From Ian:
Dr. Einat Wilf: 'We lied to ourselves about the Palestinians'
Dr. Einat Wilf, a former Labor MK who says she underwent a political awakening, explains in a recent interview with Maariv why she views Mahmoud Abbas as an adversary and why she is forming a new party, Oz, to advance a program that ties peace to Arab and Palestinian acceptance of Zionism.
Wilf says her focus is to confront the “right of return” and UNRWA’s role in perpetuating conflict, arguing that state services should prioritize those who serve the state.
Wilf frames her platform around three points: peace based on Arab and Palestinian acceptance of Zionism, state services for those who serve the state, and a shift from a diasporic mindset to sovereign governance.
‘After October 7, these issues are at the core’
About a year ago, Wilf was invited to a filmed interview about Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians. The former Labor MK and left-wing figure, who experienced a political awakening, tried to explain why she sees Mahmoud Abbas as an enemy.
“I spoke about his commitment to the Palestinian ethos that believes in the right of return and fights against the existence of a Jewish state for the Jewish people,” she recalls. “It was a long interview, and when I finished, studio staff, from the lighting tech to the director, came up to me and said, this is what we want to vote for. Why is there no one in Israeli politics who represents your ideas?”
Playing the dangerous boycott game
As Commentary’s Seth Mandel wrote: “How should we judge the countries that stomped out of Eurovision over Israel’s participation? Harshly. A singing competition is not a diplomatic convention. Would you leave a karaoke bar because there was an Israeli Jew there? Will these folks boycott all establishments that serve Israeli Jews?
“Aside from emitting a faint segregationist stink, these Europeans are politicizing every cell in their bodies in an attempt to enforce those same artistic limits on everyone else. If rare apolitical music gatherings are impossible, it has a stunting effect on the industry and on the minds and temperaments of the people participating in their own dumbing down.”
As many have noted, it’s not just the Eurovision Song Contest. There are ongoing boycotts of Israel in sports, academia, the literary world, and cultural events (ostensibly more cultured than Eurovision.)
Guinness World Records could hold its own world record in being tone-deaf. As a spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Jerusalem Post’s Mathilda Heller last week: “We truly do believe in record-breaking for everyone, everywhere, but unfortunately, in the current climate, we are not generally processing record applications from the Palestinian Territories or Israel, or where either is given as the attempt location, with the exception of those done in cooperation with a UN humanitarian aid relief agency.”
In case you were in any doubt, the UN relief agency clause means that Palestinians can still participate. It’s only the Jews – well, Israelis of any religion–who have been canceled.
The gaslighting of the Jewish state was revealed when the non-profit organization Matnat Chaim (The Gift of Life), which encourages altruistic kidney donations, contacted Guinness World Records regarding its planned record-breaking event scheduled to bring 2,000 Israeli kidney donors together next month for a photo in Jerusalem. Of all things to boycott!
A look at the GWR site shows some of the strange feats it has recognized, including, for example, this “brilliantly bonkers food record”: “Largest serving of chicken wings... To celebrate their 50th anniversary, Big Green Egg didn’t just throw a party – they grilled up a record! They cooked a mouth-watering 297.5 kg. (655 lb. 12.8 oz.) of chicken wings. That’s as heavy as 3 baby elephants!”
I find the comparison of thousands of devoured chicken wings to baby elephants more bizarre than bonkers, but that’s besides the point. As a vegetarian, I find the whole event in poor taste, but that’s not my beef. What do you think is healthier, educational, and life-affirming: grossly overeating chicken wings or encouraging people to donate a kidney to someone they don’t know?
As it happens, Israel is considered by some to be the highest global consumer of poultry per capita, but I’ll save my pride for the fact that Israelis, thanks largely to Matnat Chaim, lead the way in altruistic kidney donations.
Notably, Guinness World Records began its ban on Israel in November 2023, not after the October 7 Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity in which 1,200 were murdered and 251 abducted; it blocked Israel when the Jewish state began to fight back.
One thing is clear from the UN plenum, the Eurovision stage, and Guinness World Records: Israel is constantly being judged by a different standard. It’s a win for antisemitism and hatred, and a massive loss for the world.
The patheticness of Nick Fuentes
What we need is a reckoning with identity politics. Fuentes hardly speaks for a whole generation of disaffected young men, but he has been lent some fertile ground at the edges. Generation Z were force-fed woke grievance politics, and chastised if they dissented. They were told group identity is great, with the exception of white group identity. Young men were told men weren’t shit. The hysterical overuse of ‘far right’ and ‘racist’, in turn, insulated a portion of young people from these forms of censure. No wonder some grifting upstarts have managed to make hay out of this.
We also need to go on the offensive against this particular faction of right identitarians. That means pushing back on their racial essentialism and BS statistics. (Piers, bless him, didn’t make the best fist of the latter, leading to a painful digression about per-capita crime rates.) But it also means pointing out how pathetic – as well as bigoted – all of it is. Just as the wokesters blame all of their problems on white supremacy, and the Jews, the new racist right blames all of their problems on anti-whiteness, and the Jews. It’s a dumb racialisation of deeper material and cultural problems, and an embrace of babyish victimhood to boot.
As for the misogyny, I for one am shocked that someone who has never so much as touched a woman seems to hate them so much. The best part of the interview was when Morgan straight up asked Fuentes if he is a virgin. (Reader, he is.) Personally, I’d have been tempted to open with that. We can and should talk about how #MeToo or victim feminism or the explosion of online pornography has poisoned relations between the sexes. But the self-pitying rage of the sexless young man is a story as old as time.
Perhaps the barmiest claim made about Fuentes is that he is the next stage of the populist revolt – a take that serves to both flatter his ego and vindicate the fever dreams of the anti-populist set. Apparently, when a multiracial coalition rebelled against the undemocratic elites at the ballot box, when parents showed up at school boards to stop critical race theory and gender ideology being preached to their children, when ordinary Americans expressed their horror at Big Tech firms silencing speech at the behest of the government, what they were really hankering for was to be ruled by a ‘Catholic Taliban’, to use Fuentes’s phrase – for someone in power to tell them what to do, put women back in their box and divide up society by race, only in a more vintage, reactionary fashion. Democracy, freedom of speech, genuine equality – these are the popular causes of our time. Nick Fuentes is only a clownish mirror image of everything that Americans have been rebelling against.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
The humanitarian front against Israel
So why has Amnesty, which has done so much to poison the West against Israel with a sustained and malevolent campaign of lies designed to destroy it, suddenly lurched toward at least some acknowledgment of the truth?
Perhaps it feels the hot breath on its neck of the Trump administration, which is now threatening to take condign action against those who have assisted the Palestinian Arab terrorist armies in their war of extermination against Israel.
Officials in the administration have reportedly held advanced discussions on hitting the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine “Refugees” (UNWRA) with terrorism-related sanctions. Both Israel and the Trump administration have accused UNWRA of links with Hamas, allegations the agency has vigorously disputed.
Washington halted funding in January 2024 after Israel accused about a dozen UNRWA staff of taking part in the Oct. 7 attack. Israel has also accused UNRWA of taking and guarding hostages, as well as consistently glorifying terrorism in its schools, and teaching its children to hate and murder Jews.
However, the use of humanitarian institutions to launder the war of extermination against Israel goes much further. An NGO Monitor report that was recently released has revealed—from scores of internal Hamas documents—the astonishing extent of the terrorist group’s infiltration and exploitation of international NGOs’ operations in Gaza.
The organizations involved include Catholic Relief Services, funded by Ireland, the United States and the United Nations; the International Medical Corps funded by the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and the United Nations; and Medical Aid for Palestinians, whose funders include UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
According to the report, the evidence confirms that these NGOs in Gaza do not operate independently or neutrally. They are instead embedded in an institutionalized framework of coercion, intimidation and surveillance that serves Hamas’s terror objectives.
All NGOs operating in Gaza, it says, are required to adhere to strict Hamas security protocols, which include regular engagement with the terror group’s Ministry of Interior and National Security and other ministries.
Local Gazan “guarantors,” approved by Hamas, serve as the point of contact between Hamas and the NGOs. At least 10 such “guarantors” were Hamas members or supporters, or employed by Hamas-affiliated authorities.
‘Expelled From the Community of Which We Were a Part Only Yesterday’ Jean Améry on the Dilemma for Left-Wing Jewish Intellectuals, Sartre’s Freedom of Choice and the Commitment to Israel
What happened on 7 October 2023, and what has been happening since then, have surpassed the Jew-hatred of the 1960s and 70s. Hamas and their supporters invaded Israeli territory, raped, mutilated and slaughtered Israelis and proudly filmed themselves doing so. 1,200 people were murdered in a bestial manner, almost 5,000 were injured in one day alone, and 251 people, mostly Israelis but also foreign nationals whose only ‘crime’ was to be in the Jewish state, were taken hostage into Gaza.
Immediately afterwards, leftist groups throughout the Western world gathered in solidarity not with the victims but with the murderers.[38] Feminist activists either ignored the rapes or treated them as ‘resistance.’[39] The tendency among prominent Holocaust, genocide, and memory scholars to delegitimise Israel by drawing unfounded parallels between the extermination of European Jewry and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians – already apparent well before 7 October – has intensified over the past two years.[40]
The accusation that Israel is committing genocide is an old classic in the repertoire of anti-Israel protesters. Since 2023, however, this blood libel has made its way into mainstream arts, academia, and politics across the West. It has nothing to do with the facts on the ground, but rather with the own psychological needs of anti-Zionists – we might recall Sartre, Adorno, and Horkheimer. In Germany, the popular chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ was supplemented by the rallying call, ‘Palestine will set us free.’ The redemptive dimension of today’s anti-Israel activism could not be sounded more clearly. ‘Palestine’ has become the new saviour or – in leftist terms – the new revolutionary subject after the proletariat and the Third World failed to deliver on the hopes invested in them.
A truly humane future, once the aspiration of the left – certainly the left Améry considered himself a part of – appears to have been abandoned long ago. The future that today’s leftist activists on the barricades are striving for as ‘liberation’ will not bring about actual redemption of mankind, but a whole different kind of suffering compared to today – suffering reminiscent of the worst horrors humanity had descended into in the 20th century.
When the Germans and their auxiliaries sought to purify the world from misery, the logic of self-preservation, the basis of all rational thought, turned into the logic of extermination: murder for the sake of murder. As a result of its enactment, the Holocaust remains unprecedented to this day. And yet, another descent into barbarism is not banished in the future as long as the conditions that enabled it prevail.
The only practical objection to the world after Auschwitz and the possible repetition of antisemitic extermination today is the Jewish state. Not international law, not human rights declarations, and not – as in present-day Germany’s case – a questionable raison d’état. The fact that antisemitism is intertwined with society at large, or in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s words ‘anti-semitism and totality have always been profoundly connected,’[41] removes everyone, Jews and non-Jews, from freedom of choice when it comes to the necessity of Israel.
However, Jews feel the ‘crushing pressure’[42] already today. When some side with antisemites and rationalise antisemitic attacks, this phenomenon is often described as ‘Jewish self-hate.’ But such a perception falls short. Because it is based on a displacement: It suggests that the reason for this behaviour lies within the Jew, when in fact it originates outside, in the pressure of antisemitic society.[43] Jews who turn against Jewish self-determination embody, paradoxically, both resistance against and identification with their persecutor. Resistance, because they try to avert the hate against them, identification because they take on their enemies’ gaze. In the attempt to gain self-empowerment, they overlook that antisemitism is not related to what its objects actually do or not do. The security promised by this identification is in fact no security at all. Non-Jews do not experience this pressure. They make their decision – and this crucial difference is all too easily missed – without duress.
Améry’s disconcerting insight is that ultimately no one who cares about a future in which freedom of choice is possible has any true choice today. This is the uncomfortable imposition which cannot be dispelled by omitting Améry’s essay from posthumously published books.
The Fake “Johns Hopkins Genetic Study” Meme
The meme is a fabrication, loosely based on a 2012 study by Dr. Eran Elhaik. In this study, he suggests that a significant number of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars—a diverse group of Turkic peoples from the Caucasus region who allegedly converted to Judaism.
This theory is known as the Khazarian Hypothesis and has been discredited as junk science by the academic community.
Elhaik’s study was methodologically flawed from the beginning. There is no Khazar DNA to compare with Ashkenazi Jews, as the Khazars have no living descendants. Elhaik’s use of modern Georgian and Armenian populations as proxies for ancient Khazars has been rejected by leading scientists, who have published indisputable evidence in numerous journals, including the prestigious journal Science.
In addition to the lack of genetic links to the Khazars, the theory is further weakened by the absence of linguistic connections. If Ashkenazi Jews were truly descendants of the Khazars, they would have spoken a Turkic language, not Yiddish, which is a Judeo-Germanic language.
The meme takes the erroneous results of Elhaik’s study even further. The paper was published in the Genome Biology and Evolution journal, not at Johns Hopkins, and it only focused on the DNA of European Jews, not Israelis, as confirmed by the author. Additionally, the figure of 97% does not appear anywhere in Elhaik’s research.
Numerous studies on Ashkenazi DNA have been conducted, and while none have proven a link to the Khazars, the overwhelming majority of genetic studies have confirmed that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically linked to the Levant.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The Danger Isn’t That the Cease-fire Will Collapse, But That It Will Become Permanent
The collective armies of Gaza understand that they can stretch out this phase of the process by stalling on the return of the final hostage’s body. That is why Israel is considering moving on to the second phase anyway—not because its leaders don’t care about the remains of Ran Gvili but because waiting for Hamas to trigger the second stage will itself incentivize Hamas to hold on to the body in perpetuity.
Refusing to advance to the second stage without the last hostage remains would be a significant strategic error on Israel’s part. For now, Hamas is waiting to see if it can bait Israel into exactly this error.
The pressure should be on Hamas of course, but also on the Arab states that have signed on to back the fulfillment of this deal. And on Europe, too, for that matter. Any time Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron move from pretending to care about Palestinians to actually caring about Palestinians, it will be welcome.
No one, except perhaps Hamas, wants this state of affairs to remain permanent.
At least that’s what they say. Let’s remember that after the Six-Day War, Israel was prepared to trade back the territories but the Arab states said, famously: no peace with Israel, no recognition of it, no negotiations with it.
Why were they so adamant? Because although they had lost the war against Israel, the Arab states received a consolation prize: The Palestinians were someone else’s problem now. Egypt was glad to be rid of Gaza and Jordan gave up its claims on the West Bank in the 1980s. The Palestinian Arabs could once again be used by the Arab world to weaken Israel with a permanent insurgency, unless by some miracle the Palestinians pulled themselves together enough for statehood.
The Arab states—and the wider Muslim world—are not exactly champing at the bit to contribute to the Gaza stabilization force that would be needed if Hamas were to be disarmed and replaced. Do they want Palestinian life rebuilt and the Palestinians given a chance to be free of Hamas’s totalitarian terror? Because from a certain angle, it’s starting to look as if maybe those Arab states would rather Gaza be split into an indefinite Israeli military occupation and a Hamas-controlled enclave. Perhaps the Arab world is not yet ready to contemplate the end of its conflict with Israel.
JPost Editorial:
The West refuses to call out Hamas's blatant manipulation of public opinion
The Palestinian refugee crisis? Israel’s fault – never mind that it was Arab leaders who rejected partition and then launched a war to destroy the Jewish state.
Hunger in Gaza? Not because Hamas brutally attacked Israel and triggered a war. Not because it hides infant formula to inflame a crisis. Instead, blame defaults to Israel, the cruel party in a narrative shaped long before this war began.
For centuries, people were conditioned to believe in Jewish cruelty – the grotesque libels of killing children and using their blood for matzot. Old habits die hard. The vocabulary changes, but the instinct remains: Accuse the Jews first, believe the worst about them, and then investigate later, if at all.
Once in a long while, however, someone from within Arab society, such as Alkhatib, who has lost 31 family members in Gaza since the October 7 massacre, dares to speak up.
He exposed a truth many in the West find inconvenient: Hamas manipulates public opinion while showing utter indifference to the suffering of its own people. If that suffering helps advance its ultimate goal of Israel’s disappearance – and if Western “useful idiots” assist along the way – then so be it.
One final point deserves attention. Alkhatib said the hidden baby formula was stored in warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the same ministry whose casualty figures are treated as indisputable fact by much of the international media. If that ministry conceals life-saving supplies to manufacture famine, why should anyone unquestioningly trust its numbers or its claims?
The answer should be obvious. The tragedy is that, for many, it still isn’t.
UNRWA is beyond repair, so it's time to move on
Moving from axing UNRWA to a constructive post-Gaza-war framework, the “international community” must focus on rebuilding Palestinian society – free from rank corruption, destructive indoctrination, coddling of terrorism, and the overall moral rot that for too long has contaminated international politics relating to Palestinians.
First and foremost, this means elimination of refugee status for all Palestinians living in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. “Refugee camps” must be transformed into regular neighborhoods or towns, and their residents redefined as, well, local residents – not refugees.
Second is that meaningful curriculum overhauls should be undertaken in Palestinian educational institutions from kindergarten through university, eliminating antisemitic and anti-Israel materials, and the adoption of population-wide deradicalization initiatives.
Third is that action toward total demilitarization of Palestinian areas should be taken (excepting lightly armed police forces), as envisioned and promised in the Oslo Accords 30 years ago – but never pursued seriously.
Alas, Israel has little confidence in the ability of anybody to swiftly rebuild Palestinian society or “reform” Palestinian government, unless the Palestinians themselves wish to do so.
Throwing more aid money at the Palestinians certainly won’t help, just as it has not done the trick over the past thirty years since the Oslo Accords were signed.
Despite tens of billions of dollars and euros invested in the Palestinian Authority by the “international community,” there is no democracy, no rule of law, no transparency, no sustainability, no investment in economic stability, and no peace education in the PA. Not a single refugee has been resettled. Not one hospital has been built in the West Bank: only one sewage treatment plant.
But there is plenty of nepotism and corruption, “pay-for-slay” handouts (meaning the incentivizing and rewarding of terrorism against Israel), violent propagandizing against Israel (including support for Hamas’s October 7 invasion and massacres), and diplomatic assault on Israel in every possible international forum.
As for Western “security assistance” to the PA, this has produced mixed results, at best. The authority does not effectively control key terrorist nodes in the West Bank, and its security personnel have repeatedly participated in or facilitated terror attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers. PA security personnel account for 12% of all Palestinian terrorists held by Israel.
In short, the overall return on Western investment in Palestinian maturity and independence is abysmal. Real reform of Palestinian government and society is going to be a long, arduous process and must involve penalty and penance, not just reward and recognition.
Which is why it is asinine of France, Britain, Canada, and others to resurrect illusions of imminent Palestinian statehood. Regrettably, their gambit is a recipe for devastating disappointment and protracted conflict.
From Ian:
The Islamification of Western Democracies
Europe's Muslim population has surged from less than 1% in 1970 to a projected 10-14% by 2050. Sweden potentially reaches 31%, Austria 21%, the UK 19%, and Germany 20%. Western civilization is being replaced - committing demographic suicide through its own democratic processes and ideological paralysis, acute passivity, and naivete. Moreover, Western societies have criminalized any discussion of this takeover.
No conquest is required - only open borders, welfare incentives, family reunification policies, refugee obligations, and a fertility differential guaranteeing Muslim demographic growth while native European populations collapse below replacement level.
Ideological conquest has weaponized social media and digital propaganda. Iran, Qatar, and Turkey invest billions in bot networks, influencer campaigns, and media empires amplifying pro-Islamic and anti-Israel narratives while recruiting Western progressives to accelerate Western ideological dismantling. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 to establish a caliphate based on Islamic supremacy, operates through media outlets, NGOs, political parties, mosques, and community organizations.
The Muslim population percentage in Canada increased by 145% from 2000 to 2025, while the U.S. increased by 90% in the same time period. Democratic societies should enable all citizens to seek office regardless of religion. The pattern that merits examination is whether officials elected primarily by Muslim constituencies adopt policies that prioritize narrow community interests over broader societal integration, whether they challenge fundamental Western values, and whether they systematically oppose Israel regardless of circumstance.
The effects of Islamification and the strategic use of social and mainstream media manipulation by jihadist state actors has already caused a significant shift in the way the Western world treats Israel. 17 out of 27 EU member states now recognize Palestine - effectively rewarding terrorism with diplomatic victory. European-funded NGOs systematically file cases against Israeli officials and soldiers in national and international courts.
Will Western civilization implement corrective policies or accept the continuing trajectory toward demographic replacement, political capitulation, and civilizational collapse?
Nikki Haley:
America must expose the left's dangerous falsehoods about Israel
The criticism of Israel is a plain attempt to defame and delegitimize the country to promote its extinction. Yet the left’s leaders either repeat this hateful language or allow it to continue unchecked.
A man carries two Israeli flags during a pro-Israel rally outside the Israeli Embassy on October 8, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Democrats’ turn toward antisemitism is disturbing enough. But the same evil is now creeping into the right, though it’s not yet as widespread as it is on the left. It’s also heartening that many conservatives are vigorously pushing back. But there’s still an urgent need for every leader on the right to unequivocally state that standing with Israel is in America’s interests.
Israel is a military and intelligence juggernaut in a strategically vital region of the world. When America supports Israel, we are directly investing in the protection of our own citizens. Israel is fighting enemies that seek our destruction too. When we sell weapons to the Israeli military, we spare our own troops from being sent into harm’s way.
Speaker Mike Johnson explains importance of US-Israel alliance Video
In the last two years, America hasn’t sent a single solider into battle against Hamas or Hezbollah, though both are committed to America’s destruction. If America abandoned Israel, it wouldn’t be long before we had to send our sons and daughters into battle against the same terrorists and tyrants.
These truths are the best antidote to the lies of antisemitism. History shows where those lies lead: to the actual genocide of the Jewish people. Preventing that tragedy is a moral imperative and a national necessity.
It starts with leaders who have the courage to say — and do — what’s right.
US: Surging Socialism and Anti-Semitism Masquerading as Anti-Zionism
Two decades ago, Islamism was virtually absent from the US political landscape.
Islamic antisemitism has gained ground in recent years, not just in the US but also in Europe. It appears fueled not only by adversaries of the US such as Iran, but also by domestic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that appear to hide the identities of foreign donors.
Many anti-Israel protesters claim to support the Palestinian cause, but oddly none of them ever calls for the Palestinians' rights from their own leaders for freedom of speech, women's and children's rights, or even for a stop to entrenched corruption, arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial executions, and other crimes against them.
The problem was not, as some have tried to claim, simply that [Tucker] Carlson invited [the neo-Nazi Nick] Fuentes, so much as Carlson's disinclination to question what he said. The veteran journalist Edward R. Murrow invited US Senator Joseph R. McCarthy for an interview but probed his statements. Carlson failed to indicate any disapproval of, or question, Fuentes's antisemitic remarks... What Carlson did was simply to give Fuentes a platform to expand his influence, unchallenged. The interview has been viewed online more than 20 million times.
This new hostility to Western civilization has also acted as a destabilizing force in major US foreign policy alliances. Israel, like it or not, is the United States' principal and most reliable ally in the Middle East.... As Israel is a world leader in technology, American investments there yield far more than they cost.
Islamists and other enemies of the United States doubtless hope that if the US abandons Israel, this would lead to both a substantial weakening of America and other democracies, and a strengthening of tyrannies -- notably Islamist tyrannies.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Hamas’s Stenographers Own Their Share of the Carnage
It’s not enough to be horrified by Hamas. Any healthy society must also be horrified by anyone who shared Hamas propaganda throughout the war.
The legions of pro-Hamas lemmings marching throughout American and European cities have tricked us into lowering the civilizational bar. We tend to be sated with scraps—just denouncing Hamas has become some kind of achievement. But the scale of Hamas’s depravity should leave its useful idiots tortured by their own conscience as well.
Because they ran interference for stuff like this:
“The father of Noa Marciano has spoken publicly for the first time, sharing harrowing details of his daughter’s final moments in Gaza.
“Speaking to a small crowd, her father Avi claimed that Noa was murdered by a doctor in Shifa hospital, who injected air into her veins – and that the family found out about her death after they were sent a video of her murder via the social media network Telegram.
“‘Noa is begging for her life,’ he said of the video, adding that, by the end of the clip, ‘she’s sweating but there’s no life to her body.’”
Noa Marciano was taken alive from Nahal Oz on October 7, along with six other female soldiers. Hamas blamed her death on an Israeli airstrike, and media were happy to repeat the claim. Hamas filmed Marciano in a hostage video pleading with Israel to stop the airstrikes, then filmed Marciano’s dead body.
What had actually happened, however, was that Hamas brought Marciano to Shifa Hospital alive and then executed her there in cold blood. Shifa was one of the hospitals that Israel said were being used by Hamas, sometimes to hold hostages, while the media pooh-poohed the claims. This is why “according to the Gaza Health Ministry” is insufficient, even if it’s followed by “… which is controlled by Hamas.” Once you know a claim or statement comes from Hamas, you cannot play the he-said-she-said game, as if dueling Israeli and Hamas claims have equal weight. Reciting Hamas talking points isn’t “reporting.”
That is especially true on subjects such as how a hostage died in Hamas captivity. The lie that IDF strikes killed the Bibas children persisted until the truth came to light: Palestinian terrorists brutally murdered the children with their own hands, then mutilated their bodies to hide the evidence.
‘Everything Is On the Table’: Trump Admin Weighs Terror Sanctions for UNRWA
The Trump administration says that "everything is on the table"—including terrorism-related sanctions—as it moves closer to taking fresh punitive measures against the Hamas-linked United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), according to three senior officials, who told the Washington Free Beacon that the aid group’s "time playing a role in Gaza is over."
"The Trump Administration is currently exploring all options to hold [UNRWA] accountable," a senior State Department official familiar with the matter said. "UNRWA is a corrupt organization with a proven track record of aiding and abetting terrorists."
Reuters reported earlier on Thursday that "terrorism-related sanctions" are among the list of options. The official said "no final decisions have yet been made," but did confirm that "everything is on the table."
The high-level discussions come as federal investigators compile mounting evidence of the U.N.’s complicity in Hamas’s aid diversion schemes. This includes instances in which Hamas "commandeered U.N. aid trucks," embedded terrorist operatives in "U.N. agencies or at U.N. facilities," and ensured humanitarian goods were "directly delivered to Hamas officials," as the Free Beacon reported earlier this year. Internal Hamas documents reviewed by the Free Beacon last week show the extent to which the terror group infiltrated U.N.-affiliated NGOs in Gaza, using them as intelligence resources and effectively controlling the network of non-profits operating in the territory.
A second U.S. official briefed on the UNRWA discussions said that, whatever route the administration takes, the aid organization will not play a role in Gaza’s future humanitarian landscape.
"UNRWA was found to have explicitly supported Hamas and other terrorist groups," the second senior official said, noting that dozens of UNRWA staffers were found to have directly participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree. "Their time playing a role in Gaza is over."
Israeli intelligence, for its part, determined in April that "among the 12,521 UNRWA employees in the Gaza Strip, at least 1,462 (12%) are members of Hamas or other designated terrorist organizations."
The Trump administration has already taken action against UNRWA in the months since President Donald Trump returned to office. In April, the administration stripped UNRWA of its immunity in U.S. courts, allowing a flood of lawsuits from the families of those killed by Hamas. The State Department informed Congress in July that it had "determined UNRWA is irredeemably compromised" and must be dismantled, according to a notice first reported by the Free Beacon.
NYPost Editorial:
Europeans finally waking up to Hamas-enabling UNRWA scam
It looks like the days are numbered for the terrorist-infested UN Relief and Works Agency, as UNRWA loses support from major European nations that have long backed it.
Cheers for Germany, Italy, Czechia and Hungary, joined by Bulgaria and Latvia last Friday in withholding support for the renewal of UNRWA’s charter. Austria, Romania and Lithuania joined in on a separate resolution.
Close observers have always known that UNRWA — the special UN agency charged with caring for Palestinian refugees, and only Palestinian refugees — works hand-in-glove with Hamas in Gaza.
But then it turned out that UNRWA directly employed Hamas fighters who joined in the Oct. 7, 2022, terror assault on Israel; the course of the war exposed many more, deep Hamas-UNRWA ties.
Israel has since banned UNRWA from working in its territory, and Washington cut off aid to the agency early this year, following a temporary suspension under President Joe Biden.
Israel, citing non-payment of taxes, even took over a former UNRWA center in East Jerusalem, raising the national standard in place of the flag of the United Nations.
Without Israel’s cooperation, UNRWA’s capacity to work in Gaza is next to zero, but that didn’t stop more than 150 nations voting Friday to keep the agency rattling along.
Remember: Every other refugee population in the world is helped by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which assists people displaced by war or persecution in resettlement and integration into their new homes; former refugees become residents and eventually citizens, losing their refugee status.
Only Palestinians, under UNRWA’s “care,” retain refugee status forever, even unto the third, fourth and fifth generations — and so perpetuating the eternal victimhood of the Palestinian people by shackling them to aid and legalizing their segregation inside neighboring nations long decades after their forebears arrived.
Deradicalizing Gaza Is Measured in Decades, Not Months
Hamas in Gaza was not merely a militant faction but a ruling system embedded in society. For nearly two decades, Hamas shaped culture, education, and everyday life. Hamas's ideological appeal remains durable because hostility toward Israel in Gaza is not dependent on Hamas alone; rather, Hamas has cultivated a social base that can keep it alive even without formal rule.
Hamas may be too weakened to govern Gaza effectively in the short run, but still strong enough - through ideology, loyalty networks, and residual armed capability - to prevent stable alternatives from taking root. The organization's disarmament is framed internally as betrayal of a divine cause. Voluntary demobilization is close to impossible. Hamas has every incentive to reorganize under another name or structure rather than dissolve.
Moreover, Gaza's wider armed ecosystem still remains, with dozens of jihadist factions and clan-based militias, many of which are hostile to Israel and in some cases more extreme than Hamas.
Hamas is sustained by a public it helped shape. Over decades, Hamas embedded religious and political indoctrination into schools, mosques, charities, youth institutions, and cultural life, producing a population in which jihadist framing became routine and institutionalized. For roughly 1.4 million Palestinians across Gaza and Judea and Samaria, born and raised under Hamas's ideological influence, Hamas is part of the worldview they inherited.
Accordingly, deradicalizing Gaza is measured in decades, not months. Hamas is embedded in a radicalized society. Deradicalization without social transformation is impossible.
Gaza's future turns on whether a non-Hamas authority can emerge that is strong enough to govern, legitimate enough to win public compliance, and capable enough to dismantle the wider militia culture that Hamas helped entrench.
From Ian:
‘After what happened to my generation, I hoped we’d moved past anti-Jewish racism’
Nine centenarian Holocaust survivors share stories from the past – and fears for the future – at the German embassy
If you had told a 13-year-old Alice Hubbers in 1938 – as she witnessed the wanton brutality of Kristallnacht – that she would one day be taking tea in the residence of Germany’s ambassador to London, she would have questioned your sanity.
Yet here she is, 87 years later, tucking into doughnuts and English scones beneath enormous chandeliers in Belgravia, celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.
Hubbers, now 100, was one of nine centenarians invited by the ambassador on Dec 8 to a unique gathering for some of the last Holocaust survivors. They have all led lives blighted by Nazi persecution, which saw the murder of many of their parents and wider family.
Susanne Baumann, the German ambassador to London, addressed her guests as “my dear centenarians”, telling them she wanted to take the chance to honour not only their longevity, but “to take this opportunity to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your inspirational and generous commitment to sharing your moving personal accounts with us over the years and for your courage in reaching out to the younger generation in the UK and Germany, who are thankfully able to grow up in freedom and in safety”.
She also wanted to treat them to a celebration ahead of both Christmas and Hanukkah. “It might not be quite as exciting as a birthday message from the King,” she conceded, “but please allow me to officially congratulate you all again today.”
Marion Koppel, who is “101 and a half”, says: “I think it’s quite impressive, if I may say so.”
The West is sleepwalking into a Jewish exodus.
There is also a growing political calculation that Jews are demographically irrelevant, especially compared with Muslim voters, with the U.S. being the only partial exception. Islamists and Far-Left activists are larger and louder blocs, so leaders choose numbers over decency.
Given all this, it is unsurprising that Jews across the West are asking: Do we have a future here? Should we encourage our children to stay? Is Europe safe? Is North America safe? Is Australia safe? Is South Africa safe? Should we move assets abroad? Should we obtain an Israeli passport as insurance? These are not hypothetical questions. Jewish emigration from France, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK has already accelerated. The U.S. is behind Europe, but rising too.
The West will not lose its Jews in one dramatic moment. It will lose them through a slow drip of insult, a steady rise in fear, and a growing sense of no longer belonging. A key question is whether today’s Diaspora Jews will repeat the mistake of their forefathers and wait for catastrophe before acting. The tremors before the earthquake rumble louder each day.
If Western nations lose their Jewish communities, they will forfeit things they never realized Jews had given them: parts of their moral compass, their historical memory of totalitarianism, a large portion of their intellectual class, and history’s finest early-warning system of civilizational decline.
Throughout history, how a society treats its Jews predicts its future with unerring accuracy. Antisemitism is a symptom of broader decay that putrefies its way into a society’s core. Western civilization will not fall because its enemies are strong, but because it is abandoning the people who held the line when others looked away.
Jews will not turn on the West; they will quietly leave, taking with them their culture, innovation, generosity, reverence for law, belief in democracy, and their disproportionate contributions to science, medicine, the arts, finance, technology, journalism, literature, and public life.
They will leave because a civilization that will not defend its Jews will defend next to nothing. The West — much of it confused, cowardly, morally exhausted, and presently self-absorbed — may not even notice the loss until it is far too late.
Yisrael Medad:
‘One Ring’ of pro-Palestine propaganda shaping the war on Zionism
The results of an intriguing study on anti-Israel and anti-Zionist language usage were published on December 2. Veteran blogger Elder of Ziyon displayed a detailed table with results of a study that reviewed the terminology employed in academic papers going back from 2005 through 2024. His findings are that antisemitic and activist anti-Zionist language is used in thousands of academic papers, thus reinforcing a negative subjective narrative.
The phrases and terms used in these papers included “Jewish supremacism,” “Talmudic rituals,” “Israeli Occupation Forces,” Gaza as an “open air prison,” and “Judaization,” among others. Such language seeps from the academic world into mainstream media op-eds, and then back again. Students and university colleagues are regularized to express themselves by using the exclusionary language of castigation and of animosity regarding Jewish nationalism and Middle East politics.
What is at work here results not in detached independent scientific research, but rather, it eventually locks the public into an ideological entrenchment primed and positioned to disallow any refutation. Moreover, there is no possible defense by those targeted as “colonialists.” Even more dangerous, it is a rhetoric of volatility.
The articulation may seem to be lofty academic verbiage, but it is just a repeat of medieval theological cancellation as when Jews were forced to engage in demeaning, unfair disputations. Today’s anti-Zionist hordes – safe in their self-constructed castles of words that reinforce the visceral animosity they already have in place – always have the advantage.
Raef Zreik, an Israeli Arab who is a senior lecturer of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, wrote a 2023 article titled “Zionism and Political Theology.” It purports to “identify what is unique about the political theology of Zionism” and “explores what the consequences of this uniqueness might be.”
From Ian:
Lahav Harkov:
The communities in central Israel that fear an Oct. 7 attack from the West Bank
Consider some of the most dangerous places to live in Israel. There are the kibbutzim and towns along the Gaza border, where Hamas massacred people in their homes on Oct. 7, 2023. There’s the northern border, which was mostly evacuated when the war began due to attacks from Lebanon. Perhaps one may think of Hebron, in the West Bank, where Israelis live in a neighborhood in a mostly Palestinian city whose mayor participated in a 1980 terror attack that killed six civilians.
Then there’s Bat Hefer, a small town of about 5,000 residents, with kibbutzim to its north and south, a few miles east of Netanya in central Israel.
The sleepy town, nestled between Highway 6, Israel’s major north-south artery, and the 1949 Armistice Line, known as the Green Line, is rated as more dangerous than the Gaza border area, according to Maj.-Gen. Rafi Milo, the head of the IDF’s Home Front Command.
In a recording leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 in June, Milo said: “If you ask me where the threat is much greater today, in Bat Hefer the threat is much greater than Yakhini,” a moshav where Hamas terrorists killed seven on Oct. 7.
The danger to Bat Hefer comes from its proximity to Tulkarem, a Palestinian city with a refugee camp from the 1948 War of Independence. Residents of Tulkarem have shot into Bat Hefer and adjacent towns. The IDF has attempted to stop attacks by razing dozens of homes in the refugee camp in recent months, in what a defense source called “the Gaza-fication of the West Bank.”
While the IDF has a constant and more intense presence in the West Bank than it did in Gaza before October 7, 2023, the threat is still present. On Tuesday, IDF soldiers found rockets in a village next to Tulkarem. For the past two years, many Israelis living near the Green Line — an area also called the seam line — have looked out of their windows at Palestinian villages in the distance and wondered how safe their neighborhoods really are. After the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on the south, some began to worry that the same thing could happen to them in central Israel.
Ran Schneider lives in Sha’ar Efraim, a moshav near Bat Hefer that is an official entry point for goods to pass between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. He did his IDF reserve duty as a member of the moshav’s rapid response team, and told JI last year that they had long heard shooting from beyond the fence, but it increased after the Oct. 7 attack.
The community’s rapid-response team “was in uniform protecting the moshav. Our area of responsibility was inside the moshav. We would check everyone going in and out and give people a sense of security,” he said.
For many residents of the towns and cities near the Green Line and the separation barrier that runs along it, built in the wake of the Second Intifada to make it harder for terrorists to enter Israel, shootings are only part of the problem. In contrast with some of the more famous segments of the barrier, a high concrete wall often painted with graffiti and murals, much of the barrier is only a metal fence topped with barbed wire. It is a simple fence, lacking some of the high-tech features that the Gaza border fence had before Palestinians bulldozed it last year. In addition, Palestinians for years frequently cut through the fence to work illegally in Israel.
Unlike some central Israeli municipalities, there isn’t a buffer zone between Sha’ar Efraim and the next Palestinian town.
Nicole Lampert:
'The Special Status of the Palestinians Has Been Great for the Aid Business and Terrible for the People'
A Facebook post I wrote asking non-Jewish people whether they had fallen out with friends over the Israel-Gaza conflict led to an overwhelming amount of messages and, eventually, an article.
When that piece came out, I was inundated with yet more examples of horrible rows over this conflict 2000 miles away.
They were all fascinating. And sad. One was from Dr Emily Brearley, a development economist whose own mother had told her she was ‘on the wrong side of history’. She revealed that she used to wear a keffiyeh until she worked with UNRWA, the UN agency specifically for Palestinians. That experience, in many ways, made her see the aid business in a different way.
Dr Brearley has written a book on her reflections on the aid industry called Aid Inferno: How to Reduce Poverty, Combat Global Warming and Be a Good Person. She sent me a LinkedIn post she had written about UNRWA.
In a week when the aid agency is back in the news, with Israel providing evidence that it, and other charities, worked with Hamas, and a raid on its East Jerusalem office leading to condemnation from the UK government, it seemed like a good idea to (with her permission) publish her incredible revelations about what UNRWA is hiding.
THE STORY OF UNRWA by Dr Emily Brearley
This is an important case study because it has been lavished with all the tools, money and attention at the disposal of the development business: US$70 billion to date. The result has been absolute failure and perpetual chaos. I do not blame the Israelis or Palestinians; you can go to Tik-Tok for that. I blame us.
If there is one topic in the development business that is far outsized in terms of global interest, it is this one. Everyone has an opinion, and the strongest and most furious come especially from those who have never been to the region.
Seth Mandel:
CAIR Accidentally Makes the Case for Zionism
If CAIR is admitting that Jordan is Palestine and that the original name of the West Bank is one that proves Jewish indigeneity, we can consider the conflict pretty much solved. It’s all over but the crying.
The truth is, “West Bank” isn’t really even a Jordanian name as much as it’s a descriptive term. It has no significance whatsoever to any of the peoples who have ever lived in the territory. And again, there was never any legal Jordanian sovereignty so its nickname for Judea and Samaria is irrelevant.
The West Bank isn’t the only descriptive term involving the Palestinians. So is “Palestine,” which was an area of the Ottoman Empire and considered part of Syria in the minds of the Arabs of the region—including those in Palestine. Amin al-Husseini, the father of Palestinian Arab nationalism, had begun the period of the British Mandate by declaring Faisal I the king of Syria, including Palestine. Until about 1920, Husseini was a contributor to a the Jerusalem-based Arab newspaper called (in Arabic) Southern Syria. Once the Western European allies severed the territories, Palestinian nationalism was born.
All that aside, CAIR’s opposition to using the term Judea and Samaria instead of the West Bank has no Arabic or Palestinian-specific rationalization. It is only to deny the history of the Jews. The idea that calling the area something other than the West Bank amounts to the erasure of Palestinians from the map is a laughable claim; nothing Palestinian would be touched in the process.
The Arabs have given Arabic names to Jewish towns in the area, of course. But no one is even suggesting changing those back.
No one who calls it the West Bank is going to stop calling it the West Bank. And that’s fine—I use the term regularly. But CAIR’s policy memo suggests to me that I shouldn’t. If even CAIR understands that the West Bank is a term made up by an illegal Jordanian occupier which has long since renounced any claim on the land, and if even CAIR knows that the land has a proper historical name, perhaps that’s what the rest of us should use. Thanks, CAIR!
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The Rise of Lifestyle Anti-Zionism
Zionism is at its core a simple belief in Jewish rights in Israel. Much of the time when pro-Palestinian activists in the West use the word Zionist, they mean “Jew.” But when they attack “Zionism” as a concept, they are making a political and ideological statement about coexistence. Anti-Zionists believe that rights are zero-sum, that Arabs in the historical Land of Israel cannot be free unless the Jews there are unfree.
Similarly, they believe that the safety and security of Palestinians must come at the expense of the safety and security of Jews. Outside of Israel, this includes Zionists—people who support or advocate for equal rights for Jews in their homeland. Anti-Zionism has become a totalizing worldview, an ideology of far greater expanse and application than Zionism itself ever was.
Anti-Zionism is an all-encompassing ideology now. It requires no association with the land of Zion. Anti-Zionism, like ISIS’s infamous “jihad in place” strategy, is about hating Jews and punishing their supporters wherever you happen to be. Think global, act local.
This is why we are seeing the founding of explicitly anti-Zionist political parties in Western Europe, of all places. And it’s why anti-Zionism has swallowed anti-colonialism as a discipline on campus. It’s why we’re even seeing the advent of anti-Zionist coffee shops. Opposition to equal rights for Jews is becoming a lifestyle for a growing number of Westerners. Now there is really no limit to what you can blame on the Jews.
Anti-Israel Celebrities Accept Major Saudi Payday To Attend Jeddah Film Festival
Some of Hollywood’s most ardent anti-Israel activists are flocking to Saudi Arabia this week for a government-sponsored film festival—and the kingdom is compensating them well for their time.
The Red Sea International Film Festival, which has been held annually in Jeddah since 2021 under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, has drawn a star-studded guest list including actors like Riz Ahmed, Juliette Binoche, Michael Caine, Kirsten Dunst, and Idris Elba—all of whom have accused Israel of committing atrocities in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and none of whom have spoken about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
The festival has been known to pay large sums to celebrity guests. Filmmaker Spike Lee received between $2.5 million and $3 million for presiding over the festival’s jury last year, Puck reported, though it is unclear how much this year’s jury president, Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, has received. A source familiar with the festival confirmed Saudi Arabia has compensated actors and filmmakers for attending, and NBC reported that "many [attendees are] set to receive checks." The festival said in a statement to NBC that it will "on occasion engage with talent on a contractual basis for work we ask them to do at the festival which includes labs, in conversations, mentorship sessions with emerging regional talent." Though representatives for the festival did not disclose the names of actors and filmmakers it is paying, Ahmed is a member of the jury, Dunst participated in a conversation on Thursday, and Elba will do so on Wednesday.
The film festival—and appearances from actors who frequently condemn Israel—comes after a group of U.S. comedians faced scrutiny for performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in September in the face of Saudi Arabia’s policing of speech and widespread human rights abuses. Comedian Shane Gillis, who turned down a "significant" payout, said he declined the offer because most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
"I’m not doing it," he said. "Then they doubled the bag. It was a significant bag. But I’d already said no. I took a principled stand. You don’t 9/11 your friends."
Dave Chappelle, meanwhile, used his performance at the festival to bash the United States—after signing a gag order shielding Saudi royals from criticism—because it was "easier to talk here than it is in America."
The Annual ‘Jesus Was a Palestinian’ Christmas Lie Is Back — and It’s Antisemitic
Each December, as holiday decorations go up and familiar music fills the air, another relatively new holiday ritual returns with equal predictability — social media fills with declarations that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” often joined by the equally fictional assertion that he was a “Palestinian refugee.”
These claims appear every Christmas season as reliably as ornaments and carols, as though the propagandists believe that repeating the lies might someday transform fiction into fact.
But this isn’t just a harmless anachronism — like depicting Moses checking Google Maps while wandering in the Sinai. It is part of a longstanding effort to erase Jews from their own history, an effort that has resurfaced in recent years precisely because it is politically useful.
The Truth Has Never Been in Dispute
Jesus lived and died as a Jew from Judea. He was born into a Jewish family, observed Jewish law, taught in synagogues, quoted Jewish scripture, and was addressed as “Rabbi” by his followers. Christian scripture traces his lineage directly to the kings of Judah.
No credible historian debates this. There is not a single academic school, anywhere, that regards Jesus as anything other than a Jew living in the Jewish homeland.
Denying the Jewishness of Jesus is not a new mistake. It is part of a familiar form of appropriation — including supersessionism (replacement theology) — that has targeted Jews for centuries.
The Colonialist Name Activists Pretend Was Ancient
The assertion that Jesus was “Palestinian” collapses instantly under the simplest timeline. During the first century CE, the land was known as Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, or the Land of Israel. At that time, there was no place or nation called “Palestine,” no “Palestinians,” and no political or cultural identity by that name. No person during Jesus’s lifetime ever referred to himself as a “Palestinian.” Claiming otherwise is like insisting that a Pilgrim stepping off the Mayflower in 1620 called himself an “American.”
Notably, the first political or national entity in history to use the word “Palestine” emerged nearly 2,000 years after Jesus, in 1920, when the British Empire established the “British Mandate for Palestine.”
And the Roman Empire only introduced the geographic term “Syria Palaestina” in 135 CE — a century after Jesus’ death — to punish Jews for the Bar Kokhba revolt and to try to break their connection to their own land.
Today, anti-Israel activists echo that Roman attempt at erasure and call it solidarity.
“What is anti-Zionism for, exactly?” The question was posed by Dr Dave Rich in his trenchant Robert Fine Memorial lecture to supporters of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.
And Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust, in a complex and detailed analysis of the thinking behind present-day anti-Zionism and antisemitism, had a simple and chilling answer.
“If we strip away the political sloganeering and academic ambiguities, it is a plot to kill a nation. That’s it. Anti-Zionism is a campaign, across decades and continents, to kill the nation of Israel, erase its name and its national identity from history, and replace it with something non-Jewish…Anti-Zionism is utterly unique, and fundamentally anti-democratic.”
In his searing lecture, Rich broke down the levers of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, using references ranging from the Star Wars Death Star to even more prosaic examples of everyday Jewish hatred. His audience laughed and shivered at much the same time.
He cited Loose Women’s Nadia Sawalha, who “took to social media to defend Louis Theroux, after his interview with Bobby Vylan, from what she called the ‘group of people’ who ‘live by their pound of flesh rule…So many of us are sick and tired of being bullied…the threat that has hung over our heads for years and years that we may be antisemitic — you’ve worn it out.” Rich commented: “There’s a brashness, a daring sense of freedom in finally saying what needs to be said about the Jews”.
Dave Rich:
The Robert Fine Memorial Lecture: where are we now? (text)
From Ian:
Netanyahu: "We're Not Going to Create a State that Will Be Committed to Our Destruction"
At a joint press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: "The purpose of a Palestinian state is to destroy the one and only Jewish state. They already had a state in Gaza, a defective state, and it was used to try to destroy the one and only Jewish state. We believe there's a path to advance a broader peace with the Arab states and a path also to establish a workable peace with our Palestinian neighbors. But we're not going to create a state that will be committed to our destruction at our doorstep."
"We are obviously going to take care of our security. The one thing that we will always insist upon is that the sovereign power of security from the Jordan River, which is right here, to the Mediterranean Sea, which is right there, will always be in Israel's hands. And that means that Israel will control its destiny, continue to protect its security."
Hamas not committed to peace plan or disarming, Israeli foreign minister says
Israel’s foreign minister warned that Hamas is not committed to the US-backed peace deal, which calls for the terror group to cede its weapons, warning that the Jewish state would enforce the condition no matter what.
Speaking with The Post on Monday, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar slammed Hamas’ latest insistence that it would neither give up its arms nor cede power to an international board unless its demands for Palestinian statehood were met.
“We will give a fair chance to see whether we can get Hamas to disarm and Gaza de-militarization in the context of the plan,” Sa’ar said about the ongoing negotiations. “If not, we will have to do it ourselves.”
Sa’ar’s statement echoes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly warned that war in Gaza could be reignited if Hamas fails to comply with the terms of the cease-fire deal.
Hamas’ leadership has recently claimed that it would give up power to Palestinian technocrats, as laid out in President Trump’s peace deal — but the terror group has fully rejected the formation of a Board of Peace set to rule Gaza in the interim.
“So I believe that if you read the statement that was given publicly this weekend, it doesn’t demonstrate that [you are] really committed to the peace plan and what it requires from them in the next stage,” Sa’ar explained.
The foreign minister also expressed distrust in Hamas’s willingness to cede power as it has effectively regained control of the 43% of the Gaza Strip not occupied by the Israeli military.
Seth Frantzman:
Gaza ceasefire's Catch-22: Hamas delays disarmament as it calls for IDF withdrawal
Hamas is trying to slow-play the Gaza ceasefire deal so that it can eke out as much wiggle room as possible and remain in charge of the Gaza Strip. “We accept the deployment of UN forces as a separation force, tasked with monitoring the borders and ensuring compliance with the ceasefire in Gaza,” Hamas official Khalil Al-Hayya said recently.
The goal of Hamas now is to perpetuate a Catch-22 in the Strip, whereby it says it will only disarm if the IDF withdraws, knowing full well that the IDF won’t withdraw until the terror group disarms. As such, Hamas creates a situation in which it always has an excuse to do nothing. It assumes time is on its side. Hamas knows that Israel doesn’t want to return to fighting.
There is one hostage that must be returned. There is no major pressure in Israel or any incentive to go back to war.
Hamas also knows that Israeli officials don’t want the Palestinian Authority to run Gaza. As such, Hamas knows that the power vacuum in the Strip will also lead to de facto Hamas control.
For almost two decades, Hamas has relied on the assumption that Israeli officials prefer to have Hamas in Gaza in place of the PA, in order to divide the Strip from the West Bank. It thus benefits from this situation. Disarmament is also an amorphous term. Hamas assumes it can quietly find a way out of this obligation.
What is the regional media saying? Arab News noted last week that “Hamas said Saturday it was ready to hand over its weapons in the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian authority governing the territory on the condition that the Israeli army’s occupation ends.”
As noted above, Hayya said, “Our weapons are linked to the existence of the occupation and the aggression… If the occupation ends, these weapons will be placed under the authority of the state.”
Hamas also said: “We accept the deployment of UN forces as a separation force, tasked with monitoring the borders and ensuring compliance with the ceasefire in Gaza.”
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Unapologetic American Jewry Is the Future
So what’s the dog that didn’t bark? That would be the legion of personalities connected to the UJA who ignored the haters and celebrated the gala and refused to consider a groveling apology in the days after the event. No apology was necessary or even appropriate, of course. But it is crucial that the organized Jewish community recognizes this.
Meanwhile Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president and a scion of the Labor left, was in New York last night and delivered an equally unapologetic speech to Yeshiva University.
In New York City, Herzog said, “We see the rise of a new mayor-elect who makes no effort to conceal his contempt for the Jewish democratic state of Israel, the only nation state of the Jewish people.”
Notice the word “Jewish” twice in that one sentence. The attempts by anti-Zionist groups to shame Jews into severing their history and heritage from their modern identity must fail.
Herzog slammed Mamdani’s justification for an anti-Semitic mob that descended on a Manhattan synagogue that was hosting an event about making aliyah. The incoming mayor had suggested the shul was facilitating the violation of international law by talking to prospective emigrants to a sovereign state. Herzog pulled no punches:
“Delegitimizing the Jewish people’s right to their ancient homeland and their age-old dream of Jerusalem legitimizes violence and undermines freedom of religion. This is both anti-Jewish and anti-American.”
Well said. Mamdani, let’s remember, is still vowing to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which would be a truly lawless act. Herzog and Netanyahu were once political rivals, but that could not possibly matter less at the moment. Herzog’s message to American Jewry was to be steadfast, unapologetic, and to be able to recognize those who seek its harm. That message is, thankfully, catching on.
Who You Gonna Call?
Amit Segal is having a moment. A longtime TV reporter for Israel’s Channel 12 and print journalist for Yediot Ahronot, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper, Segal burst into the English-speaking spotlight courtesy of multiple post–October 7 appearances on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast, numerous op-eds in the Free Press, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, and a popular Substack aimed at a foreign audience. He presents a cogent, witty, and likeable center-right perspective, often in friendly contrast to center-left sparring partners like Yediot’s Nadav Eyal, and he comes across as a happy warrior, a smiling avatar of mainstream, security-minded Israelis.
His latest book follows this blueprint, cheerfully but critically examining the history of leadership (and, at times, lack thereof) in the Israeli prime ministerial class. A Call at 4 AM is about some of the consequential choices of Israel’s premiers during the country’s eight-decade-long existence. “My aim,” Segal writes, “is to describe the political decisions that they made,” like the ones that helped create Israel’s byzantine electoral system under the guidance of its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. In seating the 120 members of their Knesset, Israelis elect by party, not geography, a method used by Slovakia and the Netherlands and no other land on earth. And so, in Israel, Segal contends, “the movement is more important than the man; the party more important than the individual.”
Segal calculates that Israel, in its first 72 years, wasted more than 11 years on elections and coalition negotiations. The opportunity costs are no less steep. Had the 1969 elections been held on a regional basis, Ben-Gurion’s party would have won an astounding 103 seats. In 2020, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would have secured 92 mandates. Equally striking is “the massive gulf between public opinion on matters of religion and state,” the result of the perpetual horse-trading created by Ben-Gurion.
Still, security questions dominate Israeli politics and have for half a century. The question that means the most to voters is this: “When the red telephone rings at 4:00 a.m., who should answer?” That notion, which provided Segal with his title, arguably originated with an actual 4:00 a.m. call on October 6, 1973, when Prime Minister Golda Meir belatedly came to realize a war was brewing. Her failure to act resulted in military and political disaster.
The prime beneficiary of Golda’s disaster was Menachem Begin, the long-suffering leader of Israel’s national camp, who overcame decades of electoral failure and finally secured the premiership in 1977. He cobbled together disparate center-right parties and appealed to the neglected Sephardi community, skillfully navigating what Segal calls
the “multiple identities” possessed by all Israelis. Begin recognized that “internal contradictions do not always impede the creation of victorious political alliances; sometimes they are even a hallmark of them.”
David Collier:
The Vermont Hate Crime Fantasy Sweeping the Nation
Who in the world wishes for a hate crime in their community? Apparently, Vermont elected officials do.
With no hate crime charge, no law enforcement or judicial finding of deliberate targeting, and no evidence establishing motive, Vermont U.S Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch, and Representative Becca Balint used the two-year anniversary of the tragic shooting of three Palestinian students to tell Vermonters a divisive fiction – a story crafted to satisfy sectarian political appetites rather than to reflect the truth.
It is not a new pattern. In another era, during the Dreyfus Affair, French elites clung to a narrative too emotionally gratifying to question. The parallel is not the substance of the case but the psychology: when a story feels right, it becomes a story that must be true, no matter what the evidence says.
The Shootings and the Race to Interpretation
On November 25, 2023, three college students were shot on a residential street in Burlington, VT – the largest city in America’s second-smallest state. The three, Hisham Awartani (Brown University), Kinnan Abdalhamid (Haverford College) and Tahseen Ali Ahmad (Trinity College) were visiting during their Thanksgiving breaks.
Two are U.S citizens and one a legal resident. All three are of Palestinian heritage. Two of the victims were wearing keffiyeh (the headdress associated with Arab Palestinian nationalism since it was adopted during the Arab Revolt in the 1930s). All three were wounded; Awartani was the worst-injured – according to his family, a bullet lodged in his spine left him paralyzed from the chest down.
Local CBS affiliate WCAX-TV was the first to report that the victims of this tragic shooting were Palestinian – a detail initially unsupported and unattributed, but later confirmed by police.
The anti-Israel movement weaponised the tragedy instantly. Neighbours targeted local Jews online, joking that their whereabouts at the time of the shooting should be investigated.
From Ian:
JPost Editorial:
Israel must refuse phase two of Trump’s Gaza plan until Hamas is fully disarmed
The problems, of course, are that Hamas is refusing to disarm, the PA has indeed not reformed from its path (particularly its pay-for-slay policy of financing the families of terrorists), and, as pointed out last week, Hamas is still holding onto the body of slain policeman Ran Gvili.
Trump is banking on all of the parties being on board, including the immediate surrounding countries, the states making up the ISF, and, of course, Israel.
The pressure on Israel is already beginning to mount. Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani agreed that there really is no ceasefire in Gaza, and put the onus on Israel.
“A ceasefire cannot be completed unless there is a full withdrawal of the Israeli forces; [until] there is stability back in Gaza, people can go in and out, which is not the case today,” he said on Saturday at the Doha Forum.
Saudi minister Manal Radwan said at the same forum that it’s not the PA but Israel that needs reform.
“We have an Israeli government that opposes the two-state solution. We have an Israeli government that has officials continuously inciting against Palestinians, against Arabs, and against Muslims,” said Radwan. “We don’t see that we have a partner for peace, not even a partner for a sustainable ceasefire. So that is the actual and important reform that we are hoping to see.”
The question now is whether Trump will stick to the 20-point plan and insist on the disarmament of Hamas, or if he will join the ISF partners, like Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who told the forum that disarming Hamas only needs to take place once there is a governance body set up in Gaza.
That’s why Israel must be more vigilant than ever and demand that Hamas be disarmed at the outset of Phase 2 of the ceasefire. The pressure from the Arab partners on the deal is one thing, but with Trump intent on seeing his deal work, he’s likely to join in the pressure on Israel to compromise.
That’s something we cannot do. Others may see the rebuilding of Gaza and the “peace” trophy in the Middle East as the most urgent items on the agenda. For Israel, however, the safeguarding of its borders and removing the Hamas threat, once and for all, is the overarching goal.
Regardless of the pressure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must defy his closest ally in Washington and insist that the second phase commences with Hamas disarming and no longer posing a threat to Israel.
Gaza Fatality Analysis: The Truth Behind the 70,000 Number
Conclusion
This analysis points to a grounded estimate of 61,125 war-related deaths due to IDF action: approximately 25,000 combatants and 36,125 civilians (plus the 4,000 deaths caused by Hamas and internal actors). Civilian casualties are tragic, and the large number of minors killed cannot be dismissed; however, they overwhelmingly result from Hamas’s human-shield strategy, in which military assets are deliberately embedded where civilians are present, and in which civilian deaths are viewed by Hamas leadership as beneficial to its aims.
A civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.45 to 1 is remarkably low by the standards of modern urban warfare in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it demonstrates that the IDF conducted a highly targeted campaign against Hamas under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Claims that large numbers of civilian deaths remain unreported do not withstand scrutiny: families had over two years to report fatalities, even without a body, and numerous “rubble” deaths are already known to have been added through the MoH’s notification process.
The evidence shows that Hamas’s headline fatality toll is a distortion. The true picture is of a war in which Israel inflicted massive losses on Hamas’ fighters while carrying out one of the most targeted urban campaigns in modern military history.
More People Died in 1 Month in One City in Sudan Than in Entire Gaza War
So what’s different in the coverage?
1. The media reports on it, but doesn’t make it the lead, doesn’t push the story constantly and treats it as something happening ‘over there’ the way it does most foreign wars. This is very different than the coverage of Israel where even the most minor confrontation, like clashes between Jewish farmers and Muslim/leftist activists in which no one is hurt, somehow become major stories.
2. The reporting doesn’t directly clarify the players in a way that’s easily understandable. That’s opposed to the media’s constant denunciations of Israel. Who is the RSF? Most people don’t know or care. Tell them that the RSF is really an Arab Islamic militia known as the ‘Janjaweed’ and that it’s backed by Muslim countries and they might have more clarity. Which is why the media tends to bury that part. Especially the Muslim racism.
3. Leftist activist groups haven’t taken up the cause, so there are no protests, little in the way of social media posts, little conversation. Whatever conversation there isn’t amplified by the media in the same vicious cycle that saw Gaza take over everything in 2024.
Neither Muslims nor the Left are especially interested in discussing the topic. Some genuine human rights activists care, but they’re not going to get any traction.
And that’s why real Islamic genocides get ignored, whether in Sudan or Nigeria, while any self-defense against Islam, such as by Israel, America or India, are falsely labeled as genocide by the actual Muslim genociders.
We know why this happens. And we can see it happening again. It’s not about the genocide, it’s about the propaganda.
From Ian:
David Collier:
The Seven Days that Shatter the ‘Nakba’ Myth
In anti-Israel circles, the dominant narrative of the Palestinian ‘Nakba’ rests on a single, almost unchallenged assumption: That a passive and defenceless Arab population was suddenly overwhelmed by violent Jewish militias determined to expel them and seize their land. From this foundational myth flow all the modern accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide, repeated by governments, activists, and even the UN. This is the central pillar upon which the entire pro-Palestinian movement is built
Take this recent post from the UN Palestine account which ties all the different strands together:
But that story collapses the moment you look at what actually happened. Not decades later, not in later stages of the war, but in the very first seven days after the UN partition vote.
Using mostly Arab newspapers of the time, the record is unmistakable: within hours of the UN decision, Arab political factions, militias, and regional actors launched a campaign of violence and mobilisation aimed at preventing the creation of a Jewish state. The civil war that followed – and the refugee crisis it produced – emerged from this aggressive, openly-declared Arab rejectionism, not from a premeditated Jewish plan.
What follows is a look through that history, reconstructed day by day from contemporary Arab and Jewish press.
Day one – November 30 1947
Arab media reacts to partition with mobilisation and incitement.
The morning after the UN vote, neither Ad-Difa nor Al-Wahda reported the partition as a political event. Instead, both papers erupted with outrage and calls for Arab mobilisation across the region. The pages were saturated with threats, anti-Jewish invective, and demands for an ‘Islamic Front’ to rise.
Ad-Difa’s lead built explicitly toward violent resistance. Al-Wahda’s headline declared: “O Arabs, the West has chosen your enemies. Will you remain stunned, or will you prepare?”
There is no ambiguity here. Arab media was calling on the Arab people inside the Mandate area and across the region to mobilise.
Day two – 1 December 1947
Violence erupts across the country. The Palestine Post reported seven Jews murdered in multiple attacks on 30 November.
Arab newspapers themselves documented the killings. Look at Ad-Difa’s own front page on the same date. Ad-Difa was a staunchly Pan-Arab media outlet that was aligned with the Husayni, ‘Holy War’ factions in the mandate area. It eventually promoted open support for the Nazis. At the time, the paper was run by Ibrahim al-Shanti.
Its headline read: “23 Jews killed and wounded in 8 separate incidents in Haifa, Jaffa, Beit Ve-Gan, Sarona, and Jerusalem.”
The article described bus ambushes around Jerusalem, attacks in Lod, Tulkarm, Haifa and Jaffa, and other assaults on Jewish civilians.
The war had begun – and it had begun with Arab-initiated violence.
The scholars fueling the current wave of antisemitism
Former US President Bill Clinton understood this when then-Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat declared that Jerusalem had never been Jewish. Clinton threatened to walk out of the room at the Camp David Summit in July 2000 if Arafat continued uttering such false claims. He recognized the statement for what it was—the purest form of antisemitism.
What Clinton grasped instinctively, these intellectuals refuse to see: that the Jewish people and Israel are inseparable. To delegitimize Israel is to delegitimize Jews. That is why antisemites applaud efforts to weaken IHRA; it leaves them free to proclaim Israel a crime and Zionism a pathology.
Delrio’s initiative represents moral courage at a time when it is desperately needed. The Jewish scholars who oppose him, intentionally or not, provide cover for those who seek to dissolve the line between criticism and hatred, between debate and incitement.
These Jews do not understand that the Jewish people and Israel are the same. The stances expressed by King, Clinton and now Delrio are more Jewish than theirs.
History is watching. And today, as in the past, the refusal to name antisemitism is its most reliable accomplice.
Our Man in Amman
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown that was invented by the British and then funded by the Americans. Constantly lies the head of state who claims to protect the Palestinians while cooperating with the Mossad. Abdullah II is the fourth king of Jordan, the state that Winston Churchill lopped off the Palestine Mandate in 1921 with, he said, "the stroke of the pen one Sunday afternoon in Cairo." The plan, as proposed by Lawrence of Arabia in 1918, was to install the three sons of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, as the Hashemite emirs, Britain's proxies in the states it was carving out of Ottoman territory. Abdullah is the last Hashemite standing. He has a pronounced facial tic.
In 1951, the first Jordanian emir, Abdullah I, was shot to death at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque by a Palestinian terrorist. His son Talal lasted a year before being deposed on grounds of mental illness. But Talal's son Hussein saved his family. He saved Jordan too, notably by massacring Palestinians when they tried to overthrow him in 1970, then cutting them loose when the Palestinians in the West Bank rebelled against Israeli control in 1988. Abdullah II inherited the poisoned chalice after his father's death in 1999.
The Most American King, by the journalist Aaron Magid, is the first biography of Abdullah, who will probably still be king by the time your copy arrives. Deeply researched with plenty of interviews, it is both a groundbreaking primer on our man in Amman and a study in timeless imperial politics. Take away the helicopters and Swiss bank accounts, and the Hashemites' relationship to the United States is no different from that of the ancient Moabite and Edomite satraps to their Hittite, Assyrian, or Neo-Babylonian emperors.
The British invented Jordan, but the Americans took over after the Suez Crisis of 1956. Abdullah's mother was the daughter of a British military adviser; she may have met Hussein on the set of Lawrence of Arabia, where she was a typist and he was catching up on some family history. Abdullah was educated at an English boarding school, Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for high school, and then Sandhurst for officer training, despite not being a British subject. He then read international relations at the University of Oxford despite, a contemporary tells Magid, having shown no academic aptitude at Deerfield beyond being the "incredibly ripped" captain of the wrestling team. Favorite food: cheeseburger. Language he had trouble learning: Arabic.
Abdullah returned to Jordan in 1983, for the first time in 15 years, short vacations aside, and joined an armored brigade. As Magid reports, he put away much "vodka and beer," wore cowboy boots when he listened to country music, and was never seen praying. He built up an extensive collection of Luger pistols, because you never know. In 1987, when he was studying at Georgetown, he impressed his Israeli tutor with a paper arguing that the Israelis had been right to pursue Palestinian terrorists across the Jordan River and into his father's territory in 1968. In 1993, Abdullah married Rania al-Yassin, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian whose family had been expelled from Kuwait in 1991 by Saddam Hussein. They honeymooned in the United States, obviously.
Saturday, December 13, 2025
.jpeg)
