Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, October 16, 2025

COGAT exposes the newest UN lies

Last week, COGAT published a takedown of UN lies about supposed Israeli restrictions on aid to Gaza that simply do not exist. It is worth reading to show how the UN prioritizes lying about Israel to actually helping Gazans.

Another week, another OCHA report filled with data manipulation, twisted facts and omitting important context, aiming to show a skewed and partial picture.

Let's break it down🧵🧵🧵
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1. OCHA mentions that cooked meal supply went down 70%, with 8 kitchen operating. What OCHA 'forgot' to mention is that over 80% of the Gaza city population moved south, and so new kitchens opened to feed the population who moved to the south.

2.OCHA says over one million people have access to less than 6 liters of water a day. THIS IS A BRAZEN LIE. A daily average of dozens of liters of water a day is available, based on water pipelines from Israel, a UAE waterline to the Mawasi, an Israeli electricity line supplying electricity to the desalination plant in Dier al Balah, another desalination plant and pumping facilities. The amount of water available in Gaza is well above the humanitarian minimum.

3.Coordination Games & UN Delays
Israel continues to facilitate large-scale humanitarian aid into Gaza with NO restrictions on food or essential supplies, prioritizing the UN. The real problem is the UN and its partners’ failure to collect and distribute the aid.
Israel has expanded capacity at the crossings, based on coordination of trucks, the UN is still coordinating a third of the amount of trucks entering. They can always coordinate more. Delays stem primarily from UN logistic failures, not Israeli limitations.

4. OCHA’s report also claims complex procedures, limited capacity, and unpredictable rejections by Israel are delaying operations.
The facts: Israel is not blocking aid to Gaza. In fact, hundreds of trucks from other organizations and private sector enter daily. The UN’s backlog at Kerem Shalom is entirely due to its own slow collection and handling of shipments. Aid moves as fast as organizations manage it; the bottleneck is the UN.

5. The UN continues to submit double coordination requests, including to areas that will knowingly get denied for the safety of the UN teams, just to inflate the denied coordination request numbers. Here are the real numbers for 24-30 September, unlike what OCHA claimed in its report.

124 UN coordination requests, 63% approved. The other 37% included and 20%(!) Of bogus and double requests, and 17% that were denied for the safety of humanitarian personnel. Oh, and 11% were canceled by the UN itself. This does not include dozens more coordinations not by the UN.

6. Here’s OCHA’s latest masterpiece of misinformation:
The UN’s own assessment says Gaza needs 103 food trucks a day. During the January–March ceasefire, 600 trucks entered daily, nearly six times the need. Today, over 300 trucks enter Gaza every day, yet OCHA claims "the amounts of food aid entering the Gaza Strip, including through UN coordination, remain inadequate and are far below the quantities that entered Gaza during the ceasefire between 19 January and 1 March 2025", just to paint a false picture of scarcity. The UN knows the numbers. it just chooses distortion over honesty.

The UN is worse than useless.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

10/16 Links Pt2: Enough is enough. We must clamp down on universities now; Maccabi Tel Aviv fans banned from Aston Villa match over ‘safety’

From Ian:

Warner Bros. Discovery Speaks Out Against Israeli Film Boycott: ‘Our Policies Prohibit Discrimination of Any Kind’

Warner Bros. Discovery has responded to a legal letter regarding calls for a boycott of Israeli film institutions, acknowledging such a pledge would likely violate its internal policies.

“Warner Bros. Discovery is committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful environment for its employees, collaborators, and other stakeholders,” a spokesperson for WBD told Variety.

“Our policies prohibit discrimination of any kind, including discrimination based on race, religion, national origin or ancestry. We believe a boycott of Israeli film institutions violates our policies. While we respect the rights of individuals and groups to express their views and advocate for causes, we will continue to align our business practices with the requirements of our policies and the law.”

Last month a plethora of industry figures including Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem signed a pledge organized by Film Workers for Palestine vowing to avoid working with Israeli film institutions “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” Examples of “complicity” suggested by Film Workers for Palestine include “whitewashing or justifying genocide and apartheid, and/or partnering with the government committing them.”

In its FAQ section, Film Workers for Palestine clarifies that Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage would not be subject to the same boycott as Israeli citizens of other heritage, with a different set of “context sensitive” guidelines applied instead.

However law associations on both sides of the Atlantic have warned the boycott is likely to violate equality laws. As Variety reported exclusively last week, the group U.K. Lawyers for Israel has warned studios, agencies and unions that the pledge breaches the Equality Act 2010 making it “highly likely to be a litigation risk.” This could also have a knock-on effect on insurance and film finance.

Brendan O'Neill: Get your hands off the Holocaust, Mehdi Hasan

The most striking part of Hasan’s tweet is where he says ‘One of the ways’ in which Gaza feels worse than the Holocaust…. So post-war jokes are not the only thing that make Gaza worse? What else does, Mehdi? It’s not the numbers, that’s for sure. The estimated death toll for the two-year war in Gaza is 70,000, a great many of which will be Hamas militants. That’s far lower than the toll for other recent wars – Yemen, Syria, Sudan – which are rarely called genocides.

But here’s the thing: at the height of their Jew-killing frenzy, in 1944, the Nazis were exterminating 6,000 human beings a day at Auschwitz II in Birkenau. Men, women, children, the elderly, the disabled: gassed, burnt, vaporised. More in 12 days than in two years of war in Gaza. It is a grotesque insult against memory, against truth itself, even to say the word Gaza in the same sentence as the word Holocaust. Hasan must know this? He went to Oxford FFS. Actually, maybe that explains it.

The numbers are only one part of the story. There’s intention, too. The wild clamour of the keffiyeh mob and their enablers in the NGO world to have the Gaza war branded a ‘genocide’ wilfully overlooks that Israel’s aim was not to destroy the Palestinian people but to destroy Hamas. There was a time when progressives would have considered it noble for a Jewish army to take the fight to a fascist militia that had raped and massacred its people. How do the ‘genocide’ nuts explain that the war is winding down – we hope – now that the hostages have been returned and there’s a peace deal that says Hamas must disarm? Do you know when the Holocaust would have ended had the Allied forces not intervened? When there was not one Jew left on Earth.

Hasan is back-pedalling. He says his tweet was ‘clumsily’ worded. He’s telling those who accuse him of Holocaust relativism to ‘go fuck yourself’. Defensive much? The fact is he gave voice to an untruth that has spread like a pox in educated circles – that Gaza is a genocide, not unlike that genocide. NGOs gleefully peddle this calumny. Pompous columnists rattle it off. You see it on every soulless march against Israel, with placards calling Israel the New Nazis and likening Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.

I can’t read Hasan’s mind. I have no idea why he parrots this myth. But I have my suspicions about why the broader ‘pro-Palestine’ movement does. Howard Jacobson says the reason Israel’s haters always reach for the Holocaust, despite there being ‘thousands of years of pitiless warfare’ they could reference instead, is ‘to wound Jews’, ‘to punish them with their own grief’. To my mind, it’s something worse than Holocaust relativism. It’s Holocaust inversion, where the Jews are reframed as the perpetrators rather than the victims of the greatest crime in history, all to the end of washing away the historic guilt of privileged woke Westerners. Now that the war in Gaza has stopped, please, can this war on truth stop, too?

Holocaust Museum director rebukes Gazans identifying as ‘holocaust survivors’

Those who say that Gazans are “holocaust survivors,” having endured Israel’s defensive war against the Hamas terror organization, are to be “widely condemned,” according to Sara Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Falsely comparing the Holocaust to Israel’s response to Hamas’s terrorist attack is an outrageous weaponization of the genocide of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, who systematically murdered six million Jews,” Bloomfield told JNS. “It’s antisemitic, inaccurate, highly offensive and must be widely condemned.”

One social media account has received 3.2 million views for a post claiming to be a “holocaust survivor” of war in Gaza. Another post from a “survivor of the Gaza holocaust” garnered 525,000 views, and a post from an artist wearing a keffiyeh, referring to “my survival from this holocaust,” received 40,000 views.

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who created a media company called Zeteo, wrote in a since-deleted social media post that “one of the ways in which the Gaza genocide is worse than a lot of previous genocides—Rwanda, even the Holocaust—is that you didn’t have Hutus or Nazis mocking the genocide after it was over. They were shunned, deradicalized, prosecuted.”

Deborah Camiel, senior vice president of communications at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS that Hasan “based his outrageous comment comparing the Oct. 7 war to the Holocaust on the canard that Israel’s military response to Hamas atrocities was a genocide.”

That claim is a “tired inversion widely used by antisemites, who try at every opportunity, no matter how inexact or intellectually lazy the comparison is, to portray Jews as Nazis,” Camiel said. “Israel’s war of self-defense was not against the Palestinian people but the vicious terrorist group Hamas.”

“As Hasan well knows, Hamas, itself a group with a genocidal charter, embeds itself among Palestinian civilians, in private homes, mosques, schools and hospitals, purposefully exposing them to terrible harm,” the Wiesenthal Center spokeswoman told JNS. “It is clear today that most of the world agrees that it is this maniacal jihadist group that should be shunned, eradicated and prosecuted.”

10/16 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: It’s not over yet; The Marches Were Never about Peace. They Were about the Destruction of Israel

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: It’s not over yet

Those organizing the refocused Western hate fests are buoyed because, while war against Israel and the Jews has experienced a setback in the Middle East, it has had no pushback at all in the West.

On the contrary, liberal Western governments—the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia—have been enthusiastically joining in the diplomatic war to destroy Israel through demonization and delegitimization based on the script served up to them by Hamas, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the Palestinian Arab-Israeli online magazine +972, Ahmed Moor gloated this week: “Jewish supremacy in Palestine—the core tenet of Zionism—is increasingly regarded as illegitimate across the globe. It is far too early to declare that the Zionist era in Palestine is over, but October 2025 portends a different future. If the genocide has rendered Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians, it has also made the world newly inhospitable to Zionism.”

This is expressing itself in ever-more jaw-dropping Western moral sickness. Videos on social media show Gazans being brutally tortured and murdered by Hamas. Western “pro-Palestinians” have either been silent about this treatment of the people they claim to support or have even applauded their execution as “collaborators” with Israel.

They have not only been lionizing the terrorists released from Israeli prisons but calling them “hostages,” thus equating genocidal mass murderers with the victims of their regime.

CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour went one better when she claimed that the Israeli hostages were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan.” The subsequent outcry forced her to issue a mealy-mouthed apology.

In Britain, an Oxford University student was filmed whipping up a crowd into a chant of “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground!”

He has now been suspended from the university and arrested. But calls to destroy Israel and murder Jews have been tolerated at these hate marches for the past two years while the police and government ministers bleat about “free speech.”

The reason for this lunacy is that the Jews are at the very core of the crisis of Western identity. Liberal universalists hate Israel as a Western nation-state, and because they believe that the Jews are behind capitalism and its associated supposed oppression and colonialism. Isolationists on the American right hate Israel because they believe that it sucks the United States into foreign wars, thus demonstrating that the Jews are a global conspiracy to put others at risk for their own benefit.

In Tablet magazine, Michael Doran writes: “The antisemitism of left and right is not a noxious gas seeping out of the soil and wafting into politics. It is being weaponized—cleverly and deliberately—by organized forces for political warfare. Progressives festoon their bigotry with banners of diversity, equity, and inclusion, demanding Jews disown Israel. Meanwhile, [Tucker] Carlson updates the Protocols to paint Jews as the hidden hand behind the empire, insisting the covenant be cut so American patriots can smash unelected concentrations of global power.”

Doran writes that the obsessional argument over Israel is, at base, an argument over the identity of America, which was originally cast in Israel’s image.

This is no less true of Britain, whose constitutional monarchy was drawn up by its 18th-century Puritan evangelical creators explicitly using the template of the ancient kingdom of Israel—the same template used by the same people who became the founding fathers of America’s constitutional settlement. And Judaism also lies at the very foundation of the West’s moral codes.

That biblically based culture has been under relentless onslaught for decades by liberal universalist Western elites. The result has been the replacement of morality by ideologies based on the false division of the world into the powerful and powerless. This opened the way for Palestinianism, which casts the fictitious “Palestinians” falsely as the indigenous people of the land of Israel who were displaced by the alleged Jewish interlopers—the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom.

The Islamist Palestinian cause, which has taken the place of Vietnam as the acme of progressivism, has opened the way in turn for the Islamization of the West.

This is a movement, through Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, to replace the Jews and Christians with Islam—and it’s now got the wind in its sails. Does Trump realize this? Israel does. The West’s craven elites certainly don’t.

George F. Will: Primary Credit for the Gaza Ceasefire Goes to the IDF - and Netanyahu-

The stark lesson of Israel's achievement since Oct. 7, 2023, is: Often military might does, and often only it can, make room for diplomacy.

Primary credit for the ceasefire between Israel and those who still aspire to murder it goes to the Israel Defense Forces. Credit also goes to the prime minister who wielded the IDF with a properly austere regard for the opinions of mankind, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The diplomats' hour arrived after, and because of, the fighting by those who form the tip of Israel's spear against unprovoked and wanton violence - the mostly young men and women of the IDF. To the Trump administration's credit, the U.S. has enabled Israel's victory by not restraining its self-defense.

Israel's reality on Oct. 7 was that it was contiguous to an enclave under the thumb of organized sadists who sheltered behind a captive civilian population. The war that paused and perhaps ended last week reminded the world that Israel has never known a day of peace, properly understood.

Israel has always had U.S. support because it has earned it. It has never, however, been dependent on it. Centuries of hard experiences, culminating in Auschwitz, have taught the Jewish people the lethal risks of dependence on others.

For decades, U.S. officials belabored Israel with reasons why, in negotiations with bellicose enemies, it should "take a risk for peace." To one official, Netanyahu, referring to a tranquil Washington suburb, replied, "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."

Israel has refused to trim its sails to accommodate gusts of critical opinions from people living comfortably at a safe distance from violence.

Douglas Murray: After the Gaza cease-fire, what will these faux revolutionaries protest? Some ideas

3. But perhaps protestors feel that the education of the next generation of Americans doesn’t matter much to them. Or that the homelessness crisis doesn’t need to bother them. Perhaps some people really do think it´s better to address their energies to far-off conflicts. In which case I have a few terrific causes that they would do well to address.

Why not throw yourself into the Northern Cyprus question? Cyprus is an EU Member State, and yet the north of the country has been illegally occupied for over half a century. It is 51 years now since the Turkish army invaded the island, killing the locals and forcefully displacing tens of thousands of Greek Cypriots from their homes. Does anyone want to call for the return of these families?

If not then how about the plight of the Christians of Northern Nigeria? I have seen that conflict myself and the relentless massacres against Nigerian Christians by the Fulani militias, Boko Haram and others really does constitute a genocide. It is an effort to wipe out the native Christian population with Kalashnikovs, suicide-bombs and machetes.

Why are there no protests on the streets of New York about this? Is it because the victims are Christians? Or is it because the perpetrators of the violence are jihadists rather than Jews? In any case, if you believe that shouting on the streets of New York can stop a genocide, how about focusing on a real one?

4. But perhaps some of the real die-hard, would-be Che Guevaras, really do want to linger on the tiny bit of territory known as Gaza that nobody — Israel, nor Egypt — wants to govern. If you are one of those people who two years ago had to check exactly where this tiny speck of land is, and decided that it is your spiritual homeland as causes go, why not keep up your interest?

Since last weekend’s ceasefire came into effect, and the Israeli Defense Forces withdrew, Hamas and other jihadist militias have moved in to try to reassert control. Anyone who has spent recent years online passing around terrible videos of violence should not turn away now.

Look at the videos of Hamas members lining up families from clans they oppose, getting them to kneel on the ground and then shooting them all in the head.

If you are somebody who “cares” then these are all very good things to care about. But if you’d rather stay home now that the war has stopped, then do know that the rest of us can see who you were all along.

Stephen Daisley: The Marches Were Never about Peace. They Were about the Destruction of Israel

Since Oct. 7, the pro-Palestinian lobby has enjoyed unprecedented success in manipulating the media coverage of Israel's war to free its hostages from Gaza.

The world swallowed without question the claim that Israel was deliberately manufacturing a famine to wipe out Palestinian children.

Yet, the only massacres or atrocities to protest were those that had been conducted by Palestinians against Israelis, and Western sympathizers were certainly not demonstrating against those.

They were celebrating their victim-idols' daring slaughter of defenseless Israelis.

Saturday's demonstration in London must be the first recorded example of people protesting the end of a supposed genocide.

This is a movement more concerned with dismantling Israel than with building up Palestine.

There is a ceasefire. The killing has stopped. Aid is going in. Who in their right mind protests that? A movement that sees peace as an impediment to vilifying Israel.

Gaza Genocide Continues Unabated In Israel-Hater Imaginations (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Gaza City, October 16 - The systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian culture by Israeli forces has not let up, at least according to reports from the fever dreams of losers who despise the Jewish State and will both generate out of whole cloth and uncritically swallow accusations of atrocities by Jews.

Gaza ceasefire or no Gaza ceasefire, the systematic Israeli extermination of Palestinians continues without interruption in the imaginations of people predisposed to believe the worst about Israel and about Jews, without evidence, with only the argument that it has to be true because of [insert previous slander of Israel/Jews] has already established the credibility of such accusations.

"This must stop!" demanded former UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. "The suffering is intolerable, and the world's inaction will go down in history as a compounding of the worst crime in history!" She pointed to reports originating in the hateful fantasies of those who purport to support Palestinians, but who urge Palestinians not to yield to pressure to stop the war, to keep the genocide going.

The imaginary realm in which the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is taking place also features several conditions that do not obtain in the current reality, such as Jewish/Zionist control of the banking system - with the Rothschild family dominating in ways not possible or plausible in our world - and the 8.25 billion non-Jews of that other, fantastical, dimension remain too stupid, weak, and weak-minded to do anything about it.

Similarly, in the there's-a-genocide-of-Palestinians-happening universe, there exists a tangible, meaningful difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, with anti-Zionists taking pains to ensure that Jews, qua Jews, do not become targets for violence or verbal assaults, regardless of Israel's behavior, because non-antisemitic anti-Zionists steer the movement in that imaginary place, and they understand that attacks on Jews outside Israel actually strengthens the case for Israel as a homeland and refuge for Jews - as opposed to in this reality, where anti-Zionism functionally invites antisemites to incite and perpetrate violence against Jews, with the tiny-minority non-antisemitic anti-Zionists powerless to curtail the phenomenon or apathetic to it.

That genocide fantasy world appears to overlap in some imaginations with a cognitively-dissonant realm where Jews are fleeing Israel in response to noble Palestinian resistance, resistance that appears unable to prevent a genocide by Jews who manifestly are not fleeing, and who, in this same imaginary realm, continuously expel Palestinians, who cannot return to their homes despite the mass flight of Jews from the land.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

In today’s New York Times, E.J. Dionne writes a love letter to Zohran's Mamdani's supposed redemption.

He casts Mamdani as a once-fiery socialist who has matured into a pragmatic reformer - a politician who fixes sewers instead of preaching revolution. It’s a story tailor-made for the weary center-left: the radical who grows up without selling out.

He emphasizes that Mamdani is not the same firebrand he was before.

It’s worth noticing that Mr. Mamdani’s critics are focused largely on the past: the 33-year old’s most incendiary statements, and the most extreme components of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization to which he proudly belongs and that initially powered his political career.
Those on the moderate left who see Mr. Mamdani’s upside look instead to the present and the future. They notice how he’s distanced himself from his more controversial statements (particularly about the police and the Middle East), insisted that he’s not running on the D.S.A.’s national agenda, and painted himself as a realistic visionary trying to solve the city’s current problems.

In short, Dionne thinks that Mamdani has modified his values and grown.

I've been thinking a lot about values in recent months, and in the course of my writings I came up with a moral analysis method I call "Derechology." It looks at a person's values and how or if they change over time - their "derech," or moral path.

By that standard, Mamdani’s “growth” narrative doesn’t hold up.

In Jewish ethics, genuine change - teshuvah - requires renunciation, reordering, and repair. Mamdani has done none of these.

He hasn’t withdrawn his most divisive statements or broken with the ideologies that produced them. He hasn’t offered moral clarity or taken responsibility for harm. What’s changed is presentation, not principle.

In other words, his derech hasn't changed at all. His optics have.

“The good thing about my youth,” Mamdani told The New Yorker, “is that I grow older every day.”

It’s clever. It invites every listener to project what they want to hear - to progressives, perseverance; to moderates, moderation.

But growth without repentance is adaptation, not evolution. Jewish ethics judges deeds, not vibes.

If you look carefully at his statements, there is no regret for his "youthful" positions. He regrets how they might impact his chances for election, not his opinions themselves.

Judaism teaches dan l’chaf zechut - giving others the benefit of the doubt - but it never asks us to suspend judgment entirely.

When moral recalibration arrives only on the campaign trail, skepticism isn’t cynicism. It’s accountability.

Optics aren't ethics. As a public figure, Mamdani’s words shape the moral credibility of the movements he represents. A politician who markets “growth” without showing teshuvah risks more than hypocrisy. He cheapens the very idea of moral change.

Dionne sees (or chooses to see) a young idealist maturing into responsibility. Derechology sees a consistent derech of committed far-Left principles and ambition where Mamdani will say different things to different crowds, and who will happily repackage his image for a wider audience without changing his actual positions in the least.

Until we see renunciation, reordering, and repair, “growth” is only a slogan, not a virtue. Mamdani's only real growth is in how to present himself to be more palatable to the center-left voters he covets.

His childish, simplistic and ultimately immoral and antisemitic socialist ideals have not changed at all.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Isaac Moses: A forgotten Jewish hero of the American Revolution

Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik wrote in the Washington Free Beacon:

It was one small meal for Jews, but a political leap forward for Jewish history. In 1788, Philadelphia hosted a parade celebrating Pennsylvania's ratification of the Constitution, and the procession was followed by a feast. An eyewitness reported that "there was a number of long tables loaded with all kinds of provisions, with a separate table for the Jews, who could not partake of the meals from the other tables." It is difficult to find a prior civic celebration in Jewish diaspora history that is its like. In a single setting, Jews were embraced as equals by their fellow Philadelphians, as full partners in the nascent constitutional republic, while at the same time feeling entirely able to observe the dietary habits that set them apart.

That single kosher table, prepared for observant Jews amid a patriotic feast, symbolized the new republic’s promise of inclusion. What most people don’t know is that the man behind that table, Isaac Moses, was far more than a caterer - he was one of the men who financed the Revolution that made such a celebration possible.

The full story of the kosher table is in a letter written by 95-year old Naphtali Phillips in 1868. He wrote:

The procession then proceeded from about Third Street near Spruce, northward towards Callowhill Street, then wheeled towards Bush Hill, where there was a number of long tables loaded with all kinds of provisions, with a separate table for the Jews, who could not partake of the meals from the other tables; but they had a fill supply of soused [pickled] salmon, bread and crackers, almonds, raisins, etc. This table was under the charge of an old cobbler named Isaac Moses, well known in Philadelphia at that time.

A 1975 article (really, a 150 page book about Jews and the American Revolution) from the American Jewish Archives tells us more about this "old cobbler:"

The fact that 100 or more American Jews may have served in the armed forces is of no great historic significance. Their commercial activities were far more important in an agrarian economy where industry and manufacturing were minimal and the coasts were blockaded by the powerful British fleet. The farmers and townspeople had to have yard goods and tea; it was imperative that the soldiers be supplied with uniforms, blankets, and shoes. One way to relieve the shortage was to arm merchant ships and send them out as privateers to prey on enemy commerce. This Jews did, arming small ships heavily and packing them with large, tough crews who scoured the seas for valuable British cargoes.

....After a fashion, privateering was a form of blockade-running. Many American ships got through the English naval barrier, for the enemy could not guard every cove and inlet of the long coast. Certainly one of the most daring of the blockade-runners was the firm of Isaac Moses & Co. Its three partners Isaac Moses, Samuel Myers, and Moses Myers had an Amsterdam buying office which shipped their goods to Dutch St. Eustatius in the Caribbean. From there the company's ships made the run to an American port, trusting to fate that they could slip past the cordon set up by the English cruisers. Isaac Moses and his associates were great Whigs. Shortly after the War broke out in 1775, when the Americans set out to conquer Canada, the three partners voluntarily offered the Congress $20,000 in hard currency in exchange for Continental paper which-as they might have foreseen-ultimately proved worthless. If it was any consolation, they received the grateful thanks of John Hancock for their generous gift.

Moses was the president of both New York's Shearith Israel synagogue and, after he moved when the British occupied New York, Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel.

Moses wrote a letter to the Continental Congress in 1779 asking for gunpowder to protect his ships as they attempted to evade the British blockade. His humility in this request is something to behold.

To the Honorable the Congress of the United States of North America:
The petition of Isaac Moses, now of the city of Philadelphia, merchant, most humbly sheweth:
That your petitioner, having loaded a schooner, letter of marque, and fitted her with every necessary but gun powder, in a warlike manner, has made all the search in his power for that article, but finding himself every where dissappointed, is now under the dissagreeable necessity of troubling Your Honours, and to pray that you would be pleased to spare him, out of the public stores, two or three hundred weight of powder.
He flatters himself his principals as a true Whig and friend to the liberties of this country are so well known to some of your members that it is needless to mention them here, or to remind your body of the assistance he has afforded these United States from time to time in the importation of divers articles which he spared them, but particularly when he and his partners spared these states upwards of twenty thousand dollars in specie, in exchange for Continental dollars...
Your petitioner submits to your honourable House to consider how unsafe it would be in him to risk his property at these times on the high seas without having proper means of defence with it, and pledges himself either immediately to pay for the powder, or to reemburse the public with an equal quantity of that article, and that either on the return of his vessel, or at the time that she ought to return. Your petitioner therefore flatters himself your honourable House will be pleased on these considerations to grant him his request;
And he, as in duty bound, will ever pray.

Isaac Moses July 27th, 1779

I don't know if he ever got that gunpowder, but it didn't affect Moses' patriotism. In fact his company went bankrupt after the war but he remained a staunch supporter of the new United States.

Wikipedia's page on Moses is just a stub, although it notes that Moses was one of the founders of the Bank of North America, which after a series of mergers and acquisitions is now part of Wells Fargo. He was also a major stockholder of the Bank of New York. His children continued in international trade, especially with China and Mexico.(I find this interesting because my impression was that Jews were successful in trade by having other Jews to trade with; I'm not sure that this was the case in those countries.)

No one seems to remember him outside this article. But Isaac Moses did more than most soldiers to help found the United States,

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Michael Oren writes in The Free Press about how a group of real-estate moguls and builders managed to bring a local modicum of peace to the Middle East. His answer is essentially dealmaking and personal relationships.

But the real story may be something deeper - and stranger. What Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Donald Trump stumbled into was not superior negotiation technique but a kind of accidental moral philosophy: an ethics of clarity that cut through half a century of false ideas about peace itself.

For decades, Western diplomacy treated “peace” as the supreme moral goal. The word sounded noble, but it concealed a category error. Peace is not a moral value—it is a moral byproduct.

A value, by definition, must transform reality for the good: it must preserve life, restore dignity, expose evil, or advance justice. “Peace,” on its own, performs none of these functions. It merely describes the absence of visible conflict, even when injustice festers quietly beneath. That’s why peace processes designed around “peace” keep failing: they mistake stillness for healing and silence for harmony.

The goal of genuine peace is to enable the higher moral work: protecting life, restraining evil, and cultivating human dignity. When peace becomes detached from those purposes, it becomes a kind of idol: something to be pursued for its own sake, even at the cost of truth and justice. Oslo ended up fetishizing the process, and ignoring the underlying moral reasons of why we want peace to begin with. These real-estate dealmakers, lacking the pretensions of philosophers or diplomats, simply ignored the idol and started building on firmer moral ground.

For decades, Western policy talked about the Middle East in the language of “rights”: the Palestinian rights of "return," "justice" and "dignity;" Israel’s right to security or even to exist altogether. The problem is that rights, when treated as absolute, collide. Everyone ends up righteous and immovable. The real estate moguls instinctively shifted the grammar from rights to obligations. Hamas must stop murdering and kidnapping and cannot profit from it. Qatar must stop funding terror. Israel must defend its citizens. The United States must stop enabling moral confusion. Each obligation could be tested in reality, whether fulfilled or violated.

This shift mirrors what I call the Obligation Principle: a moral claim is valid only if it binds the claimant to concrete responsibility. In that light, the Abraham Accords were less a diplomatic triumph than an ethical correction. Once obligations replaced abstractions, the fog cleared and progress followed.

Critics sneered that Trump spoke “the language of strength.” They missed that strength, properly ordered, is a moral language. In the Middle East, as in human life, evil rarely yields to polite conversation or diplomacy. Peace imposed by fear of justice is not perfect, but it is better than a false peace that is only a stage toward the next war. The builders’ willingness to back moral clarity with material power was not barbaric; it was coherent. They also used positive incentives to nudge the players towards the US position which supported this coherent vision. And coherence is the first test of moral truth.

The remarkable thing is that the “builder’s ethic” produced not chaos but alignment. Once the United States stopped rewarding contradiction - condemning terrorism in principle while rewarding it in practice - regional actors recalibrated. The same kings and presidents who had long mouthed anti-Zionist clichés suddenly saw advantage in stability. Reality, long suppressed by moral relativism, reasserted itself. Ethics turned out to be the shortest path to strategy.

This is the central lesson of the episode and the reason it matters beyond politics. Ethical clarity is not an ornament to policy; it is policy. A coherent moral framework functions like a blueprint: once you know which beams must bear weight, you can build anything upon them - whether cities, treaties, or even peace.

For too long Israel's enemies screamed about their dignity and how important it was, and they even use that word to justify murder and terror. The West has been cowed by this appeal to the legitimate value of dignity, and did not have the confidence to counter that Arab dignity is just one value among many that need to be balanced. It cannot override preservation of life, fairness, or the dignity of the other side.

Real ethics is all about that balance, but without a moral core, concepts like dignity or justice can morph into evil.

Whether Kushner and Witkoff understood this in ethical terms or they simply saw through the moral posturing as another negotiating position, they did not allow themselves to be bulldozed by false ethical concepts that have stymied Western diplomats for so long.

It may seem absurd to describe Donald Trump as an ethical actor. But history is full of flawed vessels who perform correct operations. Ethics is not about personal saintliness; it is about whether one’s actions align with moral structure. Just as people with Aristotelian virtues like wisdom or courage can be immoral, people without those virtues can do the right thing. In this case, they did. By accident or instinct, the builders behaved as if guided by a hierarchy of values long familiar to Jewish moral thought: life before peace, justice before diplomacy, truth before comfort.

The diplomats built process; the builders built structure. One collapses under pressure; the other stands.

If peace required rejecting the false philosophy that had dominated foreign policy, perhaps moral clarity can do the same for our other failing institutions. The same logic that produced the Abraham Accords can produce trustworthy systems anywhere: don't assume all claims have equal moral value, name evil accurately, replace sentiment with structure, and require obligations before rights.

Peace, properly understood, is not the goal of ethics: it is what ethics produces when values like life, justice, and truth are rightly aligned. The builders’ achievement, however imperfect, was to rediscover that order without ever naming it.

That’s the architecture of ethics, and, as it turns out, of peace.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

"Workshopping" genocidal chants against Jews at Oxford

"A chant that we've been workshopping in Oxford that maybe you guys want to join in? It goes "Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground."

Yes, the most privileged of the world's youth at the most prestigious university on the planet huddled together to come up with a rhyming slogan to support Gaza terrorists murdering Jews.

And in the end, it doesn't even rhyme.

I'm just trying to picture the scene of the workshop in Oxford.

Scene: The WorkshopMagdalen College JCR, late evening. Fairy lights flicker over armchairs and tea stains. Four students in ill-fitting keffiyehs huddle around a low table littered with gin glasses and scribbled notepads. SAMUEL WILLIAMS, floppy-haired and commanding, leads the circle. OLIVIA lounges elegantly, THEO sprawls like a lacrosse jock, ELIZA fidgets with her pen.SAMUEL: (adjusting his keffiyeh) Right, comrades. Rally tomorrow. We need a chant that rhymes with "proud" but stings like settler-colonial guilt. Punchy. Political. Not another bloody "river to the sea" —that's so last term.OLIVIA: (sipping gin, iPad glowing) Edge, Sam. Something that calls out the oppressors without triggering the dean's wine hour. "Zionists" is too wordy. "Zios"? Short, snappy. Like a slur with a syllabus.THEO: (scrolling TikTok, spilling IPA) Zios works, dudes. "Jews" is too grandma's attic—ADL nightmare. "Israelis"? Nah, sounds like a travel agency. Zios it is. Now the kill shot: "Kill the Zios"? Straight fire.ELIZA: (shivering theatrically) Kill? Too American Psycho. We're poets of resistance, not slashers. "Burn the Zios"? Evocative, but climate vibes are off—think wildfires in the West Bank.SAMUEL: (nodding, scribbling) Implication over incrimination, Eliza. Met's watching. "Genocide the Zios"? Fanon would approve—violence as history's midwife.OLIVIA: (rolling eyes) Heavy, Sam. Alienates the normies. Remember "Exterminate the Settlers"? Vice-chancellor called it a "lapse." I Ubered home from cocktails in tears.THEO: (snorting) Tears? Bro, go big or go home to Daddy's estate. "Bury the Zios"? Nah. Wait— "put the Zios in the ground." Earthy. Final. And it half-rhymes with proud if you slur like we're pissed at evensong.ELIZA: (clapping, giggling) Yes! Gaza Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground. Nursery rhyme for the apocalypse. Try it—rhythm's got that gritty incompleteness. Real resistance aesthetic.SAMUEL: (standing, keffiyeh fluttering) Brilliant. All in? Gaza! Gaza!ALL: (chanting, voices rising) Make us proud! Put the Zios in the ground! (Repeat twice, echoing off portraits.)THEO: (frowning mid-chant) Half-rhyme though. Ground-proud? Like a haiku on bath salts.OLIVIA: (snapping selfie) Perfection's propaganda poison, Theo. It's raw—like Rafah rubble. Post-rally, we're viral. Noble work.SAMUEL: (smirking at window reflection) Steadfast. To the spires—and the streets.Lights dim as they disperse into fog. Chant fades like a flawed echo.

It almost demands a response chant: "Oxford wankers waste their time/cannot even make it rhyme."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)