Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 19, 2026

10/19 Links Pt1: How ‘Palestine’ conquered France; UN Watch Releases Database Exposing Who Funds UN’s Human Rights Experts; As a UN envoy, I saw my colleagues’ anti-Israel obsession first-hand

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: How ‘Palestine’ conquered France

This is why the omnipresence of the Palestine flag matters – it confirms France is being consumed by the flames of anti-Westernism, by a nihilistic disdain for the very virtues of our civilisation. For that is what the so-called Palestine cause now embodies – not concern for the Palestinian people but contempt for ‘the West’. Not a desire for a ceasefire in the Middle East but a longing for fire here at home.

Some of us have argued for a while that the Islamo-left’s hysterical, disproportionate, bigoted and at times demented loathing for the Jewish State is proof that Israel has been made into the whipping boy of modernity, into the scapegoat, the sin-eater, of the West and all its supposed crimes. That the birthplace of the Enlightenment is now being burnt down by mobs draped in the Palestine flag proves this beyond doubt.

As one commentator notes, the ‘Palestinian cause’ seems to have become ‘a symbol of protest against Western institutions, national identities and political establishments’, even in situations that ‘have nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians’. It’s the great, mad omnicause – a raging engine of grievance that absorbs every local resentment and every anti-Western pathology into a single, holy crusade. The actual geopolitics of the Levant are irrelevant to the Palestinianism that has swept the West, except, of course, that many of these people long for the annihilation of the Jewish State as a proxy for Western sin. What Palestinianism really adds up to is a cult of self-loathing. The keffiyeh is the mask the death of the Enlightenment wears.

This is the intifada coming home. The West’s craven failure to hold the moral line after 7 October, its indulgence of the Islamo-left mobs who hailed Hamas and libelled Israel, has started a fire of anti-civilisational hysteria that it will be incredibly difficult to put out. The nation that erodes its borders, tells newcomers their culture is just as valid as ours, fails to assimilate its foreign-origin youths and coaches its own young to feel shame over their national history is a nation that has signed its own death warrant.

Gavin Mortimer at the Spectator made a striking observation. The far-left agitators in France are mostly white, while the looters and cop-fighters ‘appear to be of immigrant background’. ‘The people seen on television forcing their way into the city halls of Marseille and Lille were mainly white’, he said, where the store invaders of Paris and Bordeaux were non-white. This is the New France. The New Europe, in fact. A place where there are youths who have no real roots in society, and youths whose roots have been violently torn up by institutions that have incited them into national self-loathing. Youths who are unassimilated, and youths who are from here but are constantly taught to hate ‘here’.

Entitled whites, young Muslim irritants, foreign-born louts, Islamist troublemakers, post-Enlightenment leftists and sanctimonious pricks who hide their hatred for the West behind a love of Palestine – that’s France now. Who’s next? Germany? Britain? We have so much work to do.

How “Globalize the Intifada” Came to France’s Streets

Israel has seen the devastation and destruction of intifadas firsthand, with buses and cafes attacked by suicide bombers that left countless people dead, injured, and traumatized. The call to globalize such a catastrophe reveals the dark desire to spread that same violence beyond Israel’s borders.

This is especially true in France, where despite the Jewish population representing less than one percent, antisemitic incidents account for 53 percent of all anti-religious acts. And as the protests spread, Jewish institutions are likely to continue to be a target. It is for that reason that in the midst of the protests in Paris, a synagogue was vandalized. In another incident in Marseille, a journalist noted that only Jewish businesses were attacked and set ablaze.

But the trespassing, vandalism, and destruction of property do not stop at a synagogue. Those protesting in the streets of France have frequently found common ground in hostility toward Israel, the Jewish people, and the systems and framework of Western civilization, including the country they are protesting. As such, the Palestinian flag and slogans have been a primary marker at these initially anti-government protests in France and Europe more broadly. Whereas the Palestinian cause has been turned into a vehicle for the radical left to express deeper anti-Western and anti-Jewish grievances, the same protests provide Islamist movements an opportunity to bring the symbols and rhetoric of a far-away conflict closer to enemies at home.

The supposed interconnectivity of these previously unrelated causes led Greta Thunberg, who previously traded her climate activism for the publicity yacht that attempted to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, to join the protestors in France. With a keffiyeh draped across her shoulders, Thunberg, who was “incredibly proud” of the protestors, insisted that all protest movements “need to be united” because they face the “same enemy,” which is an “extremely destructive system.”

Ultimately, the protests are a telling sign of how the pro-Palestinian movement is no longer confined to demonstrations explicitly concerned with Palestinians, Israel, or the war against Hamas. The Palestinian flag, symbols, and slogans being chanted have become attached to other social or political movements, regardless of relevance, making the cause a prop for broader anti-Israel or anti-Western activism.

The integration of such symbols has become so normalized that “globalizing the intifada” is no longer merely a slogan chanted without understanding its words, but a European reality. The result is the exportation and glorification of a campaign of violence onto the streets of France.

Don’t Tell Me London Wasn’t Warned

In August 1994, The Independent⁠ reported Jewish students’ complaints about intimidation and literature invoking the killing of Jews. Farid Kassim, quoted as a spokesman for the organizers of a Wembley conference, rejected allegations of antisemitism and said the quotations had been taken out of context. Omar Bakri Muhammad was identified as Hizb ut-Tahrir’s national organizer.

The report also recorded Muhammad condemning the London bombings and the authorities saying there was no evidence of terrorist attacks by the group’s followers. That did not dispose of the concerns about what was being preached and circulated.

By the time I photographed Abu Hamza, officials were familiar with him too. A released Home Office document⁠, dated September 11, 2000, described his activities, his Supporters of Sharia organization and his extreme views. A year before the attacks in America, he was already the subject of government paperwork.

In November 2001, answering questions concerning Al-Muhajiroun and Omar Bakri Muhammad, Home Office minister John Denham said enforcement units were “monitoring and evaluating”⁠ information that might support prosecution.

There were investigations, and eventually prosecutions. The government’s later account of the Hamza case⁠ described earlier decisions that the evidence was insufficient, followed by material supporting charges in 2004. Knowing that somebody holds extreme views is not the same as having the evidence to prosecute them. I understand that. But the official record makes it impossible to pretend the concerns had never reached the people responsible for acting on them.

What I witnessed on London’s streets contributed to my decision to move to Israel in 2007. London remained the city where I grew up, learned my profession and spent much of my working life. Leaving did not remove that attachment. It is why the photographs still trouble me, and why there is anger in the pieces I write about the city today.

I look at today’s images with memories of what I photographed decades ago. I remember the people raising concerns, the public arguments and the assurances that the authorities were paying attention. My archive gives those memories faces, places and dates.

Outside the embassy that day, nobody needed an intelligence briefing to establish that an Israeli flag was burning. It was happening in front of us. I was recording it, and the police decided that my taking pictures risked antagonizing the people doing it.

Watching the rioting and looting in Paris over the past few days⁠, I find myself worrying about London again. The immediate causes are different, but the sight of another European capital struggling with violence on its streets brings back uncomfortable memories. I fear London could face scenes like these. That is my judgment, shaped by years of standing behind a camera in crowds that the authorities knew perfectly well were there.

The police were warned repeatedly. So were the security services and successive governments. Jewish communal organizations kept raising concerns, and the public record shows how long those concerns had been reaching officials. There were investigations and prosecutions, but there are still questions about the years in between. I remember being told to stop taking photographs because I was “antagonising them.” Looking at those photographs now, I wonder how much more people were expected to tolerate before their warnings carried sufficient weight.

Should London face the kind of scenes we are watching in Paris, I will have very little patience for anyone in authority who claims they could not have seen trouble coming.

British investigative journalist David Collier attended the Green Party conference earlier this month, and as usual, he hits it out of the park. He describes a political party that has been taken over by anti-Israel activists to the point where its original environmental mission appears almost secondary.

Collier describes an exhibition hall filled with booths devoted to Palestine, anti-Zionism and associated activist groups. Environmentalism was still present, but the excitement seemed to be elsewhere. Speakers repeatedly insisted that Palestine was an environmental issue, because obviously everything has to be about Palestine nowadays. Otherwise, organizers think, no one cares.

One particularly revealing episode involved the Green Party Women stand. The women displayed a sign reading "More Trees, Less Hamas," referencing the sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7. According to Collier, a man confronted them, upset that they had criticized Hamas without also criticizing Israel.

To many Green members, women's rights are apparently subordinate to anti-Israel activism.

And the party has now officially adopted a resolution declaring that Zionism is racism, by a vote of 1,022 to 813. In order to do that they needed to redefine Zionism so that by definition it was racist, making the declaration a ratification of a made-up definition. But truth is not something the party values to begin with.

The hijacking is explicit. Animah Kosai, a co-chair of Greens for Palestine, openly explained her approach: "I don't believe in serving the Green Party ... I actually believe in using the party in order to reach certain goals. And in this case, for Palestine, for anti-imperialism."

At least she's being honest.

This should sound familiar to Americans. The Democratic Socialists of America have openly embraced running candidates on the Democratic ballot line to build political power and advance their own agenda. The idea is to use an established political party's infrastructure to change its direction from within even when its values and the values of the governing party contradict each other.

One detail that Collier noticed is most telling. Despite the conference's obsession with Palestine, Collier found that three events specifically devoted to Palestinian causes, organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, International Centre of Justice for Palestinians and Friends of Al-Aqsa, were held in rooms that appeared more than half-empty.

Hating Israel and Zionism attracts enormous enthusiasm. A resolution declaring Zionism racist mobilizes the membership. Activists celebrate what they regard as a historic victory. But sessions supposedly devoted to helping Palestinians cannot even fill their rooms.

I've argued for years that much of what calls itself the "pro-Palestinian movement" is better understood as an anti-Israel movement. Palestinian welfare is often used to give moral legitimacy to a campaign whose overriding objective is opposition to the Jewish state, and Palestinians are pawns in this larger desire to delegitimize Israel. The most prominent anti-Israel political party seems to bear this out.

The activists don't spend too much time raising money to provide food or medical services to Gazans. Their energy is in tearing Zionism down, not building Palestine up. It just so happens that the latter is the most convenient excuse for the former.

But to claim that these organizations are pro-peace or pro-Palestinian is false. Their motivation is anti-, not pro-.

And in this, they have illustrious ancestors.

Can you teach philosophy to five-year-olds? I decided to write a book to try!

Introducing Sarah Makes the World Better, my first children's book inspired by Derechology.

As my regular readers know, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years developing a philosophical framework I call Derechology. It’s an attempt to build a practical system of thinking from first principles that makes intuitive sense and can be applied to literally any situation.

I’m still trying to organize the Derechology book, but as I played with the idea, I wondered: could the concepts be made simple enough for a five year-old?

The result is my first children’s book, Sarah Makes the World Better.

Sarah is a little girl who wakes up one morning to the sound of workers repairing a pothole outside her window. She learns that things wear out and need to be repaired, but also that people can create entirely new things that make life better. She decides that she wants to make the whole world better herself.

It turns out to be harder than she expects.

In the course of a deceptively simple story, Sarah encounters several problems that adults struggle with as well.

She discovers that telling the truth is important, but so is how you tell it. She finds a drooping flower that she wants to move into the sunshine, but doing so might destroy an anthill beside it. Which is more important? How can she know what the right thing is?

These are serious ethical questions that are difficult to answer. That’s the point. Sometimes we don’t have enough information to know what is best, and sometimes legitimate values conflict with each other. How do we navigate these decisions?

Sometimes we should not act. Sometimes we do what is clearly right, like when Sarah visits a friend with a broken leg. Even then, she inadvertently hurts her friend’s feelings, recognizes her mistake, apologizes, and learns to listen to what her friend actually wants.

She also discovers something about relationships: helping one person can help others as well. And since those people are part of the world, making their lives better really does make the whole world better.

Along the way, the story introduces ideas about truth, the limits of knowledge, ethical judgment, competing values, creativity, relationships, and learning from mistakes. These are all central to Derechology, but none of the philosophical vocabulary appears in the story itself.

I wanted to avoid the usual formula where a children’s story presents a moral problem and then supplies the correct answer. Real life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes there are no perfect choices. Sometimes we misunderstand other people. Sometimes what matters most is recognizing that we made a mistake and doing better next time.

Sarah Makes the World Better includes a note for grown-ups on how to discuss some of the issues mentioned in the book with the child. These are mostly open-ended questions but even children face real dilemmas every day, and the book helps children navigate them without giving black and white answers.

The Hebrew word derech means a path. That is really the central idea: ethics isn’t about making one perfect decision. It’s about choosing a good direction and continuing to learn as we travel along it.

Sarah doesn’t solve every problem by the end of the day. But she has made the world better in her own small way, and she wants to stay on that same path tomorrow.

I’m happy at how this came out. It was also an interesting test of Derechology itself: if these concepts are genuinely fundamental to human life, they should be scalable from children to nations.

While Derechology is based on Jewish thinking, the book is for all; there is nothing overtly Jewish in it.

Sarah Makes the World Better is now available on Amazon. It would make a great gift for your children or grandchildren.

You can see all of my current books available on my new media kit.

I’d be interested in hearing what readers think, especially whether the story succeeds in encouraging children to ask questions rather than simply accept the ready-made answers most children’s books offer.

10/18 Links: Trump endorses ‘great warrior’ Netanyahu; Collier: Inside Occupied Territory at the Green Party Conference; Synagogue vandalized in Paris amid nationwide riots

From Ian:

David Collier: Inside Occupied Territory at the Green Party Conference

I attended the Green Party conference, spending time inside the conference halls and observing demonstrations outside. I tried to speak to as many Green Party members as possible. When I dive into sewers such as this, I rarely rush to publish. I need time to recover, as well as to analyse footage and digest and understand what I have experienced. My goal is to try to bring deeper insight to what is unfolding.

As always, I bring receipts. In these two photos, you can see me alongside Mothin Ali, Deputy Leader of the Green Party, and Ismail Patel, the Islamist Founder and Chair of Friends of Al Aqsa and one of the key people responsible for the hate marches that have plagued our streets for years.

Green Party conference selfies. Ismail Patel and Mothin Ali

To be fair, I doubt they knew who I was.

The Ignorant Cult of Hate
Lee Harpin captured footage of a group of Green Party members chanting “all of Palestine is Arab” in Arabic after the motion passed.

Harpin also uploaded two videos in which he spoke to Green Party members who had supported the motion. I identified both of those involved. In one video, Lambeth’s Serena Oliver explains that people who support Israel are the real antisemites, before outrageously suggesting that Jewish people who associate their Jewish identity with a belief in Jewish self-determination are the ones who need to educate themselves.

It is hard to imagine white people on the left dismissing the self-identity of any other minority group in this fashion. As if to prove she has been totally brainwashed by ahistorical garbage, Oliver says Jews should learn about how the “Zionist project was linking with the Nazis.” Turning her Holocaust revisionism dial up to maximum, she implies that “history has been rewritten” to suggest otherwise.

It may shock her to learn that Jews at Auschwitz were not divided into Zionists and non-Zionists before being selected for the gas chambers.

The second video features Alex Blower from Peterborough. Blower was one of those singing “Palestine is Arab” in Arabic, although it is unclear whether he knew what he was saying. Then, speaking straight to camera, Blower suggests that “Zionism has to go” and that the motion “empowers UK people”. He tells them to “go out and fight” Zionism. Stressing how important this mission is, he says “we cannot have a world with Zionism”, adding that the future of humanity depends on it.

This is unhinged, irrational hate, fuelled by ignorance and targeting the only Jewish state in the world. This is what the Green Party has unleashed – and it is their motion the party adopted.

Standing Next to a Jew
This movement evolved within Corbynism, but many of those involved believed Corbyn was too weak. They are more forceful in their antisemitic ideology, more confident in their manner, and now supported by an army of arrogant, cocky young people who truly believe Israelis are the new Nazis. A generation educated through doomscrolling classes on Instagram or TikTok.

“How on earth can we be antisemitic?” they will respond. “The leader of our party is Jewish.”

Finding Jewish outliers to hide behind is standard practice for left-wing antisemitic movements.

History is littered with examples. The early communists created a special group, the Yevsektsiya, for just this purpose. The Soviets did it again in 1983, creating the Anti-Zionist Committee and placing Jewish figures at its forefront to deflect accusations of antisemitism.

The Soviet propaganda statement that accompanied the 1983 launch stated that Zionism “concentrates in itself extreme nationalism, chauvinism and racial intolerance, justification for territorial seizures and annexations, armed adventurism, the cult of political permissiveness and impunity, demagoguery and ideological diversions, filthy maneuvers and perfidy.” It also rejected attempts by Zionists to call their opposition to Zionism “antisemitic.”

That 1983 Soviet propaganda statement is mirrored in the Green Party’s 2026 ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion.

Within ten years of the committee’s formation, the Soviet Union had collapsed, its borders had opened and approximately 1.5 million Jews had escaped, most of them to Israel. So much for the committee’s insistence that there was no Jewish problem in the Soviet Union.

Yet the strategy is still deployed successfully on the left. Corbyn’s inner circle created Jewish Voice for Labour. It is no coincidence that, after Corbyn’s defeat, ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’ changed its name to ‘Jewish Voice for Liberation’ and some of its founders became Green Party members. I saw JVL executive member Jonathan Rosenhead at the conference. In the video below, Mike Cushman, a JVL founder and now a member of ‘Jewish Greens’, talks about how happy he is that the motion passed:

This is always how it is done: find fringe members of the Jewish community and use them as cover.

Andy Burnham, knowing he was going to swing left to chase the Islamist vote, deployed Ed Miliband in the Foreign Office to make criticism of his anti-Israel policies more difficult. The Green Party chose Zack Polanski.

Once that protection is in place, fringe anti-Zionist groups form around the larger movement to reinforce it:

Green Party Jews against Zionism
For Jews, the strategy is transparent. They know most of these token Jews already have one foot, if not both, outside the community. But non-Jews are left scratching their heads, and this confusion helps to blunt the voices of Jews who speak out in opposition. After all, how can a movement be antisemitic if Jews are there defending it?

Someone should ask the 1.5 million Jews who fled the Soviet Union.

The antisemites have invaded and occupied the Green Party.

I am unsure whether the Green Party has the numbers or the energy to oust them.

When Sunday arrived, I could not wait to get home.

Predictions of Gaza’s death toll were wrong - why is no one being held accountable?

Gaza’s Health Ministry, an arm of Hamas with every incentive to inflate, reported 455 malnutrition deaths across nearly two years of war, fewer than Somalia’s famine killed in half a day at its height.

By the IPC’s own threshold, two deaths per 10,000 people a day, the declared famine should have killed about 9,000. Hamas’s own ministry counted fewer than 200, across all of Gaza, fewer than the US records in four days.

Rafah followed a familiar pattern. Before Israel entered the city in May 2024, the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry warned an assault would bring “the annihilation of about 1.5 million Palestinians.” The EU’s then-foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, scoffed at evacuating civilians: “Where? To the moon?” Within three weeks, about a million people had evacuated Rafah. There was no annihilation and no apology.

The pattern is older than this war, and it only ever runs in one direction.

In April 2002, during Israel’s operation in Jenin, PA negotiator Saeb Erekat told CNN that Israeli troops had killed more than 500 people. The UN secretary-general’s own report later counted 52 Palestinians dead, at least half of them terrorists, along with 23 Israeli soldiers, and found the 500 figure unsubstantiated. By then, the “Jenin massacre” had entered the world’s vocabulary.

Operation Cast Lead followed the same arc. Hamas initially acknowledged fewer than 50 dead combatants. The since-discredited 2009 Goldstone Report cited a Palestinian Centre for Human Rights tally identifying just 236 of the dead as combatants. Then, in November 2010, Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad acknowledged that up to 700 men from Hamas’s military wing and security forces had been killed, close to Israel’s count of 709.

Abroad, the dead were nearly all civilians. At home, they were Hamas martyrs.

On October 17, 2023, Hamas’s health authorities instantly blamed Israel for the Ahli hospital explosion and reported nearly 500 dead. American, British, French, and Canadian intelligence assessments concluded that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the likely cause; US intelligence put the toll at a fraction of the ministry’s tally. The New York Times later conceded that its early coverage had relied too heavily on Hamas’s claims.

The progressive Left, which prides itself on following the science, rarely asks why so many catastrophic predictions and claims about Israel fail. A growing faction of the populist Right, the so-called “woke Right,” recycles Hamas figures and UN forecasts it would ridicule on any other subject.

The method works because the claims and predictions do their work before they can be tested. Put Israel in the dock. Push for sanctions or an arms embargo. Pressure Israel, but not those sworn to its destruction. By the time the evidence arrives, the damage is done.

Tom Fletcher still runs the UN’s humanitarian office. The IPC has not retracted its 2025 famine declaration. Newsrooms still headline the forecasts and bury the accounting.

In most fields, predictions this consequential would at least produce an audit. When the subject is Israel, they produce the next failed prediction.

If Gaza Is "Genocide," What Was Tokyo?

On March 9, 1945, close to 300 American B-29s bombed Japan under cover of darkness, dropping 1,665 tons of napalm incendiaries on Tokyo. Between 80,000 and 100,000 people died in a single night. More than 60 Japanese cities followed.

Yet almost nobody calls the firebombing of Japan "genocide," and for good reason. Genocide requires intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group "as such." America aimed to completely defeat a regime that murdered millions of civilians across Asia, massacred Nanjing, ran the "comfort women" system of sexual slavery on an industrial scale, and performed human experiments under Unit 731 - a regime whose cruelty rivaled that of the Nazis.

The clearest proof of intent came after the surrender. America occupied Japan, gave it a democratic constitution, fed its people and poured money into rebuilding it. A country bent on destroying the Japanese people, as such, does not spend seven years rebuilding them.

In Gaza, instead of fire, Israel used precision munitions. Instead of surprise, it warned civilians by leaflet, text message and phone call before strikes, and opened evacuation corridors. It moved food and medicine into the territory it was fighting in. It accepted losses no army in 1945 would have accepted to spare enemy civilians.

The law is clear about who bears responsibility when one side hides its war machine among civilians. The 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions forbids using civilians to shield military targets and requires each side to keep military objectives away from populated areas as much as possible. Hamas spent 16 years doing the reverse. The presence of civilians does not make a military target immune. If it did, then every terrorist group and tyranny would win every war simply by hiding among its people.

America burned dozens of Japanese cities to the ground and is remembered, correctly, as the nation that defeated a monstrous regime and helped rebuild its people into a free and prosperous ally. Israel faced a more entrenched version of the same problem, chose far greater restraint, and stands accused of "genocide."

There is one more lesson from 1945: Japan became a free and peaceful nation only after its militarist regime was totally defeated, disarmed and replaced, and its schools stopped teaching children to die for the emperor. Nobody suggested leaving Japan's rulers in place to rearm.

I've been writing about Arab antisemitism for many years, and Western media simply pretends it doesn't exist, or that Arabs don't hate Jews but only Zionists.

It is one of the least covered stories in the Middle East. The idea that Arabs could hate Jews, as Jews, is too uncomfortable for Westerners to accept in the 21st century. Even though surveys confirm this time after time - the ADL Global 100 says that 76% of the entire MENA region harbors antisemitic attitudes - things like October 7 are blamed in Western media on political factors, not pure hatred of Jews.

That refusal to accept the obvious is dangerous to Jews. Instead of denouncing the antisemitism that pervades Arab societies, the world accepts explanations of anti-Zionism as if they explain the obsessive hate. As a result violent and pervasive anti-Israel protests are similarly categorized as reasonable anger at Israeli policy rather than rooted in the insane hate that is behind age-old antisemitism. The fact that no other country sparks such vitriol is then presumed to be because Israel's alleged crimes are the worst in the world, and the classic antisemitism grows.

All because the Western media and politicians refuse to call out what everyone knows: Arab Jew-hatred is not an anomaly but the default. Not being antisemitic is the anomaly, and anyone who says anything nice about Jews or meets with them as normal human beings are routinely accused of supporting "genocide."

Of all Arab countries, Morocco is the biggest anomaly. It is by far the most friendly to Jews. Its media includes many stories that are sympathetic to the Moroccan Jewish community, arguably more than its Jewish population merits. Yet even in Morocco, one can find virulently antisemitic attitudes without any visible pushback.

Dr. Abdullah Al-Mashukhi is a founding member of the Turkey-based Palestine Scholars Association.

He wrote an article for a Marrakesh-based news site that shows, yet again, that anyone who claims that the Arab world is only "anti-Zionist" and not antisemitic knows nothing.

Excerpts:

Anyone who examines the history of the Jews will notice that all the countries of the world have rejected them and sought to expel them from their territories, particularly the countries of Europe during the Middle Ages, when they were expelled from England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, and other countries.
Likewise, the Jews have been subjected to the hatred of other nations since ancient times, including the Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Assyrians, Hittites, and others.
This hostility and hatred can be attributed to several factors, including:
1. The first factor: Religion
The Jews believe that they alone are God's chosen people, that they are God's children and beloved ones, and that all other peoples have no value or importance. Rather, they regard other peoples as insignificant and inferior. For this reason, they contemptuously refer to them as goyim. The term goyim derives from goy, which, according to the author, refers to animals gathered in a herd or to insects.
The Jews also believe that they were created from the essence of God, whereas all other human beings were created from satanic clay.
Because of this sense of superiority, we find them enslaving others and considering their blood permissible to shed.
Another matter that contributed to the hatred of the Jews, and even to their killing and expulsion, was the accusation that they kidnapped Christian children and used their blood to prepare bread for the Jewish Passover.
This occurred in Britain, where an English child was killed during the reign of King Henry II. Ninety-three Jews were accused, and eighteen of them were executed. The Egyptian writer and novelist Naguib al-Kilani wrote his novel Blood for the Matzah of Zion about this subject.
Hostility toward Jews intensified because they were accused of responsibility for killing Christ, according to Christian belief. The Jews had incited Pilate to kill Jesus, peace be upon him, and said to him: "His blood be upon us and upon our children." This is recorded in the Gospel of Matthew.
As a result of the foregoing, we find that hatred of the Jews featured prominently in the sermons and writings of religious figures such as Martin Luther, who declared that the Jews were a source of evil, economic harm, and betrayal of God.
2. The second factor: Their bad morals
Among the factors that have caused hatred of the Jews are their bad morals, including treachery, betrayal, breaking promises and covenants, and spreading corruption.
For example, one of the things that provoked German anger against the Jews was the accusation by German Nazis that the Jews had betrayed Germany during the First World War, thereby causing its defeat.
They also accused the Jews of spreading corruption, vice, homosexuality, and moral degeneracy in Berlin because of their control over the press, media, and theater. The Jews also caused economic problems and unemployment through usury.
The words of God Almighty are indeed true concerning them:
"And they strive to spread corruption upon the earth."
3. The third factor: Their greed and usury
Among the factors that led to the loathing and hatred of the Jews were their extreme stinginess, material greed, exploitation of people's needs, and their permitting themselves to engage in usurious transactions with non-Jews.
These usurious practices caused bankruptcy and unemployment within European societies. In addition, their dealings in mortgages and pledges resulted in many people losing their homes and farms, provoking widespread resentment and hatred toward the Jews.
The secret behind Jewish control of banks and financial institutions during the Middle Ages was that the Church prohibited lending money at interest. The Jews exploited this situation, gained control over the lifeblood of the European economy, and caused bankruptcy and unemployment among most of the people of Europe.
Shakespeare portrayed the Jewish usurer in his famous play The Merchant of Venice, associating the Jewish character with a greedy, avaricious, voracious man whose heart knows no mercy.
Likewise, Jewish characters in many European plays were portrayed as men obsessed with money and thirsting for blood.
For all these reasons, the Jews were subjected to loathing, hatred, and expulsion from Western societies.
This occurred in France, where 100,000 Jews were expelled in 1147 CE.
In 1290 CE, King Edward I of England issued an order expelling all Jews from his country.
In Geneva, a special quarter was designated for the Jews, and they were not permitted to touch any food in the marketplace.
In Russia, the Jews were persecuted because of their crime of assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
In America, former American president Franklin warned the American people in 1789 about the danger posed by the Jews. He expressed his fear that the Jews would gain control over America, dominate every aspect of life, and reduce the American people to slaves working for them.
Among the things he said were:
"Gentlemen, in every land where the Jews have settled, they have lowered the moral standards and corrupted its commerce..."
Conclusion
In conclusion, the hatred of the Jews by peoples, states, and nations throughout the world stems from the corrupt characteristics and morals that have distinguished them throughout the ages.
These are deeply rooted, fixed, and enduring traits, inherited by successive generations throughout history because of their connection to a corrupted religious doctrine that glorifies every Jew while degrading all other human beings.

This is as pure antisemitism as there is. All the greatest hits are there like the blood libel, Jewish control of media and banking, and fake "President Franklin prophecy." But it adds an Islamic flavor by describing attributes of Jews that are considered inherent, practically genetic, something that even the worst Christian antisemites usually stayed away from as a primary reason to hate Jews.

10/17 Links: The problem with Israel’s hasbara is what it refuses to say; Shai Davidai exposes universities’ deep-rooted antisemitism; Netanyahu warns of 'campaign to smear Israel' after European diplomats attacked in WB

From Ian:

'Now is not a time to tremble': Casey Babb's Moral Case for Zionism

Babb's new book argues Zionism is not the colonialist or racist caricature commonly presented by its critics, but a Jewish national-liberation movement
No part of this book is me pontificating about Zionism or how to live a Jewish life or a Zionist life. In fact, as I mention in the book, the recommendations I make in the book are for me, too.

That said, one of the ideas I raise is to remember that the Jewish people and our allies have never been stronger, never in history, and that now is not a time to tremble. There’s a distinction between fear that sharpens your attention, which I think is what we need now, and fear that paralyzes action, and the second kind is the enemy of Jewish life in virtually every era.

There’s no need for us to retreat inwards. We need to really remember who we are, embrace our story, and all that comes with it, and muster up a new level of chutzpah and courage, because that’s what it’s going to take to get through this. We cannot allow ourselves to fall victim to the gaslighting and the moral inversion that has characterized not just Jewish life, but most of our society the last number of years.

People need to know who they are, know the story that they’re part of, and know that they aren’t alone. Another thing, is to do Zionist things. Help people in your community. Start living a more Zionist life. There’s a temptation to orient ideas and day-to-day living around opposition and defensiveness. I understand that, but we can’t allow that to shape who we become. That’s no way to live. We have to say yes to things like Shabbat. We have to say yes to the Hebrew language. We have to say yes to Israeli culture, have the full fullest expression of what living a Zionist life actually means – a genuine abundance of meaning, of connection, of beauty, of purpose, of pride, and of exhilaration.

How is your book different from Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel”?

OK, so that was published 25 years ago and much has changed since then. Too much. Dershowitz’s is principally a prosecutorial defence of Israel against historical, legal, and political accusations. It is legalistic and forensic.

I make a more affirmative moral, historical, and civilizational argument for Zionism itself. I speak of dignity, belonging, return, liberation, tikkun olam, democratic pluralism, Jewish historical continuity. He speaks of legal context, double standards, anti-Israel demonization. I’m not refuting charges against Israel; I’m building a case for Zionism as a morally serious, positive ideal – one of the most morally inspiring stories and ideas in all of history.

I think there’s a lot to be said about keeping Zionism alive and modernizing it and renewing it. If Dershowitz’s book asks, “Why is Israel not what its detractors say it is?” mine asks, “What valuable moral ideas are its detractors failing to see?”

'American Intellectual Antisemitism': Shai Davidai exposes universities’ deep-rooted antisemitism

In 1919, my grandmother applied for admission to Barnard College of Columbia University. The notoriously antisemitic dean at the time, Virginia Gildersleeve, told her she would not be notified of her acceptance until after the start of freshman year, in an attempt to encourage her to choose a different school. My grandmother stood her ground and entered the graduating class of ’23 only a few days late.

In ousted Columbia Prof. Shai Davidai’s exposé, American Intellectual Antisemitism, I learned that Gildersleeve, who supported Nazi Germany’s expulsion of Jews from academia, was taking her cue from the higher-ups at Columbia.

“After Jewish enrollment reached 40% of the incoming class of 1919… the university implemented a series of exclusionary policies explicitly designed to curb the presence of Jews on campus,” he writes.

Jew-hatred is nothing new in the Ivy League. It just takes on new forms.

“American Intellectual Antisemitism” is the term Davidai coined for what he defines as “a modern and insidious form of Jew-hatred that cloaks itself in progressive jargon and academic rhetoric,” using the “language of social justice” to disguise bigotry as intellectual virtue, and constitutes “a direct assault on Western liberal values.”

Davidai became known throughout the world after he posted a long letter on social media on October 18, 2023, in reaction to vile and violent post-October 7 events – and top-tier American university leaders’ shocking support, or at least lack of condemnation, of those pro-terror, anti-Jewish incidents.

'We cannot protect your child[ren]'

“I want this message to get to every parent who sent their kids to Columbia University, entrusted their kids and their children’s safety with us. I want this message to get to every parent in America who sent their kids to New York University, to Harvard, to Stanford, to Berkeley, and I want you to know one thing: We cannot protect your child[ren],” he wrote, calling Columbia University President Minouche Shafik “a coward.”

Over the following year, he organized rallies, appeared on prime-time television, and testified before Congress.

Davidai paid dearly for his ongoing peaceful activism on behalf of beleaguered Jewish students, organized with “a small but dedicated group of Jewish students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and alumni.” He and his family received death threats, and he was barred from teaching his award-winning business course. He was derided by detractors as a “genocidal maniac,” “a hate-mongering charlatan,” and an “extremely dangerous” professor.

A year after the Hamas-led massacres in Israel, when Davidai’s video of the unchecked disruption of a campus memorial service for October 7 victims garnered over a million views in a few hours, Columbia’s administration suspended him – not the perpetrators – from campus.

“The decision’s timing told me everything I needed to know about Columbia’s priorities,” he writes.

Blending a firsthand account with broader analysis, his book exposes the radical politics, ideological indoctrination, institutional indifference, leadership failures, and moral unraveling of American academia.

The timing of the book’s release coincides with the beginning of another school year. “Across the nation, more than 1.5 million new students are stepping into lecture halls for the first time, joining student organizations, and attending campus events where the dogmas of American Intellectual Antisemitism are paraded as moral virtue,” he writes.

Mother referred to Prevent for ‘over-identifying with Israel’

When Holly Passmore heard a knock at her front door at about 11am on July 4 last year, she assumed it was an Amazon delivery.

Instead, the 44-year-old mother-of-two from County Durham found two plain-clothes police officers on her doorstep wanting to know why she had recently visited Israel.

“They said it was a safeguarding matter,” recalled Ms Passmore, who cares for her nine-year-old son, Rex, who has severe autism, while studying for a master’s degree.

She assumed they were concerned she had taken her son into a war zone.

“I said, ‘Well, my son didn’t go to Israel. He stayed here with my mum and my daughter, who’s 20’,” she recalled. But the female officer replied: “No this is about you – because you may be at risk of manipulation.”

The officers from Durham Constabulary were investigating an anonymous referral to Prevent, the Government’s counter-extremism programme.

Ms Passmore suspected her support for Israel had prompted the referral. It was only months later, when she obtained police records through a subject access request, that her suspicions were confirmed.

A police intelligence report seen by The Telegraph reveals that the referral said she “over-identified with the conflict between Israel and Palestine” and was “supportive of Israel to the point that she has travelled to Israel”.

It also described her as having “MH” – meaning mental health – issues and being “vulnerable to negative influence”.

“Nobody would describe me as vulnerable,” said Ms Passmore, who combines caring for her son Rex with studying for a master’s degree in Holocaust studies at the University of Haifa.

Ms Passmore said that, while she has health concerns, including severe endometriosis and adenomyosis, and has been diagnosed with ADHD and autism, she has no mental health issues.

“I think they knew I’m not vulnerable but they wanted to monitor me because I was advocating for Israel,” she told The Telegraph.

“When they came to the door they didn’t discuss my health. They only asked about Israel.”

The police intelligence report Ms Passmore obtained under data protection laws acknowledged that there “is no CT [counter-terror] concern with an individual being supportive of Israel as a democracy and it would not be a CT concern for a person to travel there”.

10/16 Links Pt2: Simon Schama: Jew hatred feeds on lies. The antidote is truth; The Silenced Howl of Howard Jacobson; El-Sayed in 2018 to a Synagogue: Hamas Is 'the Same' as the Israeli Military

From Ian:

Simon Schama: Jew hatred feeds on lies. The antidote is truth

Antisemitism is now the fastest metastasising race hatred in the Western world. Eighty years after the end of the war that exterminated two-thirds of their European population, Jews are experiencing a drastic contraction of citizenship. They no longer enjoy the assumed right, for instance, to wear in public what clothing when and where they wish; to gather for prayer or weddings or bar mitzvahs without the necessity of armed guards in front of their place of worship.

Should Jews have the temerity to show up near a pro-Palestinian demonstration carrying a sign indicating their allegiance, they are the ones threatened with arrest unless they remain silent or, preferably, remove themselves altogether from the scene. In April 2024, the head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism was told that looking “quite openly Jewish” near to a demonstration (he was wearing a kippah) constituted “a breach of the peace”.

Never mind that this dramatic loss of security in the Diaspora makes the case for Zionism more effectively than anything Herzl or Ben-Gurion wrote (though in many ways it rehearses their prophecies and warnings); the pile-on continues unabated. College faculties are commanded by student demonstrators to cleanse themselves of suspect – or, worse, professed – Zionists.

An undergraduate leader of marches and rallies at my own Columbia University in New York excitedly proclaimed on video that he would like to go out and murder as many Zionists as he could. A British government review in June 2026 revealed National Health Service workers saying they would refuse to treat Israeli patients, even if they were on the verge of death. Medical staff at a hospital in Bankstown, Australia, were filmed performing a throat-slitting gesture, indicating how much they looked forward to prime opportunities to hasten the death of any Israeli patients.

Everywhere, Jews have been instructed that they cannot expect to remain in cultural or social institutions in which they have participated, should they not publicly and vehemently repudiate their ancestral homeland. Installed on this cultural and social selection ramp are the arbitrators of which Jews may pass this acceptability test and which not.

In Italy, Keshet Italia and Keshet Europe, Jewish LGBTQ organisations, were forbidden from joining a Pride march in Rome for insufficiently denouncing Israeli genocide. The Israeli presence at the Eurovision Song Contest was enough for Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Iceland and Ireland to pull out of the event, claiming in high dudgeon that it would be morally tainted. Purges and exclusions, active or passive, are now the norm.

On a New York subway car in 2024, a shouty pro-Palestine militant demanded to know whether there were any Zionists aboard, as they would have to exit before the train could proceed. In November the following year, supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team were banned by Birmingham City Council from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa on the grounds that they had demonstrated a thirst for exceptional violence at an earlier match in Amsterdam.

The council acted on information supplied by the West Midlands Police; the fact that the information turned out to be false did not prevent the chief constable from repeating it to Parliament. In January 2026 it was revealed that the WMP had had intelligence about local groups planning to arm themselves and target Maccabi fans but failed to disclose this to the MPs.

On 3 June 2026, an unhinged woman on the C train subway in New York shouted that “Jews are eating kids”, adding that she could smell the children on a nearby Orthodox woman whom she went on to assault.

Appearing at an anti-Israel rally in the heart of a conspicuously Jewish district of Toronto, Abbas Hamze – who has been an instructor at Canadian colleges, including the University of Niagara Falls – spoke of Jews “practising black magic” and raping and eating children. The fleeting period when social media platforms made an ostensible effort to block evidently harmful lies from multiplying has given way to the higher imperative of clicks, triggered not by conscientious resistance to conspiracy and malevolent fantasy but by encouraging its profitable sensationalism.

The road to revenue is lined with lies and Jews are its run-over casualties.

In the digital universe, the revelation of outlandish falsehoods is no guarantee of their impotence, much less their disappearance. Long gone are the times when John Milton, arguing in Areopagitica for an unlicensed press, could write, “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

The Silenced Howl of Howard Jacobson

Is a brilliant new novel about Britain after October 7 being cashiered?

Many of Draxler’s demoralizing and deranging experiences are inspired by real events, among them teenagers filmed tearing down posters of October 7 hostages, London police officers telling “obviously Jewish” people to get off the street lest they provoke Gaza marchers into violence by their mere presence, and upper-middle-class activists vandalizing paintings to protest Zionism. Even so, there is a surreal quality to Draxler’s experiences. He is a far from reliable narrator, and even he wonders whether his Holocaust-shadowed childhood is distorting or intensifying his perceptions of post–October 7 London.

Does his daughter really have “Kill all Zionists” tattooed around her belly button? Could it be that it was his own brother, not roving anti-Semites, who daubed “Yid 1” on his car while he sleepily kept guard outside his mother’s house? And on the night of October 7 itself, did Draxler really hear his neighbors chorus “gas the Jews” as they “popped prosecco corks”? In real life, there were no reports of such an incident in Britain, as bad as things became in the days after October 7.2

Draxler is well aware that his mind is swimming in paranoia, but he also knows that there are sound historical reasons for a Jew like himself to be fearful, and that on a more local scale, there really are people who are out to get him.

In one of the richest parts of the book, Draxler has a friendly conversation with a Syrian Arab doctor, the father of one of his pupils. (Draxler has carefully made sure that a copy of the Koran is prominent on his office bookshelf.) The physician tells him about the hadith concerning the Gharqad tree. He explains that during the End of Days, when the Faithful are in their final war with the Jews and the very rocks and stones call out “O, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him,” only the Gharqad tree will refuse to take part and stay silent. But then, says the doctor, “because Jews seek safety behind Gharqad trees we will know where to find them.” The doctor says he doesn’t subscribe to this teaching; he just wants Draxler to know what he is up against.

But Draxler’s predicament is not just a question of fear and the reasons for it. He is dealing with overwhelming disillusionment. He (like Jacobson, presumably) has always put his faith in the morally improving effects of knowledge, education, and culture, a faith that has become untenable in the face of campus bloodlust and bigotry: “Teach people and Belsen will never happen again, the world said in 1945. We forgot that it depended on what we taught.” Far from a source of hope, the young generation programmed in the West’s universities possesses an ugly moral certainty as profound as its ignorance. Language itself can no longer be trusted: “The language I’d been reading all my life assumed a common enterprise of imagination and compassion. Words were there to help us navigate our way to the truth. Not any more.”

Howl is not without flaws. Despite Jacobson’s acute understanding of the various forms of anti-Semitism, he does not and maybe cannot portray a convincing anti-Semite. Then there is his own predilection for Jewish stereotype. Draxler, like most of Jacobson’s male stand-ins, is proudly ignorant of the natural world, compulsively argumentative, impractical, and obsessed in a quasi-Oedipal way with his mother. Perhaps in the 1960s, when Jacobson’s comic sensibilities were taking shape, it was a cute act of aesthetic rebellion for Jewish authors to favor male Jewish protagonists who were hairy, sweaty, neurotic, self-conscious, unathletic, sexually perverse, and socially awkward. As quintessentially Jewish as those qualities may have seemed in the era of Lenny Bruce, today they feel like tired shtick.

None of this diminishes what Jacobson has achieved with Howl, a comic novel that is as serious and important as it is funny. Its implications reach far beyond Britain and the predicament of its Jewry—a predicament that has actually darkened since the book was written, as the Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 made clear. Howl is the Catch-22 of the post–October 7 era, the first major artistic response to that horror and the ways in which it has changed the world.

It is therefore all the more bizarre—and troubling—that the novel could not find a mainstream American publisher.

That failure is so striking that it has become a key exhibit in the charge that mainstream American publishing has become institutionally hostile to Jewish authors and Jewish books (with the exception of those that are explicitly hostile to Zionism and/or reek of anti-Semitism).

According to a widely circulated article in the Wall Street Journal, there is considerable evidence of something that looks like an informal boycott in the publishing industry: “Published writers with overtly Jewish books say their agents have dropped them from their roster; writers are being asked by editors to purge Jewish or Israeli elements from their books.”

Jacobson’s mixed commercial record over four decades and the general decline of the literary novel could make for a plausible market-based explanation for the failure of Howl to find a U.S. publisher—if it weren’t so topical, so timely, so well-reviewed in the UK, and, above all, so damned good.

A publisher would have to be an idiot not to see the commercial potential of a comic masterpiece like Howl. Given that most heads of major publishing houses are not idiots, it does look, troublingly, as if some other, less creditable factor has been at play.

At best, it could reflect the cowardice of politically correct middle-aged executives who fear more than anything condemnation by their intolerant young staff. Certainly, it would be interesting to know what influenced the decision-makers at Simon & Schuster, which previously published two of Jacobson’s novels (Kalooki Nights and The Act of Love). It is not as if S&S has been afraid of publishing politically controversial authors. It has, after all, bought the novels of the Arab-American writer Susan Abulhawa, whose overtly anti-Semitic remarks have been condemned as “reprehensible” even by Zohran Mamdani.

Eventually, Wicked Son, the small publishing house that has inaugurated a new line of books specifically from the list of those by Jewish authors who find their work summarily rejected by the big firms, bought Howl. It is apparently due to come out in 2027. The fact that no mainstream American publisher would touch Howl is a disturbing confirmation that Ferdinand Draxler’s October 8 perceptions of a world changed for the worse are spot-on: “I had suffered no loss but the space I moved in, like the air I breathed, had acquired a different density.”

Seth Mandel: You Hate To See It

Though the Times gushes that Mamdani could have been built in a lab, he is running into a problem: his voters believed him.

Mamdani was always looking for ways to up the ante—rhetorically, at least. And so he infamously told socialist activists that the Jewish state was to be blamed for every local New York City problem. If you see police brutality, he mused, picture an IDF soldier lacing the cop’s boots. Then he insisted he would abuse his office by directing the NYPD to arrest a foreign head of government, the prime minister of the one and only Jewish state.

These were ludicrous claims, and they suggested Mamdani was very much a bigoted con man who would try to sell New Yorkers the air they breathed. But people believed him, because they hated Israel enough to believe anything.

And what is one thing you’d expect of a man who blamed Jews for NYPD misbehavior and who claimed total control over the police force as if it were his praetorian guard? Of course: His rabid supporters want the head of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who wears a Star of David pendant around her neck.

Demands to purge high-profile Jews who haven’t renounced their own people are not unprecedented, of course. But rarely are they so nakedly proposed in New York, home to more Jews than any city outside Israel (and most cities inside Israel).

Of course, the pro-Palestinian fire-the-Jewess campaign is part of a larger menu of items on which anti-Zionists seek to gorge themselves. As the Times notes, Mamdani “is being asked to fulfill an activist wish list unlike any delivered to mayors in the recent past. It includes abolishing the City University of New York Board of Trustees (over investments tied to Israel); intervening in the programming decisions of local synagogues; and halting any military shipments to Israel through the city’s major airports, which the mayor does not control.”

Why would they think he had control over U.S. foreign policy? Perhaps because he indicated that he had precisely those powers when he threatened to J. Edgar Hoover the NYPD on Bibi Netanyahu.

The reporting on this all suggests poor Zohran Mamdani has been put in a tough spot. But of course, that’s not true at all. Mamdani put himself in that spot. He deserves all of this. It is important, in fact, that an anti-Semitic power-hungry demagogue be brought back down to earth with simple politics.

Mamdani’s mob wants what it voted for. They won’t get it—not all of it—and Mamdani will look like what he is: a man who over-promised and under-prepared for a serious role in a democracy.

10/16 Links Pt1: Netanyahu to Obama: ‘Our land isn’t stolen,’; Bret Stephens: Going Back to To Jerusalem and Back; Seth Mandel: Anti-Semites Waste So Much of Our Time

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Going Back to To Jerusalem and Back

Current events books tend to age poorly. Controversies fade. Trends that seem unstoppable in one decade are unexpectedly reversed in the next. Predictions based on extensive data and careful analysis nonetheless prove wrong. It’s hard to make sense of one’s time, or of its direction, while living within it.

Yet to read Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back a half century after its publication feels remarkably, almost disconcertingly, current. On a visit to Kiryat Arba, the Israeli settlement next to Hebron, Bellow is distressed by the sight of Jewish kids playing so close to the Palestinian town: “It’s when I see the children on their bikes that I feel most uneasy, knowing how much madness there is just over the horizon.” (Remember: This is the mid-1970s.) Speaking of settlements, Bellow worries about “ultra-Orthodox zealots who insist that to settle on the West Bank is their God-given right.” The occupation, he says, “is costly and embarrassing. Israel, born out of a national liberation movement, now seems to be denying the Palestinians their political liberties.” But the attitudes of Israel’s enemies aren’t far from his mind, either. He quotes Syria’s minister of defense urging his troops not only to butcher Jewish foes but to eat them. “Egyptian and Syrian leaders speak of the founding of Israel as ‘the original sin,’” Bellow writes. “Is this sin so great that it justifies not only slaughter but cannibalism?”

Turning to global perceptions of Israel, he relates a conversation he had over lunch with Yitzhak Rabin, then the prime minister. “The Arabs have succeeded in winning worldwide public support,” Bellow warns, and “Israel had better give some thought to the media intelligentsia in the United States.” Rabin, like Israeli leaders before and after, shrugs.

In Europe and the U.S., far-left critics of Israel “are not overtly anti-Semitic” but discuss the country using “the Marxist-Leninist categories: finance capital, colonialism, and imperialism.”

The Ford administration, along with prominent commentators who speak for it, are growing weary of what they see as Jerusalem’s recalcitrance in the face of American diplomatic maneuvers, leading Israelis to fret constantly about whether their only true ally is about to turn on them.

Then there’s the problem of historical ignorance, particularly of young people passing judgment on Middle East affairs. “Very few Americans,” Bellow writes, “seem to know, for instance, that when the U.N., in 1947, proposed the creation of two separate states, Jewish and Arab, the Jews accepted the provision for the political independence of the Palestinian Arabs. It was the Arab nations which rejected the U.N. plan.” Many French intellectuals agreed with the Arabs, Jean-Paul Sartre most of all, leading Bellow to note: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

As for the Israelis with whom Bellow spends time—not just political figures such as Rabin or Shimon Peres or Abba Eban but also kibbutzniks, Soviet émigrés, fellow novelists, Holocaust survivors, academics, masseurs and barbers, people of the left and others of the right—they were in 1976 very much what they are in 2026: brimming. Brimming with anxieties and hopes, recrimination and self-recrimination, opinions on every subject, profound doubts about the future matched by that unmistakable Israeli resoluteness. “Life in Israel is far from enviable, yet there is a clear purpose in it,” Bellow writes. “People are fighting for the society they have created, and for life and honor.”

If Bellow’s experience of Israel feels familiar, it’s a reminder that while much has happened in the intervening 50 years, little has changed. Threats from Egypt, Syria, and their proxies may no longer keep Israeli generals awake at night. Threats from Iran, Turkey, and their proxies do. The social tensions and splits that Bellow saw then—between the religious and secular, Israelis and Palestinians, critics of the occupation and defenders of it—remain more or less unchanged. Unchanged, too, is the volcanic hostility Israel arouses from its critics, so completely disproportionate to its place in the world or, even on the most invidious reading of its actions, the comparative scale of its alleged crimes.

Seth Mandel: Anti-Semites Waste So Much of Our Time

You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.

Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.

I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.

Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”

But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.

That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.

It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.

Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.

It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.

And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.

Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.

I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.

Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”

But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.

That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.

It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.

Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.

It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.

And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury says Israel is ‘the land that God promised’

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has said that Israel is “the land that God promised, and we must hold on to that”.

Speaking to a mostly Jewish audience at an event in Westminster, he said: “I think that the pattern of the history of God's people is that the nature of the land [of Israel] is embedded in who they are, and if we lose sight of that truth, we lose sight of why the situation there now is so difficult.”

The speech was for an event organised by Repairing the Breach, a group which works to “build healing relationships” between the UK and Jewish people who suffered under the British Mandate, especially in the post-Holocaust.

Addressing the current situation in the region, he said: “I'm not commenting on what's going on at the moment.

“It doesn't mean everything else is fine, you can do anything – but it does mean that place and promise, journey and return, are utterly and deeply embedded in the story of Israel, and we have to listen to that truth, and recognise that we must live in that truth.”

Guests heard from speakers who as small children had boarded the Exodus, a ship which carried more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors towards then-Mandate Palestine in 1947, and which was attacked and seized by the British Royal Navy, with passengers forcibly removed and sent back to Europe.

Others spoke about their relatives’ role in the Bricha movement, the underground network that helped Jewish refugees escape post-war Europe and make their way towards the land which would soon become the state of Israel.

“There are no reflections that are adequate in the face of those stories,” Welby said.

“Listen to the truth as to what the British did. Listen to how we kept people from going to the land which they were intending to make sure was the one place of safety in the world, and how we stopped that.

“It’s very easy for institutions to do the wrong thing because the rules say X or Y, or because we've been given orders to do it.

"But the lesson for me and the reflection I hear is that we must act according to what is right, to love justice and do mercy and walk humbly with our God.

“Where we have gone wrong, as the British nation, in our recent history and in our further history, it is a cause for repentance and sorrow and acknowledgement.”

Welby, who served as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury between 2013 and 2025, also spoke positively about the “people of Israel”, and of his reaction on encountering the opposite sentiment.

“One cannot look at the history of the people of Israel in any place without realising that wherever they are, they bring blessing,” he said.

The media have spent the past several days investigating new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia's legal credentials. She admitted that she failed the California bar exam, even though she has repeatedly called herself a lawyer.

This is legitimate news. Not because a White House press secretary needs a law license, but because someone in a position of public trust should not misrepresent her credentials.

But there is another prominent public figure with a remarkably similar problem: Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian territories.

In her 2021 application for the UN position, Albanese described herself as a "human rights lawyer by training and call." Her official UN biography still describes her as an "international lawyer."

Yet in a May 2025 interview with Vanity Fair Italia, Albanese admitted that she had never taken the examination required to practice law in Italy because she had never wanted to practice there.

UN Watch documented the discrepancy and called for an investigation. Albanese remains in her UN position.

The media is curiously unconcerned. The controversy has attracted nowhere near the attention devoted to Zacharia over the past two days.

Both women studied law. Neither needs a license to perform her current job. But there is a significant difference: Zacharia's job is communicating White House policy. Albanese's job involves interpreting international law, issuing legal conclusions and producing reports accusing Israel of some of the gravest crimes imaginable.

Surely the accuracy of Albanese's claimed legal credentials deserves at least as much scrutiny as Zacharia's.

If misleading the public about legal credentials is a scandal when someone works for Donald Trump, why isn't it a comparable scandal when someone makes international legal accusations against Israel under the authority of the United Nations?

To ask the question is to answer it.