors of the Palestinians are not only from later Arab conquerors, and the Romans and Byzantines themselves, but they are also descended in large part from parts of the Jewish population that stayed on the land in spite of Roman rule, and later converted to Christianity or Islam.
This is why Jewish and Palestinian populations are genetically quite closely linked:
The reality of Zionism is that it was the descendants of Jewish people who had previously been displaced from Palestine (or the Land of Israel, or whatever you want to call it) trying to return to the home land of their ancestors.
This is why unlike with classical colonialism, for example the French colonisation of Algeria—which is often cited as an inspiration by Palestinian anti-Zionists—there is no mother country or colonial metropole in the case of Zionism. Colonialism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the act of one country acquiring control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.
Now some may contest this definition. But by that definition, the New York Times description of Zionism as an act of colonisation was simply not accurate.
The question to ask anyone who claims Zionism is colonialism is what is the mother country?
Reform rabbi: ‘Hamas is the Palestinians,’ two-state solution a delusion
The murder of Shiri Bibas and her two children at the hands of Palestinian terrorists has ended the possibility of a two-state solution, a prominent Reform rabbi declared on Friday.
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi at New York City’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, told congregants in an explosive Shabbat sermon that he had “snapped” over the killings.
“This was the week that finally ended the hope–at least in my lifetime–for a Palestinian state and a Jewish state existing side-by-side,” Hirsch said. “The Palestinians themselves strangled this fragile hope in its crib.”
“Until such time as the Palestinians themselves say they want peaceful coexistence–two states living side-by-side–we must cease deluding ourselves that a two-state solution is available now,” he added.
Gazan terrorists abducted Shiri Bibas, 32, and her two sons Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9-months-old, from Kibbutz Nir Oz in the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Based on forensic evidence, their captors murdered the two children “with their bare hands” within weeks of the attacks, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
The funeral for the three victims was held on Wednesday after their bodies were returned to Israel as part of Phase 1 of the ceasefire-for-hostages deal between Hamas and Israel.
According to Hirsch, the murders and Hamas’s staging of parade-like ceremonies to crowds of cheering Gazans during the release of emaciated Israeli hostages is an indictment of Palestinian society, which suffers from a “moral miasma and social collapse” and whose national movement fuels “an endless cycle of violent depravity.”
From Ian:
The West is colonizing the Palestinian cause
This term “Palestine” was first introduced by the Romans. Expelling the Jews from their land, they renamed Judea as Palestine. Over the centuries, this term was accepted by Jews themselves. The Land of Israel and Palestine became synonymous.
But in the 1920s, the West migrated the term. Arabs in Palestine at the time expressed their collective sentiment through the nascent Hashemite Arab Kingdom of Syria. They identified as Syrians. When France took over Syria and ended the Arab Kingdom, Western colonialist offices imposed a new identity on Arabs in Palestine: “Palestinians.” British diplomat Mark Sykes (of the Sykes-Pictot agreement) even came up with a flag.
While this colonialist identity-engineering exercise was initially rejected by Arabs living in Palestine, European powers cultivated the notion of Palestinian nationalism in order to promote their own Western interests: The British as counterforce to the Jews, Germans as counterforce to the British, and since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the EU and European governments as a counterforce to the State of Israel and by extension to America.
This worked and, by the turn of the 21st century, it was clear that the term Palestine, as well as the Sykes flag represented the national movement of Palestinian Arabs.
But in recent years, and especially since October 7, the term has been migrating, yet again, from describing a group of individuals in the Middle East, toward describing an abstract concept in the West.
This, for example, was reflected in the September 2023 University of Pennsylvania Palestine Writes festival. American students were not expected to write of the longing for a land they never been to – nor knew much of – but about such concepts as: occupation, suppression, injustice. Similarly, President Donald Trump referring to Senator Chuck Schumer as a “Palestinian” is not a reference to his ethnic background, but to his ideology.
Some can argue, cynically, that the re-appropriation of the term is legitimate. After all, it was Europe who “owns the copyright” on the term Palestine: The Romans created it, and the British, French, and Germans promoted it.
But what about the human rights of Palestinians themselves?
Voluntary de-Palestinization
Repeatedly, Palestinians are denied their basic rights to personal self-determination by their European oppressors. When Palestinians chose to be employed and mentored by Jewish-owned businesses, European governments launched aggressive campaigns to have those businesses shut down, such as SodaStream. Similarly, when Palestinians in Gaza chose to flee a war zone, the West failed to provide escape routes, and now that President Trump has introduced such a plan, Westerns are opposing it, effectively denying Palestinians the basic human right to leave.
There is an inevitable clash: Europe and Europhilic circles in the United States care exclusively about Palestinian national rights, even at the price of Palestinian human rights. This, while Palestinians naturally care about their personal safety, prosperity, and indeed rights as human beings.
To put it bluntly, Europeans and Western pro-Palestinians dehumanize Palestinians.
We are in an era of seismic changes. The Middle East of September 2023 is not coming back, and therefore, Western foreign offices and seasoned peacemakers should get rid of legacy frameworks and assumptions that, perhaps, were relevant back then, but are only standing in the way of peace today.
In this realm, there is a golden opportunity to shift away from frameworks based on a zero-sum game, such as “land for peace” and the two-state solution, toward frameworks that are based on a win-win, such as the Abraham Accords and President Trump’s Gaza relocation plan.
Dara Horn returns to history — and literature — after Oct. 7
The last few years have been strange ones for writer Dara Horn. Used to creating imaginative Jewish worlds as a fiction writer, she published her first nonfiction book in 2021, expecting it to be a “detour.” Instead, the publication of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, about the very real and often very depressing world that Jews inhabit, changed the course of her career.
“I became this receptacle for all of these horror stories from Jewish readers,” Horn said. “I was immersed in this dumpster fire that now all of us are living in.”
The book was a series of essays examining the ways in which different societies engage with Jewish history and culture — usually, she found, by venerating Jewish suffering in traumatic historical events such as the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition, without teaching people to reckon with Jews as they currently are. The argument was explosive even before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Since then, the book’s title has become a ghoulishly ironic tagline for many Jews.
“The premise of the book is really that Jews are only acceptable in a non-Jewish society when they have no power, whether that means politically impotent or dead,” Horn told Jewish Insider in an interview this week. “That is just roaring back at us now. That is the only way that it’s acceptable to be Jewish, if you have no agency.”
Now, Horn has published her first new book in more than three years, a departure from both the award-winning literary fiction she is known for and the nonfiction essays about antisemitism she has written for major publications including The Atlantic and The New York Times since Oct. 7.
One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe is a graphic novel, geared toward middle school readers, about a family that gets stuck at their Seder for six months because their house is so messy that the children are unable to find the afikomen. In order to retrieve it, the protagonist must go on a time-travel journey through thousands of years of Jewish history, visiting Seders throughout time — guided by a talking goat from the song “Chad Gadya” — until he retrieves the afikomen, finally saving his family from the longest Seder ever.
“If you’ve ever been to a Passover Seder, you know that they feel like they last forever,” the book begins. In the pane below, the text reads: “It’s a holiday celebrating freedom, but you are stuck at that table for a very long time.” Horn read this passage with a laugh, and a word of praise for the illustration skills of her collaborator Theo Ellsworth, a cartoonist in Montana who she cold-emailed after she found her kids reading one of his books.
“The way he illustrated this is he has this kid sitting in the chair in the top frame, and then the bottom frame is a bearded skeleton covered in cobwebs, seated in the same chair, which is how I feel like a lot of kids feel, and even some adults,” Horn said.
BBC is in crisis and only systemic change can fix it
In a quite remarkable first, after 16 months of anti-Israel bias and gaslighting of the Jewish community, the BBC has admitted fault in relation to its documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone.
Yes, they passed the buck and failed to take any immediate action, but after the Asserson Report, the 100-plus corrections in “misreporting” they’ve been forced to make, the appalling anti-Israel social media posts senior BBC journalists have indulged in and of course BBC Arabic continuing to employ staff who openly celebrated the Oct 7th massacre, any admittance of guilt feels significant.
Perhaps worst of all was the acknowledgement by the BBC that money was in fact sent to the wife of a senior member of Hamas. This is now a question for the authorities and certainly for Dame Dinenage Commons select committee to investigate.
The complete and utter failure of journalistic standards, lack of due diligence and breakdown in trust between the public and our national broadcaster with regards to this documentary, is the culmination of the arrogance of BBC leadership since the Hamas massacre.
This depth of failure does not happen in a vacuum though. It happens because the BBC’s values & code of conduct, it’s very mission to tell the truth, be impartial and transparent have been eroded over time.
The license fee payer’s money in this country should not be going to terrorists, the content coming out of our national broadcaster should not be terrorist propaganda and BBC talent and staff shouldn’t be signing politically motivated statements, which place their own twisted world views above the importance of their employer’s impartiality.
The BBC is in crisis and when one faces a systemic problem, the only solution is systemic change. For anyone who cares about the integrity and indeed the future of our national broadcaster, let’s hope that Samir Shah and the board have the courage to do just that.
Thursday, March 06, 2025
