Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, July 07, 2026

Does Bernie Sanders think that he will never get the Scott Wiener treatment?

Bernie Sanders tweeted:

AIPAC, and other billionaire-funded super PACs, are spending millions to buy the Democratic primaries in Michigan and Minnesota.
This is not about Abdul El-Sayed v. Haley Stevens or Peggy Flanagan v. Angie Craig.
This is about Abdul and Peggy v. AIPAC and the establishment.

It is precious that a white millionaire who has been in Congress and the Senate for 35 years pretends that he isn't the "establishment."

Beyond that, Sanders gets the fault line completely wrong. The actual line runs between people who think America has been the greatest nation on earth for 250 years, including in how it treats Jews and its allies, and people who want that America torn down and replaced with something that would be horrific to Jews nationally and internationally. AIPAC's spending is defending a system it values for the good of America; there is nothing more American than that.

Sanders, as a Jew, couldn't have become a senator without America being as exceptional as it is. He is the beneficiary of the system he now decries. He has power and wealth unimaginable in most other countries. Instead, he has dedicated his life to supporting those who want to tear it all down because Jews are considered oppressors in the us vs. them universe he pretends exists.

The Hebrew term for what's missing from his framing is hakarat hatov — recognition of the good, the obligation to acknowledge the system that made him. Sanders is a Jew who reached the Senate, ran twice for president, and became the most influential socialist in American life; no country he holds up as a model would have let him get anywhere near that position as a Jew. He is also a millionaire several times over, built inside the American system he now describes as a corrupt machine serving only "the establishment," his wealth and his platform both products of the same country he suggests needs to be fundamentally remade.

Does Sanders have principles? In his early career he routinely voted against military aid to Israel; he even objected to others blaming the Second Intifada on Palestinian terror. But in 2014 he angrily defended Israel's Gaza campaign to his own constituents at a town hall, deploying the same "Hamas fires from populated areas" line the Israeli government itself used, and he stayed largely quiet on the subject through his first presidential run.

In the wake of October 7 Sanders affirmed Israel's right to defend itself, pushing back on colleagues who wanted an instant cease-fire because Hamas couldn't be trusted. His own former campaign staffers signed an open letter demanding he reverse course, the DSA-aligned wing of his coalition organized against him, and within a year he was praising the International Criminal Court for indicting Israel's prime minister for doing what he had supported a year before.

His supposed principles are most obvious with his support of Graham Platner, the Senate candidate Sanders endorsed in Maine and has refused to abandon through a Totenkopf tattoo modeled on an SS insignia and a New York Times report in which multiple women described disturbing behavior, including an accusation of rape. Sanders waved off the tattoo as a distraction from "one or two more important issues" and asked the country for "a little bit of forgiveness." A Jewish senator campaigning for a man with Nazi imagery on his chest has no standing to lecture anyone about principles. It is all politics and Sanders pivots his towards where the wind is blowing.

Picture a young socialist challenging him the way DSA candidates now challenge every establishment Democrat: career politician, out of touch, wealthy, doesn't represent the people anymore — the standard toolkit, and every word of it fits his record. Thirty-five years in federal office, a net worth in the millions, multiple properties, a movement he built now being primaried from further left by people who consider him a relic of the system he claims to be fighting. An AOC figure would eat him for lunch.

He wouldn't even need to imagine what that looks like. Scott Wiener already lived it. Wiener had called Israel's campaign in Gaza a genocide, voted against military aid, and stepped down as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus to appease exactly this crowd. None of it mattered. Activists chased him out of San Francisco's Trans March, screaming about his "Zionist handlers" and his "tainted bloodline," days after another activist cornered him at a bar and demanded he say "Free Palestine" on camera. Total capitulation bought him nothing, because the target was never his positions. It was that he's a Jew who hadn't disappeared.

Sanders, for all his purported principles, did not say a word in Wiener's defense. Because if he would, the same machine he helped build that attacks a young gay Jew with an impeccable progressive record would go after an older wealthy Jew in a nanosecond. He knows that better than most, because the knives have already come out for him.

When the socialists Sanders supports today inevitably turn on him tomorrow, the country he's spent a career denouncing won't be there to save him. The Jewish state that he regularly demonizes, though, would welcome him.

Because that is what principles look like.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Weeks before Sydney's Bondi Beach attack, an international trauma medicine conference in Perth was set to feature Dr. Elon Glassberg, the former head of the Israeli military's medical corps, sharing the protocols that gave the Israeli army the lowest battlefield mortality rate in military history. Anti-Israel doctors and nurses groups threatened mass pickets. The organizers folded, and the conference was cancelled. Australian trauma specialists lost the chance to learn techniques that could have saved lives at Bondi itself — a cost one Adelaide trauma doctor, interviewed for a major investigation by Megan Goldin in The Australian (paywalled), says his own colleagues paid weeks later.

That is the shape of the story Goldin lays out over more than thirty interviews with Australian doctors, nurses, and midwives: an industry-wide activist campaign, running since October 7, 2023, that has repeatedly put ideology ahead of the patient in front of the practitioner. It is a chilling article that did not get enough publicity.

The pattern started with symbols. Doctors and nurses wore "river to the sea" pins on shift and plastered hospital corridors with a Star of David crossed out in red. At Melbourne's Alfred Hospital — a facility built in part on tens of millions of dollars from Jewish philanthropy — one such sticker ended up on the bedside wall of a dying elderly Jewish patient, in the last hours of his life.

The online conduct got worse than the stickers. Physicians posted Nazi caricatures relabeled with the word "Zionist" instead of "Jew," a substitution one Jewish pediatric neurologist in the piece calls a way of dressing up old hatred as new virtue. A prominent doctor described Jews mourning at a Bondi memorial vigil as "genocide supporting Zionists." Facebook groups that once existed for parenting advice turned on Jewish members who so much as mentioned the 251 hostages held in Gaza, or the mass rape and slaughter of October 7 itself.

Then the activism reached the bedside. Two nurses at Sydney's Bankstown Hospital were filmed describing what they would do to an Israeli patient who came through their doors — footage serious enough that police became involved. After it surfaced, Jewish patients across the country began hiding their religion on hospital admission forms. Charlotte Frajman, the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, calls having to conceal her faith on a medical record a line she never expected to face in Australia.

The suspicious pattern shows up in cannula insertions — the ordinary act of placing an IV line. Frajman describes a nurse who took four attempts and left her bruised for weeks, after visibly registering her religion on his screen. Orit Brand, at a different Melbourne clinic, endured eight failed attempts before a different staff member was called in and succeeded immediately, without pain or bruising. Hospital protocol caps failed attempts at two before a colleague takes over; nurses at both hospitals confirm that cap was ignored. A mental health nurse who now counsels antisemitism victims calls the needle a nearly perfect weapon: it leaves a practitioner able to say, with total deniability, that the vein simply wouldn't cooperate.

The mistreatment extended to obstetrics and psychiatric care. A Jewish woman recovering from a C-section at a Sydney hospital was left overnight in a pool of blood with no pain relief while her newborn cried in the bassinet beside her. A Jewish ICU patient in Adelaide was given a bedside lecture by her own nurse denying the Holocaust and denying October 7. A Queensland psychotherapist posted online that Israelis were "not fit to live." A university psychiatry academic compared food-line queues in Gaza to gas chambers.

Regulatory failure compounded the clinical one. AHPRA, Australia's national health practitioner oversight body, took nearly three years to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and now faces a campaign from more than 1,400 healthcare workers demanding it reverse that decision. In the meantime, the agency's own numbers — 124 antisemitism complaints against 97 Islamophobia complaints since mid-2023 — obscure a documented double standard: midwife Sharon Stoliar drew more than fifteen complaints for objecting to a doctor's post quoting Hitler on "the Jewish question," while AHPRA closed the file on that doctor without action. Perth physician Deborah Cohen-Jones was formally cautioned by AHPRA for a social media post; the post in question compared a masked pro-Palestinian protester to a Klansman, after two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered in Washington. Stoliar, who isn't herself Jewish, was separately called "Jewish mafia" online and told her grandmother had been raped by Hitler in hell.

None of this occurs in a vacuum stripped of the war's brutality on both sides. But the piece is careful to note what the activist narrative leaves out: Hamas ran command bunkers inside Gaza hospitals, launched its October 7 assault partly from vehicles that departed hospital compounds, and held hostages inside them — one of whom was murdered by hospital medical staff. Palestinian Islamic Jihad's own misfired rocket, not an Israeli strike, caused the al-Ahli Hospital blast in the war's first days, a fact that took only hours to establish and made no difference to the doctors and nurses who marched through Sydney and Melbourne in scrubs chanting about Israeli hospital bombings.

The through-line across every incident Goldin documents is simple: a 2,500-year-old medical principle, that the patient's interest comes before the practitioner's politics, gave way the moment the patient was Jewish. A regulator that spent three years failing to say so plainly is now being lobbied, by more than a thousand of its own licensees, to say so even more quietly.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

07/06 Links Pt2: From Historian to Polemicist: What Went Wrong with Omer Bartov; Are the Democrats to become America’s anti-Israel party?; GOP Voters Remain Deeply Supportive of Israel

From Ian:

Jeffrey Herf: From Historian to Polemicist: What Went Wrong with Omer Bartov

Bartov’s betrayal of the craft of history is apparent in a deficiency of evidence and causal reasoning. He refers to the “genocidal intentions openly expressed by Israel politicians and senior military officials” as if this was a proven fact. Nowhere in this book is there a discussion of the details of Israeli military operations, of the battle for specific towns or areas in Gaza, or of how various Israeli units conducted themselves. Yet Bartov claims that “the pattern of operations by the IDF” in Gaza, which he has not examined, leads him to conclude “that these [genocidal] intentions were put into practice.” Attacks on civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, water supplies, and electricity grids “went far beyond military necessity … . All of this was not accidental, but part of a strategy to destroy Gaza as a livable space for Palestinians. Even if there was no formal order for genocide, military logic show that genocide was the consequence.” It was “no longer a coincidence” but was “a deliberately pursued policy” (pp. 193-194).

Bartov fails both to establish that a genocide occurred and, even on that assumption, to provide evidence or a causal account of it as a “deliberately pursued policy.” This is a shocking conclusion for an historian of Nazi Germany to advance. As readers familiar with the works of Yehuda Bauer, Richard Breitman, Christopher Browning, Lucy Dawidowicz, Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, Ian Kershaw, Peter Longerich, and many others know very well, the effort to establish the causal connections between Hitler’s ideology and the decision-making that led to the Final Solution has consumed thousands of pages, tens of thousands of footnotes, years of research in archives, careful examination of the dates and sequence of statements, meetings and orders to the Einsatzgruppen, and the construction and operation of the death camps. Yet Bartov, without access to Israeli archives and having made no serious examination of the public record of Israeli decision-making confidently asserts the existence of a “deliberately pursued policy.” There is no reason to take this conclusion seriously. Here again, Bartov has abandoned the historian’s craft in favor of polemics.

Bartov the polemicist concludes with an accusation of collective guilt against Israelis. “How,” he asks, “How do we come to terms with the obliteration of Gaza? Will Israel ever face justice for its genocidal actions?” (p. 201). The long-term consequence of “this travesty may, however, be that the genocide in Gaza will finally liberate Israel of its status as a unique state rooted in a unique Holocaust.” The “license that Israel, the land of the victim, has long enjoyed and abused may be expiring. The sons and daughters of the next generation will be free to rethink their own lives and their future, beyond the memory of the Holocaust; they will also have to pay for the sins of their parents and bear the burden of the genocide perpetrated in their name” (p. 203).

So having written a book of unsubstantiated accusations, Bartov plays judge and jury declaring the accused guilty. Israel will “not be viable,” will become a “pariah state … isolated from its allies and the Jewish diaspora,” and eventually “Israeli apartheid will implode, as happened in South Africa under the pressure of mass protests, violence an arms embargo and economic sanctions by the international community” (206). An alternative to that is the replacement of the existing state of Israel with some form of confederation of Israelis and Palestinians that replaces the Zionist project.

Bartov has written a book that combines a paucity of evidence and a compelling causal argument with a writing style that is likely to appeal to journalists and political activists and even academics eager to read an Israeli-born historian of the Holocaust who eloquently reinforces their increasingly antagonistic views not only of the State of Israel but also of the Israelis as people. The question is not whether Bartov is an antisemite, though it is clear that he thoroughly rejects Zionism. The issue is whether, in Israel: What Went Wrong, he advances arguments that are true or false—and, if false, whether the book recycles and skillfully refurbishes the oldest and most enduring accusation at the core of antisemitic ideology: namely, that the Jews, since the time of the Crucifixion, through the Koranic stories of Jews killing the prophets, to the blood libels and modern conspiracy theories blaming them for wars, are a people uniquely inclined by habit, tradition, and character toward the murder of the innocent. This calumny lay at the heart of centuries of anti-Jewish persecution and culminated in the Holocaust, when the Nazis propagated the idea of international Jewry bent on the “extermination” of the German people.

The charge of genocide against the State of Israel should be understood within this long history of antisemitic libels. Like the calumnies that preceded it, it transmutes claims supported by little or no evidence into articles of faith and passionately held convictions. The problem with Bartov’s argument is not that it is wrong because it is antisemitic; it is wrong because it is false. Yet the repeated circulation of such falsehoods against the Jews—and now against Israel—inevitably fuels antisemitism, intensifying hatred of Jews around the world, and deepening the growing hostility toward Israel.

Bartov’s tome is likely to contribute to the ongoing effort to make hatred of Israel respectable in the faculty lounge, the editorial office, the think tank, and in many political parties. I hope that in this case, the strategy of prestige transfer fails and that more discerning readers will ponder the question “What went wrong with Omer Bartov?” The book does not represent the standards expected from professional historians nor from what we should expect from a distinguished publisher such as Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Nevertheless, initial responses indicate that it may be a successful polemic and a commercial success. Its lack of scholarly distinction will not diminish its contribution to the global campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel. If so, it will not be the first time that a very bad book has an outsized impact on public and published opinion.

Jonathan Tobin: Are the Democrats to become America’s anti-Israel party?

Is it possible for the pendulum among Democrats to swing back to the center over the course of the next two years? Possibly. If leftist candidates, like Michigan’s pro-Islamist Abdul El-Sayeed, are defeated by Republicans in November (Maine’s Nazi-tattooed Israel-bashing Graham Platner may be crashing and burning due to allegations of sexual assault that may destroy his candidacy long before the voters render their verdict), it could convince many Democrats to change course. The far left’s dominance in primaries has given Trump an issue that could lead to the disappointment of the Democrats’ expectations for a midterm blue wave in the same manner that sunk the GOP’s hopes for a red wave in 2022.

Such a scenario could be ideal for Shapiro. But in a party that seems convinced that it lost the White House and Congress in 2024 because their leaders were insufficiently anti-Israel, rather than because of their embrace of far-left ideas like gender ideology and critical race theory, that sort of sensible thinking seems unlikely.

And it’s unclear if Fetterman, whose health issues have dogged him for the past four years, will even try to hold onto his seat in 2028. Though he has a respectable amount of money on hand in his campaign treasury, his fundraising efforts have stalled in the last couple of years. Were he to cross the aisle and become a Republican, that might be an easier path to another six-year term, though that seems unlikely. And while independents have won Senate races in other states, that is viewed as less likely in Pennsylvania, due to both the partisan spirit of the times and the way the commonwealth’s election system is skewed toward enforcing party dominance. The smart money is now on him simply not running for re-election. If so, he will be missed because of his rather unique style, both in terms of his centrism and his sartorial choices.

A haunting precedent
The problem for someone like Shapiro, who tries but usually fails to conceal his unquenchable ambition for higher office, is that the shift to the left among Democrats may have already gone too far to accommodate someone with his views, particularly on Israel.

Indeed, his hopes for a return of the Democratic Party of 1992 should worry rather than encourage him. In that time, the dominant politician in Pennsylvania was one of his predecessors in Harrisburg, Gov. Bob Casey Sr. (father to his namesake, who represented Pennsylvania in the Senate from 2007 to 2025). The popular Casey was a throwback to an earlier era of American politics in many ways, not least because he is usually referred to as the last of the pro-life Democrats. The Clinton camp denied him a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention largely because they felt that it was no longer possible to give that sort of prominence to someone who was so out of touch with the rest of the party on an issue on which so many felt so strongly.

That precedent should haunt Shapiro. Because just as anti-abortion Democrats are now extinct, it’s entirely possible that if current trends hold, by 2028 or soon thereafter, pro-Israel Democrats might be put in the same position. Indeed, right now, I’d say the odds of Shapiro being denied a speaking slot at the 2028 DNC are slightly higher than his rather minimal chances of being nominated for president at that gathering.

Even if you don’t share Shapiro’s high opinion of his capabilities, that’s tragic. If, as recent primaries and the polls indicate, opposition to Israel is a requirement to get the votes of most Democrats, the party is on the verge of becoming as anti-Israel as it is pro-abortion. While the rise of antisemitism on the right is creating genuine concerns about the future of the Republican Party, the far more serious situation on the left is now creating the possibility that the national Democratic Party will soon not be so much divided on Israel but will have become a space where politicians like Shapiro, let alone Fetterman, will have no place in it.

07/06 Links Pt1: Why Entebbe Wouldn’t be Celebrated Today; Hamas move to dissolve Gaza governance ‘means nothing,’; Sa’ar says Turkish FM’s remarks a ‘clear call for genocide’

From Ian:

Why Entebbe Wouldn’t be Celebrated Today

Zionism, once understood by many as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, had become, in much of Western discourse, synonymous with colonialism, racism and oppression. The Jewish homeland became the Jewish oppressor, while Jewish self-defence became uniquely suspect.

After the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, many Jews found themselves accused not because they celebrated murder, but because they celebrated rescue.

Think about that for a moment.

More Jews were murdered on 7 October than on any day since the Holocaust, hundreds more were kidnapped, families watched parents, children and grandparents dragged into Gaza to face torture, sexual violence and captivity.

Yet the expectation placed upon Israel by much of the international community was unlike that demanded of almost any other democracy. If rescuing your own citizens risks too many civilian casualties because terrorists have embedded themselves among civilians, then perhaps your citizens should remain where they are.

That expectation would have been unimaginable in 1976.

The Jewish state was created because Jewish history had demonstrated, catastrophically, what happens when Jews lack both sovereignty and the means to defend themselves. After the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, many seemed to believe that lesson should be forgotten.

Entebbe taught the world that Jews would never again be abandoned. Nuseirat revealed how many people now believed they should have been.

This is not an argument against criticising Israel. Criticise governments, criticise military strategy, criticise political leaders. Every democracy should expect that scrutiny. It is, however, an argument against changing the moral principles by which democracies are judged.

Because if we conclude that the rescue of hostages becomes illegitimate simply because terrorists have made the rescue sufficiently costly, then we hand every terrorist organisation in the world a blueprint.

Hide behind civilians, kidnap innocents, raise the price of rescue. Wait for democracies to decide that saving their own people is no longer worth the condemnation.

Fifty years ago, the world looked at Entebbe and saw a democracy refusing to abandon its citizens. Almost fifty years later, much of the world looked at Nuseirat and asked whether those citizens should have been rescued at all.

Fifty years ago, Israel was admired because it refused to abandon Jews. Today, it is too often condemned for refusing to abandon them.

The operation changed remarkably little. It was the world that changed.

Israel urges WHO to condemn Hamas over press conference at Gaza hospital

Israel’s mission in Geneva on Monday called on the World Health Organization to denounce Hamas after the terrorist group held a press conference outside a hospital in the Gaza Strip.

“Hamas held a press conference today at Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza,” the mission wrote on X, using the Arabic name for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.

“Any silence on Hamas’ exploitation of the hospital for propaganda will be a choice,” it continued, tagging the WHO and its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“Al-Shifa, Nasser, and Kamal Adwan Hospitals, all have been abused by Hamas to hide terrorists and weapons, cynically and brazenly. They used them as terror hubs to hide and torture hostages. And now they use a hospital as a stage for propaganda,” the post added. “With each step, WHO’s silence is so much more deafening.”

The press conference was held outside the emergency department of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital on Monday afternoon by Ismail Thawabta, head of Hamas’s “government” media office, and Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem.

Thawabta and Qassem announced that Hamas was dissolving one of the key “civilian” bodies through which it administers Gaza, while saying employees would remain in their posts, in what appeared to be a largely symbolic move.

An Israeli official told Kan News public broadcaster that the purported resignation of the Hamas government, while all of its members remain in office, was “a spin that means absolutely nothing.”

A Turning Point in a Parking Lot

A single nighttime photo from October 17, 2023 exposed the Hamas playbook and Al Jazeera’s role in laundering it through global media and human rights organizations. It was the first consequential press event for Palestinians since October 7 and was a turning point in the war.

The photo is the choreographed scene broadcast live from Al-Shifa hospital in the immediate aftermath of an explosion at the nearby Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health claimed that 500 Palestinians were killed in a “targeted” Israeli airstrike of the 80-bed hospital in Gaza City just two hours before.

It was a lie.

An errant rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) landed among a dense crowd of Palestinian civilians seeking shelter in the hospital parking lot. The bodies from Al-Ahli Baptist were rushed to a press conference at Gaza’s largest hospital, where they knew international media were already stationed and ready.

The shrouded bodies are presumably real. But note the unidentified young man in front of the podium posing with a dead infant still in its bloodied clothing. Note the second young man holding the corpse of a young girl.

This was not merely a press conference. It was macabre theatre for a global audience that was in denial about the mass atrocities Hamas perpetrated only ten days prior.

It was an attempt to stop the war while Hamas still held 240 hostages and before Israeli ground forces could enter the Strip to rescue them and stop the incessant rocket fire.

While it failed to halt Israel's offensive, this is the event that crystallized the "Israel bombs hospitals" narrative and that primed audiences for the rapid spread of the genocide libel.

At the press conference, Dr. Abu-Sittah said:
“Every western politician who has declared unconditional support for Israel’s war effort on the Palestinian people has the blood of these children on their hands. That unconditional support is what led us to this massacre… no other country feels free to target hospitals and get away with it. What happened today is a war crime.”

The Human Rights Asterisk for Jews

In June 2026, a group of human rights and humanitarian professionals calling itself EiGHT delivered a submission to Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism, drawn from the first-hand accounts of more than seventy people inside the world’s major rights and aid organizations — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, Oxfam, and others.

Its sixty-three pages are the first extensive insider account of how the sector operates when the subject is Jews.

The findings are consistent across organizations, functions, and continents: complaints about antisemitism produce no consequences; retaliation and non-disclosure agreements used against staff who raise them; Jewish employees excluded from the discussions that concern them; senior leaders publicly modeling hostility toward Israel and Jews; and methodological failures in published work that propagate outward through media, academia, and the courts into public life.

Running through all of it is a single institutional habit. On matters touching Israel and antisemitism, the sector applies its own principles — universalism, neutrality, evidentiary rigor — with a slant. Complaints of antisemitism trigger debates over definition rather than investigations. Israeli and Jewish victims receive systematically less attention and empathy than victims in comparable contexts. Antisemitism, alone among bigotries, is treated as uniquely disputable and politically inconvenient.

The report gathers this evidence overwhelmingly from the inside: its Slack channels, its dossiers, its leaked emails and its exit interviews.

That’s bad enough. But as we’ve seen over the years, it is not surprising — because that is how these organizations and their top officials act towards antisemitism in their public pronouncements as well. These organizations, whose entire warrant is the equal moral standing of every human being, cannot condemn an attack on Jews the way they condemn an attack on anyone else. The condemnation, when it comes, arrives with an asterisk. The clearest proof is in the cases where the condemnation is real.

On 18 November 2014, two Palestinians murdered four worshippers and wounded eight at a synagogue in West Jerusalem. Amnesty International’s statement opened exactly as a human rights statement should: “Nothing can ever justify such an abhorrent attack on worshippers in a synagogue. The deliberate killing of civilians must be utterly condemned.” That is a flat condemnation, and it demonstrates that Amnesty is entirely capable of producing one for murdered Jews.

Having produced it, Amnesty spent the rest of the statement taking it back. Within three paragraphs the document had pivoted to Netanyahu’s promised “heavy hand,” to punitive house demolitions, to collective punishment, to “a spate of unlawful killings of Palestinians,” to settlers attacking olive harvesters, and it closed on the demand that Israel hold accountable “anyone who attacks civilians on either side.” 128 words to condemn the attack; 330 words to warn against how Israel might respond.

A massacre of Jews at prayer had become an excuse to denounce the Jewish state.

Another statement, a year later on 20 November 2015, followed the same architecture.

It opened cleanly — “there can be no justification” for the attacks, “deliberately attacking civilians is contrary to one of the most fundamental principles of international law and can never be justified” — and then folded the murdered Israelis into a ledger that ran through house demolitions, “a pattern of unlawful killings by Israeli forces,” extrajudicial executions, and settler attacks, balancing the dead against the conduct of the state they belonged to.

In both statements the clean condemnation is real, and in both it is a hand extended and then withdrawn. It’s a real shame about the victims, but there are two sides to every story!

Now look at the condemnations Amnesty produces when the victims are not Jews. When a white nationalist murdered fifty Muslims at prayer in Christchurch in March 2019, Amnesty widened the frame — to Islamophobia across Europe, to Le Pen and Farage and Brexit, to Trump and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The widening ran entirely toward the killer’s side, enlarging his guilt into a movement’s, and it never once paused to weigh the murdered worshippers against the conduct of any government they belonged to.

When two men murdered a migrant stopping for water near El Paso in 2022 — having, they said, mistaken their victims for wild animals — seventy human rights organizations signed a letter that named the dead man and the children he left, traced the killing to a “dangerous trend” of white-supremacist violence, invoked the El Paso massacre three years earlier as precedent, and demanded the government answer for the policies that let such violence “thrive.” The state conduct they criticized was the state’s failure to protect the victims.

Every widening ran on the victims’ behalf.

Only when the victims are Jews does the scope of the condemnation get narrowed, not widened. It includes a “but,” implicit or explicit. That is the asterisk.

The asterisk cannot be explained by the identity of the attacker, and the proof is Pittsburgh. In October 2018 a white nationalist — the sector’s least ambiguous villain, the figure it condemns without hesitation for Christchurch and El Paso — murdered eleven Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue.

Unni Karunakara, former international president of Médecins Sans Frontières, responded that blame “must be shared by Zionists like Netanyahu for enabling white nationalists like Trump.” The post was later deleted; the EiGHT submission preserves the screenshot. An attack with no Israeli policy anywhere in its causal chain — a synagogue in Pennsylvania, a gunman animated by hatred of a Jewish refugee agency — was routed back to Netanyahu regardless.

The perpetrator was precisely the kind the sector condemns cleanly. The asterisk appeared anyway, because the only constant it tracks is the identity of the victim.

Amnesty’s own conduct confirms that the asterisk is a choice rather than a reflex. In the middle of that Christchurch essay, the author pauses to recall Pittsburgh: “when a white supremacist entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot dead 11 worshippers.” The reference is clean — named killer, named crime, no pivot, no balancing paragraph. Amnesty can narrate the murder of Jews without an asterisk when the murdered Jews are a supporting example in an essay whose subject is the suffering of Muslims.

The plain condemnation is available. It is withheld only when the Jews are what the story is about.

The report documents a second form the asterisk takes, and Kenneth Roth performed both forms in a single morning. Twelve hours after two gunmen murdered fifteen Jews at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in December 2025, Roth — who ran Human Rights Watch for thirty years — posted that “attacks on civilians are never justified regardless of the cause,” a sentence that enters a cause onto the scale in the same breath it condemns the attack.

Twenty-two minutes later he attacked Netanyahu for connecting the massacre to Australian policy, spending his one substantive invocation of antisemitism that day on defending the “genocide and apartheid” charge against Israel from any association with the killing of Jews. And within days he was attacking Australia’s antisemitism envoy for “cheapening the concept” of antisemitism by linking anti-Israel protest to the murders.

There are the two flavors of the asterisk in one man’s response to one atrocity: the Jews had it coming, and the Jews are too sensitive about it. Both place the Jewish victim, rather than the killer, as the problem in the sentence.

Condemning antisemitism, when it happens, always carries a qualifier — either the Jews provoked the attack or the Jews are exaggerating it — and both qualifiers do the same work, which is to withdraw from Jews the flat, unconditional defense that a human rights organization exists to extend to everyone. Not one Jew can read what Amnesty or Ken Roth or Unni Karunakara writes and think, “they are on our side.” Because they aren’t.

Just as EiGHT documents internally, these “human rights” leaders must be dragged kicking and screaming to write half-hearted public condemnations of Jews being murdered, and even then they must always add that one caveat - don’t forget the Jews are just as bad, too.

Read together, the private evidence and the public evidence describe one movement, deciding case by case and attack by attack that the Jews don’t quite deserve the same presumption of human rights that all other people do.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The New York Times published a piece this weekend on Wikipedia's many enemies. AI companies are scraping it. The MAGA right is smearing it. The US government is hectoring it. Authoritarian regimes are locking up its editors. Through it all, we're assured, Wikipedia remains a bastion of objectivity — "beloved," "credible," a "trustworthy source," per CEO Bernadette Meehan, who gets to make her case in her own words at length. Only crackpots have a problem with Wikipedia, we are reliably told.

There's just one problem with that framing. Wikipedia itself has admitted its Israel-related articles were hijacked.

For at least two years, reporters and bloggers — Aaron Bandler at the Jewish Journal and then JNS, the pseudonymous Wikipedia Flood blog, Ashley Rindsberg at Tablet — documented what Rindsberg dubbed the "Gang of 40": a network of editors who racked up 850,000 combined edits across 10,000 Israel-related articles, rewriting the opening line of "Zionism" to say the movement wanted a Jewish state with "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible," stripping Hamas's charter references to the destruction of Israel, deleting Israel as the origin of the Jewish people from the article on Jews. This wasn't a fringe accusation. In January 2025, Wikipedia's own Arbitration Committee — the "Wikipedian Supreme Court," in the site's own description — banned eight editors from the topic area by name, six identified with the pro-Palestinian side (Selfstudier, Nableezy, Nishidani, Levivich, Iskandar323, Makeandtoss) and two with the pro-Israel side (BilledMammal, AndreJustAndre). More sanctions followed this year, including an indefinite ban for an editor called TarnishedPath in the weeks before the Times piece ran, with a University of Haifa researcher calling it "an important, if overdue, step."

That is Wikipedia, using its own procedures, concluding across multiple cases that its own coverage of Israel had been captured by organized editors. Even after the bans, Wikipedia let the disputed "as few Palestinian Arabs as possible" line stand — an administrator froze it in the article's lead for a full year, shielding the banned editors' preferred wording from challenge until they could appeal. Wikipedia did the same thing to the title of another page, freezing debate over the name "Nuseirat rescue and massacre" — which accuses Israel of a massacre for a hostage-rescue raid — so that no one could even discuss changing it until August 2026. And it wasn't content to let these articles sit quietly in the archive: Wikipedia's own editors linked the "Gaza genocide" article in the "In the news" section of the site's main page, the highest-traffic real estate on one of the ten most visited websites on earth, putting an accusation Wikipedia's own arbitration process was simultaneously investigating in front of millions of readers a day.

This should be the single most relevant fact to a story asking whether Wikipedia's neutrality is a settled matter or an open question, and the Times left it out entirely. Instead, the Times lists a set of critics and files them all under one label: Elon Musk, Ted Cruz, David Sacks, Tucker Carlson, "and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001" — five names, one sentence, one bucket: "the MAGA right." Most of them would object to that label. None of them would say they mean the same thing by their criticism. Musk thinks Wikipedia is "Wokepedia." Sanger, an actual co-founder who wrote much of the site's original neutrality policy, has spent years arguing the site abandoned it. Those are not the same complaint, and lumping them together does exactly what it's designed to do: it lets the reader dismiss all five with one word instead of engaging any of them.

Sanger's case is the giveaway, because the Times itself knows better. Eleven days earlier, on June 25, it ran an entire article on Sanger's ban — his "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity" proposal, the procedural vote that got him banned "indefinitely" days later, his own furious response that he'd been blocked "by the 'consensus' of a mob" with "no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury." That piece treated him as a serious subject worth understanding on his own terms. This piece drops him into a list next to Tucker Carlson and moves on. Nothing about Sanger changed between June 25 and July 5. What changed is which narrative he was being used to serve.

And the criticism of Wikipedia isn't new, and it certainly isn't MAGA. The ADL spent months documenting the same "Gang of 40" pattern the arbitration committee eventually acted on — a report the Times never mentions. Wikipedia's own editors, for their part, responded to the ADL's findings by voting the ADL "generally unreliable" specifically at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism, while keeping it "generally reliable" everywhere else, including on hate groups and extremism. The administrator who closed that vote wrote that the ADL has "a habit... of conflating criticism of the Israeli government's actions with antisemitism." Think about that: Wikipedia's own governance apparatus adopted, as an official sourcing rule, the argument that criticism of Israel is being mislabeled as antisemitism — while Wikipedia's own arbitration committee was simultaneously banning editors for exactly the kind of rabid anti-Israel distortion the ADL had flagged. Wikipedia disqualified the messenger while acting on the message. You wouldn't know any of this reading the Times piece, which treats Wikipedia's reliability as a foregone conclusion rather than a subject with an actual paper trail. (An earlier interview with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales last November likewise doesn't even touch on the anti-Israel bias as he defends its entries on topics like abortion and how well opposing editors work together.)

Maybe the reason the Times can't see any of this is that it suffers from the same affliction it's covering for. A newsroom that already shares Wikipedia's general politics — anti-Israel by reflex in places, reliably left of center, comfortable treating its own instincts as neutral — isn't equipped to notice when an institution built on the same instincts calls itself neutral too. It isn't hiding the evidence. It doesn't register as evidence, because the lens producing Wikipedia's judgment calls is the same lens the Times used to write the story.

This matters well past Wikipedia's own pages, which is what makes the Times' AI section so thin. The piece frames artificial intelligence as a threat to Wikipedia — chatbots "gorging on a data buffet," "polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia." This has some truth to it, but it doesn't mention the real danger from AI.. Nathan Marcus, a former Education Department civil rights official, told JNS that what's frightening isn't just how many people rely on Wikipedia, but that AI models "rely so heavily on it" too — the site can "launder accusations" from anti-Israel sources and "turn them into encyclopedia entries," which then "become the basis for AI-generated materials that become the basis for all sorts of education, indoctrination and decision-making." A ruling like "the ADL is generally unreliable on antisemitism where Israel is concerned" doesn't stay contained to one article once a model has trained on it — it becomes background assumption, repeated with the same confidence as any other fact the model learned. An article asking whether Wikipedia deserves the trust it's given had every reason to ask what happens when that trust gets inherited automatically by the tools answering a growing share of the world's questions. It asked instead whether the AI companies are treating Wikipedia fairly.

Either way, this is a case study in why the Times has bled the trust it used to have. The information was sitting right there — the arbitration committee's own bans, the ADL report, the Times' own reporting on Sanger three weeks earlier. The paper had everything it needed to write the piece its own headline promised: a real look at a real controversy over Wikipedia's objectivity. It chose not to. That's not an accident of space constraints. It's an editorial decision, made by editors, about what the story was allowed to say.

Which puts the Times in exactly the position it's describing. Wikipedia's article on Zionism isn't biased because facts are biased. It's biased because a group of editors decided what counted and what didn't. The Times' article on Wikipedia isn't biased because facts are biased, either. It's biased because a group of editors decided what counted and what didn't. This is the same failure of hubris, with both Wikipedia and the NYT insisting that their own policies inoculate them from bias, that blinds them to the bias itself.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

07/05 Links: How Israeli Society Reacted to Oct. 7; When Medical Journals Sell Hate Propaganda; Natasha Hausdorff: How the West's own laws are being used to destroy it

From Ian:

How Israeli Society Reacted to Oct. 7

Micha Popper, 78, professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Haifa, said, after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, "We were going crazy, thinking: What can we do? So we drove down to [Kibbutz] Kfar Azza [a few days later]."

"This was during the early days. Everything was in ruins, they had just removed the bodies. We started to clean the refrigerators in the dining hall, to work in the fields - we helped physically with whatever we could, and we were in contact with the army personnel who were in charge of the work there. We decided to go anywhere where help was needed."

"I saw that there are masses of people here who simply couldn't stand by. That wherever there is a problem, they are there. It floored me."

"Everything worked excellently, without the need for meetings, through spontaneous activity that was carried out by talented, take-charge people who came up with ideas of their own."

"And they did it masterfully, with the aid of other skillful individuals: locating missing people; establishing schools and daycare for the people evacuated from their homes; farming; providing psychological assistance to and employment for the evacuees; helping businesses."

"Israelis are problem solvers. Give them a problem and they'll know how to handle it. And then there is the ability to improvise, implement and be creative. That has to do with our history, with survivability."

"And then there is familyhood, which is part of the willingness to step in and carry the burden together."

"There was a woman who understood algorithms, data, and she suggested an idea to locate missing persons with the aid of photographs taken by the [Hamas] terrorists, who filmed everything with their body cameras. To look for all sorts of signs - like a stain on a shirt."

"She brought in a high-tech person and a few other people, and together they created things that don't exist anywhere in the world. After three days it was already up and running. The Israel Security Agency called; they wanted what the group had invented."

"There were plenty of initiatives like that, of people with vision, creativity and knowhow in their fields. No one waited for anyone."

"I saw people coming in private cars to transport equipment to wherever it was needed. I saw CEOs, well-known people who had already retired, companies that donated money. It was like they were all on steroids; people didn't sleep."

"Having so many go-getters is something you don't see anywhere in the world."

Gerald Steinberg: When Medical Journals Sell Hate Propaganda: The Lancet Crosses the Line (Again)

The ramifications of The Lancet’s role in this campaign should disturb anyone who takes science, medical ethics, and professional accountability seriously. It is also, more broadly, another step toward the normalization of silencing among doctors and health providers — actions that have become distressingly common among academics, including medical schools. The central involvement of once respected humanitarian NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders highlights the processes by which these structures have been hijacked by small groups of anti-Israel activists.

Horton has a long history of abusing his position and The Lancet to publish pseudo-scientific articles filled with false accusations against Israel, including an “An Open Letter for the People of Gaza,” a heinously propagandistic screed. Two co-authors had sent emails to other medical professionals under the subject line “CNN Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix” that promoted a video featuring white supremacist leader David Duke and other antisemitic materials.

In 2014, following many calls for Horton’s removal, he suddenly appeared before an audience of Israeli doctors and expressed contrition, declaring he was hurt by the accusations of antisemitism and of abusing his position as editor of the medical publication.

But now, Horton and The Lancet have reverted to earlier form, joining in a campaign led by fringe NGOs that singles out Israel for opprobrium and vicious demonization. Once again, the abuse and lack of accountability is blatant.

In response, Horton repeats his standard claim that professional journals should not be “neutral” or hide their “moral outrage,” in this case, triggered by Israeli actions in Gaza following the October 7 atrocities. But this argument collapses in the absence of any criteria or review processes for the ostensibly moral claims and the evidence ostensibly behind them. Instead, moral outrage is simply an excuse for abandonment of scientific principles — and systematic discrimination and bias targeting Israel in general, and medical professionals in particular.

Neither The Lancet nor the NGOs pushing this campaign have called for boycotts of medical associations in the many countries involved in actual — as distinct from invented — ethical violations, for example, Russia, Iran, Sudan, and China.

The credibility of scientific publishing depends precisely on the ability to distinguish between evidence-based claims and ideological advocacy. By erasing that distinction, this once respected journal is transformed into another platform for orchestrated discrimination and demonization.

The responsibility for ending such abuse rests first and foremost with the publisher, Elsevier, and its corporate framework, which has already allowed Horton to control this platform for far too long. The lack of oversight and accountability, and the stain resulting from the trashing of medical ethics has spread throughout Elsevier’s network of publications and other activities. The time to pull the plug on this farce is long overdue.

Doctors Without Borders plagued by deep-rooted antisemitism, anti-Zionism, NGO Monitor says

Antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and other expressions of hostility are “deeply rooted” within Doctors Without Borders (MSF), claimed NGO Monitor in its new report “Documenting the Antisemitic Organizational Culture of Doctors Without Borders.”

The report documents MSF’s internal staff conversations and culture regarding Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the personal experiences of Jewish staff members within the organization.

Based on these many testimonials by MSF insiders, NGO Monitor says it is “clear that antisemitism and anti-Israel bias are widespread in MSF’s organizational culture and are expressed by both top officials and lower-level staff.”

One testimony is from former MSF Secretary-General Richard Rossin, who, on July 13, 2024, told Canada’s National Post that the ideological bias against Israel “was perceptible around the beginning of the 80’s.”

“Antisemitism within MSF began under the cover of anti-Zionism. It [the ideological shift] cannot be fixed. How can you fix antisemitism, which is not an opinion but a mental disease?” Rossin said.

MSF Holland contingent refused to interact with a fellow Israeli medical NGO team
The National Post wrote, “Rossin recalled his experience in 2010 on a mission to Uganda when an MSF Holland contingent refused to interact with a fellow Israeli medical NGO team dispatched to help. Rossin remembered it as an episode of ‘one-way empathy,’ where prejudice had poisoned the MSF team’s ability to cooperate with Israel in their shared goal of helping civilians. He feels these same issues continue to plague MSF’s mission in Gaza today.”

NGO Monitor also draws on the words of Alain Destexhe, a doctor with MSF in the 1980s and its Secretary-General in the 1990s. In an October 2025 interview, Destexhe stated: “I think now MSF in Gaza is really taking the side [of] Hamas and against Israel. Americans need to know that Doctors Without Borders is not anymore the organization that it was 15 or 20 years ago. It has become a biased, partial and militant organization.”

“MSF is lying, MSF is partial, MSF is biased, and MSF is an accomplice of Hamas.”

MICHAEL GOLDFARB, who is Jewish, spent 15 years at Doctors without Borders US. He told The Jewish Chronicle of London in March 2026 that “European colleagues freely told me, knowing I am Jewish, that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.”

“You see extreme ideological fervour – Israel as a Nazi state, Jews as the oppressive, colonial, white supremacists, Zionism as Nazism,” Goldfarb said. “Nothing meaningful has been done to address antisemitism, to show solidarity with Jewish staff, or call out this hate. That creates a permissive environment in which it flourishes.”

A biting Palestinian cartoon criticizing Egypt during the World Cup

Egypt's World Cup coach Hossam Hassan waved a Palestinian flag on the pitch after his team’s victory over Australia in the World Cup, saying he was dedicating it to both Egyptians and Palestinians.

Palestinians are celebrating Egypt's victories, Egyptians are celebrating their supposed love of Palestinians.

One Palestinian cartoonist sees through the hypocrisy.

Dr. Alaa Al-Laqtah portrayed a Palestinian child climbing the barbed wire fence between Gaza and Egypt, his feet bloodied, crying, as he waves an Egyptian flag to celebrate. The caption says "The people of Gaza are cheering the Egyptian national team."

The world sees Arab "solidarity" with Gaza and ignores the reality: no one wants to actually help Gazans who want to leave. Egypt's wall to Gaza is much larger and more elaborate than Israel's. From the start of the Gaza war, Egypt and Jordan vowed not to let any Palestinians who wanted to flee Gaza to be allowed in their territory.

But Arab media, including most Palestinian media, don't want to rain on the "solidarity" parade, even though it is a joke. In fact, most people sharing the cartoon do not seem to realize the irony behind it.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Israeli Arabic site Makan reports:

The Jewish community in the German capital, Berlin, expressed its anger over a Palestinian art project scheduled to take place over the weekend in the Neukölln district, arguing that it links the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip to the Holocaust by using sites dedicated to commemorating Jewish victims killed during the Nazi era.

The project, titled “Walking with Gaza Monologues,” is an initiative organized by the “Ashtar” Theater in Ramallah. It involves taking participants on a tour, using an audio guide, among the copper “stumbling blocks” planted in the sidewalks of the neighborhood streets, which commemorate the Jews who lived there and perished in the Holocaust, while at the same time the participants listen to testimonies and monologues of residents of the Gaza Strip.

Dr. Elio Adler, a prominent figure in Berlin's Jewish community, described the project as an affront to the memory of Holocaust victims and demanded its immediate cancellation. He stated that the "stumbling blocks" are not merely urban elements or public symbols of suffering, but each one bears a person's name and address and commemorates a Jewish life lost during the Holocaust. He argued that using them in this context conflates Israel's war against Hamas with the memory of the Holocaust.

Adler called for an immediate halt to the tours, demanding an investigation into how public funds reached the project and for action to be taken against those responsible, noting that the event, in his view, contradicts the principles that emphasize the privacy and centrality of Holocaust remembrance in Germany.

This is truly outrageous, and even more so if it is funded by German public funds.

I could not find this story in any German or English language outlet at this time. But Dr. Elio Adler is a leader of the Berlin Jewish community, Ashtar is a Palestinian theatre company, and they have sponsored "The Gaza Mono-logues" worldwide together with dozens of local theatres since 2010, updating it periodically.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

07/04 Links: America at 250: Why Washington’s promise to US Jews still matters; 1,000 days after Oct. 7, the Jewish people stand proud; 'Hijacked his name': US genocide institute faces probe amid Israel attacks

From Ian:

250 years of America: The alliance that safeguards the free world

Not just interests
Some believe that the closeness between Israel and the United States stems solely from geopolitical considerations. There is no doubt that shared interests matter, but they do not explain the depth of the relationship. The deeper reason is that Israel and America are perceived, by their friends and enemies alike, as representing a similar idea: human liberty, moral responsibility and the belief that man is created in the image of God.

It is no coincidence that regimes and movements that hate the Jewish nation also tend to hate America. And with almost the same consistency with which hatred of Jews has served as a moral test for societies, hatred of America has also become a moral test of nations, regimes and individuals. Despite all its flaws, America alone stands between democracy and the rise of tyranny around the world, and so it is no surprise that among tyrannical regimes and their defenders, America and Israel are so often identified as one and the same enemy.

This is not only because the United States stands alone behind Israel; the United States has also given generously to various Arab states, and at several critical moments even supported Arab regimes (such as Nasser’s Egypt in 1956) against Israel itself. This hostility stems largely from the fact that America and Israel continue to strive toward a moral ideal higher than themselves: the belief that liberty is not only a right but also a moral responsibility granted by God, and that a nation’s strength is measured not only by its power but also by its values. This is also why the two non-Muslim countries that have suffered the most casualties from Islamic suicide bombings are the United States and Israel.

An alliance that must never be taken for granted
For precisely these reasons, neither Israelis nor Americans can afford to take their alliance for granted. The special relationship between Israel and the United States is founded on far more than defense agreements, military assistance or intelligence cooperation. Above all, it rests on cultural, moral and spiritual foundations that have been built over more than four centuries, from the voyages of the Mayflower and the Arabella to the New World, through Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and into today’s Oval Office.

This is why the relationship between the United States and Israel has endured crises, changes of administration, and political disagreements for nearly eight decades. It is also why it has the strength to withstand the challenges of the future.

As America marks a quarter millennium of independence, and Israel continues to fight for its security and its right to exist, we should remember that the alliance between Jerusalem and Washington did not begin in 1967, nor even in 1948. Its roots run far deeper.

They are anchored in an ancient book given in the wilderness of Sinai thousands of years ago, a book that found a home at the very heart of the American story. That is why this alliance is greater than any administration, deeper than any disagreement, and longer-lasting than any political cycle. As long as both nations remain faithful to those values, they will not only secure their own futures, but also strengthen the very foundations of the free world.

Happy Independence Day, America. And thank you.

America at 250: Why Washington’s promise to US Jews still matters

As America celebrates Independence Day and the 250th year of our Republic, it is worth recalling one of the founding promises that has distinguished our nation from the beginning.

In 1790, president George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, assuring a small community of Sephardi Jews that the Government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Those words were no mere courtesy. They were revolutionary.

The Jews who received Washington’s letter were descendants of families expelled from Spain and Portugal, driven from one refuge to another across Europe, the Caribbean, and the New World. They knew what it meant to live only on sufferance, forever dependent upon the whims of princes and magistrates.

Washington offered something radically different: not toleration bestowed by a sovereign, but equal citizenship secured by law.

Americans of every faith, he declared, would stand not as guests but as equal members of one republic. Each would “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

America at 250: The triangular relationship between US, Israel, and Jews is at risk

The weakening relationship with the US, Israel, and American Jews

But strength does not last forever. A sober look at this triangular relationship shows that each of its sides has weakened in recent years.

On the Washington-Jerusalem axis, American public support for Israel has declined significantly and worryingly.

Significant parts of the Democratic Party now voice sharply critical positions toward Israel, while even among younger Republicans, the once-instinctive warmth toward Israel can no longer be assumed.

On the Washington-American Jewry axis, changes are also evident. Waves of antisemitism from the fringes of both the American right and left have raised the fear that the golden age of American Jewry may be coming to an end.

Finally, on the Jerusalem-American Jewry axis, cracks are visible as Israeli governments have failed to invest sufficiently in cultivating the vital ties between the two branches of the family.

The gaps between an American Jewish public that tends toward liberalism and an Israeli society that tends toward conservatism are growing wider. The unfortunate facts are clear: Israel’s position as a central anchor of identity for North American Jewry is no longer what it once was.

The government formed after the elections will need to think anew about how to strengthen each side of this triangle.

This will require renewed investment in bipartisan support in Washington, serious engagement with younger Americans across the political spectrum, and a deliberate rebuilding of trust between Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

The resilience of “we, the Jewish people” depends on the success of this effort.

07/03 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The fateful question for Diaspora Jews; Why two Jews left London for the Jewish State; 70+ NGO staffers allege antisemitism, lack of accountability in new report

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: On its 250th birthday, Jews mustn’t abandon the fight for America

If Jewish life is unsafe in America, it will be unsafe everywhere. And that will impact Israel as well. That’s why it is essential that, rather than giving up or giving in to hysterical talk about the end of American liberty and even the end of American Jewry, we must recommit to the fight to roll back the woke tide on the left and its antisemitic echo on the right—and to defeat it.

This may be a generational struggle in much the same way that leftist efforts to impose these false beliefs on the United States were one. But it is a battle that is necessary to fight—not just to save American Jewry, but to save the canon of Western civilization on which our freedoms rest.

The contempt for traditional patriotism and belief in the truth that the American republic—flawed though it might be—is a force for good in the world has already been made clear by left-wing elites. But as discouraging as this discourse may be, it is a reminder that the stigmatizing and targeting of Jews is part and parcel of the same struggle that other Americans are engaging in. America is and always has been exceptional. But it will only remain that way so long as a broad cross-section of its citizens—Jews and non-Jews, liberals and conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans—are willing to stand up against the woke forces seeking to traduce its founding values.

The appropriate answer to attacks on Jews is not flight or a call to shelter in place. Jews must speak up and not abandon the streets or the public square to the antisemites and woke mobs. The rejoinder to anti-Jewish violence and intimidation is for Jews to act in the most quintessential American way possible: to arm themselves and make it clear that they will not be intimidated or silenced.

Those who hate the founding principles of the United States, in addition to its Jewish residents, may seem to be on the ascent, as election results in various Democratic Party primaries have shown. But they are wrong about the end of American greatness or the need to transform it into some pale reflection of Marxist or Islamist concepts. And as dire as the situation may seem at the moment, these enemies of liberty may be sealing their own fate with their attempt to foist antisemitic extremists on a country that is inherently moderate and where Jew-hatred of this type has always been confined to outliers rather than the mainstream.

Faith in the good sense and decency of the American people may seem like a forlorn hope when you witness the ability of figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to affect the future of American democracy. But those who bet against America have always been shortsighted suckers. Right now is no time to doubt that this will continue to be the case.

On this 250th Independence Day, rather than writing off America, we should be embracing it all the more enthusiastically and pledging to defend it against those who wish to tear it down. The alternative is not merely unthinkable; it’s an abandonment of Western civilization, and all that decent people hold dear.

Happy birthday, America! Even on your worst day, we still believe in you, and we know you’re worth fighting for.

Melanie Phillips: The fateful question for Diaspora Jews

More profoundly, Zionism is not a political cause. The religion of Judaism is itself inseparable from the land of Israel. Judaism consists of the belief by the Jewish people that they were given a Divine command to create a particular kind of society in the land that was promised to them.

Jewish religious liturgy is studded with countless references to Zion, the ancient Hebrew name for the land. Zionism, which emerged as a discrete political movement in the 19th century, is thus intrinsic to Judaism.

Of course, Jews who aren’t religiously observant are still Jews, just as are Jews who are anti-Zionist. But in Judaism, the people, the faith and the land are inextricably connected. Trying to pluck Zionism out of Judaism is to destroy it by plucking out its heart.

So, attacking the Jewish world is to attack the West; attacking Israel and Zionism is to attack Judaism.

Many Diaspora Jews won’t acknowledge this because the implications are too devastating. Especially in America, where the majority of Jews have signed up to anti-Jewish liberal ideologies, many of them will therefore dump Israel.

Observant Jews will remain loyal, and more of them will move to Israel. A number of progressive Jews, meanwhile, are agonized. Finding that their erstwhile comrades have now turned viciously against them over their support for Israel’s existence, they feel like politically homeless Jewish orphans.

It’s now more than 1,000 days since the terrible events of Oct. 7. During that traumatic period, which is still far from over, Israel has changed. It has returned to the biblical ideal of the heroic Jewish warrior nation.

This isn’t just because of its astounding military and intelligence prowess, or the awesome bravery of its fighting forces.

It’s also about its moral courage. It’s about the way it surmounted the devastating shattering of its security; the trauma of seeing so many of its precious and beautiful children fall in battle; the nightmarish return of the unspeakable shadow of the Holocaust, from whose ashes it had somehow emerged.

It’s about how it stared down disaster, demoralization and death, determined instead to fight for life—the life of its people in their ancient home.

Israelis fight to live because they passionately love what they are. They aren’t conditional Jews or Jews with trembling knees or confused Jews with hyphenated identities.

They are Jews who are made whole and complete by the land of Israel. They triumphantly reaffirm every single day what Judaism is: the faith and culture of a people created through a sacred covenant in their own land.

Oct. 7 and its aftermath forged the Israeli spirit anew in iron. Oct. 7 and its aftermath left Diaspora Jews terrified and uncertain about what they are.

The Israelis are fighting for the life of the Jewish people. Can Diaspora Jews say the same?

Why two Jews left London for the Jewish State

"A terrorist just tried to stab Jews at my work" - This was the text Joseph received in January 2024, moments after a Muslim terrorist walked into his local Kosher supermarket in London and tried to stab Jewish shoppers. The only reason no one was killed was because a heroic worker held the terrorist off with a shopping cart until his arrest.

The attack itself was terrifying, but what followed was worse. The perpetrator, Gabriel Abdullah, was arrested, charged, and convicted - but didn’t serve a day in prison. To Jews, the message was clear: Britain tolerates violent antisemitism.

A few months later, Joseph experienced this ‘tolerance’ firsthand when an antisemitic mob surrounded and threatened him, as seen in the video below. The police were present, but instead of intervening, they just watched.

For Alex, the turning point came during the 2014 Gaza war. That year, Alex and Joseph began filming Palestinian protests together, and he quickly realized the antisemitism they were witnessing wasn't an aberration; it was the tip of the iceberg.

While the spike in antisemitic incidents in the UK was alarming, it was what Alex saw in France that truly disturbed him. During the 2014 Sarcelles riots, a synagogue was besieged, and Jewish-owned businesses were targeted in scenes reminiscent of a darker era, signaling a complete collapse of public order for the Jewish community. Witnessing the speed at which this hatred manifested in France, he concluded that it was a contagion: the turmoil he saw in Paris would inevitably reach Britain, and the patterns established in London would eventually reach America and Canada.

The Ratchet Effect
After the conflict ended, Alex identified a recurring pattern he termed the ‘ratchet effect.’ During the conflict, antisemitic incidents surged, but with the toxic combination of social media and changing demographics, the baseline of hatred never retreated to previous levels after the conflict ended - it just ratcheted up. He realized then that this was a cycle without a ceiling. From Gaza and Lebanon to the catastrophe of October 7, each flare-up has made these incidents increasingly violent and uninhibited.

As the number of attacks on Jews increased, the British authorities consistently failed to protect Jewish citizens. The failure reached a nadir during the May 2021 Gaza war; on the same day that Islamic extremists were hunting Jews on streets with a police escort, a convoy of cars drove through Jewish neighborhoods with a megaphone, calling to rape Jewish women. No one was jailed for these offenses.