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

From Ian:

Myths of the Iran War

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

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

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

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

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

Winners and Losers in the Iran War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telegraph Editorial: Iran Is Not a War of Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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03/30 Links Pt1: Confronting Jihad's Forever War; The Big Ugandan Bear Hug; Trump considering operation to extract Iran's enriched uranium; Michigan synagogue attack was inspired by Hezbollah

From Ian:

Confronting Jihad's Forever War

The U.S. has confronted seemingly implacable ideological enemies before - and won. The lessons of Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Reagan's Cold War strategy point to a common principle: overwhelming force, credible will, and the imposition of unsustainable costs ultimately prevail.

Iran has not surrendered. Its proxies continue to launch missiles and drones. Its parliament invokes jihad. This is the behavior of a regime that does not process war through the same conceptual framework as does the West. The question policymakers must answer is not why Iran keeps fighting - but what kind of pressure will finally make continued fighting more costly than stopping.

One of the most consequential failures of Western strategic analysis has been treating the Islamic Republic's rhetoric as theater. It is not. Its leadership has articulated - with remarkable consistency across four decades - a vision of global, divinely ordained, open-ended struggle against Western civilization. Since 1979, Iran's Islamic Republic has called for "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."

The Karbala Paradigm functions as the Islamic Republic's operational code for conflict. In 680 CE, Imam Hussein ibn Ali - grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the third Shiite Imam - rode with 72 followers into the plains of Karbala. He was surrounded by a vastly superior Umayyad army. He was offered a choice: submit to the Caliph Yazid, or die. He chose death. His followers were massacred. For Shiite Islam, this was the foundational moral event of the faith - proof that righteous resistance is sacred even when it leads to annihilation.

Any signal that Washington will negotiate the terms of Iran's nuclear program or proxy network - rather than their elimination - will be read as confirmation that the forever war is working. Yet, America does not want a forever war. Neither do Israel, the Gulf states, or the broader community of nations. The theology of jihad is formidable. The martyrdom culture of Karbala is real. But it is not more formidable than American resolve has proven to be.

The Islamic Republic has built its resistance strategy on the assumption that the West lacks the strategic patience and political will to sustain pressure long enough to defeat the regime. Now there is a narrow window to prosecute a historic change. We need to make clear - through action, not rhetoric - that the forever war will end Iran's revolution before it ends ours. The Islamic Republic's leadership has told us explicitly what they intend. The only remaining question is whether the U.S., Israel, and the West have the moral and strategic will to confront this messianic jihadi phenomenon and to defeat it.

Amb. Michael Oren: The Outcome of the Iran War: A Victory or a Pause before the Next War?

On Tuesday night, as U.S. President Donald Trump declared victory over Iran during a press conference, my family and I took shelter in our safe room. Despite the close partnership between Washington and Jerusalem, and the historic cooperation between the U.S. military and the Israel Defense Forces, America and Israel are living in entirely different realities.

From an American perspective, the near destruction of Iran's military capabilities, damage to its nuclear infrastructure, and the elimination of senior leadership can be framed as a victory. For Israel, the standard is far stricter. Any outcome that allows Iran to rebuild its nuclear and ballistic programs, retain enough enriched uranium for multiple nuclear weapons, and continue supporting terrorist proxies is not a victory. It is a pause before Israel is forced to fight the same war again, possibly alone.

During negotiations, Iran may accept principles in theory, then stall, dilute and avoid implementation in practice. We have seen this pattern before. The 20-point Gaza plan stalled when Hamas refused to disarm. The risk now is that Iran follows the same path, agreeing in principle while preserving its core capabilities. Israel cannot afford that outcome.

Israel must press for clear, enforceable guarantees before any agreement takes shape. Not vague assurances, not frameworks, but concrete commitments that address the core threat. At the same time, Israel must act with urgency, both in Iran and in Lebanon, to shape the strategic environment before diplomacy locks in outcomes it cannot reverse.

In Allied Campaign, Mission to Kill Top Iranians Fell to Israel

As U.S. and Israeli military commanders met to map out war with Iran, they deliberated over how to divide responsibility for an array of targets.

It was clear from the outset that one grim mission would belong to Israel: hunting and killing Iran's leaders.

Israel has pursued this assignment with ruthless efficiency, killing Iran's supreme leader in the opening salvo of the war and more than 250 other "senior Iranian officials" since, according to the Israeli military.

The campaign relies on an apparatus that Israel spent decades building but transformed over the past several years to achieve new levels of lethal proficiency.

Senior Israeli military and intelligence officials cited a proliferation of sources and surveillance capabilities inside Iran - regime insiders recruited to spy for Israel as well as cyber-penetrations of thousands of targets including street cameras and payment platforms.

These and other streams of data are being scoured by a new, classified artificial intelligence platform programmed to extract clues to leaders' lives and movements.

Israel's targeted killing tactics - bombs planted months before being detonated, drones capable of slipping into apartment windows, and supersonic missiles fired from stealth fighter jets - have been honed by years of conflict in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

Asked why the mission of targeting Iran's leaders was assigned to Israel, a senior Israeli security official cited its experience and expertise, saying: "There was a need to target them. And we could do it."

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03/29 Links: The War on Civilization: 'Israel Cannot Outsource Its Survival'; Why They Lie About ‘Jewish Terrorists’; No, Trump Is Not Losing His Nerve on Iran

From Ian:

The War on Civilization: 'Israel Cannot Outsource Its Survival'

A Conversation with Pierre Rehov
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism." — Zoheir Mohsen, late PLO senior official, Trouw, March 31, 1977.

Hamas did not attack military targets to "end an occupation." It attacked families to affirm an old doctrine: the Jew is not an opponent; the Jew is a problem to be erased.

If you want to understand October 7, forget the comforting story of "desperation turning violent." Pogroms are not born from desperation; they are born from permission — social, religious, political permission to commit the unthinkable and feel righteous doing it.

In the Battle of Jenin, there was never any "confusion in the fog of war." The story that part of a hospital had been destroyed was a total fabrication. It revealed something essential: a good story has priority over reality.

The genius of the system is psychological. Once the image circulates, correction becomes irrelevant. The emotional verdict has already been delivered.

In modern warfare, the camera is no longer documenting the battle. It is part of the battlefield. The objective is not only to accuse Israel. It is to morally disarm the West. If you can persuade democratic societies that defending themselves equals murdering children, you have already won half the war.

They hate Israel for what it is: an infidel state – and in their midst. If Israel were a Christian state, the same problem would exist. Just look at the genocide in Nigeria – with more than 52,000 Christians killed in just 14 years – in a free society, which is a visible rejection of the Islamic totalitarian dream.

The Palestinian project is not a "two-state solution" or "a better border." The project is a world where religious and political absolutism rules, where minorities submit or vanish, where women are controlled, where dissent is crushed. Israel is the laboratory target. If the West rewards October 7 with political gains, it teaches a lesson to every violent movement on earth: massacre pays. So yes — Israel is defending itself, and in doing so, it is also defending the principle that civilization cannot survive if it negotiates with barbarity as if it were a partner who is misunderstood.

"In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel -- over, and over, and over...." — Ion Mihai Pacepa, a lieutenant general in the Socialist Republic of Romania's Securitate, the secret police, who defected to the West in 1978, Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2003.

If a deal buys time for the "wrong" side, it is not a deal — it is an extension of the threat.

The point is that Israel cannot outsource its survival, and the United States cannot pretend that totalitarian jihadism can be "managed" indefinitely. Either you dismantle the infrastructure of terror, or it regrows.... Israel's enemies... are imposing a war on civilization.

Peace that is built on amnesia is not peace; it is a pause before the next war.

The West will not be defeated by lack of power. It will be defeated — if it is defeated — by the refusal to oppose danger when they see it.

Amir Peretz saw what others missed: Iron Dome reshaped Israel’s defense and future

Because Peretz was an outsider, he could think outside the box. It brings to mind the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Con men convince the king they can weave him elegant invisible clothing. Everyone parrots the praise of the new garments until a little boy in the crowd shouts that the emperor is actually naked.

The Israeli strategy had, in fact, focused on offense and ignored defense, leaving us as exposed as the emperor. It took a defense minister who grew up in beleaguered Sderot to make defense a priority.

In 1983, American president Ronald Reagan planned the grand-scale Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly called Star Wars. Reagan wanted to protect the US from long-range intercontinental nuclear-armed missiles. The program was canceled before it could be realized.

Not that the doubters were idiots. There was adequate reason for skepticism. The idea that a missile could hit another missile with exactitude sounds fantastical. Even after the Iron Dome was showing its worth, you can look back in military history to find claims by so-called experts magnifying its imperfections.

Once Israeli ingenuity was applied to defensive systems, an Amir Peretz priority, additional systems were developed with the confident financial support and technical collaboration of the United States. David’s Sling and Iron Dome are complementary layers of Israel’s multi-tier missile defense. Iron Dome works for four to 70 kilometers, intercepting short-range rockets and mortars, while David’s Sling intercepts up to 300 kilometers and defends against medium- to long-range missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. David’s Sling was jointly developed by Israel’s government-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and US contractor Raytheon. The next level is protected by Arrow 3, jointly developed by the Israel Missile Defense Organization and the US Missile Defense Agency. The primary contractor is Israel Aerospace Industries.

The same Amir Peretz concluded his three-year tenure as chairman of Israel Aerospace Industries in November 2024. He successfully boosted international partnerships and company revenue.

The newest Israeli defense system, Iron Beam, depends on the development of powerful fiber lasers and is designed to destroy drones, rockets, and mortars at the speed of light, at a negligible cost per interception. None of these amazing tools is complete or airtight. The defensive systems are not “hermetic,” as the IDF spokesperson reminds us daily. Even with 90% accuracy, we have experienced enough misses to understand what horror we would face without our made-in-Israel protection. Bigger and richer countries than Israel do not have the defense systems we have.

So thank you, Mr. Peretz, for your foresight and persistence. President Donald Trump wants to name an American defensive system Golden Dome. He just might be calling you.

Why They Lie About ‘Jewish Terrorists’

The curious timing of this “international criticism,” right as the U.S. and Israel operate jointly against Iran, and the IDF pummels the Islamic Republic’s foreign legion in Lebanon, may offer one explanation why the violent settler narrative has picked up momentum once again. It’s noteworthy that this “criticism” is no longer confined to Europeans and the precincts of the Left. Since a faction of the American Right has resolved to make classic antisemitism and Israel-centered conspiracies central to its domestic political organization and identity formation, the Very Violent Settlers™ have come to play a particular role in this faction’s third-world sectarian universe, facilitated by D.C.-based Palestinian operatives and, regrettably, Palestinian Christian clergy in the West Bank. Last year, for example, this constellation of actors featured settlers in an info op targeting U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and through him, American Evangelicals, who strongly support Israel and President Trump. The op at the time was that the settlers set fire to a church in the village of Taybeh. Only there was no fire in any church—the site was archaeological ruins; the fire, the cause of which was unclear, was in the dry field next to it—and settlers were recorded on video helping to put it out using firefighting equipment.

But the op did succeed in establishing a precedent and an audience on the Right receptive to Arab sectarianism. And so, earlier this week, the same players, including the same clergy from the same village—“the last entirely Christian village in the West Bank”—piled on the “international criticism” against the settlers. Not only does Israel drag Americans to war, this line goes, it also permits violent maniacs to deliberately target the Christians of the Holy Land.

Like the IDF bombing displaced Palestinians at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza in Oct. 2023, or Israeli snipers deliberately shooting Palestinian children in the head one day and in the testicles the other, “almost as if a game is being played,” or Israel blocking the entry of baby formula into Gaza, it’s all rubbish. By the time Western audiences figure it out—after bad people have been rewarded and good people have been punished—most will move on to the next lie.

That’s because there is a large investment in there being a trend of Jewish Extremist Terrorism. The purveyors of this narrative—the mainstream media, politicians, even well-meaning activists—are all invested in the existence of Jewish villains on par with Muslim ones. Why? Maybe because there have been some 65,000 Islamic terror attacks since 9/11 across more than 70 countries. Maybe because jihadist attacks and plots in the EU in 2024 nearly doubled from the previous year, according to Europol. Maybe because, whatever wave of “Islamophobia” Mamdani imagines is sweeping the nation, Jews remain, by far, the most targeted religious group in the United States. But the good liberals of the West can’t admit any of this. Imagine what it would mean for their precious universalist principles—to say nothing of national policies—if they admitted that some cultures are different from others.

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03/27 Links Pt1: Israel is crafting a powerful new anti-Iran axis; Iranian missile strike US airbase in Saudi Arabia, 12 soldiers wounded

From Ian:

‘Experts’ hate Trump’s war on Iran. They’re making seven fatal errors

What is wrong with the West’s expert class? Do they really believe, as they keep telling us, that the war against Iran is a disaster, the end of days, the final humiliation for Donald Trump? Such defeatism, such catastrophism are not warranted. It is far too soon to conclude how this war will end, regardless of what Iranian propagandists and other appeasers would have us believe.

I can count seven principal errors clouding “expert” judgments in the West.

Error 1
The first is the European establishment’s inability to accept the scale of Iran’s defeats since the Oct 7, 2023 pogroms against Israel, one of the greatest military miscalculations in modern history.

The regime’s decades-long plan for regional domination lies in tatters. It has wasted tens of billions of dollars, its proxies have been defanged, its economy plunged into depression, its mainland ravaged with close to 20,000 targets bombed, its navy sunk, its air defences crippled, its missile stock and launchers decimated, its military-industrial complex blown up, its nuclear capacity curtailed – but apart from that, all is well in Tehran. It is a strange kind of victory which has seen Iran fail to shoot down a single US or Israeli manned plane or sink a single ship.

The reality is that Iran has been downgraded from regional superpower to a pirate terror state, able only to shoot a few missiles and drones at civilian targets, to threaten crimes against humanity, and to blackmail the shipping industry.

Yes, this residual power matters greatly: controlling the Strait of Hormuz and threatening Gulf oil and gas facilities is a potent form of asymmetric warfare that is inflicting devastating damage. But it hardly amounts to US defeat, or certainly not yet.

I don’t know how this war will end. Trump’s negotiations may fail. He may botch an invasion, or he may launch a successful airborne raid. What is certain is that he must reopen the Strait and will be judged on the outcome.

Error 2
The second myth is that Trump is somehow struggling because he supposedly failed to plan for the obvious. In fact, many US assumptions were either right or too pessimistic. It proved remarkably easy to kill Ali Khamenei. Iran failed to overwhelm US and Israeli defence systems.

Critics warned that stockpiles of allied interceptors would run out almost immediately; that was false. The Gulf states turned out to be more resilient than anticipated; instead of turning to China or hoisting the white flag, they shot down missiles, and the Saudis and UAE are moving closer to Washington. US combat losses have been smaller than expected.

Not everything has gone better than planned. Trump may have hoped that Iran’s ability to deploy missiles and drones would have diminished further. The low-probability possibility of an immediate implosion of the regime hasn’t materialised. It may well be that the US underpriced the chances of attacks on Qatari energy assets.

But the idea that Iran would move to block the Straits of Hormuz was the best-rehearsed risk in geopolitics. Trump probably accepted it as a necessary trade-off, an inevitable hit. It may well be that Trump didn’t expect Iran to move so fast. It might have been a blunder not to dispatch more demining resources to the Gulf ahead of time. We shall soon find out; the stakes are enormous.

History’s Pro Tips on Iran

Nothing in human experience compares to the wars of the last 120 years. Their scope has grown as the world has shrunk. The international laws governing conduct in war have too often failed. Technology advances, and along with it war’s lethality and devastation. So war is bad. No one wants another war. Or rather, almost no one. More on that shortly. In the meantime, the question before us is whether the current U.S. and Israeli operations against Iran qualify as just. It’s a debatable matter. I believe they are. I understand the opposite view. But I also find it unpersuasive. Here’s why.

The United States and Israel didn’t start the current conflict. It’s merely the latest phase in a war that began in earnest forty-seven years ago; a methodical war of aggression pursued by Iran to erase Israel as a nation and defeat the United States as the world’s “Great Satan.” The Tehran regime now supports a global network of terrorist violence. In the process, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the same regime has murdered or sponsored the murder of scores of thousands of people, including many of its own citizens, the vast majority innocent of any wrongdoing.

It would be easy but inadequate to excuse today’s Iranian policies as vengeance for the 1953 Mossadegh Affair. In that year, at the height of the Cold War, Britain’s MI6 and the American CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. In his place, they secured the pro-Western Reza Shah Pahlavi in power. For Britain, the goal was maintaining its control over Iranian oil. For the United States, the coup sought to prevent any Iranian drift toward the Soviet Union and any internal threat from Iran’s Tudeh (communist) Party. In the end, Mossadegh was imprisoned for three years and then held under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Several hundred pro- and anti-Mossadegh rioters died in the ensuing street violence.

So much for the past. The hatred animating today’s Islamic regime is far more intense, systematic, and expansive than mere revenge for an event more than seventy years ago. Mossadegh died in 1967. The 1979 revolution sidelined and repressed Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist allies, and his memory is treated with deep ambivalence. In practice, Tehran reviles anything non-Muslim. Its “tolerance” for internal, legally recognized minorities, including Catholics and other Christians, is little more than theater. It amounts to a kind of slow strangulation with distrust and oppressive constraints. The regime especially loathes what it sees as a godless West with its arrogance, licentious comforts, and obscene wealth. It has the same brutal zealotry, the same puritanical extremism, the same easy use of deceit, as the homicidal ideologies that preceded it in the last century.

Tehran has repeatedly lied in negotiations about its nuclear program. It continues to pursue nuclear weapons. This, despite years of pleading and pressure from the international community. It ignores both sanctions and financial enticements. It’s built an immense missile and drone capability, putting Europe and eventually the United States within range. It uses cluster weapons—banned by international law—against civilian populations. And if current military efforts against Iran prove anything, it’s the impressive scope and depth of the regime’s war preparations, the dispersal and hardening of key infrastructure, and the survival of many leadership cadres despite massive damage. A reasonable peace assuring mutual security has never been, and is not even now, on Tehran’s agenda. One doesn’t “make a deal,” a deal that’s sincere and lasting, with psychotics. Religious and political fanatics don’t stop. They won’t, because they can’t. Thus, the best one can hope for when dealing with mentally diseased zealots is preventing them from hurting others.

Hamas Confirms: Gaza Airstrikes That Hit Homes & Tents Actually Killed Terrorists — 10 Examples

A common narrative of the Gaza war is that Israel conducted indiscriminate bombing, striking civilian homes, shelters, and tents in humanitarian zones without military justification. Some observers have alleged that AI and automated systems were used to target single junior operatives or persons with no real affiliation to Hamas or other militant groups. Yet no clear, affirmative evidence has been produced showing the IDF deliberately targeted a civilian site absent a military objective.

This narrative nevertheless became central to accusations of war crimes and genocide. It gained traction in part because Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) systematically operate in civilian dress and embed within homes, mosques, hospitals, and humanitarian zones as part of their human shield strategy. Under these conditions, strikes on legitimate military targets can appear indistinguishable from attacks on civilians, especially in initial reporting. Early accounts, often provided by Hamas operatives posing as journalists , were frequently accepted and amplified before additional information emerged.

Even when the IDF identified targets and provided operational details, these explanations were often dismissed. However, that posture is becoming difficult to maintain. Recent disclosures by Hamas and PIJ, through official statements, affiliated Telegram channels, and martyr notices, have identified dozens of their own operatives killed in incidents widely reported as attacks on civilians. PIJ alone has acknowledged more than 140 members of its command structure killed during the war.

When these admissions are cross-referenced with specific strike reports and contemporaneous local reporting that initially presented the individuals as civilians but now confirms them as combatants, a consistent pattern emerges. Many incidents described as unlawful attacks on homes, shelters, or tents in humanitarian zones were in fact strikes targeting embedded fighters. As more of these cases come to light, the narrative of indiscriminate or blind AI directed airstrikes on civilian targets is exposed as false by the accumulating evidence.

The following ten cases, drawn from recent Hamas and PIJ martyr notices, demonstrate the pattern using the groups’ own admissions.

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03/23 Links Pt2: Hatzola ambulances set alight in Golders Green arson attack; We love life, they love death and Britain still can't pick a side; Can Democracies Survive the Age of AI Propaganda?

From Ian:

The Golders Green ambulance attack reveals the depths of the new Jew hatred

We’ve been told since Brexit that a new 1930s is upon us. Apparently, British voters politely asking for more democratic clout and better border control constituted a terrifying descent into Nazism. All the while, those menacing Britain’s tiny Jewish community – smaller in number than British Sikhs – were rendered invisible.

Smashed shops, firebombings, murder – purely because they are Jews. I don’t know how many echoes of history need to ring out, how much broken glass needs to rattle on the ground, before the anti-fascists rouse from their slumber. Or realise they’ve slipped on to the other side.

Muslim anti-Semitism, in particular, has been lent cover by all the usual idiots and cowards. Despite anti-Semitic attitudes being stubbornly higher among British Muslims, despite Islamic extremism being the biggest terror threat we face by a country mile, every political discussion must at some point pivot to the spectre of the ‘far right’.

Given you could now fit the actual far right in the back of an Uber XL, this requires smear tactics and spectacular mental gymnastics – like when Gary Neville responded to the Heaton Park killings by bemoaning the blokes putting Union flags on lampposts, or when Green MP Hannah Spencer blamed the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing on the ‘division’ generated by Reform UK.

The arguments are almost too stupid to rebut. Apparently, Jihad al-Shamie only decided to lunge at Jews with a knife because he was made to feel ‘unwelcome’ by the sight of our national flag, and Salman Abedi only blew up girls at a pop concert because he stumbled across one of Nigel Farage’s old speeches to the European Parliament.

These are just the more low-wattage attempts to defend the indefensible. Jew hatred is back. But our rulers cannot compute it, let alone fight it. For that would require ditching their comforting ideologies, their identitarian blinkers, their deranged Israelophobia. It would mean accepting that they are part of the problem.

Jake Wallis Simons: We love life, they love death and Britain still can't pick a side

The firebombing of the ambulances is a case in point. We saw it in the Manchester synagogue stabbings and in all likelihood, we have seen it again: unbridled antisemitic incitement has consequences. Ever since October 7, our country has been debased by weekly carnivals of Jew-hatred on our streets, powered in large part by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies. Yet when Suella Braverman labelled them “hate marches”, it was she who was silenced rather than the racist agitators.

Once again, even as the ambulances smoulder, the same propaganda is all over social media. If the Jews hadn’t tried to defend themselves against the jihadi hordes of Hamas and the Islamic regime in Tehran, if they had simply rolled over and joined Kier Starmer in bleating that vanquishing your enemy is “against international law”, they claim, then ambulances would not be firebombed in London.

Such are the foul consequences of lies. Such is their weaponisation. Such are the results of fanning the flames of hatred for years, or taking no action when it happens under our noses.

There was no “genocide” in Gaza – which genocide features evacuation warnings and humanitarian aid? Which genocide involves soldiers fighting hand-to-hand in tunnels to avoid harming civilians when the Strip could easily have been levelled from the air? – just as there are no “war crimes” in Iran.

Saturate people’s brains with footage of the appalling sufferings of war, however, and deceitfully frame it as evidence of atrocities, and lies have borne the fruit of hatred. Even our political leaders are not immune. With one eye on the Muslim vote, which is increasingly functioning as an anti-democratic sectarian bloc in a contribution to our social decline, the Prime Minister recognised a state of Palestine with the Israeli hostages still in the catacombs, earning the open congratulations of Hamas.

About ten days later, two Jews were killed in Manchester, again to the great satisfaction of the jihadis in Gaza. When David Lammy turned up to offer his condolences, he was heckled by the grieving Jews of Manchester, and with good reason.

What does all of this amount to? Simple: Britain faces a choice. Either we find the courage to look the Islamists in the eye and tell them that enough is enough, or we see the disappearance of our Jewish community and the gradual fall of our democracy. If that sounds alarmist, look back at history. Read the 2015 government report on the Muslim Brotherhood, which labelled the group a national security threat and yet resulted in no action.

As Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said, “they say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.” Does Britain wish to stand on the side of the ambulances that seek to save us, or the arsonists who fetishise blood? Disturbingly, the country is finding it hard to make up its mind.

Daniel Sugarman: Golders Green, antisemitism and Passover

In a little more than a week, we will sit at the Passover table to conduct the seder. We will tell our children the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The people of Israel were honoured in Egypt – Joseph served as the Imperial viceroy – until it all came crashing down. What happened? The book of Exodus, quoted in the Haggadah, the telling over of the Passover story, tells us. “A new king arose, who did not know Joseph”. Did he literally not know who Joseph was? Unlikely. But Joseph – and his service to Egypt, helping protect the populace from the ravages of famine – meant nothing to him. The Bible goes into detail about what was the first instance of antisemitism in history – the charge, repeated so many times down the millennia, of dual loyalty.

“Let us deal wisely with them”, says Pharaoh to his people. “In case they increase in number and a war befall us and they join our enemies and wage war against us.”

A little later on in the Haggadah, we will read the paragraph of Vehi Sheamdah, which says “in every generation, our enemies rise up to destroy us”. It would be taken as paranoia were it not demonstrably true. The last few years have seen a sickening sanitisation of Jew hate in public life. In an era where every antisemitic attack is followed by a tidal wave of accusations of false flags and dual loyalty, where Jews are blamed for the very attacks they are targeted by, this takes on a new meaning.

That paragraph of the Haggadah ends by saying “and the Holy One, blessed be he, rescues us from their hands.” Returning momentarily to my charedi upbringing, the word for “rescues us” – matzilenu – has the same Hebrew root as the name of the organisation whose ambulances were firebombed – hatzola – literally, “rescue”. At the time I write this, more than £1 million has been been raised for Hatzola NW, raised by thousands of people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike – and the government has pledged to replace all the ambulances that were destroyed.

Those who seek to intimidate us and bring us down will find it far harder to do so than they think.

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03/21 Links: Allies in name only: Israel left alone against Iranian aggression; Over 100 injured, 11 seriously, in strikes on Arad, Dimona; What Looks Like Resilience in Iran Is Its Collapse Plan

From Ian:

Allies in name only: Israel left alone against Iranian aggression

Essentially, they say: Iran is not such a threat to global peace and security. Israel and the US may be the greater shared threat. Therefore, this is not our war. We will only defend our narrowest of interests a bare bit.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has sought to wrap repudiation of the US and Israel in highfalutin diplomatic terms. “We lack a mandate from the United Nations, the European Union, or NATO for the war,” he said. “Diplomacy and de-escalation” are the preferred route for handling Iran, he predictably added.

Yeah, sure. As if “mandates” from impotent international edifices are more important than winning the war that has been engaged. As if European-led diplomacy has ever effectively defanged or dissuaded Iran from pursuing its path of genocidal aggression.

I say that such studied neutrality in the great struggle against Iran is collusion with the enemy. All the “calm and level-headed” excuses for sitting out this war (of course, excepting “defensive assistance” to several oil-rich Gulf countries) is a grand collapse of Western spine and principle.

I also cast off anodyne sentiments about “heartfelt feelings for all victims of conflict in the region” and other such throwaway international statements. Without determination to quell Iran – and again, without specific expressed concern for Israel and Israelis too – these mushy musings equal profound moral failure.

Indeed, the frostiness exhibited by the “leaders” described above recalls the adage that you rudely discover who your true friends are (and are not) when the chips are down.

Alas, the ethical limpness and political animosity described here regarding the struggle against Iran is of a piece with the rotten global standard in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict, going back decades.

The response of UN and EU leaders to every Palestinian-Israeli conflagration long has been to condemn the “continuing cycle of violence” (and then press for endless negotiations while boosting Hamas blood libels about Israeli war crimes). As if Israel and the Palestinians each were cavalierly engaging in murder just for fun or out of comparable burning hatred. As if “both sides” were “suffering casualties” and equally responsible for the “cycle” of warfare.

What is missing from the above comments in relation to both the Iranian and Palestinian fronts is a no-nonsense diagnosis of enemy aggression. Few are willing to reference Tehran’s almost five-decade-long record of assault against non-Shi’ite Arab, Western, and Israeli interests. Nobody has the guts to remark upon the death-glorifying political culture of Palestinians that repeatedly chooses war and terrorism over peace negotiations.

This nonalignment keeps the storyline in a neat, supposedly non-judgmental, and purportedly “level-headed” comfort zone – bereft of any right-minded backbone, free from any commitment to explicitly recognize and concretely fight evil. Alas, such detachment is tantamount to betrayal of Israel and the US, and is perfidy against the future of Western civilization.

The Buenos Aires Bombings

The decades of institutional failure that defined Argentina’s response to the AMIA bombing reached an inflection point with the 2023 inauguration of President Javier Milei. Whereas Kirchner was willing to accommodate Tehran, Milei has anchored Argentina firmly within a Western–Israeli security axis, designating Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC’s Quds Force as terrorist organisations and joining the Combined Maritime Forces to combat Iranian-backed threats in international waters. In April 2024, Argentina’s Federal Court of Criminal Cassation, the country’s highest criminal court, formally declared the AMIA attack a crime against humanity and attributed responsibility to senior Iranian officials and to Hezbollah, thus lending the weight of the country’s highest criminal tribunal to what investigators had argued for thirty years. In 2025, Milei’s government used newly passed legislation to authorise the trial in absentia of ten Iranian and Lebanese suspects—among them former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian and Ahmad Vahidi, the former Quds Force commander who directed the unit responsible for planning the AMIA operation and who has been subject to an Interpol red notice since 2007. On 28 February 2026, US and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and decapitated much of Iran’s senior military leadership, including IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour. Vahidi, who is wanted for the murders of 85 people in Buenos Aires, now commands the IRGC.

What Argentina’s experience reveals is not simply that Iran projects violence across continents, though it does. It also shows that such projections are more likely to succeed when a target’s state institutions are vulnerable. The lawlessness of the Tri-Border Area enabled the logistics. The corruption of Judge Galeano provided impunity. The political calculations of successive governments delayed justice. Each failure compounded the last, and for thirty years the gap between what is known and what has been adjudicated has remained almost unchanged. The names of the planners are on file at Interpol. The mechanics of the attack are documented in thousands of pages of investigative records. The dead have been counted, mourned, and memorialised. But justice has never been served.

Recent US–Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have triggered fresh security alerts across Argentina at Jewish institutions, airports, and border crossings. The Buenos Aires bombings serve as a reminder that Iran’s willingness to strike at Israeli and Jewish targets outside the Middle East is not merely hypothetical. Argentina has already been a front in this war, and the traces of that history remain visible on its streets today. Concrete barriers line the entrances of Jewish community centres across the city, standing as a permanent physical acknowledgment that the threat that destroyed the AMIA building has never fully receded. Thirty years on, the most important question is whether the lessons of that experience have been learned by those who failed to deliver justice—and by those who may yet need it.

A Historic Moment: The Case for Ending Both the Iranian Regime and Hamas Once and for All

The critical question is whether we will stop at weakening the Iranian regime or Hamas or move toward ensuring that they can never again recover as long-term threats to their neighbors or global security. At this moment, leaving those regimes in place – the ruling mullahs in Iran or Hamas in Gaza — is probably the most dangerous option.

Authoritarian regimes such as Iran's, and terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic State and the Taliban, rarely respond to setbacks by abandoning their ambitions. Instead, they pause, regroup, and rebuild.

Russia and China, each with its own anti-American calculations, could provide political cover, technological assistance, and indirect support that would allow Iran to resume its nuclear program. China has already been supplying Iran with "almost everything but troops" during this war, and supplying Russia with military materiel for its war against Ukraine.

If Iran's regime and Hamas are allowed to recover, their primary strategic objective will likely become to rearm as quickly as possible, and we will be right back at war again.

Stopping halfway through such efforts only allows threats to reemerge dangerously in the future. History will judge whether these two opportunities presented today were seized — or allowed to slip away.

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03/20 Links Pt1: The West should double down on the Iran war; That Was Before October 7; Guterres and the gutless United Nations; Iranian missile hits Jerusalem’s Old City

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: That Was Before October 7

For some reason, the world still hasn’t quite grasped how much has changed since that day, at least for Israelis. One reason is the terrifying “what if” that Israeli policymakers have had to ask themselves: What if Hezbollah had invaded along with Hamas on October 7, when Israel’s defenses were down and it had to fight to regain territory within its own borders?

What if Hamas’s control of the highway near the Gaza Envelope meant a Lebanese convoy could be on the scene within two hours? By many accounts, it took IDF units twice as long to reach Kibbutz Be’eri that day.

Even without the prospect of an actual Hezbollah ground invasion, consider: Hamas pushed Israel’s border residents into retreat, essentially moving the border itself for a brief period. Hezbollah periodically forces the same effect on residents of the north just by using rockets. And while both of those groups were working to herd Israelis into the center of the country, Iran was developing the capability to overwhelm Israeli air defenses with its ballistic-missile arsenal.

Each of those three threats must be neutralized. There cannot be a force in Gaza able to slaughter communities on the other side of the fence. There cannot be an arsenal in Lebanon that forces the evacuation of Israeli towns. And Iran cannot be allowed to retain or reacquire the means to make the country dwell in bomb shelters.

October 7 revealed what can never happen again. That’s why a yellow line divides Gaza. Lebanon is getting its own line, whatever color it ends up being designated.

New lines, new rules, new terms—all set by Israel. That’s how this works now.

The old rules put Israel’s enemies in a great position to strike at the Jewish state’s vulnerabilities. But, well, that was before October 7. They will not get a second shot at it.

Seth Mandel: The Media’s Attempt to Drive a Wedge Between the U.S. and Israel

Trump is indeed responsible for elevating Kent to his recently vacated position. But thankfully the administration very publicly vested exactly zero credibility in Kent. He was given a job with an important title, but he was not responsible for policymaking and his influence was nil. Kent is under FBI investigation, and he decided to leap before he was pushed.

So who is Kent influencing against Israel? Democrats don’t need his help, unfortunately, independents repeatedly rejected him as a candidate for office because of his ties to white nationalists, and Republicans back Trump in the war with Iran.

The third and final example is at least a point of legitimate debate: the question of whether the U.S. and Israel have contradictory war aims.

CNN uses the Israeli attack on Iran’s Pars gas field to frame this question. That attack was followed by an Iranian retaliatory strike on Qatar’s section of the gas field, sending energy prices up. Trump disavowed any knowledge or approval of the initial Israeli strike, but that is not remotely plausible. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Trump doesn’t want a repeat of that incident.

It’s also clear that Israel will respect the president’s wishes. Indeed, at yesterday’s press conference, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made this point explicitly. Trump, he said, is “the leader. I’m, you know, his ally. America is the leader. Israel is, as the national security memorandum described us … they called Israel the model ally. That’s how they call it, the model ally. It’s not a superpower.”

You can see the progression here of attempts by narrative-setters to degrade Israel’s credibility. First it was that Israel is joining Trump’s war, and Trump’s war doesn’t poll all that well. Then it was “Israel is responsible for this war.” But nobody believes that, and Trump has been happy to own this war; he sees it as a legacy-defining conflict. Then it was “Israel’s interests clash with U.S. interests.” But that, too, fails to ignite because Israel comes right out and says it’ll follow Trump’s lead on every aspect of the war. And now it’s “Israel’s reputation will continue to suffer if it sticks with this war.”

That has been the case since October 7, 2023. Israel has been forced to choose between survival and shallow, fleeting popularity with the president’s critics. Israel is not going to “fix” its unpopularity by committing suicide, and this type of concern trolling is ineffective against people fighting for their survival.

Spectator Editorial: The West should double down on the Iran war

The regime may yet be proven right. America’s Nato allies equivocate over efforts to restore freedom of navigation – a core interest of the West. The traumas of past interventions have encouraged formidable resistance within the US political establishment to deploying ground forces. European political leaders, including our Prime Minister, are courting short-term popularity by resisting what they see as Trump’s ‘adventurism’.

But what would the consequences be if this war was allowed to end with the Iranian regime still in place? Our allies in the Gulf – from Oman to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – would be left to reflect on our inconstancy. They would be left, too, with a wounded and resentful Iran, plotting its revenge. Tehran would have renewed incentive to fund terrorist proxies and nuclear missile technology, the better to deter and overawe its neighbours. Russia and China would feel confirmed in their view that a weakened West has neither the strength nor the stamina to resist their own adventurism. Iran’s people would see the democracy they dreamt of vanish beyond the horizon, and those who had been anything other than fierce in their loyalty to the regime would be crushed underfoot.

What of the West? Those celebrating such an outcome would be the ‘post-colonial’ left, who would rejoice in an epochal reversal of American power, and the ethno-nationalist right, who rage against Israel, Jewish influence and ‘the Epstein class’ which, as they see it, dragged us into a costly and counter-productive debacle. These are the forces within western society that disdain western civilisation itself – liberal, open, capitalist, creative, Judeo-Christian and confident. These people would feel emboldened in their drive towards identitarianism, division and communal enmity.

Victory in Iran, by contrast, would give that country the chance to show the world what a free, successful, post-Islamist but majority-Muslim society could achieve. It would liberate the talents, voices, and consciences of millions. It would undergird the stability and prosperity of Gulf powers and their orientation towards the West, with the leadership of nations such as the UAE in the vanguard. It would liberate Israel from existential threat and enable both an accommodation with its Palestinian neighbours and western support to that end. It would re-affirm the ability of the West to secure its strategic goals through united deployment of military strength and thus bolster the defence of Ukraine and the security of Taiwan. It would place control of oil and gas in the hands of western allies to counter the huge economic advantages that China has built up.

Victory is far from easy or assured. It will require a commitment of time, troops and patience that has so far not been articulated. But if that commitment is not made then the price will be far higher than what we might endure in the weeks ahead. We can either finish the job in Iran, or it will finish us.

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03/18 Links Pt2: Amid Anti-Semitism Wave, Europe Calls in the Military; The ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ Canard; October 7 report will remind ‘useful fools’ that Hamas started Gaza war

From Ian:

The Israel Lobby: A Historical Primer

The United States became the second country to accord official recognition to Israel upon its establishment (the Soviet Union was the first), but in the new state’s early years, when it had the greatest need of outside support, America provided very little. In Israel’s War of Independence against the five Arab armies that invaded it in 1948, the American government did not supply it with weapons. (The Israeli army did obtain some American arms through nongovernmental channels.) In the Anglo–French–Israeli 1956 war with Egypt, Washington forced Israel to withdraw from positions it had gained in the fighting. In its sweeping victory over three Arab countries in June 1967, Israel relied on French, not American, arms.

Not only did Israel not receive American help when it was most needed, as the events after the 1956 war demonstrate, American Middle Eastern policy did not always favor Israel, the efforts of the pro-Israel lobby notwithstanding. In 1981, the lobby and the Israeli government strongly opposed the sale of a sophisticated Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, fearing that it would be employed in ways that would undermine Israel’s security. The sale went ahead anyway. In 2014, the lobby and Israeli government (and a majority of the American public) opposed the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA). That deal also went forward.

American foreign policy worked to Israel’s advantage when and because the two countries’ domestic political values, and more important, their strategic outlooks, were aligned. More often than not, they were. During the Cold War, Israel acted as a bulwark against pro-Soviet countries and movements in the Middle East; and in that region, Israel stood out as the lone democracy.

In the post–Cold War period, it has retained both distinctions, becoming the major regional opponent—and by far the most effective one—of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has, since its inception in 1979, threatened America’s allies and interests in the Middle East. Indeed, Israel qualifies as the most valuable ally of the United States in the sense that, unlike America’s many other allies, it has actually fought and won wars against the adversaries of the United States and has done so while not asking or expecting American troops to fight alongside Israelis for this purpose. The joint attack on Iran launched on February 28 demonstrated anew Israel’s high strategic value to the United States.

The American public and, for the most part, the American government have understood and appreciated this, which accounts for the generally pro-Israel tilt of American foreign policy. Both what Israel is and what it has done, and not the supposed machinations of the groups lobbying on its behalf, have inclined Americans to be favorably disposed to the Jewish state. Because of this positive disposition, policies favorable to Israel followed. That is how democracy works.

Still, the critics of the pro-Israel lobby who assert that it differs from other interest groups are correct in one way—although not in the way that they believe. The other such groups have consisted mainly of people with ethnic ties to the country whose interests they were attempting to promote. Similarly, one of the principal pro-Israel organizations, the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is composed mainly of Jews. By far the largest pro-Israel group in the United States, however, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), has a largely non-Jewish, Christian membership. CUFI has supported the Jewish state for reasons related to their Christian faith. A reported 6 million people belong to AIPAC. The comparable number for CUFI is 10 million. In this one respect, the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which in every other way is similar to every other ethnic group seeking to influence American foreign policy, and like them a pure product of American democracy, is unique.

The ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ Canard

Contrast this to Palestinian Arab identity, which crystallized only in the 1960s. The first formal claim of Palestinian national identity came in 1964, with the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization—after Israel’s founding in 1948 but before its territorial expansion in 1967.

The timing raises eyebrows and further questions, some uncomfortable. What makes a person in or around the historic territory of Palestine a Palestinian? Jews, Jordanians, and Israeli Arabs are not Palestinians. The term does not refer to persons descended from people who lived in British Mandate Palestine; if it did, the necessary conclusion would be that there already is a Palestinian state—called Israel. It is not defined as a lack of Israeli citizenship; otherwise Jordanian Arabs would be Palestinians, too. Nor does it mean an Arab living in the territory once called Palestine; Israeli Arabs don’t count. Nor can it have anything to do with living in the territories Israel conquered from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in 1967, since the term was invented before then and is used to demand a “right of return” for Arabs displaced in 1948-49 from present-day Israel.

What is it to be Palestinian, then? It is, as its early popularizers were happy to explain, an Arab whose identity is defined by wanting to destroy Israel. It is the ethno-political fusion of non-Jewish Levantine ancestry with anti-Zionism.

The Egyptian-American analyst Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has been one of few scholars willing to state this conclusion plainly. That it takes an Arab to articulate what is clear to see is unsurprising. Polite Westerners and Jews consider the notion of discussing constitutive elements of foreign national identities daunting and rarely worth the payoff. Doing so to legitimize Jewish civil rights while eschewing the universalist mentality of protection for all, further, is quite distasteful. It appears to be a violation of profound liberal commitments, including the equal treatment of all people before law. But it appears that way, as Mansour deftly explains, only because the concept of “identity” obscures crucial differences between the Jewish connection to Zion and the Palestinian connection to Palestine. “The most central problem of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” he writes, is that “the absolute and final negation of Zionism, by any means necessary, [i]s the central ideological content of the Palestinian identity and its symbols.”

There is a stark asymmetry between Zionism and anti-Zionism. Zionism holds that a Jewish state should exist in the Levant, though not to the exclusion of a non-Jewish state—clearly. It is minimalist and rooted in shlilat ha–golah, negating the exile, by granting Jews self-determination within their ancestral lands. Anti-Zionism, by contrast, is definitionally opposed to the existence of a Jewish state. It is maximalist and rooted in reversing the Nakba, the failed Arab attempt to destroy Israel in 1948. This is why Jewish Israelis continue to offer two-state solutions and peace plans, and why Palestinians cannot accept them. And it is precisely that honest assessment that APR seeks to prohibit.

Yet it is neither compassionate nor intellectually honest to give APR an inch. Rather, as Mansour argues, “perhaps the most merciful and responsible course is for the Palestinian identity—as a state-bound ambition—to be gently laid to rest.… The cost of perpetuating a vision that repeatedly descends into cruelty is too high.” It does so not out of boiling frustration or the inequities of uneven Western civil rights regimes, but because it is an identity “written in blood,” as the old PFLP slogan goes. Those who “genuinely care about the lives of Palestinians, Israelis, and their neighbors,” writes Mansour, should let Palestinians be Arabs again: “Walk away from the fantasy of ‘Palestine’ and offer every real opportunity for inclusion and a dignified future elsewhere.”

The inapt comparison between IHRA and APR reveals an even greater irony: While Zionism is called a political movement and Palestinianism an ethnic heritage, the opposite is closer to the case. The Jewish relation to the Holy Land is essential and ethno-religious; the ethnic story of the Jews makes no sense without the land. Palestinians’ relationship to the land is essentially political; what makes them Palestinian is that they need all the land. Perhaps that is why APR advocates describe what they seek to prohibit as anything that “defames…Palestinians or their narratives” or even their “allies.” They are trying to erect a force field around a political view—the very accusation they level against Zionists—that just so happens to have ethnic bigotry at its core.

We may wish there were a rough parallelism rooted in “nobody’s perfect” that leaves room for moderation and outward signs of empathy. But the truth is that, in this conflict, there are not two equivalent sides. There are two people with claims to the land; one has control, right of first possession, and has been willing to compromise nonetheless. The other has neither the right of might nor the might of right, yet defines itself by its very identity as eliminationist.

The charade of false equivalence helps no one and nothing except the Western liberal conscience, the terrorists waging a long war against the Jewish state, and sham NGOs that exploit the former to support the latter. And the growing specter of APR, the evil approaching stealthily from the north, makes explicating the charade an urgent and unavoidable task.

Irina Velitskaya: One day, everyone will have this book at the back of their closet

Novelist Omar El Akkad’s new nonfiction book about the Gaza conflict, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” which recently won the 2025 US National Book Award, encapsulates everything that is wrong with the state of political discourse, intellectual culture, and Western elites who favor feeling good about themselves over civilizational survival.

The book was first published one year ago this month. Why write about it now? Because it is still, to this day, the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in the category “Middle Eastern Politics,” and #3 in the category of “Democracy.”

So what’s wrong with El Akkad’s heartfelt memoir? Let’s begin with the title itself. It is a naked appeal to peer pressure: If you are not part of the “pro”-Palestine movement now, you inevitably will be some day, and if that glorious day of dawning, God forbid, never comes — if, in other words, you continue to hold out stubbornly for the right of one tiny Jewish state to exist in a world of 56 Muslim-majority states, many of them actual “settler colonial ethnostates” — then you are on “the wrong side of history,” as the balaclava-clad mobs tirelessly proclaim. “Shame on you,” they bellow at their antisemitic demonstrations, those who themselves in their naked hatred feel no shame at all, nor any self-awareness that their actions, which they proclaim with proud self-absorption place them on “the right side of history” are in actuality indistinguishable from that of the average Berliner or Viennese Durchschnittsmensch in 1938.

(Incidentally, the prefix “pro” is in quotes because the recent ceasefire agreement, conspicuously uncelebrated by the demonstrators, and the subsequent murders of Palestinian dissidents by Hamas, also ignored, proved that the protesters were never “pro” Palestine at all.)

The title is, in other words, a form of shaming. It also is incredibly presumptuous, a classic example of the logical fallacy of “begging the question,” or assuming the truth of a conclusion in the premise of an argument. The conclusion, of course, is that “this” — which is to say Israel’s defensive and preventative war against Hamas and jihadist terror — is something that one must be ashamed of before, or perhaps instead of, even considering the arguments that support this assertion.

To be clear, the pivotal “this” in the title is not the barbaric October 7 massacre, nor the attempts by naive or hateful Westerners to justify it or deny it, nor the 18 years of rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli communities that preceded it, nor the stabbings and car rammings and bus bombings of the First and Second Intifadas, nor the massacres of Persians, Christians, Hindus, Druze, Yazidi, Alawites, Jews, African animists, and other minorities by radical Islamist groups currently taking place worldwide.

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03/10 Links Pt2: Forget ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s Islamism the West should be fighting; Is ISIS now part of the ‘progressive’ alliance?; Pro-Iran Al-Quds Day march in London CANCELLED

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Forget ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s Islamism the West should be fighting

The word ‘Islamophobia’ might be gone, but the tyrannical impulse is the same: to keep a beady eye on commentary about Islam. To ensure the masses’ rude blather on that religion is not too ‘intimidating’, too ‘stereotyping’, too far beyond the government-decreed bounds of ‘the public interest’. This is a blasphemy law by the backdoor. Once more, it is the policing of irreligious speech in the drag of anti-racism. For all the lip service the new definition pays to freedom of speech, the entire point of singling out Islam as uniquely deserving of government pity and attention is to circumscribe discussion. As shadow justice minister Nick Timothy says, this latest effort to lavish special protections on Islam is yet another ‘attack [on] our freedom to criticise, satirise and scrutinise ideas’.

The announcement of a bureaucratic offensive on ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ would be worrying at the best of times. That it has come now, at the outset of the Iran War, as we are witnessing explosions of Islamist intolerance, is mindblowingly reckless. The evidence of our eyes is that Britain and the West are afflicted with Islamism. With large numbers of people who feel a greater affinity with the anti-Semitic tyrants of Tehran than they do with the nations in which they live. Where’s the tsar for that, Keir Starmer?

Forget ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ – who will protect us from the anti-Western hosility of the Islamist mob? To weep showy tears over the ‘rise of hatred’ without mentioning the hatred for our own civilisation that courses through the veins of the Islamist movement and its suicidal allies on the bourgeois left is nothing short of insane. That we only ever hear chattering-class bleating about ‘hatred’ when the targets are Muslims is so striking. It confirms how catastrophically blind these people are to the hatred for our society. The hatred for our values. The hatred for our citizens, almost a hundred of whom have been slain by Islamists these past 20 years. The hatred for our working-class girls, who were raped by gangs disproportionately made up of Pakistani men, who called them ‘white slags’, as officialdom looked the other way. And the hatred for our Jewish compatriots, who remain the key victims of religious hate crime, many carried out by Islamists.

The Iran crisis has shone a harsh light on our moral troubles on the home front. In the US, the UK, Europe and Australia, people have openly wept for the ayatollah and prayed for the defeat of America and destruction of Israel. Now that is hatred. That is hostility. This week there was an explosion outside a synagogue in Liege, Belgium. We saw the allegedly ISIS-inspired hurling of a homemade bomb in New York City. The Iranians suspected of spying on Jewish institutions in London remain in custody. And you want us to fret over some muppet on the internet making a joke about the burqa? This is something worse than fiddling while Rome burns. It’s the throwing of petrol on to Rome’s flames. For in sanctifying Islam as the most put-upon religion, the ideology most deserving of special protection, the UK government risks inflaming the very cult of grievance that powers the Islamist mindset. They think they’re tackling hatred when in truth they’re inflaming it, giving ever greater licence to the anti-civilisational self-pity of the West’s Islamists.

What a betrayal this is of the good people of Iran who thirst for freedom. There they are praying for the demise of their Islamist oppressors while we shake our heads over mockery of Islam. There they are tearing off their hijabs while we worry about ‘hijabophobia’. So long as we fear ‘offending Islam’, we will be incapable of standing up for our own values or offering solidarity to those valiant warriors for liberty in the Islamic Republic.

Seth Mandel: Blaming Jews for Global Sadness

There are two primary points to consider here. The first is the subject of O’Neill’s column, which is that the cause of “Palestine” is not about helping Palestinians but about helping Sally Rooney—and the legions of likeminded bored-to-death Europeans—get out of bed in the morning.

Indeed, Rooney asked in her speech: “What else can make our lives endurable in times as dark as these? What else, in the face of such horror, can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves.”

To some people, the permanent war against the Jewish state is all there is.

But there’s a second point here, in addition to Sally Rooney’s personal cry for help. And that is the unbelievable irresponsibility of public figures portraying the war against the Jews as a war to rescue humanity and save the earth.

In addition to Rooney and Albanese, the conference included—according to its website—the notorious anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn and Omar Barghouti, the founder of the main BDS movement which seeks the destruction of Israel.

It was, in other words, a conference devoted to drumming up enthusiasm for globalizing the intifada. There have been such rallies against Jews throughout history—many of them, in fact—and not a single one has been about making the world a better place.

Although the conference bills itself as progressive, one can hear in Rooney’s spiel an echo of America’s right-wing “lost boys,” drifting into white nationalism as a demented form of group therapy.

Throughout history, Jews have been blamed for a very long list of maladies. Ennui is a new one, I think. Yet in an era rife with the self-pathologizing of emotional duress, it makes a certain kind of sense that we’re somehow now being blamed for sadness, boredom, restlessness, loneliness, and the guilt of the privileged.

All these things are real and, to judge by the public discourse, on the rise. But scapegoating Jews is not the cure. One can imagine a television ad in which hand-drawn clouds morph into words describing the symptoms of depression, as a voiceover recommends one consult one’s physician before taking anti-Semitism. The civilizational side effects, after all, are pretty rough.

And those civilizational side effects are precisely what the superstars of the People’s Congress for the Hague Group are threatening to bring down on everyone’s head. Rooney’s assertion that Israel is the great enemy of all the earth is the reason for the war in the Middle East in the first place. It is a battle cry that brings death and destruction to innocent people all over the world. And bored literary poster children have no right to make it their coping mechanism.

Seth Mandel: On Coexisting with Supporters of October 7

Essentially, October 7 became the kind of dividing line that made a lot of Jews understand history.

So it’s a useful question to ponder: How should we act? After all, not only must we maintain precisely the values we did before, but we also should work toward returning society to a place in which support for October 7 is brings public shame. What follows are a few guidelines.

First, Jews must not permit our own beliefs to be diluted by a society that makes excuses for pogroms. Nor should it temper our own criticism of October 7. Fact is, October 7 should be a red line for all civilizations, and it must remain a red line for us. We should not hesitate to state and restate that fact—that unqualified condemnation of that day is a basic human litmus test—even in front of those who justify Nazi barbarism. Especially in their presence, perhaps. We do not accommodate, out of misguided politesse, those who think our children deserved to be burned alive.

Second, and this goes for non-Jews just as much as for Jews: Use October 7 as a barometer for political, ideological and moral hypocrisy. Not because we’re looking for “gotcha” moments, but because it is impractical to remain unaware of who can be trusted in public life. We know, for example, that people who travel in the same circles as Duwaji and her husband Zohran Mamdani are not interested in protecting women from sexual assault, and that when they sign on to such campaigns it is because they are lying. We know that when they falsely accuse Israel of child murder it is because they support the murder of the children of Israel. Another example: The war began with Hamas carrying out the largest massacre at a music festival in recorded history. Musicians and artists who ignore this and instead parrot the propaganda of those who carried out the massacre do not believe in artistic expression; they only believe in dogmatic political expression. Indeed, they support regimes that would abolish the arts entirely.

Third, do not “trade” for condemnation of October 7. Do not dignify someone’s attempt to say “if you want me to condemn October 7, will you condemn [some random perceived crime they want you to falsely equate with October 7]?” October 7 is not something to be bartered away to some bad-faith ideological actor. October 7 is not an opening bid in some negotiation. Take it or leave it.

Finally: Punish people politically for their refusal to recognize the barbarousness of October 7. Just add it to any public figure’s civic record. This isn’t holding a grudge, it’s just more practical politics. People on the wrong side of October 7 are expecting to benefit from some sort of statute of limitations—or the limitations of human memory. Instead, let’s help them remember.

Is ISIS now part of the ‘progressive’ alliance?

In case anyone out there might still be under the impression that the violent fanaticism of the lefty culture warriors is abating, Saturday’s events should lay that to rest. Lang’s stunt was undoubtedly designed to cause maximum offence, but the cognitive dissonance of the counter-protesters and the media was truly something to behold. It was the most clear example yet of the theory that ‘words I don’t like’ are literally violence, but literal violence from ‘people I like’ is not violent at all.

One counter-protester, Walter Masterson, was in the middle of delivering a Kumbaya, we-love-everyone speech when one of the two attackers threw the first bomb. ‘We want everyone here to stay in New York. You don’t get to come from outside, and then tell everyone else…’, he was saying as Emir Balat – who had indeed come from outside New York – appeared behind him and, with a facial expression filled with rage and hate, appeared to hurl the nail bomb just above Masterson’s head, before running away.

Another video posted to X showed the attack from Lang’s perspective. As he stood there, annoying the counter-protesters, the bomb landed near him, prompting him and his supporters to run away. ‘Somebody threw a fucking bomb, bro!’, says one man. ‘That was a nail bomb!’, says another. Voices are heard thanking Jesus that the nail bomb did not go off. Eventually, someone calls out, ‘Somebody’s gotta get the goat’, and a female voice is heard saying, ‘Oh the goat!’.

The mayor’s immediate reaction was to condemn the ‘vile protest rooted in white supremacy’. New York governor Kathy Hochul blamed ‘both’ sides. Never mind that one side came armed only with a goat and a bad attitude, the other with multiple bombs and gave a statement to police that read in part: ‘I pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. Die in your rage you kufar.’ (sic)

Masterson, the now famous counterprotester, posted on X earlier this week: ‘I stand by [my speech]. As a born and raised New Yorker, everyone is welcome. Everyone except chief goat-fucker Jake Lang.’

So according to these truly thick white liberals with precisely zero self-preservation skills, coming to New York to chuck bombs at non-Muslims is just part of life in an open, tolerant city. If anything, it should be celebrated! However, coming to New York to loudly complain about Muslims wanting to bomb non-Muslims is an outrage of the highest order and will not be tolerated.

Good luck with that, ya dumb bastards!

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03/01 Links: The hypocrisy of the West’s weepers for the Islamic Republic; 9 killed as Iranian missile destroys synagogue in Beit Shemesh; 3 American soldiers killed

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: First Thoughts on the New Iran War

He did not say the war was for regime change. He said that ,after we had achieved our military aims, the Iranian people should take the golden opportunity to free themselves from the tyranny that has had its boot on their faces for 47 years.

There is a distinction.

A regime-change war would effectively require us to go in on the ground in Tehran, take out the mullahs, and announce that a regency of some sort that would then lead to a new republic. Instead, this war is designed to take out the command, control, communications, and military abilities of the regime and leave Khamenei and his demonic underlings denuded, undefended, alone, and astoundingly weak—to leave their regime a carcass to be picked over rather than continue to exist as a punch-drunk boxer who can rise from the canvas and try to keep swinging. Once we’re done, it would be quick work for Iranians themselves to kick the mullahs to the curb.

But, regime change war or not, I think my questions now have pretty clear answers. The six weeks of diplomatic dithering following the Iranian slaughter were, in fact, simply temporizing. We got our ducks in a row—and, presumably, gave Israel time to help us locate the necessary targets inside Iran to strike the bad guys while leaving the general population largely unmolested.

Today, February 28, 2026, may be the most important day of the 21st Century so far. May God bless our fighting forces as they place themselves in harm’s way to protect, defend, and save the West—and may we triumph over this remorseless, conscienceless, and evil enemy that has been at war with the “Great Satan” for nearly half a century.

Brendan O'Neill: The hypocrisy of the West’s weepers for the Islamic Republic

How do we explain a moral universe where there can be more fury over strikes against a government than there was over that government’s mass murder of its own citizens? This, sadly, is what has become of ‘anti-imperialism’. That old noble cause was once about defending the independence of nation states that found themselves in the crosshairs of the Great Powers. In recent years, however, it has curdled into a cynical, blind loathing for America. It’s just anti-Westernism now. It is fuelled less by a love of sovereign rights than by a kind of cultish self-flagellation, where the fashionable suspicion of all things Western gets falsely dolled up as ‘anti-war activism’.

This idea that the West is always wicked, and thus its enemies deserve empathy, is less the heir to the great peace movements of old than an outgrowth of the anti-civilisational trends that run riot in the academy and across the cultural establishment. We end up in the sick-making situation where the moral guardians of the new left are silent when a people’s revolt is savagely put down but agitated when the men responsible for it get a missile through their bedroom window. Because according to the juvenile commandments of anti-Westernism, America is the source of every earthly problem. Thus when America causes a death in Iran, it’s World War III, it’s a crime against humanity. Yet when the regime causes infinitely more deaths in Iran, meh.

There’s a curious reverse racism to this insistence on blaming the West for everything bad. It infantilises the regimes of the world, treating their crimes almost as instances of diminished responsibility rather than true offences against the human spirit. To see imperialism in action, look no further than the Islamic Republic. It deploys cruel proxies to enforce its theocratic writ everywhere from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen. It green-lit the Islamofascist invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023, as a warning to both the Jewish State and the Saudis who were repairing their relationship with it. It calls home its brutish proxies every now and then to deploy them against the Iranian people themselves – classic coloniser behaviour. If you’re an anti-imperialist, the Islamic Republic should offend your every moral fibre.

I know, it has long been a tactic of the interventionist lobby to call the critics of their wars ‘pro-regime’. Those of us who opposed the lie-fuelled invasion of Iraq and the reckless US-UK intervention in Libya were slandered as Saddam sycophants and Gaddafi apologists. But in this instance, isn’t it justified? ‘Anti-war’ leftists made apologies for Hamas. They shed more tears over the exploding bollocks of Hezbollah militants than they did over the Druze kids killed by those militants. They chanted for the anti-Semitic brutes of Iran’s personal army in Yemen – the Houthis. There is a serious discussion to be had about the wisdom of what is happening right now. Many of us remain wary of external intervention, believing it is more likely to deepen regional and global tensions rather than liberate the oppressed populace. But we are well within our rights to wonder if those saying ‘Hands off Iran’ really mean ‘Hands off this regime that slaughters innocent men and women because at least it is anti-American like us’.

I fled Iran’s terror — Trump’s courage is an answer to my prayers

Every US president since Jimmy Carter has sat across the table from Iran and bought what they were selling.

Trump is the first one who didn’t.

When Barack Obama blinked on Syria in 2013, after Assad crossed Obama’s red line on chemical weapons, the world learned American threats were negotiable.

When Obama handed Iran the nuclear deal formally known as JCPOA, with its sanctions relief, billions in unfrozen assets and a sunset clause, the regime learned America would reward it for promises it never planned to keep.

Saturday, the regime learned that era is over.

Trump sees the Iranian regime for what it is, a destabilizing force that has plotted assassinations of American officials, including Trump himself — and he acted.

That takes courage. It takes historic vision.

For the first time, an American president has come to the rescue of the Iranian people, rather than focusing only on the nuclear file.

When the strikes began early Saturday, I heard from friends and relatives, some of them in Iran.

They were celebrating — particularly the reports that the Supreme Leader himself had been killed — and cautiously hopeful.

But every one of them said the same thing: Their deepest fear is that these strikes will stop short.

That they will wound the regime just enough to bring it back to the table, but leave it intact, still capable of crushing dissent, still able to imprison, torture, and execute the young Iranians who dare to dream of something better.

The Iranian people do not want a weakened theocracy.

They want a free Iran, one whose government answers to the nation’s interests, not to a revolutionary ideology exported on the backs of suffering civilians across the region.

If these strikes are designed to achieve that end, history will remember them as a turning point.

If they are designed merely to extract concessions, if the regime survives and regroups, the Iranian people will pay the price.

The courage it took to begin this must be matched by the vision to see it through.

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02/19 Links Pt1: Trump announces $10 billion U.S. investment in Gaza, 10-day timeline for Iran; Hamas Debunks the ‘Genocide’ Narrative; The Lancet’s dubious Gaza casualty figures

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Hamas Debunks the ‘Genocide’ Narrative

Hamas has wrapped up its latest revision of casualty data in the Gaza war, and it makes clear why Israel’s critics have been flailing since the end of the war.

The list has enough information to cite 68,800 deaths. Hamas has lost 25,000 fighters, which leaves 44,000 war deaths to account for. Included in that 44,000 are about 10,000 natural deaths. The remaining 34,000 would include civilians killed by Israel and those killed by Hamas and associated militant groups—either by execution, rocket misfires, turf wars, and the like.

The result is that even when using Hamas’s numbers, Israel’s civilian-to-combatant death rate is close to 1:1, an unheard-of accomplishment in an urban war setting, let alone one in which much of the territory has been turned into Hamas human shields. Given that Hamas started the war, refused to surrender, and fired at Israel from civilian homes, the terrible tragedy of Gazan lives lost is laid at Hamas’s feet.

It feels pretty silly at this point to even consider the “genocide” accusation, but this is another opportunity to note that Hamas goaded its defenders out on that limb and then personally cut it off under their feet. While plenty of bad-faith actors have been accusing Israel of genocide since the war started, and are therefore immune to facts, I’m sure there are a number of decent folks who fell into the “genocide” trap because they followed a trend in the name of “human rights.” I do not envy the humiliation they are experiencing now, but neither do I find such people particularly sympathetic. They ought to feel bad about what they’ve said and done, and I hope they do.

The reason people were willing to believe it is twofold. First, it is the quintessential example of the Big Lie. Hitler’s belief was that the bigness of the lie not only lends it credibility but serves as an emotional, rather than rational, appeal. As we watch Israeli companies flood Gaza with sweets and drinks for Ramadan, we cannot maintain any rational, conscious interpretation other than Israel won a defensive war while protecting civilians to an extent never seen before. But those who shape their beliefs based on subconscious appeals to emotion? Who knows what contradictions they can maintain.

The other reason is, yes, anti-Semitism. The public’s willingness to believe the worst about Jews is not new, and it’s not an accident. Those who have participated in the “genocide” Big Lie have not made an honest mistake. A mistake, perhaps—but not an honest one.

Colonel Mike Kelly: Debunking the Gaza Genocide Myth Overview
Dr Mike Kelly AM examines why a finding of genocide against Israel by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is highly unlikely under international law.

Drawing extensively on the 1948 Genocide Convention and relevant ICJ jurisprudence, he argues that genocide requires proof of a specific intent to destroy a protected group in whole or in part, and that this must be the only reasonable inference from the evidence.

Kelly analyses the ICJ’s current proceedings, prior genocide cases, and the Convention’s drafting history to demonstrate the high legal threshold required.

He contrasts the definition of genocide with the realities of urban warfare, reviewing casualty claims, humanitarian aid flows, medical operations, IDF precautions in attack, and internal investigative mechanisms.

He further critiques reliance on unverified casualty data and partisan UN reports, arguing that they fail to establish the specific intent required under the Convention.

The article concludes that, whatever criticisms may be made of particular incidents or conduct in the war, the legal standard for genocide has not been met, and that expanding the Convention beyond its original scope would require a formal international renegotiation of its terms. Download PDF Trump announces $10 billion U.S. investment in Gaza, 10-day timeline for Iran

President Donald Trump used the occasion of the first meeting of the Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday to announce significant monetary and troop commitments from the U.S. and other countries to stabilize Gaza, as well as lay out a timeline for military action against Iran.

“I want to let you know that the United States is going to make a contribution of $10 billion to the Board of Peace,” Trump said at the United States Institute of Peace, where several foreign leaders gathered for the meeting.

The president also named, for the first time, which countries have agreed to make additional financial contributions to the reconstruction of Gaza: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Kuwait “have all contributed more than $7 billion toward the relief package,” Trump said.

The meeting comes as the administration works to address several issues in the Middle East, including rising tensions with Iran. The U.S. has amassed a large collection of military assets in the region in preparation for a potential strike, as the two sides attempt to negotiate a nuclear deal.

Trump said in his remarks, “Now we may have to take it a step further or we may not. Maybe we are going to make a deal [with Iran]. You are going to be finding out over the next probably 10 days.” Last June, Trump said he would decide whether to take action against Iran within two weeks, and carried out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities two days later.

Trump also called on Iran to “join” the board “on a path that will complete what we’re doing.”

“If they [Iran] join us, that will be great. If they don’t join us, that will be great too, but it will be a very different path,” the president said. “They cannot continue to threaten the stability of the entire region, and they must make a deal. Or if that doesn’t happen, I maybe can understand if it doesn’t happen, but bad things will happen.”

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