Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 05, 2026

In 1909, Harvard's former president predicted "the religion of the future." A rabbi answered that Judaism already had the features he wanted.

The Evening Star (Washington DC), October 8, 1909, published an article about Simchat Torah and also about a speech about religion given by a former Harvard president that was causing a stir.

In 1909, Charles W. Eliot, recently retired after forty years as president of Harvard, gave a lecture called “The Religion of the Future.” He believed that modern science, Biblical criticism, democracy, medicine and education had changed human understanding so profoundly that religion would have to change with it.

Religion, Eliot wrote, was “not a fixed, but a fluent thing.” The nineteenth century’s extraordinary growth of knowledge and “passion for truth-seeking” had already transformed religious belief, and he expected the process to continue.

A few months later, on Simchat Torah, Washington Rabbi Abram Simon responded. He did not simply defend tradition against modernity. His argument was much more interesting: Eliot was identifying genuine problems, but Judaism already had answers to many of them.

Simon warned that people are often attracted to ideas because they appear new:

“People are as a rule ready to embrace the apparently new because of its alleged novelty.”

The irony, he argued, was that Jews themselves frequently did not know how much of this supposedly new religion was already contained in Judaism:

“Even among many of us there exists an astounding ignorance as to the real content of Judaism as based on the law.”

His conclusion was sweeping:

“No religious theory has as yet surpassed the law given us by Moses. Though ancient, it is still modern; though old, it is still new.”

And specifically about Eliot:

“The teachings of Judaism need not be abandoned for other creeds whether already proclaimed or still unannounced. They have anticipated the religious platform of the so-called religion of the future.”

Look at Eliot’s actual complaints, and Simon’s point becomes much clearer.

Eliot’s first principle was:

“The religion of the future will not be based on authority, either spiritual or temporal.”

Modern people, he said, would demand reasons rather than simply submit to authority.

Judaism certainly has authority, but it does not reduce religious life to passive obedience. Rabbinic Judaism is built around argument: What does the law mean? Which principle applies? What happens when values conflict? The Talmud preserves rejected opinions alongside accepted ones. Jewish law develops through precedent, analogy, interpretation and dispute. Authority exists, but reasoning is part of the system rather than its enemy.

Eliot was right to reject a model in which religion means “because the priest said so.” But Judaism’s alternative is not the abolition of authority. It is authority disciplined by argument, precedent and interpretation.

Eliot also objected to religion becoming tribal:

“There will be...no more tribal, racial, or tutelary gods.”

Here again Judaism gives a more complicated answer than Eliot seems to recognize. Judaism is unapologetically particularistic: Jews have a covenant, particular commandments, a particular history and a particular people. But the Jewish God is not merely the God of Jews. The Torah begins not with Abraham but with Adam. All human beings descend from the same human being; all are created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God.

Judaism therefore does not solve tribalism by erasing particular identities. It combines particular obligation with universal human value. A Jew can have special obligations to family, community and people without concluding that outsiders have no moral claims.

That is arguably more realistic than Eliot’s expectation that moral progress would dissolve particular loyalties altogether.

Eliot’s next principle sounds almost entirely Jewish:

“The religious person will not think of his own welfare or security, but of service to others, and of contributions to the common good.”

He adds:

“Repentance wipes out nothing in the past, and is only the first step towards reformation.”

That is close to the Jewish understanding of teshuvah. Saying that one is sorry is not enough. One must stop the wrongdoing, acknowledge it, repair the damage where possible and behave differently when the same opportunity arises again. Yom Kippur itself does not atone for wrongs committed against another person until the offender has sought reconciliation.

Eliot presents this as the future of religion. Simon’s point is essentially that Judaism had long ago made it part of religious law.

The same is true of Eliot’s emphasis on attacking the causes of suffering. When the believer encounters evil, Eliot says,

“his impulse will be to search out its origin, source, or cause, that he may attack it at its starting-point.”

He praises sanitation, medicine, housing and education because they prevent suffering instead of merely consoling its victims.

Judaism hardly objects. Pikuach nefesh makes saving life an overriding obligation. Jewish law requires preventative measures against foreseeable danger. A dangerous roof requires a parapet. One may not leave hazards where others can be injured. Charity is not simply emotional compassion; Maimonides famously ranks helping someone become self-supporting above merely giving him relief after he becomes dependent.

In other words, Judaism does not say only, “comfort the suffering.” It also asks, what obligation could have prevented the suffering in the first place?

Eliot similarly wanted religion to become practical rather than sacramental or magical. Its great command was:

“Be serviceable.”

He envisioned believers of different creeds cooperating in hospitals, charities and social institutions because service to human beings mattered more than theological uniformity.

Again, Judaism turns general benevolence into concrete duties. Feed the hungry. Visit the sick. Return lost property. Pay workers on time. Do not exploit the vulnerable. Give charity. Bury the dead. Protect life. Administer courts fairly.

And hospitals in Israel already have Muslims and Jews working together.

That may be the most important difference between Eliot’s formulation and the Jewish one. Eliot offers a principle: be serviceable. Judaism asks what being serviceable requires on Tuesday afternoon.

Its detailed law is not necessarily the obstacle to moral religion that Eliot imagined. It can be the mechanism that converts moral aspiration into behavior.

Eliot also placed enormous emphasis on truth. His future religion would cultivate

“the love of truth and the passion for seeking it,”

and he believed truth would progressively make people free.

Judaism again agrees. Emet—truth—is a central religious value. But Judaism also recognizes something Eliot’s formulation tends to obscure: truth is one value among others, and moral life frequently consists of negotiating collisions among values. Peace can matter alongside truth. Human dignity can limit certain rules. Saving life overrides almost the entire Torah.

That produces a moral system considerably more complicated than “follow truth wherever it leads.” Judaism asks not merely whether something is true, but what one is obligated to do with that truth in a particular relationship and circumstance.

This may be the larger point Simon saw in Eliot’s “new” religion.

Eliot identified legitimate weaknesses in certain forms of traditional religion: blind authority, excessive concern with the afterlife, indifference to preventable suffering, magical thinking and narrow tribalism. His mistake was assuming that overcoming those problems required leaving traditional religion behind.

Judaism not only anticipated these issues, it already went beyond them to something arguably better.

Not no authority, but authority subjected to argument.

Not no particularism, but particular obligations inside a universal moral framework.

Not repentance as absolution, but repentance as behavioral change and restitution.

Not merely compassion for suffering, but duties to prevent foreseeable harm.

Not simply goodwill, but commandments that tell people what goodwill requires.

Not morality discovered anew by every generation, but an accumulated legal and ethical tradition that can itself be argued with, interpreted and developed.

That makes Simon’s response much more than a boast that Judaism is ancient and therefore superior. His point is that Eliot had confused age with obsolescence.

“Though ancient, it is still modern; though old, it is still new.”

Eliot thought he was describing the religion that would emerge once modern people discarded the religious past.

Simon’s rejoinder was that, before discarding it, they might want to find out what was actually in it.

10/04 Links: Douglas Murray: Israel Is Winning; The Green Party is now an openly anti-Jewish party; ‘Evil incarnate’: Israel’s top forensic pathologist reveals unseen Oct. 7 evidence; IDF Dismantles Claims in "NAZA" Documentary

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: Israel Is Winning

The attempted hijacking of a Flydubai plane en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv is a reminder that Israel and the West remain at war with Islamic radicals, and that it is a war we are winning. The online world is filled with shrill declarations that Israel has lost this war. But on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel and its allies have been winning the war on the ground even as they have lost the PR war around the world.

The PR war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. Better to win the ground war and lose the PR war than the other way around.

Piece by piece, the Israeli government took apart the Iranian axis. First, they took apart Hamas in Gaza, despite constant attempts to make them stop, which came not just from Europe but from President Joe Biden's White House. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran in July 2024. Then, while Netanyahu was in New York speaking at the UN, Israel bombed the compound where the head of Hizbullah, Hassan Nasrallah, and almost all his remaining senior colleagues were gathered.

Two years into the war that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar started, the Israeli air force took out the majority of the Iranian regime's air defenses, then came back and struck thousands of regime targets, opening the route for American B-2 bombers to attack the main Iranian nuclear sites. Then the Americans and the Israelis returned. They not only targeted the Iranian nuclear program again but also killed the supreme leader.

Everybody alongside and above Sinwar in the chain of command is now dead. Neither Hamas, Hizbullah, nor the Iranian regime has a noose ready to pull around Israel's neck anymore. A large share of the Israeli hostages were eventually returned alive. Three years ago, this set of victories would have seemed unthinkable.

What happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday stands as a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.

Israel’s Growing Allies on the Ground—and in the Sky

Israel is no stranger to diplomatic isolation, but the widespread condemnation it has received after Hamas's October 7 atrocities has been unusually strong and meritless. Last week, the dozens of delegates walking out on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations seemed to dramatize Israel's diplomatic plight. Bibi defied the well-heeled "moral cowards" of Turtle Bay and defended his policies against Iran and its terrorist minions. But even as many of Israel's friends applauded him at the rostrum, their eyes darted nervously to the swelling exodus in the aisles.

A different set of images portrayed a more important reality this week. When an Omani terrorist attempted to hijack an airplane bound for Israel from Dubai, an improvised multinational coalition sprang into action. This was largely the work of brave individuals, but it illustrates the larger forces affecting Israel's foreign policy. The Jewish state faces many enemies, but a growing number of countries are attracted to it because of Israel's battlefield prowess, technological skill, and shared values.

The terrorist aimed to kill Jews, but his first target was an Indian. The pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar, fought off his treacherous copilot long enough to open the cockpit door. Israeli passengers then rushed their would-be murderer, subdued him, pulled the Boeing 737 out of its fatal dive, and stabilized the stricken aviator. The plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia, where medics tended to the injured civilians until another plane brought them to Tel Aviv.

Much like Captain Machchhar and his passengers, Israel and India are becoming a dynamic duo. Although India still expresses plenty of sympathy for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, the Jewish state's value is too obvious to miss for a country with hostile neighbors and severe terrorist threats. India is Israel's top destination for defense exports, and it has reciprocated with nearly 3,000 shipments of defense equipment and components since October 7. During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit in February, he and Netanyahu announced a bevy of agreements on technological cooperation and that a free trade agreement is in the works. Together, they form one half of the I2U2, a quadrilateral that includes the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Of course, the flight only occurred because of Israel's relationship with the UAE, which has deepened because of the immense damage Iran is inflicting across the Middle East. In fact, as the pinstriped diplomats stormed down the aisle at the U.N., the Emirati delegation remained.

Less symbolically but perhaps more importantly, the military leaders of several Arab countries reportedly met with U.S. and Israeli generals in Germany a few days before the walkout. No countries have formally joined the Abraham Accords this year, but the Saudis and even the Qataris attended this meeting. Iran's belligerence across the wider Middle East is forcing previously implacable foes to coordinate militarily with the Jewish state.

Like-minded friends in the Global South are rallying to Israel too. Argentina's Javier Milei excoriated "the alleged defenders of human rights" at the U.N. who "have systematically voted against Israel while remaining silent in the face of Islamic terrorism and the genocide of Christians in Africa."

Brendan O'Neill: The Green Party is now an openly anti-Jewish party

‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of [and] I’ll tell you what you are guilty of’, said the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. Today, that grim, eternal truth was starkly illustrated by the Green Party’s passing of a motion saying ‘Zionism is Racism’. To throw around the word ‘racism’ even as you single out Jewish sovereignty as uniquely demonic, to pose as an enemy of bigotry even as you dream of the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state, takes moral duplicity to sickening new heights. In their snivelling whisperings about ‘racism’, these scumbags reveal their own.

It was at their conference in Brighton that the Green Party of England and Wales voted in favour of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ screed. The motion expressly defines the Greens as an ‘anti-Zionist party’. It says Zionism is a species of racial hatred, and will henceforth be ‘treated as any other form of racism’. Most obnoxiously of all, it commits the Greens to campaigning for the scrubbing of the Jewish nation from the face of the Earth. It calls for ‘the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital’. So no more Jewish homeland. No more tiny patch of land, a poxy 263 by 71 miles, for the Jews to call their own. All of it would disappear. Imagine accusing others of being ‘genocidal’ even as you agitate for the total dismantling of the ancestral kingdom of the Jews.

Anyone who thinks this is ‘just about Israel’, that the Islamo-left’s demented hatred for the Jewish nation has no impact on the Jews of the West, needs to pay closer attention. One of the most chilling events in Brighton today was the enthusiastic voting down of an amendment that would have offered protection to Jewish Greens who attend Zionist synagogues. Designed to ‘safeguard Jewish membership’, the amendment warned against ‘indirect discrimination’ against ‘practising Jews’ on the basis of the ‘synagogues, community centres or denominational groups’ they are aligned with. It was smashed, defeated by 1,026 to 648 votes.

Think about this. Really think about it. A mainstream party, and a supposedly progressive one, has just voted against an amendment that would protect its own Jewish members from discrimination on the grounds of the religious institutions they attend. I cannot remember anything like this in my lifetime: a party effectively greenlighting the harassment of Jews who commit the ‘sin’ of attending synagogues that believe in the right of Jews to nationhood. It is stunning. It’s a moral crisis. Not since the BNP has a party so openly committed itself to hostility towards certain Jews.

The historic gravity of today’s events cannot be overstated. We now have a party in Britain wholly devoted to the moral annihilation of Jewish sovereignty. A party committed to the abolition of Israel. A party content to hang a target sign around the necks of its own Jewish members who continue to patronise institutions that believe in the continued existence of a Jewish State. If the Tories overnight devoted themselves to the removal from the Earth of the state of Pakistan, and the moral isolation of every pesky Pakistani in Britain who likes that nation, it would be leading the news. Every progressive would cry ‘racism’, and rightly so. Will they do likewise here? Don’t hold your breath – you’ll die.

I’ll say it, though. I’ll say that if Jewish nationhood makes you vomit, if the right to self-determination of the Jews keeps you awake at night, then you are a bigot. You might consider yourself woke and good, but your frothing animus for Jewish nationhood betrays the blackness of your soul. For that’s all Zionism is: the belief that the Jews, like every other people, have an inalienable right to build and flourish in the land of their forebears. That the same people who tilt their heads in bourgeois indulgence of every native claim to territory then puke into their matcha when the Jews say ‘What about us?’ tells you everything you need to know. It is impossible to explain these double standards without using the word ‘anti-Semitism’. Go on, try.

10/02 Links Pt2: Holocaust education is not working in the fight against contemporary antisemitism; Thoughts from Neriyah’s bedside; VDH: The Islamo-left takeover of the Democrats

From Ian:

Holocaust education is not working in the fight against contemporary antisemitism

This universalising impulse turns Jews into symbols, not people. It encourages students to see Jews only as historical victims, stripped of contribution, culture, and survival. It lavishes attention on Auschwitz, Anne Frank and memorial candles while ignoring the lived reality of Jews today, their attachment to Israel and the antisemitism they face.

Jonathan Frisher, a British teenager who persuaded his school to teach about today's antisemitism and is campaigning to make this nationwide, pointed out that the education at his school made no connection between the events of the Second World War and today's antisemitism, thus failing to ensure that young people recognise it.

Maybe I am alone in finding it strange that the annual memorial event in the Foreign Office includes speakers about other genocides and concludes with wine and sandwiches. The Canadian academic, Professor Ruth Wisse, has warned for decades that treating Jews as metaphors rather than neighbours is itself a form of antisemitism. When Holocaust education becomes a generic lesson about tolerance, it erases Jewish particularity and makes it harder to understand why antisemitism persists.

The second failing, which is evident in Holocaust memorials, is placing antisemitism safely in the past: Germany, Nazis, and nothing to do with today. Holocaust education often frames antisemitism as an historical problem located safely in 1930s Germany, an interesting subject for films. Students learn about Hitler, Nuremberg Laws, ghettos and concentration camps, but almost nothing about where antisemitism comes from, how it mutates, or why it remains potent. It teaches them that to upset Jews of today, Nazi symbolism is very effective.

Are young people taught about the elimination of Jews from most Middle Eastern states in the 1940s? The history approach creates a dangerous illusion: antisemitism is something only “the Nazis did,” not something that exists in Britain, Europe, or the wider world today. It places responsibility for Jew-hatred firmly in the past, absolving contemporary societies of any need for understanding.

The result is moralising rather than history. Students are encouraged to “not be bystanders,” “be kind,” or “stand up to hate,” but are not taught what antisemitism actually is: its theological roots, political uses, conspiracy structures, or modern expressions. They are not taught why despising Jews has become normalised again, or why Jews today report rising fear, harassment, and exclusion. The very word “Holocaust” is misused. With survivors dying, the emotional storytelling model is losing its power, and even so their very stories and their age again fixes antisemitism in the past. And because students have not been taught how antisemitism mutates, they are not equipped to recognise or resist contemporary Jew-hatred. They know how Jews died, not how Jews live, or why Jews are still targeted. How many of the young visitors to Auschwitz later defend the existence of Israel?

The third failing is ignoring Israel: the missing piece of contemporary antisemitism.

Perhaps the most striking omission in Holocaust education is Israel. Students are taught little if anything about why Jews need a state, how Zionism emerged, or why today’s antisemitism is overwhelmingly focused on the only Jewish state. This silence is not neutral. It leaves students unable to understand the central driver of modern antisemitism: the political demonisation of Israel and the delegitimisation of Jewish self-determination.

Without explaining Jewish history up to the present, Holocaust education cannot explain why antisemitism today looks different from antisemitism in 1936, yet is rooted in the same ideological patterns. One would not teach people not to discriminate against black people by teaching only about slavery. Yet we teach about antisemitism by teaching and commemorating only the Holocaust and not about the living Jewish world and its state. The UCL Centre for Holocaust Education has reported on the defects of current education courses, but their criticisms have had no impact so far. The UK Jewish leadership and organisations have too much invested in the current model to be open to constructive change.

Dara Horn has put forward a new model of Holocaust education in her most recent book The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, pointing out that Holocaust education has preserved memory but that alone cannot counter contemporary antisemitism.

I agree with her that we need a new model that teaches:
- Jewish civilisation, not just Jewish destruction
- Jewish survival and contribution, not only Jewish victimhood
- The history and legitimacy of Israel
- The roots of antisemitism, past and present

Horn, Wisse, and Bauer all point toward the same conclusion: education must present living Jews, not only dead ones. It must teach who Jews are, not only what was done to them.

Sir David Bell has been commissioned by the government to report on antisemitism in schools and colleges. His report is imminent and one can only hope that he will understand how Holocaust education has failed and what has to be done to make it relevant today.

Only then will students be equipped to recognise and resist the antisemitism of their own time, not just mourn the antisemitism of the past.

What does the pro-Palestinian movement really reward: Aid or ideological conformity?

That same moral scrutiny becomes even more interesting when following Macklemore beyond the donation itself.

In 2025, when Macklemore performed the halftime show for Qatar’s celebrity-fueled sports event, he was hosted by and performed for Qatar’s International Media Office. The event reached over 25 million viewers across television and social media.

Macklemore’s fee is not public information. The relationship between him and Qatar is.

But Macklemore’s participation in a Qatari state-linked cultural spectacle produced no corresponding international boycott campaign. “Censorship,” his followers cried when venues refused to host him earlier this month.

Yet losing a private booking is not quite the same thing as state censorship. If censorship is the principal issue, why does the principle appear to stop at Qatar’s border in this case?

None of the celebrities that attended the 2025 Qatar-funded event had any issues with the censorship of this terror-funding state, and its human rights violations were of no concern to the audience currently crying over Macklemore.

The same cultural ecosystem willing to treat a warm-up artist’s loss of a private performance as a free-speech crisis seems remarkably comfortable engaging with a state whose laws restrict free speech.

Perhaps Macklemore’s defenders genuinely believe his removal represents censorship. Perhaps they believe cultural boycotts create political pressure.

Perhaps Pink’s critics sincerely believe a decade of humanitarian advocacy should be forfeited over a repost she explicitly clarified was not a statement. And donating money obviously does not buy immunity from criticism. All fair.

But principles must survive consistent application. If humanitarian relief matters, Sheeran’s millions matter. If humanitarian advocacy matters, Pink’s UNICEF work matters. If artistic freedom matters, Qatar’s restrictions on expression matter.

If institutional integrity matters, UNRWA’s documented October 7 employee cases matter. And if institutional association itself morally contaminates an artist, that principle cannot conveniently expire when the stage is in Doha.

After all the petitions, canceled artists, tour withdrawals, boycotts, festival threats, violence, and purity tests, does the cultural machinery being constructed in Palestine’s name actually improve the daily life of a Palestinian?

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the entertainment industry’s Palestine activism isn’t whom it supports. It’s what it rewards.

When the same cultural class can cry censorship in Massachusetts and apparently misplace the principle somewhere over Doha, perhaps the currency was never free expression in the first place.

What is the moral currency of the pro-Palestinian movement: humanitarian assistance or ideological conformity?

And if Palestinian welfare is the objective, perhaps the cultural world should start measuring its activism not by how many artists say the approved words, lose their jobs, abandon stages, or sign petitions, but by what actually reaches Palestinians.

And perhaps humanitarian due diligence should include asking exactly which institutions receive the money.

That is where the moral accounting should begin. Because humanitarian assistance is measurable. Ideological conformity merely has better celebrity endorsements.

Robert Kraft’s Wikipedia entry edited to describe pro-Israel media watchdog as ‘genocide’ denier

A Wikipedia editor added a disputed description of the pro-Israel media watchdog Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s biography days after Kraft barred rapper Macklemore from performing at Gillette Stadium with Ed Sheeran, raising questions about the entry’s neutrality.

Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s U.S. Loop Tour after saying “free Palestine” during a Sept. 4 performance at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., said Macklemore would not be permitted to perform there because of what he described as the rapper’s “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” Messina Touring Group, the tour’s promoter, subsequently announced that Macklemore would not perform at the remaining dates after multiple venues said they would not host shows with him on the bill.

On Sept. 19, five days after Macklemore’s removal from the tour, a Wikipedia editor added material to Kraft’s entry based on a Sept. 18 article in The Intercept about his philanthropic giving to pro-Israel organizations, including the Kraft Family Foundation’s $63,500 donation to CAMERA.

The Wikipedia entry had described CAMERA as “an organization that has denied Israel’s genocide in Gaza and has organized pressure campaigns against those it considers ‘anti-Israel,’” mirroring language used in The Intercept article. The phrase “denied Israel’s genocide in Gaza” also linked to a Wikipedia page titled “Gaza genocide denial.”

The description, which is not included in CAMERA’s own Wikipedia entry, was removed on Thursday afternoon and replaced with recognition of a 2018 contribution from the foundation “with the memo line ‘fighting antisemitism.’” As of press time, the entry has not been reverted to reflect the anti-Israel language.

10/02 Links Pt1: The Morality of the Gaza War; Oman banned flydubai terrorist due to suspected extremism; Two Iranian men charged with terror plot targeting UK Jews

From Ian:

The Morality of the Gaza War

The most clearly legitimate reason for going to war, one that finds universal acceptance, is self-defense. That is a basic principle – perhaps the basic principle – of international law. Beginning on October 7, Israel fought to defend itself. It had terminated completely its presence in Gaza in 2006, removing its troops, its settlements, and even its graves. Hamas took control there and eleven years later launched its October 7 attack. Without it, there would have been no war. By any reading of international law, Israel had the right to defend itself by force against Hamas.

If Israel’s actions unambiguously conformed to the requirement of jus ad bellum, those of Hamas clearly violated it. The Palestinian group engaged in cross-border aggression, which the Western ethical tradition prohibits. In international legal terms, Hamas did to Israel on October 7, 2023, what Nazi Germany did to Poland on September 1, 1939, and what Vladimir Putin’s Russia did to Ukraine on February 24, 2022: it invaded a neighboring country with the intent to destroy it. That is a war crime, one of which several Nazi officials were found guilty after World War II and for which they were then executed.

Still, even a country engaged in legal and legitimate self-defense, as Israel was, must, according to the traditional ethical rules of war, defend itself in proper ways. Or, more accurately, it must avoid defending itself in improper ways. Here again, in the Gaza war Israel passed the test of jus in bello while Hamas conspicuously and indeed intentionally failed it.

The major rule governing the conduct of war is the avoidance, as far as possible, of civilian casualties. The Gaza war presented Israel with two challenges in abiding by this norm. First, the fighting took place in crowded urban areas. Wherever and whenever such wars have been waged, they have taken a heavy toll in civilian noncombatants. Second, Hamas placed military equipment and fighters in or beneath civilian facilities – houses, schools, mosques, hospitals – in order to maximize the number of civilian deaths and injuries, which counts as another war crime.

Israel took the opposite approach. It adopted measures to minimize harm to non-Hamas Gazans. When about to attack a civilian area in which Hamas military forces were present, the Israeli government warned the people in the area – through tens of millions of emails, leaflets, social media posts, and telephone calls – that an attack was coming. Israel designated safe areas to which civilians could go to avoid forthcoming military operations. The IDF also embedded with its forces legal experts who vetted proposed targets in real time and sometimes called off planned attacks because of the danger they posed to noncombatant Gazans.

By forfeiting the military advantage of surprise through such advance notification, as well as by canceling what would have been militarily effective attacks in order to spare civilians, Israel put its own soldiers at higher risk than they would otherwise have been. History offers few if any other examples of countries at war ready to sacrifice the lives of their own troops in order to comply with international law. The Israeli government also ensured food shipments to Gazans — press reports of famine there were fabricated, although Hamas did steal a good deal of the aid – and even interrupted the war to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza against polio.

Civilians did die in Gaza, but perhaps half of all Arabs killed there were not civilians but rather active Hamas combatants, although they ordinarily did not wear uniforms so as to blend in with the civilian population. Israel was clearly targeting Hamas but was not able, because of the location of the war as well as because of Hamas’s efforts, to avoid all noncombatants. Given this fact, an assessment of Israel’s compliance with the demands of jus in bello depends on the ratio of civilian to military deaths. In Gaza, the best estimates put it at between 1 and 1.5 to 1. In other, comparable conflicts the ratios were far higher. American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are estimated to have cost 4 or 5 civilian deaths for every combatant killed. Other, similar conflicts reached ratios as high as 9 or 10 to 1. According to Major John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, in Gaza “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history – above and beyond what international law requires and more than the United States did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Hamas, for its part, bears ultimate responsibility for all deaths, civilian and military, on October 7 and thereafter because it began the war. During the fighting, it violated the basic norm of noncombatant immunity that governs the conduct of war in two ways. It murdered Israeli civilians; and it caused the deaths of Gazan non-combatants by making them military targets through its policy of surrounding them with military infrastructure. In addition, Hamas built, at great cost, several hundred miles of underground tunnels in Gaza, beneath hospitals, schools, and residential blocks, which it used to shelter its personnel and its weaponry. Had Gazan civilians been able to take shelter in them, they, too, would have enjoyed some protection from the war; but Hamas prevented Arab noncombatants from doing so. Deliberately causing the death of civilians is a war crime, and Hamas committed this crime on a large scale.

It did so for the purpose of falsely blaming Israel for civilian deaths and thus contributing to the demonization of the Jewish state in the West. In this it has succeeded, the mark of its success being the wide dissemination of the myth that Israeli is responsible for genocide. Those propagating it are, wittingly or not, validating Hamas’s pernicious tactics and thereby acting as its allies and accomplices. This will have consequences. It will encourage Hamas to persist in its campaign to destroy Israel by employing the tactics it used on October 7 and thereafter. It may also encourage other, similar groups to make use of these tactics.

Albert Camus, the French Nobel laureate in literature, once said: “False ideas always end in bloodshed, but it is always other people’s blood. That is why some of our intellectuals feel free to say just about anything.” Substitute for intellectuals (in French philosophes) the Westerners who propagate the charge of genocide against Israel and his words apply to the present case. The false charge – or, to call it by its proper name, the lie – that Israel committed crimes in Gaza, including the worst crime of all, genocide, supports the perpetuation of the criminal project that Hamas exists to carry out: the slaughter of innocent Jews and Arabs.

JPost Editorial: Governments cannot stay silent on the threat against Israel after flydubai hijacking

How will the world respond to the flydubai hijacking attempt?

India responded by honoring Capt. Smit Machchhar, the injured Indian pilot. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Droupadi Murmu praised his courage. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong thanked those who intervened and wished the injured a full recovery.

US President Donald Trump, who discussed the incident after speaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, acknowledged that the full account had not been established. The United Nations said it was following developments and was thankful that a major tragedy had been averted.

Beyond that, the reaction was thin. The UAE opened a formal investigation, but Saudi Arabia had issued no substantive statement about its investigation by Thursday morning, Reuters reported. Oman had not commented on the Israeli report that the suspect was an Omani national. By early Thursday afternoon, no public condemnation had come from the European Union’s leadership or most major Western governments.

What more is required before they speak? Condemning the confirmed violence would not require endorsing every Israeli account. It would not require calling the incident terrorism, assigning a motive, or accusing another country of involvement. It only would require saying that violence in the cockpit of a passenger aircraft is intolerable and demands a thorough, transparent investigation.

The absence of a death toll should be a source of relief, not an excuse for indifference. An act does not become less worthy of condemnation because the people caught up in it prevented its worst possible consequences.

Passenger aircraft are not battlefields. The International Civil Aviation Organization requires states to report unlawful or attempted seizures and other acts of unlawful interference, because a breach aboard one aircraft can expose vulnerabilities affecting travelers everywhere.

Passengers also cannot be treated as extensions of the government at their destination. People do not lose their claim to international concern when they board a flight to Tel Aviv.

Flight FZ1073 connected two countries that established relations under the 2020 Abraham Accords. Flydubai inaugurated scheduled commercial service between Dubai and Tel Aviv that November, making direct aviation one of the agreement’s most visible results. The people placed at risk on Wednesday included an Indian captain and passengers of several nationalities aboard an Emirati aircraft bound for Israel.

The heroes aboard FZ1073 did not have the luxury of waiting for perfect information. They saw a cockpit in chaos and acted. Governments have official confirmation of violence aboard a civilian aircraft and the safety of solid ground. As such, they should be able to manage a sentence.

Simchat Torah in the newspapers, 100 years ago

From The Burlington Free Press, Fri, Oct 01, 1926, Page 7

British MP Ayoub Khan thinks there is something suspicious about the attempted destruction of the Flydubai flight to Israel this week.

Khan isn't some random X account. He is the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr and a barrister. He was elected in 2024 as one of a group of explicitly pro-Gaza independents after leaving the Liberal Democrats, saying he had been pressured to remain silent about Gaza. He subsequently joined the parliamentary alliance with Jeremy Corbyn and other pro-Gaza MPs.

After reports emerged that the co-pilot of Flydubai Flight 1073 had attacked the captain and apparently tried to crash the Tel Aviv-bound aircraft, Khan tweeted:

“I am genuinely shocked as to the speed of this enquiry by the Israeli spokespeople!!! Normally it takes them months if not years. I think i smell a rat!”

He followed that up by boasting:

“And that’s why I believe the most powerful MP in parliament is not the PM but the one that can speak without fear or favour!!!!!!!”

So I asked the fearless MP a pretty simple question: if he “smells a rat,” what exactly does he think happened?

To Khan's credit, he answered me directly:

“Since you have asked in a non-disparaging manner I will answer your question.
The answer is: I don’t know.
Any reasonable person would wait for the black box recording; testimony of those in the cockpit! not going to simply accept what the lying Bibi butcher of Gaza says.”

But that isn't really an answer. “I don't know” is perfectly reasonable when the evidence is genuinely ambiguous. It is not what Khan originally said. “I smell a rat” means that the story we are being told is suspicious. It implies that something does not add up.

So what doesn't add up?

There is already substantial evidence about the basic events aboard that airplane, and most of it has nothing to do with accepting Benjamin Netanyahu's word.

The aircraft's flight data showed an extraordinary plunge. According to the Associated Press, the plane descended from roughly 34,000 feet to 16,600 feet and transmitted both the standard 7700 general emergency code and then the 7500 code indicating unlawful interference or hijacking. Multiple passengers described a violent struggle in the cockpit. The injured captain himself has now publicly described what happened, saying that after being attacked he managed to open the cockpit door so passengers and crew could subdue the co-pilot. Reuters reports that the captain remains hospitalized after being stabbed.

Of course there are still questions. Investigators need to establish motive, determine what happened immediately before the attack, how a weapon could get onto the plane, reconstruct precisely what happened inside the cockpit and find out whether anyone else was involved. The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel are investigating, and Flydubai has quite reasonably warned against reaching premature conclusions about motive.

But that is completely different from pretending that we know nothing until somebody downloads the black box.

Nobody applies that standard to aviation disasters or other catastrophes. Newspapers immediately analyze radar data, eyewitness testimony, photographs, videos, communications and whatever other evidence is available. Officials issue preliminary assessments. Experts discuss likely explanations. Those assessments are explicitly preliminary and can change when additional evidence appears.

That is normal investigation.

Khan instead takes the existence of unanswered questions and uses them to cast suspicion on the evidence that already exists.

And once you do that, the obvious question is: what would have to be false for Khan's “rat” to exist?

Are all the passengers lying about what happened in the cockpit and colluding to say the same story? Is the wounded captain lying? Were the flight-tracking records somehow manipulated? Were the emergency codes fabricated? Was the airplane's enormous plunge coincidentally unrelated to the reported cockpit struggle?

If Khan has an alternative hypothesis that explains those facts better, he should tell us what it is. That would at least be an argument.

But “I smell a rat” followed by “I don't know” isn't an alternative hypothesis. It is a conspiracy insinuation carefully constructed so that the person making it never has to specify the conspiracy.

This is the methodology of 9/11 "truthers" and Holocaust deniers. It is not one an elected official should publicly boast.

Ayoub Khan is a barrister. He presumably understands the difference between evidence and insinuation. He is also a Member of Parliament who built much of his political profile around Gaza and Israel. If this had been virtually any other aviation emergency, would he insist that no one draw even preliminary conclusions from flight data, emergency signals, videos and multiple eyewitnesses until the black box had been analyzed, weeks later?

Or does this extraordinary standard of skepticism suddenly appear because the people reporting what happened are Israelis and the Israeli prime minister repeated the preliminary findings?

Khan says the most powerful MP is the one who can speak “without fear or favour.”

Fine. Then tell us all, exactly, what exactly is rat he smelling?

10/01 Links Pt2: IDF: 170 Hamas, PIJ terrorists killed in Gaza were misrepresented as 'innocent journalists'; IDF rejects ‘NAZA’ claims of deliberate targeting of Gaza civilians

From Ian:

Andrew Fox: Why does the BBC refer to dead terrorists as ‘journalists’?

By its dodgy reporting, the BBC implicitly bolsters one of the most pernicious myths about Israel: that it deliberately kills journalists to silence their reporting. But the fact that a fighter has a camera does not erase his military role, and nor does a journalist’s death alongside a military target establish that his journalism made him a target. By presenting men engaged in war as independent witnesses, the BBC has helped turn their deaths into evidence for an accusation that those deaths cannot, by themselves, sustain. Hamas could hardly ask for a more useful service than what the BBC provides for it.

The overlap extends beyond proven combat roles. A December 2025 study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre identified terrorist affiliations in 157 of 266 reported journalist and media-worker deaths, roughly 59 per cent. Its definition included employment by factional media, so not all 157 were fighters, but this should have given editors ample reason to investigate whose version of the Gaza war they were publishing.

Hamas has a vested interest in demonising the Jewish State, yet the BBC consistently treats the word of this proscribed terrorist organisation as the truth. The BBC owes viewers an explanation of how it checked its contributors and what relevant affiliations it failed to disclose. Any competent editor should examine their source’s independence, particularly in a conflict as polarising as this one. Instead, the BBC has allowed Hamas propaganda to be smuggled into Western homes with the stamp of a trusted broadcaster.

Since 7 October 2023, the BBC has happily shown footage of a devastated Gaza Strip – but there has been comparatively less interest in explaining the broader security threat that Hamas poses to Israel, or any of the measures taken by the Jewish State to minimise civilian casualties.

The BBC’s record on the Gaza war makes a mockery of its claims to accuracy and impartiality. The BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, used a child narrator whose father was a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-run administration. Ofcom found that omitting this fact materially misled audiences. The BBC later claimed that it wasn’t aware of the connection. But, as with the dead ‘journalists’, this isn’t good enough. The BBC broadcast an emotive and highly biased piece of propaganda without knowing the full picture.

Earlier failures were just as grotesque. After the October 2023 Al-Ahli hospital explosion, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, claimed an Israeli airstrike was responsible. In fact, it was a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The following month, the BBC was forced to apologise for falsely claiming that Israeli troops were ‘targeting’ medical teams at Al-Shifa Hospital.

The BBC’s repeated professions of editorial rigour are contemptible when set against that record. A broadcaster that lectures the public about misinformation has repeatedly failed the elementary checks its own authority depends on.

Senior editors must now account publicly for the sources they trusted and the reports that need correcting, across BBC Arabic and English-language output. Failures this serious should cost careers. Licence-fee payers deserve a broadcaster that is capable of questioning Hamas’s propaganda. The public should not have to investigate the BBC itself to discover what it left out.

More Than Half the Names on Committee to Protect Journalists List of Slain Gaza Journalists Are Still Linked to Terror Outfits Despite Group’s Self-Policing ‘Audit’

More than half the names on the embattled Committee to Protect Journalists' revised list of "journalists" slain in Gaza "have connections to terrorist groups," even after the New York-based advocacy organization conducted a months-long review meant to identify and remove confirmed combatants from its widely cited database, according to a leading media watchdog.

CPJ first announced in June that it was undertaking a wholesale review of its list of "Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza War" following a series of Washington Free Beacon reports questioning the integrity of its influential list and revealing that numerous confirmed terrorists were included in the death toll. CPJ has been in turmoil for months—driven by infighting and the public defenestration of a pharmaceutical heiress—over allegations of myopic anti-Israel bias that's clouded its historic mission of protecting journalists worldwide.

While CPJ initially said its internal review would be completed in July, the organization did not publicly disclose its findings until late last week. CPJ ultimately removed 19 terrorists and 3 other fake journalists from the list, but reinstated 4 others who had previously been nixed for engaging in terrorism against Israel. That leaves a total of 191 supposed Gazan journalists on the CPJ's rejiggered database—102 of whom still have demonstrable "connections to terrorist groups," according to an independent review of the CPJ audit performed by the Israeli media watchdog group HonestReporting.

"Although the CPJ review removed almost two dozen individuals who participated in combat during the war that began on October 7, 2023, 53 percent of those still listed have terrorist ties, with CPJ failing to remove identified terrorists and even reinstating some to the database," HonestReporting concluded in a comprehensive 138-page review. "CPJ continues to include members of the non-military wings of terrorist groups on its list, and has failed to issue an apology for spreading disinformation."

Thursday afternoon, the CPJ doubled down, making the claim on X that "Israel has been targeting and killing journalists in connection with their reporting for decades, and this deadly pattern must end," something the Israelis strongly dispute, presenting, case by case, documentary proof such as "martyr posters," photos, and Hamas payroll and membership records.

The CPJ was first thrust into the spotlight in May, when it served as a critical source for an outlandish column by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof alleging that Israeli soldiers raped two Palestinian "journalists" with a carrot and a dog.

Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups operating in Gaza have a well-documented practice of installing their operatives as journalists—often as cameramen in TV crews—so they can take advantage of longstanding conventions to avoid killing journalists during war. When Israel identifies and targets these militants, it faces international opprobrium, especially if CPJ claims there were indeed journalists.

HonestReporting further determined that CPJ's updated list fails to meet the organization's own "criteria for inclusion as a journalist, while broader methodological issues remain." CPJ's board voted 17-1 in July to affirm that "organizations affiliated with militant groups" meet the criteria of a legitimate journalistic outlet "provided they are not engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have imminent effect." That contentious definition, opposed only by the Fox News board representative, essentially allowed CPJ to continue considering known terrorists for inclusion on its list.

10/01 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Those amazing and heroic Israelis; How Fiction Will Remember October 7 - with Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff; Does U.N. stand for "unknown"?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Those amazing and heroic Israelis

The British government is blind to the risks posed by the Palestinian Arabs because, to the morally bankrupt left, the Palestinian cause is synonymous with morality.

The spittle-flecked fanaticism of Miliband’s speech to this week’s Labour Party conference took many people aback.

Having paid lip service to standing against antisemitism and for Israel’s right to defend itself, this scion of a Jewish family decimated by the Holocaust denounced Netanyahu’s responsibility for Palestinian “suffering” in Gaza and the West Bank as a “stain on the conscience of the world.”

Having falsely accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” by the “settler terrorists of the West Bank,” “war crimes in Gaza” and the “illegal occupation of Palestine,” Miliband declared: “To the millions in Britain and elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you. You were right.”

Precisely what does Miliband think those people were “right” about? Their claim that Israel is committing “genocide”? That Palestine must be Arab “from the river to the sea”? Their demand to “globalize the intifada”?

Miliband, who came across as an unhinged demagogue, is a stain on the memory of his slaughtered family.

The suicidal imbecility of Britain’s hostility to Israel was demonstrated by the incident at RAF Fairford, the base in southwest England from where U.S. bombers have taken off for Iran.

Last Sunday, five men were arrested on suspicion of being about to attack the base. Although much about this incident remains murky, Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham has now said there are “strong indications” that Iran was involved.

But as Netanyahu has revealed, it was Israel that gave the Brits the intelligence warning of such an Iranian attack—and pretty much the next day, he said, the United Kingdom announced sanctions against the Israeli “settlements.”

Where Britain leads, the rest of the West follows. There is acute concern that these sanctions are intended to broaden out into a global financial strangulation of Israel, especially if the Democrats win the post-Trump presidency.

There’s anxiety that American support for Israel is crumbling. Some reports suggest that, apart from CENTCOM, even the U.S. defense establishment has become hostile to the Jewish state.

This is fundamentally because the West is undergoing a rapidly progressive erosion of its core values, including the destruction of morality, truth and reason itself.

Even today, diminished as it is, the United Kingdom sets the Western cultural pace. That’s why the British government’s defamation and delegitimization of Israel are so important.

Britain is leading the West into the heart of darkness—the abandonment of civilization for the embrace of barbarism. And the people upon whose backs Miliband et al have accordingly stuck a bullseye are the Jews.

But another narrative is emerging to counter this obscenity. Flydubai is a United Arab Emirates airline. The terrorist co-pilot was Omani. Oman is an ally of Iran. The UAE has become a close ally of Israel fighting Iran. The Emirati crew helped Israelis on the plane to avert catastrophe. And the plane was allowed to land in Saudi Arabia.

A new order is being born in which Arabs and Jews are fighting together against the forces of barbarism in the Islamic world.

On their way home to Israel, survivors of the hijacking sang the words written by the 18th- century Chassidic rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is to have no fear at all.”

Britain and much of Europe—and even America if it allows the Democratic Party to gain power—are now hurtling downward towards a catastrophic crash. But Israel will live because it has seized the cockpit controls.

JPost Editorial: The flydubai passengers have returned home safely, and that is all that matters for now

Serious questions will have to be answered about how the terrorist came to be piloting an Israel-bound aircraft and whether every security requirement governing flights to Israel was properly followed. Those questions are legitimate, and they should be investigated thoroughly.

But this incident is not an indictment of the UAE.

One terrorist does not represent a country. The UAE has maintained its relationship with Israel through years of regional upheaval, including war, and Wednesday’s attack should not be allowed to undermine a relationship that has become an important part of the region since the Abraham Accords.

Another country also deserves Israel’s gratitude: Saudi Arabia.

Israel and Saudi Arabia still do not have formal diplomatic relations. Yet when an aircraft carrying 166 Israelis needed somewhere to land after a terror attack in the cockpit, Saudi Arabia opened its doors.

The Saudis did more than provide a runway.

Passengers received food and medical care after landing in Tabuk; the wounded were treated, and frightened children and families were looked after. One Israeli passenger described the Saudi treatment as “very nice” and “very understanding.”

At a moment of extraordinary fear, Saudi authorities responded with humanity and professionalism. Israelis should recognize that and say thank you.

There will, of course, be time for questions, and there should be.

The investigation must determine exactly how this attack was possible, whether security procedures failed, whether warning signs were missed, and what changes are needed to ensure nothing like it happens again.

A political argument is already developing around the attack.

Netanyahu warned on Tuesday that Israel’s enemies could try to attack ahead of the election. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, who received a security briefing from Netanyahu that evening, said afterward that nothing resembling the flydubai incident had been presented to him and accused government figures of trying to use the attack for political purposes.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) responded that Netanyahu had been briefed about a significant increase in terrorist activity around the world.

Those competing accounts will need to be examined. Israelis deserve to know what intelligence existed, what the government knew, and whether the statements now being made accurately reflect the information available beforehand.

But that reckoning does not have to overshadow what happened on Wednesday.

For now, think of the passengers who ran toward danger. Think of the pilots who regained control of a plunging aircraft. Think of the dentist who treated a wounded pilot in midair. Think of the Saudis who received Israelis in Tabuk and cared for them.

And think of 174 families who could so easily have received a very different call.

A terrorist tried to hijack an aircraft carrying 166 Israelis.

He failed.

They are alive and safe.

For now, that is more than enough.

Khaled Abu Toameh: 'October 7 Will Return': Hamas, Like Iran, Will Not Voluntarily Give Up the Fight

The chants matter because they reveal what speeches about peace and reconstruction conceal.

These slogans raise a fundamental question for anyone discussing the future of the Gaza Strip: What exactly has changed?

The answer is particularly important because the international framework for the Gaza Strip explicitly calls for something very different.

US President Donald J. Trump's 20-point peace plan states that Gaza is to become a "deradicalized terror-free zone" that poses no threat to its neighbors. The plan calls for the decommissioning of weapons, demilitarization and the establishment of an International Stabilization Force. It also envisages a process intended to change Gazan mindsets and narratives by emphasizing tolerance and peaceful coexistence.

On paper, the objective is peaceful coexistence. Public gatherings are proclaiming that Gaza belongs to Hamas and rejecting international forces.

This is the main problem facing any attempt to transform the Gaza Strip.

Reconstruction can rebuild buildings. It cannot dismantle an ideology.

The answer will determine whether Gaza's reconstruction becomes part of a genuine transition toward stability, or whether reconstruction takes place alongside the reorganization of the same forces that brought the Hamas terrorists to power in the Gaza Strip and the region into war.

Has the ideological and military foundation for another October 7 massacre actually been removed?

On the eve of the October 7 anniversary, the world should pay close attention when people in the Gaza Strip say they want the October 7 massacre to happen again.

It is crucial to remember what senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said shortly after the October 7 massacre: "The Al-Aqsa Flood [what Hamas calls the October 7 massacre] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight."

TIL That Taking Unprecedented Measures To Protect Noncombatants Is The Same As Genocide (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

TIL That Taking Unprecedented Measures To Protect Noncombatants Is The Same As Genocide

By Jessica Montross, Student, International Law

New York, October 1 - Are you telling me... are you telling me that everything I'd always thought I'd known about the Laws of Armed Conflict, International Humanitarian Law, all of that, is incorrect, and that moving civilians out of harm's way, as required by those laws, in fact violates those laws in the most egregious possible way?

Well, you live and learn, I guess.

Okay, it is not quite that simple: for most militaries, in most armed conflict situations, my original understanding holds. Where it differs: when Israel is involved. Then, according to experts in International Law, we must invoke whatever principle makes Israel look the worst.

Thus, in the example we mentioned at the outset, whereas evacuation of noncombatants from a combat zone forms an unremarkable step we expect any military to take before initiating hostilities in that area, once we discover that the party conducting or encouraging those evacuations is the IDF, that evacuation, even its merest attempt, constitutes genocidal ethnic cleansing.

I have been taking notes. The notes are embarrassing, because they look like the syllabus.

Warning before an attack: normally a precaution. Article 57. Feasible advance warning. I highlighted it in green. Green meant “this is how you stay inside the law.” When the warning is an Israeli phone call, a leaflet, a roof-knock, the highlight changes color. The warning becomes proof that the civilian population was identified as a population and then operated upon. Identification, which I had understood as the beginning of distinction, is refiled as the beginning of intent, a key element of determining that genocide has occurred.

"Distinction" itself changes. Elsewhere, a combatant embedded in a school is a problem the defender created and the attacker must still try to solve. The involvement if Jews somehow converts every nearby civilian into evidence against the attacker. The attacker’s effort to separate them is not credited as separation. It is credited as "sorting."

But again, only if we're talking about Israel.

Proportionality works the same way. I was taught to weigh concrete and direct military advantage against expected incidental harm. Tedious work. Lawyers pretend it is math so they can sleep. When the actor is not Israel, a bad ratio is a tragedy, a scandal, maybe, in rare cases, a war crime. When the actor is Israel, the ratio is not weighed. The existence of the civilian is the whole case. The military object is treated as a story the perpetrator tells in order to stand near the civilian.

I used to think “as such” in the Genocide Convention did some work. National, ethnical, racial or religious group as such. The phrase was there to stop people from renaming every ugly war. I wrote a whole outline on specific intent. I can still recite it. Recitation is now a form of denial. Intent, in the special file, is inferred from the fact that Israel knew there were Palestinians in Gaza and fought a war there anyway. Knowledge of geography becomes mens rea. And Israel has maps! Maps are inculpatory.

Aid is also reversible. A state that facilitates food, medicine, vaccination, and fuel is, in ordinary doctrine, not inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction. When it comes to Israel, facilitation is calibration: you keep enough people alive to prove you had them in your power. Restriction is the same crime at a different setting. There is no compliant setting.

I asked a professor whether the rule was simply lex specialis Israel. She said of course not, and then walked me through a chain of inferences that only fires when the defendant is the Jewish state. Siege law for everyone else. Collective punishment if the name on the brief is Israel. Human shields as a legal problem if the defender is a state we recognize as a state; human shields as a moral reproach to the attacker if the defender is Hamas.

I wrote “see also: whatever principle” in the margin. It is not a term of art yet. It will be.

09/30 Links Pt2: 85 years later: Babyn Yar and the fight against deliberate erasure; Jeremy Boreing: They're Trying To Eradicate the Jews; Melanie Phillips on how Britain sides with Islamist evil

From Ian:

85 years later: Babyn Yar and the fight against deliberate erasure

In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote about the absence of a monument at Babyn Yar. His poem became a protest against the silencing of memory and against antisemitism.

In 1991, a menorah-shaped memorial to the Jewish victims was erected at the site, but the road to establishing a comprehensive memorial center was long. Memorials now stand there, yet the war has halted the momentum of construction and development.

Research continues, even under fire.

In September 2025, the center reported that 1,031 previously unidentified victims’ names had been added to its database since the outbreak of the war. Birth certificates, adoption applications, and court testimony are restoring identities once thought lost.

In the face of erasure, each name restores a person to memory.

A line connects Soviet erasure to Russian propaganda today. Once again, history is subordinated to the needs of the state.

The Kremlin justifies its invasion of Ukraine with the false claim that the country must be “denazified,” exploiting the memory of the victory over Nazism.

A study by Ruslan Kavatsiuk, Oleksiy Makukhin, and Violetta Seleznova, published this month in Eastern European Holocaust Studies, analyzes 4,263 Russian television broadcasts from 2012 to 2024.

The researchers show how “Nazism” became a label used to delegitimize Ukraine and justify military action against it. This, too, is a form of erasure: blurring the historical meaning of Nazism, pushing its victims to the margins, and replacing their story with a narrative that serves the state.

Then, the victims’ Jewish identity was suppressed; today, the memory of their murderers is exploited to justify aggression.

Through my work in Holocaust education and remembrance with March of the Living, I have learned the power of encountering the places themselves. Visiting a town, a synagogue, or a killing site connects historical knowledge to human lives.

To understand what was lost, we must know what existed: families, culture, spiritual life, and daily routines. This is how we counter erasure beyond commemorative ceremonies: by learning about communities, reading testimonies, and remembering names.

Babyn Yar should be a gateway to understanding Eastern European Jewry and its world, while also bearing witness to its destruction.

Ukraine’s efforts to confront this chapter of its past deserve recognition, as does its perseverance in the work of remembrance after more than four years of a devastating war.

On the 85th anniversary of the massacre, our responsibility is to protect memory against erasure, distortion, and manipulation.

That means returning to the facts, supporting research, opening archives, and making their findings accessible; teaching the Holocaust by bullets and learning about the communities that lived before they were murdered.

Behind the name Babyn Yar are tens of thousands of human beings, and beyond it are millions whose stories were buried in the soil of Eastern Europe.

Our duty is to remember their names, their lives, and their Jewish identity, and to ensure that no regime succeeds in bending their story to its own purposes.

The Palestinian Inquisition

Hasan Piker interviews politicians and other public figures and helps establish which answers are acceptable. Having likened liberal Zionists to 'liberal Nazis', he plays at being the grand inquisitor, the arbiter of correct beliefs. If any attachment to Israel puts you in the heretical category, what room is left for disagreement?

You don’t even have to be Jewish to find yourself before this tribunal. Ask Ed Sheeran. His crisis began when Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s tour following pressure from venue owners over the rapper’s anti-Israel statements and history of anti-Semitic imagery.

Soon Sheeran’s own beliefs were on trial. A picture of him meeting a former Israeli hostage was enough to ‘prove’ he was irredeemable. And when he condemned the October 7 terrorist attacks while also calling the situation in Gaza catastrophic, this too was evidence against him. For some critics, acknowledging suffering on both sides was offensive. British MP Zarah Sultana accused him of ‘both-sidesing genocide’. Apparently, the problem with his compassion was extending it to all humans.

Saturday Night Live UK then turned his reluctance to take sides into a recurring joke. In one sketch, a fictional Sheeran remained unwilling to choose even during a conflict between humans and robots. The joke depended on the audience accepting that his neutrality was cowardice. When comedy writers can’t conceive of there legitimately being two sides to a two-sided conflict, that’s troublesome.

Sometimes you don’t even have to give any answer to become a victim of the inquisition. You just have to sit next to someone who gave the ‘wrong’ one. Pop singer Pink faced an immense backlash after criticising Macklemore’s concert remarks. Then Elizabeth Banks and Amy Adams were photographed sitting with her at the US Open. People began questioning them, too. In a Reddit discussion of the photographs, commenters condemned their friendliness toward Pink and flooded their Instagram accounts with hateful comments. Watching tennis with someone deemed ‘impure’ was enough to start the examination. The warning extends beyond what you’re allowed to say to who you’re allowed to be seen with.

You don’t even have to help anyone to pass the test. A person can donate to Palestinians privately and still fail if they don’t use the required language. Another person can make the proper declaration and be celebrated without being asked to do anything more. The words become the whole point.

The celebrity inquisition doesn’t need everyone to believe what they say. It only needs everyone to know what happens if they don’t say the right words.

‘Put me down for not getting burnt at the stake.’

Adam Brody blasted as ‘ignorant Jew’ over Palestine stance by former ‘Nobody Wants This’ Rabbi consultant

Adam Brody has been lambasted by former “Nobody Wants This” technical consultant, Rabbi Steve Leder, who called the actor an “ignorant Jew” over his comments on Palestine.

“Hi Adam, you might not remember me. My name is Rabbi Steve Leder, and I was the technical advisor for Season 1 of ‘Nobody Wants This,’” he began in a social media video, responding to Brody’s recently published comments to GQ — in which he referred to Israel’s attack on Gaza as a genocide.

“My job was to make sure that your character was authentic and that everything in Season 1 about Judaism was authentic,” he went on.

“Your pronouncement the other day about a genocide in Gaza was truly shocking, not only because of your misuse and mischaracterization of the word ‘genocide.’ There is no genocide in Gaza. There are genocides in other countries happening, but you failed to mention any of them.”

“You, by your own admission, are a relatively ignorant Jew, and your ignorance really showed the other day,” Leder said.

“If you’re gonna use a word like ‘genocide,’ you oughta know what it means, he continued, calling the way Brody referred to the term as “so flippant” and “disgusting,” while likening it to “asking for a table for two at Craig’s.”

“Here’s some more technical advice: If you know nothing about something, you should say nothing about it.”

Brody previously told GQ when asked about his stance on the Isreal-Gaza conflict, “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine.”

He added that he’s “hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”

In Netflix’s hit series, Brody plays Rabbi Noah Roklov, who begins an unlikely romance with a non-Jewish podcaster Joanne Williams, who is played by Kristen Bell.