The Chabad Rabbi Advocating a Jewish State in 1872

While looking at yet another stupid anti-Israel academic paper, I saw that the Romanian writer was upset over an anti-Romanian quote from a 19th century Jew who railed against Romanian persecution of Jews.  

When I checked out that quote, I saw that it came from an 1872 book by Rabbi Haim Zvi Sneersohn, a great grandson of the first Lubavitcher Rebbe and second cousin, three times removed from the most recent Lubavitcher Rebbe.

The book, "Palestine and Roumania, a description of the Holy Land, and the past and present state of Roumania, and the Roumanian Jews" is a collection of essays, letters and articles by Sneersohn advocating for the rights of Jews worldwide. He famously met with President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869 and asked him to replace the American consul to Jerusalem. (The consul was indeed replaced but not because of the rabbi.)

But perhaps more remarkable is that the book also calls for a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, 24 years before Herzl. 

Rabbi Sneersohn writes that while some Jews wait for the Messiah to arrive and miraculously re-establish a Jewish kingdom, and he awaits the Messiah with no less eagerness, he suggests that a more practical solution be promoted for Jews in Palestine in the meanwhile. Addressing the Alliance Israelite of Paris to help foster unity among Jews, he uses strikingly Zionist-style arguments for his proposed Jewish commonwealth in Palestine:

Take up at once the great cause of establishing a Jewish independent commonwealth in the land of our forefathers. Hoist up the flag of Jehudah on Mount Zion, and return the scattered sheep of Jacob to their rightful pasture....

If such a political Jewish existence is once established all the misfortunes of our race throughout the world will cease. Russia and Roumania will have to honor the Jewish flag, and our famishing brethren of all parts of the world will flock together to their land to cultivate the soil and to live in prosperity under their own vine and figtree...

The time has arrived when Jerusalem shall awake from her ashes and the mount of Zion shall become once more, and forever, the centre of our glory. We do not want now to renew the institution's sacrifices, or to waste our time in casuistic controversies about an anointed high-priest. These things remain mysteries to be solved by the revealtion of the Lord. Our duty is to help ourselves in the way we best can and leave the other things to the will of the Lord our God, in whose power we trust and rely.

Do not object to my plan because some of our brethren believe that the restoration of our .glory ought to be established in a different manner. I am certainly not one of those who have no faith in the prophecies of our Bible, or who reject the wisdom of our wise. But for the present state of things I do believe (and hope that every right-minded brother will coincide with me) that it is better for us to learn how to handle the spear than to waste our time in mourning over our vanished glory. It is better that we study the science of politics, than to waste our brains with the sharp casuistic dialogues concerning sacrifices and feast-offerings. It is better for us to unite in one council and devise means of bringing new life into the dried bones of Israel than to make synods for the purpose of establishing new ceremonies and abolishing old ones in our synagogues. It is better that we should have to sing songs of victory in the streets of Jerusalem, than to hear strangers sing their songs in the place of our sanctuary. It is better for Israel to dwell in their own land, work their own soil and have their wants satisfied by the blessings of God, than to go astray in the world like birds that have not their nests. And who will tell me that we have not the means of establishing a government of our own ?

Sneersohn is not the first rabbi to advocate a political return to Zion. Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai (1857) suggested a Jewish territory governed as an Ottoman tributary state. Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1862) was more practical, urging Jewish immigration, land purchases, agriculture, settlement organizations, and security arrangements. But Sneersohn, who was influenced by Kalischer and others, seems to have had a more expansive vision in advocating a truly independent Zion, with a Jewish flag, international recognition, and becoming a new political power in the Middle East. 

Unfortunately, Sneersohn was spurned by the religious community in Israel, who treated him as a heretic and even physically assaulted him when he moved to Tiberias, almost killing him. 

I don't see any evidence that Herzl was influenced by Sneersohn, who died in 1884, But Herzl's vision was in many ways very similar to Sneersohn's.

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10/12 Links Pt2: Brendan O'Neill: The bourgeois war of annihilation against Israel; Andrew Roberts: Why the West Is Losing the Fight Against Antisemitism; Extra hearings for Royal Commission into Bondi terror attack

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The bourgeois war of annihilation against Israel

If Zohran Mamdani had a functioning moral compass, Wednesday would have been the wake-up call of this life. There he was in Union Square being heckled by a feral mob. Their faces hardened into snarls of hatred, they barked ‘Shame on you!’ at the New York mayor. And they were radical leftists, the kind of people who normally gush over Mamdani’s reactionary Third Worldist guff. What sin had he committed to irk his erstwhile fawners? He commemorated Jewish suffering.

That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. He attended an Israelis for Peace vigil on the third anniversary of the 7 October pogrom to pay tribute to the men, women and children slaughtered by Hamas. For that he was damned as a stooge of a genocidal regime. ‘Zohran you can’t hide / We charge you with genocide!’, howled the mob. Some chased him, screaming: ‘Traitor!’ To a Jew hater, sympathy for Jews is high treason.

There’s no denying it now: the Hamasniks of the Islamo-left enjoy Jewish suffering. They crave it. Indeed, some of Mamdani’s scolds waved the Hamas flag and hollered, ‘We support Hamas’. They were mad at the mayor because he had the temerity to look sad about the slaughter of Jews. To these keffiyeh Nazis, when Hamas kills Jews it’s ‘resistance’, and when Jews fight back it’s ‘genocide’. They call themselves anti-fascists yet hail from the same violent, vomitous gutter as the mobs of Kristallnacht.

And yet, even the mockery of Jews at a commemoration for dead Jews is unlikely to wake Mamdani to the horrors of the Gaza cult. Indeed, that mob in Union Square was a monster of his own making. He has made anti-Israel hate respectable in New York City. He refuses to call Hamas terrorists. His own statement on the third anniversary of 7 October spent a few poxy lines condemning Hamas’s ‘crimes’ before raging at length against Israel’s ‘devastating, ongoing genocide’. He had no right to look shook when the keffiyeh fash turned a commemoration of the slaughter of Jews into a Two Minutes Hate against the Jewish nation – he did it first.

For the rest of us, though, it’s time to get real. That crowds feel confident to gloat over the mass murder of Jews is the clearest sign you could ask that a spiritual sickness ails the West. And it’s not just NYC. Across the West last Wednesday, there were orgies of ecstasy over the butchery carried out by Hamas three years ago. In Amsterdam a mob marched with a banner saying ‘We support Hamas’. They screamed ‘Long live 7 October’. In Edinburgh, they marched behind a banner saying ‘Glory to our martyrs’. The martyrs they were referring to were the Islamofascists who invaded Israel to rape and annihilate Jews.

In London, keffiyeh-adorned lowlifes gathered on 7 October to fume against the Jewish nation. Some made an inverted triangle with their fingers – a sly expression of support for the murderous violence of Hamas. In Italy, a mob celebrated 7 October as ‘one of the most significant [acts] of Palestinian Resistance’. Across the West there were scores of anti-Israel gatherings on the day Israelis mourned the rape and destruction of more than a thousand of their citizens. There’s an all-out effort to redefine the day that Hamas unleashed genocidal violence on the Jews of the Holy Land as the day ‘Israel’s genocide’ started. The old Nazis stole Jews’ property – the new ones steal their days of commemoration.

El-Sayed in the Harsh Light By Abe Greenwald

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Then more testiness. Asked by NewsNation’s Leland Vittert last week whether he believed Israel or Iran was a bigger threat to the U.S., El-Sayed responded that it was a “dumb question.” Suddenly realizing it was a bad moment, he hastily offered to shake Vittert’s hand.

The next night, El-Sayed debated Mike Rogers and won on style (which wasn’t hard). But Rogers managed, finally, to move El-Sayed’s familial ties to terrorism somewhere near the center of the race. So yesterday, on Meet the Press, Kristen Welker asked him whether he or his family had any connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. He said no, twice.

Which means twice he lied. And the Washington Free Beacon has the receipts: El-Sayed’s half-sister has bragged on social media that her family (meaning his family) “has long been” involved in the Muslim Brotherhood, and some relatives have even been jailed for their involvement. In another post, she wrote, “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”

If there’s a brilliant way for him to get out in front of this situation, I don’t know what it is.

It would be too dramatic to call any of this a crisis for El-Sayed at the moment, but he’s just not showing anything like clear frontrunner momentum. We shouldn’t make too much of polls in such a tight race, but they’re not beside the point either. In the RealClearPolitics polling average, El-Sayed’s largest lead over Mike Rogers was 3.6 points. That was on October 3, and that gap has steadily been shrinking since. It’s now at 2.7, well within the margin of error.

As Kamala Harris learned, once the mask comes off, you might as well throw it out. Everyone knows who’s underneath. El-Sayed has three more weeks of the spotlight and nowhere to hide.

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10/12 Links Pt1: Herzog calls out Nobel Peace Price winner Pillay; Teen killed, 24 injured by unexploded Hezbollah munition; Israel has two years left to act. After that, it will be too late

From Ian:

Amit Segal: Israel has two years left to act. After that, it will be too late

On Jan. 20, 2029, in the early evening, a new occupant will sit down in the Oval Office at the White House. In front of the cameras, following the tradition of the last decade, he’ll sign a long string of executive orders that will instantly and sharply alter the course of the great American aircraft carrier. If he’s a Democrat, and the odds of that now stand at 50% at least, among the stack of papers his aides hand him will likely be recognition of a Palestinian state, a ban on importing goods from the settlements, sanctions on a string of right-wing Israeli politicians and more still to come.

It’s remarkable how little connection there is between the shabby, substance-free Israeli election campaign that’s been running here these past months and the real issue of the next term: the head-on collision approaching between Israel and the world over the Palestinian question.

This is the diabolical legacy of the tormentor Yahya Sinwar, the senior Hamas leader who, in dying, bequeathed the return of this issue to the center of the international table at the exact moment Israel has run out of supporters for establishing a hostile Islamist terror state next to the central city of Kfar Saba, given the bitter experience of Kfar Aza.

The only one who has proposed anything along these lines is Avigdor Liberman. His plan to bring Jordanian forces into the territories of Judea and Samaria is, in my view, a bitter mistake and a terrible error, but at least he understands that Israel has to seize the initiative rather than keep sailing calmly toward the iceberg. Gadi Eisenkot swings back and forth between visiting Gush Etzion and reversing Bezalel Smotrich’s moves in the West Bank; the coalition’s answer is to stick with the current course—another dunam, another goat—in the hope that the world will get used to it.

“This isn’t a foregone conclusion,” a source who knows a thing or two about U.S.-Israel relations tells me. “Even a hostile Democratic administration won’t rush to drop the automatic veto at the Security Council or recognize a state if we’re on a stable, positive track.”

He, for instance, laments the scrapping of the annexation clause in Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” whose absence has let settlement efforts sprawl across the whole territory instead of gaining legitimacy for applying sovereignty.

But looking ahead, he says, the real story is Gaza. That’s where everything started, and that’s where everything will be decided. The Trump plan that ended the war is a significant achievement worth holding onto because it’s the first one that attempts to decouple the territory between the Jordan and the sea from the Oslo framework.

Judea and Samaria and Gaza are no longer linked; a different governing arrangement is replacing the Palestinian Authority; the 1967 lines are being swapped out for an Israeli presence in the Strip; and above all, the United Nations is being pushed aside in favor of the Board of Peace. A Gaza that is rehabilitated, demilitarized, run by neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas could be exactly what stops the world from trying the same mistake it made in Judea and Samaria in the 1990s, hoping for a different result this time.

The first clause in the Trump plan includes something Oslo and its offshoots never did: deradicalization. Israel will always have that stick to wave against any rollback, and the world can’t object to it.

The problem is that everything is stuck.

The Americans are frustrated to the point of alarm with how Israel is conducting itself in the Strip, but the truth is they couldn’t have picked a worse moment to launch their plan: at the start of an election year. Two months passed before all the hostages’ bodies were returned, then came “Operation Roaring Lion” in Iran, and by then, the campaign at home was already heating up.

A senior Israeli official drummed it into Kushner’s ears: If you want the plan to die immediately, the surest way is to push for it right now. The right will kill it, and Netanyahu will have no choice. And the opposition? the Americans asked. They’ll make sure it’s dead too, he told them. Netanyahu, after all, is being attacked these days almost entirely for being too dovish, not too hawkish.

Amit Segal: Hamas: The Victim of Genocide

It’s Monday, October 12, and it took a Holocaust scholar six days after October 7 to accuse Israel of genocide in print, and South Africa less than three months to take the charge to the International Court of Justice. The Gaza Ministry of Health beat both to the punch: its count began with the first Hamas gunman to fall in southern Israel.

So far, researcher Salo Aizenberg has identified by name 364 Hamas attackers killed on October 7. Eighty percent of them appear on the Health Ministry’s list, counted among the victims of the “genocide.”

This not-so-subtle sleight of hand has been there for anyone to see for years. Of the 692 Gazans the ministry lists as dying on October 7, 2023, 646, or 93 percent, were men of fighting age. Most of the children recorded that day were boys aged 14 to 17.

More recently, under the October 2025 ceasefire, Israel returned roughly 400 Palestinian bodies to Gaza. To help families identify them, the Health Ministry published photos of the bodies along with the names of those already identified. Of 396 bodies listed, 91 have been named.

All 91 are on the ministry’s casualty list. All are men between 18 and 60. Sixty-three of them, 69 percent, are listed as having died on October 7, 2023, the day they crossed into Israel. Only three are listed as dying at any point between mid-November 2023 and the ceasefire, nearly two years of war. Twelve are recorded as dying after the ceasefire began, which for bodies dead this long most likely means no one knew the date and logged the day they came home. At least 23 have already been claimed as “martyrs” by Hamas’ Qassam Brigades or Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades.

All of them, regardless, made it into the database as victims of a supposed genocide.

But that’s not all. Roughly a third of the 91 were on the list before their bodies came back, and 26 were still on the last list published before the ceasefire. A Gazan family can report a presumed death with no body and no location, and the ministry will count it. That may be understandable for grieving families. It is not how you build a casualty count anyone should cite as evidence of genocide.

Add this to the mounting blows against the genocide accusation, and the charge is faltering. On Friday, the Nobel Committee tried to shore it up by awarding its Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, the South African jurist whose U.N. commission accused Israel of genocide last year. The infinitesimal courage it took to condemn Israel from a U.N. commission does not earn her a place beside laureates like Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel and Yitzhak Rabin, though she would have a comfortable seat beside Yasser Arafat.

The committee honored her for her efforts to promote “peace and international law.” Yet few things have done less to advance peace and international law than the genocide libel. The accusation did nothing to hasten the end of the war or the suffering in Gaza. If anything, it prolonged both by generating American pressure that could not stop Israel, only delay it. As for international law, the genocide campaign degrades law’s most basic principle: impartiality. In the trial of international law, its blatant anti-Israel bias is Exhibit A.

If President Donald Trump would kindly return Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s medal and take Pillay’s instead, everything would be where it belongs.

“Israel has shifted from a concept of containment to a concept of decisive victory”

Three years after the October 7 disaster, the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF) held its “From Disaster to Victory” security conference yesterday, at which seven fundamental insights concerning national security were presented.

Senior figures from the defense establishment, defense industries, local government, and the public sphere are participating in the conference, which centers on the changes in Israel’s security doctrine since October 7 and the challenges that will accompany Israel in the coming years. The various discussions addressed military and technological strength, Israel’s diplomatic standing, national resilience, internal security, the threat of delegitimization, and the battle for our home.

Participants in the conference included Prof. Yuval Steinitz, chairman of Rafael; India’s Ambassador to Israel, Jitender Pal Singh; Brig. Gen. (Res.) Erez Winner, chairman of IDSF; Col. (Res.) Dr. Ronen Itzik, the IDSF CEO; Lt. Col. (Res.) Itamar Eitam; Col. (Res.) Ilan Dickstein; Gabi Naaman, head of the Shlomi Local Council; entrepreneur and philanthropist Yossi Hollander; and Dov Oster, father of the late Capt. Eitan Oster.

Prof. Steinitz addressed Israel’s military and technological strength: “Within 36 hours, the Air Force achieved decisive air superiority over Iran, even though our closest partners in the world did not believe we would succeed in achieving this for many months. This achievement was made possible, among other things, thanks to Rafael’s unique munitions, some of which are still classified.”

*A profound shift in the concept*
India’s Ambassador to Israel, Jitender Pal Singh, paid tribute to the victims of the October 7 terrorist attack and expressed solidarity with the affected families.

He reiterated India’s steadfast commitment to combating terrorism.

IDSF chairman Brig. Gen. (Res.) Erez Winner said in his closing address at the conference: “We are currently in a state of victory. We will not be - we are winning today. Israel has shifted from a concept of containment to a concept of decisive victory, from an enemy firing and us responding to a situation in which we act to prevent it from building the threat in the first place. Today, when people discuss a strike in Tehran, they no longer ask how and why - they ask when. This is a profound shift in Israel’s security doctrine.”

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Book review: "Excuse Me, Is This Yours?" by Tuvia Tenenbom

A few weeks ago I wrote on my Substack about how the world seems to prefer to admire the emperor's new clothes than admit that the child who speaks the truth is right.

No one does as good a job at acting the child, asking simple questions, than Tuvia Tenenbom.

I've reviewed Tenenbom's books before. His methodology is deceptively simple: go to major hotspots that people are talking about, where experts opine on what is going on on national news shows, and see the truth for himself. Live among the people being discussed, ask them simple questions, describe their situations, and write about it. He also manages to get interviews with politicians and other leaders and asks them similar questions about their positions.

What he discovers rarely matches what the media says.

His latest book, "Excuse Me, Is This Yours?" has him living for a year in what he calls Biblical Israel:  Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, mostly among the Jews there. Yes, he goes himself to see the Hilltop Youth, the settler leaders, ordinary citizens, the Samaritan community, and to a smaller extent Palestinians. 

The book is easily twice the size of his previous books, at over 470 pages. But he covers a lot of ground.

Most of his adventures are concentrated in Area C, which makes sense because that is the only area Jews are allowed to live in.  And for much of the book, Tenenbom describes a giant geographical game of Go. Jews and Palestinians each try to grab land to surround their opponents land and stop them from expanding in any direction. 

Starting in 2009, the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad came up with a plan to work together with the Europeans to build as much as possible on Area C lands. Tenenbom sees huge, beautiful Palestinian houses, practically palaces, dotting the entire Area C, but he never sees any residents. We had seen how the EU builds schools and infrastructure, illegally, in Area C, but the PA apparently manages to convince wealthy Palestinians to build these houses, without permits, in strategic areas. So together with the Europeans they manage to encircle Jewish settlements.

The Jews, led by the hilltop youth and other ideological settlers, cannot build as easily as the Palestinians, because they have laws they still have to live under. Their strategy is to bring caravans on top of unclaimed hills, declare that a farm, and graze land with their cattle, and then the adventurous move on, building "farms" from hill to hill, and the grazed lands can then be claimed by them, supposedly, and in turn thwart Palestinian building in areas that their cattle go. This is all based on old Ottoman land codes that allow people, under some circumstances, to claim state lands after being cultivated or lived in for ten years.

So there is a strange situation where Palestinians still live in "refugee camps" under PA rule while mansions are left apparently empty. But plenty of Palestinians have moved into Area C, in recent decades. All part of their plan to expand into enemy areas.

You know, what the world accuses Israel alone of doing.

Tenenbom grew up a haredi in Israel, then became a religious Zionist, and then became non-religious himself. He is respectful to the religious Jews, as he is to everyone,  but he clearly doesn't agree with their beliefs.

There is plenty here that Tenenbom reports that are not in any of the thousands of news articles about the "settlers." Like the constant terror attacks against Jews and how many of them have lost relatives to war. He also notes that there are many who follow Chabad and many who follow the very late Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

There were also things I was not aware of. While the religious settlers say they want the entire land to belong to Israel, whenever there is a chance for a vote in Knesset to annex part or all of the land, they seem to get skittish. They worry about the American reaction to annexation. They love symbolic votes but not anything with teeth. And this includes the biggest monsters in Western media, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. 

Another fact that amazed me was that it appears that a huge percentage of religious Zionists who grow up in the territories end up non-religious, perhaps 40%. 

Speaking of secular Jews, there are plenty of them in the territories, perhaps 30% of the settlers, like the ones who live in the Jordan Valley, Shaked, and elsewhere. They are more hard core ideological in some ways than the payot and tzitzit-wearing religious settlers. Unlike them, they really want to see the land annexed to Israel. 

Tenenbom being who he is finds a Palestinian who wishes that Israel would annex the entire West Bank as well. He despises the PA and Hamas wants to become an Israeli.

This is part of the whiplash one experiences when reading a Tuvia Tenenbom book. Nothing at all is as reported in the media, even the Israeli or religious settler media. And few people are immune from looking foolish trying to answer Tenenbom's deceptively childish questions.

In the second half of the book Tenenbom manages to hook up with s left-wing Israeli Jew, Robby,  who willingly crosses the line into Area A, so Tuvia manages to get to the Arab areas he wanted to see. For example, the Palestinian Museum, a beautiful piece of architecture, seems to have no exhibits about anything outside the Gaza war. 

He visits Rawabi, the  planned Palestinian city, filled with beautiful buildings and almost no people. And then they visit Balata, a camp, where the graffiti is filled with images of Palestinian "martyrs" killed while trying to kill Jews and living Palestinians who suspect that they are Jewish and do not like it one bit. Robby gets nervous, and more nervous, and finally begs to leave Balata. When Tuvia asks why he got so upset  with the Palestinians he loves so much, Robby answered, "I don't love them. Fuck all Palestinians. What I care about is that we, Jews, not mistreat them."  

That's what the book is filled with. Idealistic people whose ideals often do not quite reach how they present themselves, from all political and religious stripes.

I cannot say whether the people Tenenbom interviews are representative; he obviously gravitates towards the nutty. But surveys do not tell the whole story either. Israelis, and perhaps even Palestinian Arabs, don't all fit in neat boxes and the boxes that Western media place them in are invariably oversimplifications. Tenenbom notes that the Jews of Area C were reluctant to open up to him simply because they had been treated badly by the media for so long, yet no journalist or writer - none - had ever decided to live with them for more than a day or two, let alone many months. 

And this is why this book is so valuable. Even with the craziness, one fact shines through: most of the so-called settlers have a deep love of the land, a connection that goes back to Abraham, and a love that Tenenbom seems to share. 

It is too bad that so many Jews cannot even fathom such an emotion.

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10/11 Links: Israel Is Clear-Eyed, Not Traumatized by Oct. 7; The lone wolf illusion: Alone in action, not in ideology; 2,000-year-old Hasmonean aqueduct section uncovered in Jerusalem

From Ian:

Israel Is Clear-Eyed, Not Traumatized by Oct. 7

The third anniversary of Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel was filled with agonizing and loving remembrances of the many civilians slain by Hamas in their bedrooms and the soldiers killed combating the jihadist Palestinian stormtroopers ever since. But through it all, the overwhelming sentiment I heard was patriotism, resilience, and defiance, not defeat.

Much of the media coverage described Israel as traumatized by the massacre and exhausted by three years of war. This infuriates me because it is an erroneous, even nefarious, reading of the Israeli mood. It is a wicked and insulting take on Israel's national psyche. The reality is that Israelis are neither crushed nor dispirited. Instead, they are appropriately angry and motivated to win against all enemies.

All Israelis across the political spectrum are proud of the brave reservists who threw themselves into battle against Hamas, and the selfless volunteers who mobilized to strengthen their families, tend to the wounded, orphaned, and dispossessed, till the fields, and manage the home front. No one in this noble cohort is drained, defeated, or paralyzed by trauma.

On the global front, Israelis are furious at the hostility and hypocrisy of the Western world, which has largely turned its back on Israel. Classic antisemitic stereotypes have saturated Western media. The deranged demonization of Jews has once again been renamed as morality itself.

Israelis are angry at the politically malign accounts of their just, successful wars against Iran and its Hamas and Hizbullah proxy armies; at the raw antisemitism becoming mainstream discourse; and at the corrosive ideologies such as radical Islam that seek to undermine Western societies while destroying Israel. Israelis will resist all this. Israel intends to hunt down its enemies, not be hounded by them or hemmed in by fickle allies.

One in five Israelis ‘still struggling to function’ since Oct. 7 – new study

One in five Israelis continues to report severe impairment in daily functioning due to mental health since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, according to a study released Sunday, with women particularly affected.

The study was conducted by the National Mental Health Barometer, an ongoing project sponsored by Clalit Health Services’ Research Institute, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute in Jerusalem.

The findings, based on a nationally representative sample of Israel’s population and updated through May 2026, show that while most of the population is recovering, a significant number of people continue to experience psychological distress.

Women reported higher levels of mental health-related functional impairment than men, three years after Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel, killed 1,200 people, and kidnapped 251 people into Gaza.

In the three years since, Israel has also been in a constant state of war, with combat in Gaza and Lebanon seeing thousands of Israelis evacuated from their homes near the borders. There have also been two rounds of fighting with Iran,, which targeted most of the country with missiles.

“The findings show that alongside a steady increase in the proportion of people receiving mental health treatment, psychological distress is becoming chronic for a significant part of the population and is accompanied by deep functional impairment,” Prof. Ran Balicer, deputy director general and head of the innovation division at Clalit Health Services, said in a statement.

Unprecedented level of exposure
The study found an extraordinary level of exposure to significant trauma according to international standards.

Approximately 15% of all respondents described themselves as being at the highest level of personal exposure, meaning they were personally present at the events of October 7, 2023, or closely knew someone who was injured or killed during the subsequent fighting.

The researchers describe this as a dramatic and unprecedented level of exposure compared with other national trauma events worldwide. In comparison, following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, approximately 4% of the population experienced direct exposure.

“The data once again demonstrate just how unprecedented October 7 was globally in terms of the scale of the population’s exposure to trauma, both directly and indirectly through exposure to disturbing videos and media content,” Balicer said. “This helps explain the findings regarding the intensity of the national trauma and its lasting effects.”

How Israel Views Gaza, One Year after the Ceasefire

The Trump plan for Gaza, launched last year, explicitly laid out Israel's goals: releasing all the hostages (which was implemented), disarming Hamas, removing it from power, and ensuring that Gaza could no longer be used as a platform for threatening Israel.

The plan offered a mostly political path to realizing these elusive goals, without enforcement on the ground. Yet Israel does not believe this approach will work with a violent Islamist actor like Hamas. It has therefore kept constant physical pressure on Hamas, conditioning any reconstruction on the group's disarmament.

Israel has continuously targeted senior terrorists and military infrastructure in the area under Hamas control, with quiet American consent, disrupting Hamas efforts to reassert governance and recover some of its military capabilities.

For Israel, disarming Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza is the most important task. Israel insists that demilitarization be inclusive, comprehensive, verifiable, and permanent. Israel insists that until a full, verifiable disarmament process is completed, the IDF will conduct no further redeployments.

Despite the current environment of skepticism, Hamas has been significantly weakened militarily, financially, and politically. According to recent polls, Palestinian public support for the group and the "armed struggle" it represents has declined significantly.

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If Jews are really Khazars, why do Islamic prophecies about Jews apply to them?

Many Palestinians insist that today's Jews, especially Ashkenazim, are not descended from the biblical Israelites at all. They are supposedly Khazars, descendants of medieval converts to Judaism with no ancestral connection to the Land of Israel. This theory, which is contradicted by genetic evidence, is used to deny Jewish historical rights to Israel.

Yet Islamists routinely invoke Quranic descriptions of the Children of Israel and Islamic prophecies about Jews to condemn modern Israelis. 

If today's Jews are not really descended from the ancient Israelites, why should any of those religious texts apply to them?

I finally found a writer who actually addresses this contradiction. Or, more precisely, he handwaves his way around it. 

Dr. Omar Al-Jayousi is a member of the Palestine Scholars Association. He is also a regular contributor to Al Jazeera. But his latest article was published in Al Sabeel, a Jordanian site associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. 

In that article, after confidently asserting that modern Jews are descended from Khazars and Europeans rather than the biblical Israelites, al-Jayousi asks how Islamic prophecies about future confrontations can apply to them.

His answer is that the conflict isn't about genes or ancestry but ideology and behavior. Modern Zionists, he argues, have adopted the same mentality, superiority complex and historical claims as the ancient Israelites condemned in Islamic scripture.

He writes:

"The present group is the true ideological and philosophical continuation of everything against which religion warned."

In other words, modern Jews don't have to be descended from the ancient Israelites. They merely have to act like them.

A little clever, but theological sleight of hand.

Consider the notorious hadith in Sahih Muslim 2922, which predicts that Muslims will fight Jews in the end times, with rocks and trees calling out that Jews are hiding behind them and should be killed. It explicitly says Jews, not Zionists, colonialists or people who supposedly behave like ancient Israelites. Is a Muslim supposed to decide who fulfills the prophecy based on political ideology? Will the rocks and trees make that decision?  Nothing in the text suggests that.

The Quran is even more explicit about the identity of the Children of Israel. Quran 2:47 addresses them as recipients of God's favors. Quran 2:49 recalls their deliverance from Pharaoh, while Quran 2:61 recounts their subsequent disobedience. These verses concern a specific historical people, identified through their ancestry and shared history. They don't describe an ideology that unrelated people can inherit by behaving badly.

Al-Jayousi writes that when Islamic texts describe end-times confrontations, they are not concerned with DNA but with the ideology and behavior of the enemy. That enemy, he says, is defined by aggression, occupation and desecration of holy sites. The modern Zionists are therefore the ideological successors of the ancient Israelites, even if they are supposedly unrelated by blood.

But what exactly does this mean for the notorious hadith about rocks and trees? That prophecy doesn't describe a war against colonialism or occupation. It describes Muslims killing Jews, with rocks and trees revealing where Jews are hiding so they can be killed. There is no qualification about whether those Jews are Zionists, soldiers, settlers or innocent civilians. The language is explicitly about killing Jews as Jews.

If al-Jayousi insists that the prophecy is really about ideology rather than Jewish identity, does that mean the predicted killing also applies to Christian Zionists? He devotes an entire section to Christian Zionism, portraying it as the driving force behind Western support for Israel. What about American politicians who support Israel, or anyone else who endorses the supposedly colonialist project? Are they also the Jews whom the rocks and trees will identify? If not, why not?

He never answers these questions. Instead, he transforms a genocidal prophecy describing the mass killing of Jewish men, women and children into a struggle for human rights. He invokes international law, justice, liberation and the protection of holy sites, as though these concepts explain the hadith's indiscriminate language. But they don't. Human rights law protects individuals regardless of their religion or ideology. It doesn't authorize killing people because they belong to a group supposedly destined for defeat.

Al-Jayousi wants the religious authority of an ancient prophecy, the political appeal of anti-colonialism and the moral legitimacy of human rights, all at once. Yet he never explains how a prophecy about killing Jews becomes a universal struggle for justice.

And after declaring that ancestry is irrelevant, he concludes by celebrating how the alleged Khazar origins of modern Jews undermine their historical claims. Genealogy is decisive when denying Jewish rights, irrelevant when assigning Jewish guilt, and ideology can substitute for ancestry whenever the argument requires it.

The problem isn't merely that his definitions keep changing. It is that he uses those shifting definitions to make an explicitly genocidal prophecy to murder all Jews sound like a modern human-rights campaign.

Apparently, the only thing that must remain consistent is the hate.

---

 

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10/10 Links: Bret Stephens: Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity; The Nobel Peace Prize is now totally discredited; Why Dolly Parton sang a song about Daniel Pearl

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.

It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.

It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.

Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism plan cannot survive his October 7 statement

Mamadani right that the suffering did not begin on October 7, but the history undercuts his antisemitic fable. Arab mobs murdered Jews in Jerusalem in 1920, Jaffa in 1921, and Hebron in 1929, where in a single morning they slaughtered 67 Jews after the circle around Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and the era’s dominant Palestinian Arab leader, spread the lie that Jews were plotting against al-Aqsa. There was no Jewish state then, and no “occupation” to blame.

Husseini’s leadership rejected a Palestinian Arab state in 1937, 1939, and 1947. He spent World War II in Berlin as Adolf Hitler’s honored guest, urging Arabs over Nazi radio to kill Jews wherever they found them. His successors were offered a Palestinian Arab state in 2000, 2001, and 2008 and refused each time. In 2005 Israel pulled every soldier and civilian out of Gaza; Hamas answered with terror, rockets, a violent takeover and, eventually, October 7. Hamas’s charter declares the land from the river to the sea an Islamic trust no one may surrender and quotes a hadith about Muslims killing Jews. Ninety-four years after Hebron, Hamas named its invasion and massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood.” From the mufti to Hamas, the throughline is a violent, fascist Islamist rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land.

None of this is hidden. The mayor left it out on purpose.

The genocide-libel itself collapses against the record. Genocidal regimes do not warn civilians to evacuate, pause fighting to vaccinate children against polio, or truck food to the people they are supposedly exterminating. In every genocide on record, the killers controlled when the killing stopped. In Gaza, Hamas could have ended the war any day by freeing the hostages and surrendering. Spreading that libel as mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel is reckless at best.

Anti-Jewish hate crimes rise in New York
The results are measurable. NYPD data show anti-Jewish hate crimes up about 8% in the first eight months of his tenure, with Jews targeted in more than half of all confirmed hate crimes. When the plan was announced, Israel’s consul general in New York, Ofir Akunis, warned that antisemitism would keep rising until the mayor recognized his own anti-Israel language as its main driver. Nine days later, the mayor delivered that same language to an audience of millions.

Most Jewish New Yorkers have no use for grant programs from a mayor who marks one of the worst days in Jewish history by calling the Jewish state a “genocidal apartheid regime funded by their taxes.” They have seen where that rhetoric leads: to their campuses, their synagogues, their streets.

Mamdani’s plan was written to show he takes antisemitism seriously. His October 7 statement showed it was written to give him cover for the hatred he keeps feeding.

Bill Maher mocks Mamdani for being ‘tone deaf’ criticizing Israel in Oct. 7 tribute

Mamdani’s reaction to the anniversary did not go over well with Maher, who harshly criticized the mayor.

“Mayor Mamdani, not all that sympathetic to this stuff, but he did make some nice remarks about it,” Maher said, referring to Mamdani’s statement.

“But then he pivoted right to, ‘but Israel made them do it,’” Maher said, offering his interpretation of the mayor’s remarks.

The comedian also mocked Mamdani’s past career as a rapper, during which he performed under the stage names “Young Cardamom” and “Mr. Cardamom.”

“You know, he used to be a rapper. His rap name was ‘Tone Deaf,’” Maher quipped.

Mamdani also faced criticism earlier this week after dining Wednesday at Ayat Hinds Hall, a Palestinian restaurant.

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10/09 Links Pt2: An Abusable Past; Mamdani spit on the graves of October 7 victims; Rabbi Soloveichik on "Fauda" and the Jewish Return to History

From Ian:

Allan Arkush: An Abusable Past

Anti-Zionism has been around almost as long as Zionism and has a respectable Jewish pedigree. When Zionists deny this and decry today’s Jewish anti-Zionists as self-hating Jews or even antisemites, those under attack can point, with some justification, to history. But usually they go further and return the insult. It is the Zionists, they say, who are tainted by antisemitism. It’s bad enough when such distortions are the stuff of sloganeering. It’s worse when they appear in books that educated people take seriously.

One such book is Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which The New York Times’s reviewer called a “terrific . . . authoritative history.”Despite her book’s subtitle, Crabapple is almost as interested in telling a story about the nefarious history of Zionism as she is about the noble history of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland. Another that has just appeared and that seems destined to get a lot of attention is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a book pervaded by hatred of Zionism. Both books depict Zionism as a Jewish form of racism, not only resembling Gentile racism but in cahoots with it. Both not only use history for political purposes, but abuse it.

Molly Crabapple never met her remarkable great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, but he opened a portal to an entrancing Jewish past of which she had known very little. A post-Impressionist painter of the lost world of the shtetl, he had been a Bundist activist before he came to America. Intrigued by his reference in one of his manuscripts to an Eastern European Jewish “underground,” Crabapple discovered the Bund (officially, the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), the Jewish socialist movement founded in 1897. It was a lost Jewish world that gave her something that she never got from the synagogue or Israel. Its heroes became her heroes, whose graves (some of which are located, due to the vicissitudes of history, in and around New York) she continues to visit.

The Bund, founded in the same year as the World Zionist Organization, was the product of Jewish Marxists, who promoted not emigration but revolution as the solution to Russia’s Jewish problem. But unlike the more famous Russian Jewish communists, such as Trotsky, the Bund leaders believed that the Jews had the right and the need to take part in the revolutionary movement not as mere proletarians but as a separate (nonterritorial) national group. The Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov called them seasick Zionists and tried to win them over to ideological orthodoxy.

In the eyes of the tsarist regime, the Bund was a subversive force that had to be uprooted. But it managed to survive government persecution while maintaining its independence as a distinct revolutionary movement, until the tsar fell. What the Bund couldn’t survive was the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in the Soviet Union. In independent Poland, however, between the world wars, the Bund had its heyday, and in its later resistance to the Nazis it made an unforgettable mark, before being all but completely extinguished.

The Bundists were, as Crabapple reminds us, admirable, often heroic, idealists. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s leading ideologue, was born into a family of opportunistic converts and raised as a Christian, “yet turned his back on a posh upbringing to devote his life to a small and persecuted people,” at great personal cost. Tiny Anna Lipshitz, whose older sister had been tortured to death by the police, was only twenty-two years old in 1905 but already the movement’s best orator. Dispatched to Odessa to inspire revolutionary activists there, she was nicknamed “the Fury” by local newspapers. One of the characters in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, identified by the script only as “a Bundist,” apparently represents her.

In the revolutionary year of 1917, the Bund fought for the preservation of the nascent Russian democracy but was helpless in the face of the Bolshevik onslaught in October, which one of its leaders, Henryk Erlich, described as a “monstrous calamity.” Erlich soon moved to Poland, where he became one of the leaders of the now legal Bund, which ran for elections to both the Polish Parliament (where it never won a seat), and within the country’s Jewish communities, where it sometimes did well. On the subpolitical level, the Bund set up economic cooperatives, day care centers, sanitariums, sports clubs, libraries, and schools. Crabapple writes: “In the words of Victor Gilinsky, son of Bundist leader Shloyme Gilinsky, “[t]he Bund was your union, your education and your church.”

But it also fought for you. One of the Bundists to whom Crabapple devotes the most attention was not a political leader or a social activist but Bernard Goldstein, a leader of its battle squads, which saw action first against the Jewish communists, the Bund’s bitter enemies in peacetime, and eventually, in wartime, against the Nazis. The communists were so enraged by Goldstein’s activities that they passed a death sentence on him. After one of them tried to assassinate him outside of his apartment, “Bernard shot back, wounding the communist, who left a trail of blood across the pavement. When the cops showed up, Bernard refused to reveal the identity of his attacker.” In the Warsaw Ghetto, after he was smuggled out (because he was too hard to conceal), Goldstein’s disciple Marek Edelman led the Bundist fighters. Both men miraculously survived the war. Goldstein despaired of a decent future for anyone in a communist Poland and moved to the Bronx, where he became “an honorary grandfather to his comrades’ children,” while Edelman become a cardiologist and eventually a leader of Solidarity in Poland.

Better the Devil You Can See By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
Which is why I like when my enemies come out of hiding and make themselves known. So two days ago, I found myself strangely satisfied by Zohran Mamdani’s October 7 denunciation of Israeli “genocide,” his statement of solidarity with its victims, and his dinner at an obsessively anti-Semitic Palestinian restaurant in New York.

Critics of Mamdani’s daylong stunt suggested that he “should have read the room,” released a statement of sympathy for victims of Hamas’s massacre, and just let the Jews grieve for one day. Or if he couldn’t do that, they offered, he should just have said nothing.

Why? Why despair that an anti-Semite chose not to hide his hatred? So we can go on playing pretend with evil people, helping them accrue more and more legitimacy until they can do large-scale harm?

Does every statement of anti-Jewish incitement put Jews at risk? Yes. But if our weapon of choice is urging our enemies not to say harmful things about us, the risk will become far worse.

Had Mamdani done what media critics suggested, he alone would have benefited from the con. Instead, his act of blatant anti-Semitism woke up a bunch of fence-sitting liberals (Jews and non-Jews alike) and sent them into our camp. I’ve spoken to some such people since, and it was the first time I heard “You were right” from any of them on any topic in ages.

I know exactly how those exchanges would have gone had Mamdani instead kept up the good-guy act. Liberal friends and family would have sent me screenshots of his pacifying mush along with digs about my unhinged position on him. I’d weigh the benefits of responding obnoxiously or trying to disarm with civility, knowing that either choice would only leave them in their ignorance. But Mamdani’s choice snapped them out of it for me. And while it’s tempting to punish such former Mamdani supporters for their blindness up till now, the truth is that we need them. So, I say, welcome to the land of the real and the side of the right.

Jonathan Tobin: A satire about Anne Frank explains woke antisemitism

A ‘secret’ ending
The producers of the play ask that critics not reveal the ending of the show so as to ensure that audiences fully register the “shock” of some of its denouement. But the secret ending of the play isn’t comparable to the last minutes of Agatha Christie’s “Witness For The Prosecution,” in which the true identity of the murderer and the eponymous witness is revealed. So, I don’t feel obligated to play by their rules.

What those who have lauded the play as “clever, gleefully provocative” or even “the most important new show around” aren’t telling you is what happens in the play’s final scenes.

Margot finally speaks, only to give an oration about the need to go to Palestine to displace and oppress its indigenous Arab population once the war ends. Anne then realizes that her family shouldn’t survive and betrays them herself, leading to their deaths. But then, after the bodies fall (they are shot on the spot rather than gassed or tortured and starved in the camps), Hitler turns up and, having shed his male identity and become a trans woman, he “cancels the Holocaust’ so the Jews don’t have to commit suicide to save humanity from the evils of Zionism.

Cue the applause, and the actors all turn up for a final chorus wearing t-shirts with woke slogans, including one reading “by any means necessary,” something that is embraced by those cheering for Hamas’s efforts to slaughter the contemporary living Jews that are not as popular as the dead Anne.

Sure, we’re not supposed to take any of this seriously except to embrace the notion that no one is 100% correct and that all causes are suspect. But the reaction of the audience to the mention of “Palestine” and the cheers that greeted Anne’s claim that the “seven million colonizers” currently committing crimes there are the result of the six million dead Jews told you all you need to know about the impact of this play at this moment.

Despite the hopes of some who lauded the play, and believed it to be a jab at the tweet that inspired it,the audience wasn’t acknowledging that Jews don’t have “white privilege.” Rather, they were nodding along at the false claim that Jews have no right to live in Israel. And this is because Jews are now wrongly viewed as “white” oppressors.

Contrary to its press clippings, “Slam Frank” is not an equal-opportunity offender. It may be poking fun at most things, but the one thing it is deadly serious about is denying the Jews their stories, as well as the right to mourn their dead with dignity and to live in freedom in their own country without being smeared as monsters and targeted for genocide.

Would they do this to another group?
Moreover, could anyone imagine someone putting on a play today in which black or Hispanic victims of racist crimes were portrayed as Jews or any identity other than their own? Would they deny them their culture and history and use them as stand-ins for more fashionable identities? Of course not.

Such a play, even if it claimed to be a satire, would be denounced as racist. Even the hit musical comedy “The Book of Mormon” by the creators of the cartoon satire “South Park,” to which “Slam Frank” has been compared, is kinder to its targets—the adherents of that faith—than Fox and Sinesky are to the objects of their scorn. But you can do this to Jews with impunity and still be applauded by liberal critics as having accomplished an act of creative genius.

This isn’t the first time the story of Anne Frank has been utilized to advance a non-Jewish agenda. The aforementioned play and movie adaptations of the Diary deliberately downplayed the Jewish elements of the story and sought to universalize Anne as a girl just like everyone else. That pleased Anne’s father, Otto, who had little use for Judaism or Jewish identity. It also drove writer Meyer Levin, who had worked to promote the book and wanted to write a more Jewish play, nearly out of his mind.

Yet, just like those adaptations of Anne’s story that came at a time when Jews were eager to fit in and be seen as the same as everyone else, “Slam Frank” speaks just as loudly to the current desire of many, including some Jews, to erase not just Israel but also Jewish peoplehood itself.

The answer to the question as to why antisemitism is flourishing in a way that it hasn’t since the Holocaust is that contemporary Western culture is willing to mock everything but not the lie that Jews, as both Hitler and woke ideologues alike have claimed, are “weaponizing antisemitism.”

While some Jews thought the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7 against Jews by a genocidal Islamo-fascist terror group and its supporters would generate sympathy for the victims, the opposite has occurred. The shedding of their blood in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t shame or deter antisemites; it excited them.

And though the movement to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state on the planet had been building toward this for several decades, the explosion of antisemitism shouldn’t have surprised anyone—since, for the chattering classes, the Jews remain a metaphor, rather than a people with rights.

A product of this moment in cultural history
A world in which “Slam Frank” is acclaimed as a work of comic genius is not only one in which nothing sacred to the Jews is granted even minimal respect. It’s one in which people, including New York theater audiences who think of themselves as enlightened liberals, can believe blood libels about Jews committing “genocide,” and that the war to eradicate the sole Jewish state and to commit another Holocaust against its people is a righteous one.

“Slam Frank” seems unlikely to have a long afterlife or hold the stage in the future, and not merely because it isn’t as clever as its admirers think it is. Rather, because it is a product of this particular moment in cultural history.

Since Oct. 7 three years ago, it has once again become permissible to strip Jews of their past and identity and to smear them as “colonizers” and oppressors. We can only hope that this episode passes quickly, ensuring that this travesty is relegated to the trash heap of theatrical history, where it belongs.

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10/09 Links Pt1: Natan Sharansky: Is the Whole World Wrong?; October 8: The war Israel still has not learned to fight; The Nobel Committee Just Made a Mockery of Its Peace Prize, and President Trump Called It Out

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky: Is the Whole World Wrong?

This morning the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who led the 2025 U.N. commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. This appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza.

As Jews around the world react with despair, I am reminded of an excellent article by Ahad Ha’am, written in 1892 and titled “Half Solace.” Observing the renewal of the ancient blood libel in his own time, the great cultural Zionist notes that “philosophers know that there is no lie and no evil that cannot obtain ‘general agreement’ if only the conditions of existence are suitable to it.” Unfortunately, however, “only philosophers know this, and in the eyes of the masses, even now there is no greater authority than ‘consensus.’”

It was a general consensus for hundreds of years that Jews killed Christian children to collect their blood for the Passover Seder. In Russia, for example, in the so-called Velizh affair of 1823, 43 Jews were arrested and interrogated over a period of 12 years on charges of killing a 3-year-old Russian boy. Many spent almost a decade in prison, and some died there. Of course, the accusation was a lie, and those who survived were eventually released without guilt. But what is particularly interesting about this episode is that even the Tsar Nicholas I, who personally signed their release, remarked in a postscript to his signature that he was not fully convinced these men were innocent, because there were so many similar Jewish crimes throughout history. How could all of these reports be wrong, he asked?

Or take another example, from a very intelligent Christian activist whom I met in a Soviet labor camp and who would become my best friend. He told me that while he knew Jews no longer used Christian blood, they must have done so a few hundred years earlier. Otherwise, how could such a widespread belief have come to be?

Ahad Ha’am concludes his essay with the same question. Is it really possible, he asks, that the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right? “It is possible,” he answers, “and the blood libel proves it.” It is therefore precisely here, he says, that Jews can find a useful lesson and some consolation. We can free ourselves from the power of false prejudices and find strength in the conviction of our own moral cause.

As I write, Israelis and Jews around the world are marking the genocidal campaign waged against us on Oct. 7, 2023, and mourning the thousands of innocent lives taken that day. A genocide, according to the legal definition, comprises acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This is exactly what the sadistic terrorists who rampaged our communities, raping, burning, torturing, and murdering everyone they could reach, intended to do that day.

Yet at this very moment, the masses are busy accusing us of genocide against our enemies. On university campuses and in the streets of capital cities, protesters used our day of somber remembrance to amplify the growing consensus that we are the ones committing unspeakable atrocities.

I’ve seen Naza and it’s a nasty piece of propaganda

The horrors of October 7, 2023, are almost impossible to comprehend. Behind the staggering scale of the Hamas massacres are individual stories of unimaginable cruelty and suffering. Stories that must not be forgotten.

Baby Kfir, for example. Or his brother Ariel. Or their mother, Shiri. The two red-haired Israeli boys were just nine months and four years old when terrorists from the Palestinian Hamas abducted them to Gaza. Videos of their kidnapping show the shock and boundless despair in their mother’s eyes as the Islamists, shouting “Allahu Akbar”, violently forced the young family onto a pickup truck and took them to Gaza.

Months later, news spread around the world that the terrorists had murdered the two brothers and their mother with their bare hands. In an act of breathtaking cynicism, Hamas handed over the Israelis’ bodies to the Red Cross. The event was staged as a family celebration, complete with music and cheering. On the boys’ coffins were images of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted as a vampire drinking the blood of the Bibas family. Instead of returning the body of the murdered hostage Shiri Bibas, Hamas handed over the remains of a Palestinian woman.

It is difficult to imagine anything more despicable.

Yarden, the father of Kfir and Ariel and Shiri’s husband, survived 484 days in Hamas captivity. He will never see his children or his wife again. Nothing will ever be right again for Yarden. Nothing. Ever.

Or Vivian Silver. The Israeli peace activist lived in Kibbutz Be’eri, right on the border with Gaza. Throughout her life, the 74-year-old campaigned for the Palestinians in Gaza and for a two-state solution. Every week, she drove to the border to collect children suffering from cancer and take them to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists stormed her home, opened fire and then threw several hand grenades into the safe room where Vivian Silver had sought refuge. It took weeks to identify her remains. Her teeth were found beneath a pile of ashes.

Or Shani Louk, the radiantly beautiful 22-year-old German-Israeli woman who had gone to the Nova festival to dance and celebrate, only to be beaten, abused and shot by Palestinian terrorists, like so many other Israeli women. Afterwards, as Hamas triumphantly paraded her body before the people of Gaza, a mob of Palestinian civilians beat, spat upon and desecrated her remains.

A reminder: On the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas breached Israel’s border with a single objective: to kill as many Jews as possible. The genocidal terrorist organisation murdered more than 1,200 Israelis in southern Israel. At the same time, hundreds of rockets were launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian terrorists were supported by Hezbollah, the heavily armed militia in Lebanon supplied by Tehran. From Yemen, Iran, Syria, Iraq and the West Bank, Hamas’s allies also sought to destroy the Jewish state and its citizens – precisely as the slogan goes: “From the River to the Sea!”

Israel was surrounded by a Shiite ring of fire. Overnight, it found itself fighting a war on seven fronts. Once again, the country was forced to fight for its very existence.

At the same time, Hamas abducted more than 250 innocent Israeli civilians and took them into Gaza. Accounts have documented how hostages were raped, abused, subjected to horrific torture and starved to the brink of death.

For weeks, Hamas ignored Israel’s offers to secure the hostages’ release. Jerusalem responded to Hamas’s war of aggression, or, more precisely, Israel did what any state in its position would have done. It defended itself, sought to end the relentless rocket fire from Gaza and attempted to bring its kidnapped citizens home alive.

Why this lengthy introduction to a film review?

Because none of this is shown in NAZA (a title derived from the Hebrew word for “collateral damage”). That is the filmmakers’ prerogative. But it is dishonest.

Would a film depicting the Allied attacks on Nazi Germany be credible if it failed to explain why those attacks took place? Would a film be credible if it gave the impression that the Allies had attacked Nazi Germany for no reason whatsoever? Or even suggested that they had done so out of some bloodthirsty impulse to kill other human beings?

October 8: The war Israel still has not learned to fight

On Wednesday, October 7, like many Israelis, my wife and I made the long drive from Jerusalem to the Nova music festival memorial. We wanted to offer support to families whose tears, understandably, have not dried up three years later.

We met the ZAKA commander who led teams recovering human remains from the devastated festival grounds. With extraordinary dignity, he described what his teams encountered and carefully showed us what was appropriate to see.

A crowd gathered. Fighting back tears, he asked everyone to stand together, united as one nation.

On our drive home, his words stayed with me.

Because as Israel approaches another election, we are doing something we do extraordinarily well.

We are fighting among ourselves.

Who knew what exactly, before October 7? What did Netanyahu know? Which agencies and/or intelligence officers failed? Who ignored the warnings? Why are these accusations only appearing now before the elections? Why, three years later, are we still fighting over a credible commission of inquiry?

These questions demand answers. Accountability is essential. But instead of allowing October 7 to strengthen our common purpose, we risk turning its memory into another political battlefield.

Meanwhile, we are overlooking something potentially more consequential.

October 8.

Two dates. Two different wars.

October 7 was a catastrophic failure within a world Israel understands.

Israel knows armies, terrorism, intelligence, deterrence, and military technology. We built an extraordinary defense ecosystem: the IDF, Mossad, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), defense industries, reserves, intelligence organizations, and alliances.

That ecosystem failed catastrophically. But we understand how to repair it.

October 7 revealed the failure of an ecosystem Israel already knew it needed since its inception.

October 8 revealed something entirely different.

An ecosystem we had never adequately built.

Before Israel’s military response in Gaza could explain the international reaction, anti-Israel demonstrations and narratives were already spreading.

The vocabulary of colonialism, apartheid and resistance was ready. Campus organizations, activists, influencers and digital networks were prepared to mobilize.

This did not require one giant conspiracy.

It required an ecosystem.

Foreign governments fund academics who produce ideas. Activists translate them. Organizations create campaigns. Influencers generate content. Algorithms amplify it. Demonstrations produce images. Media broadcast them. Politicians respond.

And the cycle accelerates.

Sinwar’s victory beyond the battlefield
Yahya Sinwar did not launch October 7 expecting Israel to remain passive.

He knew Israel would retaliate. He accepted the prospect of devastating consequences for Gaza while seeking a confrontation that could ignite additional fronts.

In effect, he launched a suicidal strategic gamble, sacrificing Hamas’s military position and exposing Gaza’s population to catastrophic consequences in pursuit of a larger objective.

Sinwar and his colleagues were killed. Hamas suffered enormous military losses. But we should not confuse military defeat with defeat on every battlefield.

Sinwar achieved a consequential victory in the battle for international perception.

Whether he anticipated every dimension of the international response is debatable. What is undeniable is that a preexisting pro-Palestinian ecosystem was capable of exploiting the war at extraordinary speed.

And where were we?

Still explaining. Still correcting. Still reacting.

A September 2026 Marquette Law School national poll found that 59% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, compared with just 29% favorably. Only 18 months earlier, Americans were evenly divided, 43% to 43%.

It is a dramatic deterioration in Israel’s standing among the American public. The consequences are for the political and social environment in which American Jews must live, and for Israel’s ability to manage current American government support.

Not all this change can be attributed to propaganda. Israel’s decisions, the war’s humanitarian consequences, and changing American attitudes matter. But that makes our strategic failure more urgent, not less.

We failed to build a sufficiently competitive ecosystem before the crisis arrived.

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The Anti-Zionist Master's Thesis That Says It Doesn't Need to Prove Its Thesis

There is a peculiar epistemic move at the center of the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Genocide is one of the gravest accusations imaginable, so ordinarily it should require an extraordinary amount of proof. Instead, the moral force of the word is often used to reverse the burden. “Genocide” is treated not as a conclusion to be established but as an obvious fact that decent people are expected to recognize. Anyone who questions the evidence risks being treated as morally suspect merely for asking.

Once that happens, counterevidence loses its normal force. Evidence inconsistent with genocidal intent can be dismissed as irrelevant, deceptive or insufficient. The accusation is morally privileged before it is empirically demonstrated. Emotion is substituted for proof. The outrage attached to the word overwhelms the ordinary process by which evidence is supposed to test a claim.

A 2026 University of Lethbridge master's thesis, Palestinian Erasure in Alberta Schools, offers an unusually explicit example of the same epistemic method in a very different context. Deema Abushaban argues that Palestinian “erasure” has come to “dominate school and curricular discourse in alberta” and attributes this to dehumanization and “Zionist settler colonialism.” 

That is a major empirical claim. One would expect such a claim to be based on evidence: a survey of school materials and websites, interviews with principals and curriculum designers, systematic examination of textbooks, lesson plans, teacher materials, board policies, classroom observations or comparisons with how other foreign conflicts are treated.

This paper has none of that.

Instead, the thesis is centered on interviews with only three people, two former students and one teacher. All of them are Palestinian. One teacher says she was told not to teach about Palestine, but we are not told whether the same rule would have applied to other contentious topics. One student says “Free Palestine” was omitted from her yearbook quote, but even she wonders whether other political slogans like "Trump 2020"  would also have been barred. Another says Palestine was barely discussed in class, but the same interviews indicate that all international current events generally received little attention.

That is about it. A sample of three Palestinian participants, with no control group and no comparative curricular analysis, is close to useless for establishing the thesis that Palestinian erasure “dominates” Alberta schools. 

Also, how does not teaching something be considered "dominant?" If the schools also didn't teach about Belgium, does that mean that Belgian erasure "dominates" the curriculum?

But Abushaban does claim that “Zionist propaganda” dominates Alberta schooling. Again, no evidence is given. She does not establish that Alberta schools teach Israel positively—or even that they teach much about Israel at all. Her own evidence more often suggests that the subject is avoided.

But the real point is that she actually defends her lack of evidence! 

In the abstract she writes:

“The purpose of the thesis is not to prove Palestinian erasure, as facts speak for themselves.”

Later she is even more explicit:

“This is not a thesis in the general sense, in that it is not a hypothesis I have to prove.”

She describes her claims instead as “nonnegotiable truths.”

And when introducing her analysis of anti-Palestinian racism in schools, she again says she does not intend to prove its existence because it is an “undeniable, non-negotiable truth.” 

This is the epistemic playbook in unusually pure form. The strongest claim, the very title of the paper itself, is placed outside the realm of proof. Evidence does not test the thesis; it is gathered afterward to illustrate a conclusion already declared true.

That is exactly what happens in much of the genocide discourse. Ordinarily, the greater the accusation, the greater the burden of proof. Here the relationship is inverted: the greater the moral gravity of the accusation, the less acceptable it becomes to demand proof.

It isn't remarkable that an activist graduate student thinks this way. Activists are free to begin with whatever convictions they like.

The remarkable part is that a university accepted a paper that explicitly claims it does not need to prove its argument as a master's thesis.

What does it say about modern academia when a thesis can explicitly state that its central proposition does not need to be proven—and still satisfy the requirements of scholarship?

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10/08 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The Jewish fifth columnist; David Collier: The BBC’s Spiteful Hamas Propaganda; NY Jews deposit hostage tags into new art installation on Oct. 7

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The Jewish fifth columnists

This movement has made a fetish of these Jewish fifth columnists. They include politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); talking heads like journalist Peter Beinart; political operatives like former Obama administration foreign-policy adviser Ben Rhodes and J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami; left-wing activist groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace; nongovernmental organization stalwarts like Human Rights Watch’s former executive director Kenneth Roth; and others.

Kerstein calls such people, who enjoy high social, economic, cultural or political status, “Jews of Privilege.” Such Jews, he writes, have always strongly disliked and often hated Zionism, feared its potential impact on their chances of assimilation and the preservation of their privilege, and have felt little or no solidarity with other Jews.

Kerstein gratifyingly skewers such people. He quotes journalist Ezra Klein sanitizing the Muslim fanatic Mamdani as being “thoroughly if banally liberal.”

Klein, writes Kerstein, has endorsed the ultimate conviction of the “Jews of Privilege” that only minority status is moral, only powerlessness is redemption, and that multi-ethnic democracy guarantees the safety of Diaspora Jewry.

But, of course, the past three years in Klein’s Western multi-ethnic nirvana have been a nightmare for Diaspora Jews. As Kerstein witheringly writes, the “Jews of Privilege” are facing demographic collapse while the Jews of Zionism are burgeoning in a state that has proved itself “remarkably resilient and successful.”

Kerstein’s account is all the more powerful because he himself originally shared these anti-Zionist views. Although he didn’t come from a privileged background, he was alienated from his Jewish identity and, as a teenager, believed that Israel had no right to exist. Much of his book is an account of how his personal voyage of the soul led him to move to Israel, discover the complexity of the Middle East—and find himself as a Jew.

Indeed, the nature of Jewishness is perhaps the most significant and least understood element in anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionist Jews want to detach Zionism from Judaism to uphold what they refer to as “Jewish values.”

What they’re actually doing is swinging a wrecking ball at those values.

For Judaism consists of a fusion of three elements: the religion, the people and the land. Judaism holds that the Jewish people were given a divine mission to establish a particular society in “Zion,” the land of Israel.

While Jews don’t need to prove their Jewishness through religious observance, living in Israel or even just supporting it, detaching the land from Judaism is to dismember it. Anti-Zionism is an attack on Judaism itself.

Anti-Zionist Jews want to reframe Jewish values—the most particularist set of principles on earth—as universalist. This inevitably privileges the values and interests of non-Jews over those of the Jews.

This is because, writes Kerstein, anti-Zionist Jews have decided that it’s impossible for the “vast and kind” non-Jewish world to be wrong and the Jews to be right. And the outcome of that attitude is the belief that Israel must be dismantled and the Palestinian Arabs granted domination over everyone else.

Kerstein has performed a vital service in holding such people to account. Jewish community leaders refuse to do so because they are terrified of disunity and of washing dirty linen in public.

Undesirable though that is, there’s worse. We are living through an unprecedented cultural emergency for Jews and for the West in which they live.

While it’s vital not to lose focus on the battle against those who are out to destroy the Jewish people, it’s suicidally reckless to turn a blind eye to those Jews who, in their abysmal ignorance and pathological confusion or worse over their Jewish identity, are assisting them in their infernal aim.

Inside NAZA’s Activist Network and Its Calls to “End Zionism”

NAZA, the documentary film that won Venice’s Special Jury Prize in September, grew from a reporting network whose editors and writers have publicly advocated ending Zionism and rejecting Israel’s nature as a Jewish state, according to a new Jewish Onliner investigation.

The documentary portrays Israeli military operations in Gaza as a system of “calculated mass killing.” Produced by The Guardian and JW Films, it draws on reporting published by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025. These institutional connections place the film within an openly activist media network, parts of which pursue political goals extending far beyond the documentary’s stated focus on Israel’s military conduct in Gaza.

A Local Call Editor Explicitly Demanded an End to Zionism
One of the clearest statements came from Orly Noy, an editor at Local Call, the Hebrew-language publication whose reporting helped underpin NAZA. In a September 2025 essay published by +972, Noy wrote:
“Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.”

She demanded a process of “denazification” across Israeli society and rejected the country’s combined Jewish and democratic identity. Her position explicitly targeted Zionism itself, not simply the government in power.

The Guardian Published Calls for the “End of Zionism”
In an August 5, 2011 column, David Hearst, then a Guardian foreign editorial writer, envisioned “The end of Zionism, no less.”

An April 24, 2024 essay by Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein called Zionism a “false idol” and declared: “So tonight we say: it ends here.”

In July 2024, the newspaper published Ahmed Moor’s essay calling for the “end of Zionism.”

The newspaper’s involvement in NAZA went beyond commentary: it produced the film, drawing on reporting by The Guardian, +972 and Local Call.

David Harsanyi: America owes Mahmoud Khalil nothing

Pro-terrorist activist Mahmoud Khalil was asked by CNN the other day if he would condemn Hamas. He, of course, would not, calling the question “silly” and “disingenuous.” It is not “black and white,” he whined.

Even if you oppose Israel’s reaction to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, the answer is still black and white for any person with a conscience. Certainly, it should be for any person who wants to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. After all, Hamas is designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization for, among other things, murdering Americans. Stay informed.Stay ahead.

But the fact that Khalil can’t condemn Hamas — and anyone paying attention understands that he supports the terrorist army — not only tells us that he deserves to be deported but also that it’s imperative we deport him.

During the 1960s and 1970s, immigration officials grilled newcomers to the U.S. and elsewhere about their affiliations with communist parties. Why would we import people who want to destroy our system? Newcomers were, and still are, compelled to disavow associations with illiberal movements, violent groups, and ideologies. They were also required to promise not to engage in any subversive or revolutionary activity.

Well, Khalil’s entire job as an “activist” is to engage in subversive or revolutionary activity.

Khalil is an Algerian, incidentally, not a Palestinian, though he is a champion of Palestinianism, one of the most nihilistic, bigoted, violent, anti-Western ideologies of the age. There’s no anti-American or Marxist protest or riot anywhere in the world these days where Palestinian flags are not prominent.

The French, of course, don’t need much impetus to riot. But protests that began over a lack of school funding a few weeks ago have now escalated into increasingly destructive and violent riots across France, clearly fueled in part by Marxist pro-Palestinian elements. The red-green alliance between Islamists and communists isn’t new — it’s just more popular than ever. France has over 5 million Muslims.

What you see happening on the streets of Paris is exactly what Khalil hopes to see in the U.S. We saw as much when he was the lead “negotiator” for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which rioted at the school in 2025. The group’s goal is to fight for the “total eradication of Western civilization,” “global intifada,” and the “armed resistance” of Hamas. That doesn’t sound very American.

Khalil’s friend, Mohsen Mahdawi, another leader of CUAD fighting against deportation, reportedly has a propensity to make Hamas-like statements, such as “I like to kill Jews,” “soon, very soon, we will annihilate the Jews,” and that “servants of the Jews or the Americans” will have their heads “cut off.” Would we give citizenship to a foreigner who said, “I like to kill blacks” or “I like to kill Christians”? I hope not.

Khalil is being deported for lying on his application, though he was initially picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for threatening U.S. foreign policy. These deportations should not be treated as a matter of botched paperwork but as a matter of national security.

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