2025 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, February 07, 2025

Haters try to resurrect the fringe anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. Here's a brief history of the ACJ and the US Reform Judaism movement.

From Peter Beinart's socialist-Left Jewish Currents magazine:

Judaism Beyond Nationalism: The Revival of the American Council for Judaism

In the years immediately preceding and following the founding of the State of Israel, the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) was the most prominent American Jewish anti-Zionist organization, shaped by a long tradition of anti-nationalism in the American Reform movement. The Reform Movement’s now decades-long embrace of Zionism can make its anti-nationalist roots feel quite alien. Most Americans, too, are unaware of the ACJ and its goals of maintaining the early Reform norm. But the ACJ has recently embarked on a revival process, with the goal of supporting American anti-Zionist Jewish communities in the anti-Zionist Reform tradition.

Join us for a conversation with Jewish Currents associate editor Mari Cohen and Rabbi Andrue Kahn, the ACJ’s executive director, as they explore the history of Jewish Reform and its intersection with Zionism. They will discuss how Jewish Reform has shaped contemporary Judaism, the movement’s complicated relationships with assimilation and whiteness, and the original Reform vision of Judaism beyond nationalism. What might this history teach us in the current moment, and what role might a newly re-energized ACJ play in today’s American Jewish landscape?

OK, here's a brief history of the Reform Jewish movement and its relationship with Zionism.

The early Reform movement in the United States was strongly anti-Zionist. Reform leaders rejected the ideas of Jews as a nation, saying it was merely a religious group. Their 1885 Pittsburgh Platform explicitly rejected Jewish nationalism and the idea of a return to Palestine, emphasizing that Jews were fully integrated citizens of their respective countries. The goal was to be seen as Americans of Jewish faith, rather than as a separate nation. (Of course, their definition of "faith" was quite fluid. In 1883 their banquet celebrating their first graduating class of rabbis was quite deliberately non-kosher, with shrimp, crab, and meat and dairy served together. )

This anti-Zionist position changed in the 20th century as Reform leaders saw the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia. Their 1937 Columbus Platform marked a major shift, acknowledging the Jewish people’s historical connection to the Land of Israel and expressing sympathy for the Zionist movement.

After the Holocaust, the vast majority of Reform Jewish leaders realized their mistake and embraced Zionism. Their Union of American Hebrew Congregations recognized Israel in 1948.

A tiny fringe minority remained opposed to Zionism, ignoring the lessons of the Holocaust and clinging to the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform. They started the American Council for Judaism, which was the Jewish Voice for Peace of its day, to combat Zionism.

We've discussed this marginal group before. Led by Rabbi Elmer Berger, they wrote articles that received lots of coverage. Like JVP, they put the word "Judaism" in their name to make them sound like they represent more than a tiny minority of Jews. Albert Einstein strongly criticized the group, comparing it to the infamous group Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens that attempted to minimize their Jewishness in favor of being good Germans.

In 1950, the Reform Central Conference of American Rabbis formally condemned the ACJ, stating that it did not represent Reform Judaism. In 1997, the Reform movement's Miami Platform affirmed the centrality of Israel to Jewish life.

Meanwhile, the ACJ and its leaders continued their jihad against Israel. I recently discussed the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD) which was founded by Libya's Moammar Qaddafi to support the "Zionism is Racism" UN resolution. Elmer Berger, who had left ACJ because they weren't anti-Zionist enough for him, was an official at EAFORD.

The ACJ pretty much only existed on paper for years, doing little beyond a newsletter written largely by one person.

Now, Andrue Kahn is trying to resurrect it. We've also looked at Kahn previously, showing how his own essays prove his own racism as well as anti-Judaism. He believes that Jews should actively oppose any Jewish traditions and embrace assimilation into American society - while at the same time he also decries Jews who did exactly that in the 1950s and 60s as being supportive, somehow, of "white supremacy."

He's as nutty as Elmer Berger.

The true irony is that the entire point of Reform Judaism is to change with the times. It reacted to world events appropriately and did "teshuva" for its early mistakes and anti-Zionism. It reformed. But Andy Kahn, who is so against traditional Judaism as it has been practiced for 2,000 years, is one of the very few Jews alive who is slavishly committed to the Reform movement of 1885.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

I found a 2010 article from former Palestinian Authority minister reminiscing about the good old days of UNRWA schools in the territories when they didn't even make a pretense of upholding UN neutrality standards - and enthusiastically supported terror.

It only changed when Israel controlled those areas after 1967.

It was decided in the regulations of UNRWA that its [school curriculum] policy is the policy of the host country, and therefore it is obligated to follow the Syrian laws in Syria, the Jordanian laws in Jordan, and the Lebanese laws in Lebanon, and thus it is obligated to follow the Palestinian laws in Palestine. In the fifties and sixties, school students (and I am one of them) lived this issue in all its dimensions, and we studied the history of Palestine in the school curriculum, and the morning anthem was Palestinian (Our country, our country.. for it our struggle.. for it our martyrdom.. our country, our country..).

The principals competed in decorating the walls of their schools with pictures of heavily armed soldiers heading to Palestine, fighting battles, tongues of flame and smoke filling the wall, while the soldiers stormed the Zionist settlements, while the Zionists turned their backs in terror. On the wall facing the main door, a map of Palestine covered the wall in every school, until the elementary school students memorized it, and their fingers ran spontaneously in drawing it, completing the morning anthem (From Rafah to Safad.. a map of my country... I drew it in my liver.. I bequeathed it to my son.. For tomorrow is our appointment... Our country, our country..).

The teacher was our role model, the guide, the revolutionary, the orator, the leader of the demonstration and the march... He planted in our hearts the sense of belonging to our occupied homeland, and we would see him the next day, standing on the shoulders leading the people in a revolutionary demonstration rejecting any peace settlement. I saw Ahmed Attia Abu Hashem, Rajab Al-Attar, and Abdul Rahman Al-Jamal in Rafah, and we knew that Muin Bseiso, Izz Al-Din Taha, and Fathi Al-Balawi were in the camps, inflaming the masses with enthusiasm whenever the teacher learned of a conspiracy against our cause, and whenever the anniversary of a disaster that befell our people passed; the Balfour Declaration, the partition, Deir Yassin, the tripartite aggression, the withdrawal of the Zionists from Gaza (March 57)... It was settled in our conscience that we would return, we would return... tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.

There were delegations coming from Asia and Africa, and sometimes they were students our age, whom we would receive in our schools, and our schools would organize wonderful celebrations for them...
Our teachers trained us to master the arts of reception and farewell and explaining our cause, and we never forgot to explain in detail the injustice of the Nazi or fascist Zionists. We told them about the Haganah and what they did, and about the seven armies and how Lod and Ramla were lost, and UNRWA did not object, and never, never, did it even draw the attention of a teacher, student, mukhtar or guide. Rather, the directors participated in these activities and events until June 5, 1967, when the situation changed, but not the situation of the agency, but the laws that the agency had to abide by, which are the laws of the occupation after the Zionist entity became the host - so it prevented all of that - but we did not hear that the agency had expelled a teacher or student for his fedayeen activity, so the teacher would be absent from his work for the duration of his imprisonment, no matter how long, to return the next day after his release to resume his work.

As a UN agency, UNRWA was always obligated to be neutral and not to attack other UN member countries. Obviously it never did.

One reason was given by John Davis, former head of UNRWA, speaking at a debate on the future of UNRWA at the UN: (The Baltimore Sun, Nov 11, 1959)

Even then, UNRWA had been hijacked by Israel hating, Jew-hating Arabs and any efforts to keep it neutral were seen to be impossible. In the same debate Davis admitted that it was impossible for UNRWA to rehabilitate and resettle Palestinian refugees because their host countries forbade that activity, and that many of the people getting aid were not real refugees. Davis, an American, knew all this but argued that it still did more good than bad and should remain funded.

In 1966, the US started complaining that UNRWA was providing aid to PLO terrorists: (Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, Jun 24, 1966):

Just like UNRWA provides aid to Hamas today.

In the 1995 book "Refugees unto the third generation" by Benjamin N. Schiff we see that the PLO hijacked UNRWA in Lebanon and used its facilities for terrorist training and storing weapons.

The world has known that UNRWA was inherently corrupt for a long, long time.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/06 Links Pt2: Three male hostages expected for Saturday release; Anti-Israel activists planned London protest durring Oct 7 attack; Biden State Dept Downplayed Jihad in UNRWA texts

From Ian:

First request for UK pro-Palestine protest came during October 7 attack

The Met Police have revealed that the first request for a national demonstration against Israel came on October 7 2023 at 12:50pm – just hours after the Hamas attack began.

New documents, released following a freedom of information request, show that the force was first notified of the intention of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) to organise marches while the IDF was still fighting to expel terrorists from southern Israel.

“The MPS were contacted on Saturday 7 October at approximately 12.50pm via telephone call and informed of the intention to protest, the MPS committed this to our systems on the same day and are satisfied being contacted by telephone was a sufficient means in which to notify the MPS as the event was taking place 7 days after notification,” the report said.

The assault on October 7 began at 6:30am and, by 12:50pm, Hamas militants were still actively killing and kidnapping civilians from the Nova music festival, Kibbutz Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and several other communities along the Israeli border with Gaza.

At 8:32am the IDF began mobilising its army reserves and two hours later, IDF fighter jets began conducting air strikes on the Gaza Strip. It was not until October 8 that Israel declared itself to be in a state of war and not until October 9 that Israel ordered a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip, cutting off electricity, water, food and fuel from entering.

The Met report on the timing of the protest notification also stated that they were advised of the march by an organiser speaking on behalf of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign group.

Ben Jamal, the PSC’s director, has since been charged with breaching police conditions during one of its latest demonstrations.

In response to the report, activist group Stop the Hate UK wrote on X: “We thought the PSC couldn't surprise us. But even for them this is a new low. A couple of hours into the most brutal attack against Jewish people since the Holocaust - and while the attack was still ongoing - they were busy organising a national protest against the victims.”

Dave Rich, head of policy at the Community Security Trust (CST), wrote: “It’s hard to comprehend that while Jews around the world watched with horror as a pogrom took place in Israel on Oct 7, the ghouls at PSC saw the exact same images and thought ‘let’s have an anti-Israel demo’”.

Russell Langer, director of public affairs at the Jewish Leadership Council, also commented on the Met Police report, writing on X: “12.55pm on October 7th was when I finally found out my family had been rescued from the house set on fire hours earlier by Hamas. Many others were still being killed and kidnapped. 5 minutes earlier, those who hate Israel were making their plans to march against the victims.”

My family home was firebombed in a vile anti-Semitic attack in Sydney. This is what I kept quiet until now - and the question every Australian needs to ask themselves

Alex Ryvchin is the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

When I was shaken from sleep by my panicked wife early one Friday morning a few weeks ago, to the news that our former home was targeted in an anti-Semitic attack, many thoughts and emotions came to me.

Shock was not among them. There was nothing unusual in the morning's chaos.

In the past 15 months, many times, I have been woken by calls from media, staff, police or politicians informing me that a synagogue was burning, that cars daubed with anti-Semitic slogans were burning, and that yet another Jewish target was hit.

This time it was the place where my wife and I first brought our daughter home from the hospital and where during the pandemic we hunkered down as a family and I valiantly attempted to homeschool my eldest daughter before she refused to call me, 'Mr Ryvchin' and the whole thing ended in tears.

It was a deliriously happy home. Our sanctuary for five years from the carnage and chaos that occurs outside and over which we have so little control. But within those walls was only love.

Our old neighbour from across the street had recorded the scene and sent it to us. A fireball rising into the night sky.

Red paint splashed on the walls I had myself painted white. On the vehicle in the adjoining driveway, which belongs to a Jewish couple in their 80s, 'F—k the Jews' was scrawled on one side, 'F—k Israel' on the other. Two sides of the same car and two sides of the same coin.

For 15 months I have shrugged off questions about my own safety. Not out of any great valour but more a symptom of my optimism. Being afraid is also no way to live.

For 15 months, the community has reeled from such attacks.

In response, the common refrain by advocates and politicians has been to condemn them as 'un-Australian,' a great term that denotes conduct that runs contrary to who we are as a country.

But a country, like an individual, is defined not by how they see themselves but how they actually behave.

A part of Australian behaviour has become to harass, intimidate, abuse and burn motivated by a hatred of the Jewish people.

In the days after my former home was hit, a childcare centre in Maroubra was firebombed, a potentially devastating mass terror attack was disrupted, schools were daubed with more anti-Semitic slogans, and a man was arrested for allegedly daubing Stars of David on a private home in Melbourne before spitting and throwing bacon on a passerby.

A small minority is responsible for this conduct, but when the majority is silent, ambivalent or apathetic the conduct continues, it spreads and it starts to define a nation.

Biden State Dept Privately Downplayed Use of 'Jihad' and 'Occupation' in UNRWA-Made Study Materials, Saying Only 'Some Other Audiences' View the Terms as 'Inappropriate'

When the Biden administration resumed funding to the United Nations relief agency for Gaza, it penned an internal memo aimed at defending UNRWA over its production of childhood "educational materials" that encourage violence and demonize Israel. Some of those materials included references to "jihad" and Israeli "occupation"—terms that the Biden State Department wrote are "in line with U.N. principles" and only "viewed as inappropriate by some other audiences."

The memo, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon through a records request from watchdog group Protect the Public Trust, came roughly two weeks after the Biden administration restored tens of millions of dollars in funding to UNRWA in April 2021 following a pause during President Donald Trump's first stint in the White House. Written by deputy assistant secretary Nancy Izzo Jackson for Secretary of State Antony Blinken, it addressed "examples of criticism" targeting UNRWA and laid out the State Department's "response."

The first section, titled, "Educational Materials," notes that UNRWA made "home-learning 'cards,' based on the Palestinian Authority's educational curriculum, to supplement textbooks sent home" during the COVID pandemic. Some of those cards, according to a January 2021 report from research firm Impact-se, included the "encouragement of violence" and accused Israel "of deliberately dumping radioactive and toxic waste in the West Bank."

UNRWA, the State Department wrote, had already removed or changed the content before the report's release. Shortly thereafter, however, Impact-se issued a follow-up report that identified additional "problematic cards," including "references to jihad in and violence in Arabic language lessons for grades 6 and 9," as well as references to "the Israeli occupation." UNRWA determined that those terms did not violate "U.N. principles," according to the State Department memo, which states that only "some other audiences" may object to them.

"UNRWA removed or updated four cards while retaining a dozen cards it deemed as in line with U.N. principles (e.g. use of 'jihad' in the Quran or the term 'occupation') but are viewed as inappropriate by some other audiences," the State Department said.The memo offers a fresh window into the Biden administration's decision to restore funding to UNRWA—one that shows the Biden State Department was well aware of the issues plaguing the embattled relief agency but opted to barrel forward with funds anyway. It came just two months before the State Department privately assessed that Hamas was likely to benefit from more than $360 million in additional aid.

02/06 Links Pt1: How Trump Can Get Arab States to Solve the Refugee Problem Without Relocating Gazans; Trump Slaps Sanctions on International Criminal Court

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: How Trump Can Get Arab States to Solve the Refugee Problem Without Relocating Gazans

That is, the Arab states made a conscious, concerted decision to make Palestinians a permanent underclass so they could be used as a cudgel against Israel. Palestinians’ statelessness is the official policy of the Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, which granted Palestinian refugees citizenship while simultaneously insisting they keep their “refugee” status as far as the UN is concerned, thus obligating UN agencies to subsidize their absorption while artificially inflating the number of claimed Palestinian “refugees” in the region. (In the real world, you can be a refugee or you can be a resettled citizen.)

Lebanon has always made its position clear. In 2006, President Emile Lahoud explained: “We have today around half a million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, their birth rate is three times higher than the Lebanese. That is a time bomb. It is the basic problem of our country, it led to the outbreak of civil war in 1975 and still remains unsolved today. Everybody today is talking about UN resolution 1559, but nobody mentions resolution 194, which recognizes the Palestinians’ right of return (to Israel). Lebanon is small and can’t integrate the Palestinians.”

That is, the Lebanese position has always been that Palestinians are a demographic threat and keep their host country constantly on the verge of civil war, so they should go to Israel.

In Lebanon, Palestinians still mostly live in camps. In addition, “Laws, decrees, and regulations of professional associations specify that members must hold Lebanese nationality for at least ten years or that there must be reciprocity of treatment for Lebanese professionals in the country of citizenship of the foreign professional applying to practice in Lebanon,” which means Palestinians cannot legally work in major industries.

In Syria, Palestinians are lucky if their camps even still stand. “The Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus was considered the capital of the Palestinian diaspora before the war in Syria reduced it to row after row of blasted out buildings,” reported the Associated Press in December. Bashar al-Assad’s forces flattened Yarmouk and left it abandoned, then made it nearly impossible to legally rebuild.

What’s the purpose of all this? Very simply, the point is to prevent full acceptance of Israel’s existence and prepare the ground for a perpetual cycle of wars of annihilation against the Jewish state. The Palestinians suffer most from the Arab world’s policy, not because they are the target but because they are the weapon.

Egypt receives over a billion dollars a year in U.S. aid. In Syria, Assad has fallen, potentially opening up an opportunity to renegotiate its official policy of using Palestinians as cannon fodder against Israel. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has been greatly weakened and the U.S. is currently overseeing a ceasefire agreement there.

If Trump wants to save Israeli and Palestinian lives and keep the peace in the Middle East, he should use U.S. leverage to end the permanent refugee status of Palestinians.

Jonathan Tobin: Trump plan puts an end to the Palestinian state fantasy

Chances for a state
The notion of a two-state solution died a long time ago.
It could have easily been put into effect if only veteran terrorist and P.A. leader Yasser Arafat—newly off his title as chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization with blood on his hands—had said “yes” to the offers of independence and statehood offered him by former President Bill Clinton and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. But after Arafat answered that peace offer with the terrorist war of attrition known as the Second Intifada, most Israelis understood that the land for peace schemes they had been sold was nothing more than land for terror. The conversion of Gaza into a terror state and missile launching pad against Israeli civilians after 2005 only confirmed that unhappy truth.

Still, the Palestinians had more opportunities and much international support. Statehood could have happened when President George W. Bush and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made an even sweeter offer to Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. And the opportunity for Palestinian statehood was always a theoretical possibility during the eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama, who did everything he could to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their direction.

But after Oct. 7 and the war that followed it, it’s safe to say that Palestinian statehood stopped being anything but a tired and meaningless policy concept that had outlived its sell-by date.

What lies ahead for the Palestinians or Gaza? It’s hard to say.

Trump pushed for a ceasefire/hostage release deal that could leave Hamas in power in Gaza. But his statements about the necessity for the removal of much, if not all, of the Palestinian population for the area to be rebuilt shows he doesn’t want that to happen. And as much as he would like for there to be no wars taking place on his watch, it seems unlikely that he would oppose further Israeli efforts to finish off Hamas—as Biden and Harris did—once it’s clear that the ceasefire will not force its disarming and eviction from power. The era of “daylight” between the United States and Israel is also over.

It’s entirely possible that the Palestinians in Gaza will insist on staying in the same state of limbo that they have chosen for themselves since 1948. They may continue waiting for Israel’s destruction so the descendants of the original refugees can go “home” to a country that never actually existed as a separate Palestinian Arab nation and never will. And it’s equally possible that with or without Hamas leadership, the political culture of the Palestinians is so twisted and intransigent that few will dare to take Trump up on his offer of the resettlement they’ve been denied for all these years for fear of being killed by Hamas operatives or their neighbors.

But there should be no doubt that despite the calumnies heaped upon Trump for having the temerity to discard foreign-policy conventional wisdom, this is the best offer the Palestinians will ever likely get.

There is no rational alternative
They may get the satisfaction of seeing Trump’s idea die for lack of support from anyone but Israel. But the alternative to the problem is for the Palestinian people to remain living in squalor, where they are only considered useful by their leaders, activists, university students and others who exploit the situation, as cannon fodder to wage war against the Jewish state.

What Trump has done is to consign the idea of Palestinian statehood to the ash heap of history, where it belongs. Along with his withdrawal from UNRWA—the U.N. refugee agency that has refused to resettle the Palestinians since 1948 and that helped perpetuate the war on Israel—and his recent defunding of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), whose “humanitarian” projects similarly helped prop up Palestinian intransigence, Trump has decisively shifted U.S. policy away from fantasy to realism.

American support was always essential for Palestinian statehood. That is finished. His critics may decry this all they want, but the bitter truth they fail to acknowledge is that their alternatives to Trump’s Gaza idea are even more unrealistic and dangerous than his.

Trump's Plan to Free Palestinians from Gaza

President Trump shocked the world with his proposal to resettle Gazans in nearby countries. The real disturbance is to think seriously about what it would mean to put Palestinian lives first rather than sacrificing them to the lost cause of Palestine as their leaders always do. Each major Palestinian leader has preferred his own generation to suffer rather than consent to live alongside a Jewish state on any part of the Jewish homeland.

This is the worst kind of nationalism, an eliminationist one that brings its people only misery. But Arab states have long indulged it. It relieved them of the burdens first of resettling Palestinians and then of starting and losing wars to annihilate Israel.

The world plays along. UNRWA was founded in 1949 to resettle the displaced from the defeated Arab invasion of Israel. The Arab and Soviet blocs made UNRWA into a permanent international commitment to the lost cause. Palestinians are radicalized in UNRWA schools and kept on the international dole rather than encouraged to build institutions of their own. That's the purpose of the Gaza. Trump now proposes to do the job UNRWA never would.

The scandal isn't that displaced Palestinians now could be "transferred" voluntarily out of Gaza; it's that they have been forced to stay there. When Palestinians tried to flee the war, as is their human right, Egypt forcibly closed the border - with the support of the international community. Their incarceration by UNRWA and Egypt is the brutal status quo, strangely unchallenged until now.

El Salvador OK Taking Violent US Criminals, But Palestinian ‘Refugees’ A Hard NO (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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El Salvador OK Taking Violent US Criminals, But Palestinian ‘Refugees’ A Hard NO

San Salvador, February 6 - The president of an up-and-coming Central American country clarified today that while he may be willing to contract with the Trump administration to imprison US residents convicted of various brutal felonies, such an arrangement cannot and will not apply to anyone fleeing the Gaza Strip, because those people are far too dangerous, a spokesman for Nayib Bukele disclosed today.

"The president has made clear his openness to working with the United States to incarcerate violent criminals," stated presidential aide Delito Violento. "President Bukele's dramatic success in crime reduction through strict enforcement and harsh penalties has driven crime way down in this country. We would be thrilled to partner with President Trump to work toward similar results in the US, which would benefit the entire region."

"The thing is," continue Violento, "not all criminals are the same. In the US, as in El Salvador, indeed, in almost all remotely civilized countries, crime, however rampant, does not form part of the ethos of the culture, of the society. The non-criminals, and even most of the criminals, understand the problematic nature of their behavior, powerless as they may feel to change it. Not so for Palestinians, certainly not Palestinians in Gaza. They live, breathe, glorify, and sanctify violence. We cannot take any of them. It would destroy El Salvador."

Bukele's unwillingness to accept Palestinians desperate to flee war-ravaged Gaza stems from the same opposition to it as every other country: no one wants to absorb a population steeped in radicalism, hatred, and violence as the answer to life's problems.

"El Salvador is hardly unique in this respect," observed political commentator Mehdi Hassan. "Muslims and Arabs make a lot of noise about loving and supporting Palestinians. Even if it were true a hundred years ago, it's definitely not true now. It's more about hating Jews and Israel than it is about helping or liking Palestinians. They're leeches. Crybullies. Entitled. Spoiled beyond belief. Not to mention a destabilizing force wherever they live, in Gaza or anywhere. El Salvador isn't staking out some bold new position at odds with global sentiment. They're giving us the consensus view, just not dressed up in the language of the conflict with Israel."

Aides to US President Donald Trump indicated that whether or not the El Salvador proposal works out - it might violate Constitutional law, according to some experts - the new administration has begun to weigh shipping the violent criminals to Gaza itself, which would raise the moral level of the territory by a significant margin.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Thousands of Gazans are begging for money to escape to Egypt - but @Reuters, @CNN, @BBC and @Guardian cannot find a single one!

Reuters yesterday:

Reuters today:

Reuters can only find people willing to parrot what Hamas says. Hmmm.

And it isn't only Reuters. The BBC has a similar article, as does The Guardian (‘We would rather die here than leave’), The Nation, and CNN (I'd “rather eat the rubble”.)

Yet I have found thousands of Gazans who put up appeals on GoFundMe begging for money to escape Gaza.

Here are some GoFundMe appeals from Gazans to leave from only the past week:

----

Don't believe me? Do the query yourself! Escape Gaza - Evacuate Gaza - Leave Gaza - Flee Gaza - Escape to Egypt . Hundreds of results are visible for each one. GoFundMe limits queries to 1,000 results, and many of these search terms have well over a thousand hits.

How come I can find these people and the major news media can only find people who improbably say they would rather keep their own families in the rain rather than find a safe refuge?

Beyond that, we know that before Egypt closed the Rafah border, according to Palestinian Authority officials, some 100,000 Gazans did scrape together the thousands of dollars needed to essentially bribe Egyptian officials to call them "VIPs" and let them in.

The narrative control is nearly absolute.

Media outlets won’t touch it because it contradicts their simplified victim/oppressor framing. Arab governments won’t discuss it because it exposes their own refusal to help. And Western activists ignore it because it makes their slogans meaningless.

At this point, it’s clear that the "Palestinian cause" is not about helping actual Palestinians—it’s about using them as a permanent, unresolvable grievance:

Arab governments use them to distract from their own failures.

The UN uses them to justify a bloated bureaucracy that will never solve the problem.

Western activists use them to signal virtue without having to support real solutions.

And who suffers?

Ordinary Palestinians who just want a future—whether inside or outside Gaza.

This is why trust in the news media is at an all time low. Normal adult human beings want their families to be safe, but Reuters and CNN want to tell people that they'd rather suffer and force their families to live in misery as well.

While some of the GoFundMe appeals are probably scams, read them yourself and see which version of events pass the smell test - the bravado of the people telling their loved ones to suffer in the rain, or the anguish of the people saying they want to leave?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

One week ago, the media was filled with warnings on how Israel's ban of UNRWA activities inside Israel would curtail aid to Gaza.

Since then, I cannot find a single news story that says that aid to Gaza has been affected one bit.

In fact, the number of stories about aid to Gaza have dropped to nearly nothing. One exception was from AP on Monday which did not mention UNRWA at all:

Two weeks after the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel took effect, aid is flooding into the Gaza Strip, bringing relief to a territory suffering from hunger, mass displacement and devastation following 15 months of war.

Israel estimates that at least 4,200 trucks have entered each week since the ceasefire took hold.

The main U.N. food agency, the World Food Program, said it dispersed more food to Palestinians in Gaza during the first four days of the ceasefire than it did, on average, during any month of the war. Over 32,000 metric tons of aid have entered Gaza since the ceasefire, the agency said last week.

Aid is now entering through two crossings in the north and one in the south. Aid agencies said they are opening bakeries and handing out high-energy biscuits, and Hamas police have returned to the streets to help restore order.

The article goes on to describe what WFP, UNICEF and UNMAS (explosive removal) are doing in Gaza - but nothing about UNRWA.

Somehow, all this is happening without UNRWA being open for business in Israel.

Since the news media lost interest in UNRWA, it is more difficult to understand exactly what Israel's ban encompasses. From what I can tell, it only closed down the UNRWA headquarters in Jerusalem. Clinics and schools in the West Bank are operating normally. Presumably the 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza are also still working since they are not dependent on working directly with Israel.

At least some UNRWA trucks have entered Gaza since the ban.

You can be sure that if there was a significant impact on aid to Gaza, the news media would be all over it.

Sometimes, the only way to understand the news is to see what isn't being reported. From everything we see, thousands of trucks filled with aid can enter Gaza and be distributed without UNRWA being a critical component.

UNRWA isn't nearly as important as the "experts" have said. Because the media is very reluctant to report on stories that disprove their confident predictions, the story simply disappears.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Writer at @Gizmodo seems to have an antisemitism problem

Lucas Ropek, writing in the popular technology site Gizmodo, is very upset at a gift Netanyahu gave Trump:

During his recent visit to the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu gave President Donald Trump a rather bizarre gift: a pair of pagers. One of the pagers was reportedly gold, while the other was a normal one. The gift appears to have been a reference to the recent Israeli operation that used pagers and walkie-talkies rigged with explosives that Israel claimed were targeted at operatives of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.

The “pager attack” killed 42 people, including two children and two healthcare workers, while wounding another 2,800 people. The attacks targeted public areas, including cars, streets, and supermarkets, and many of the wounded suffered eye, hand, and brain injuries. Many survivors needed surgery, and some victims went blind or had to have their limbs amputated. One of the attacks killed an 11-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl, along with a nurse. At a funeral for some victims, another electronic device attack was carried out by Israel, wounding more people. It’s unknown how many Hezbollah operatives the attack actually killed.

These are outrageous lies. The pager attack killed 12 people and the following walkie-talkie attack killed 30. The only people who owned the pagers are radios were Hezbollah. None of the pagers killed more than one person, and certainly no single explosion killed two children and a healthcare worker.

The vast majority of dead and wounded were Hezbollah members. Most estimates say over 3,000 Hezbollah members were injured. 500 Hezbollah members were sent to Iran alone for surgery and two teams of Iranian doctors flew to Lebanon to treat only Hezbollah members. The pagers were distributed only to Hezbollah members.

Hezbollah didn't admit how many of its members were killed in the two waves of attacks (pagers and mobile radios.) Based on Hezbollah funeral notices, most of the victims of both attacks were Hezbollah fighters.

Months later, Hezbollah admits that the operations were the biggest single blow to its miliary capabilities. A Hezbollah Radwan Forces official interviewed by Al Arabiya said, "the biggest blow Hezbollah suffered was the pagers operation that struck the arteries of his military and logistical bodies, paralyzing its military column after disabling about 3,000 of his cadres and injuring them in their faces, eyes and hands." No conventional military attack on a terror group embedded among civilians imaginable could have been so effective with so little collateral damage.

This Gizmodo article is not about technology - it is pure anti-Israel propaganda that isn't even remotely accurate.

Later in the article, Ropek shows his bias by using the word "zionist" without capitalizing it, which is something only die-hard haters of Israel and Jews do and something that no respectable media outlet would allow. The sentence itself betrays his hate: "There has long been an alliance between the zionist movement and evangelical Christians, who believe that Israel is the holy land and an important component in ushering in the apocalypse."

The only other time Gizmodo used the word "zionist" non-capitalized was when it quoted a white supremacist.

Looking at previous articles by Ropek we see this very curious picture choice of Elon Musk:

There are thousands of wire service photos of Elon Musk, and for some reason a Gizmodo article that is highly critical of him chooses a photo from two weeks earlier, during Trump's inauguration, where he is talking with a kippah-wearing Jew. (Searching for that photo, nearly all media outlets cropped out the kippah because it was obviously irrelevant to the stories. But not Gizmodo.)

It hardly seems like a random choice. And it makes the pager story look like it is motivated by something more than just anti-Zionism.

UPDATE: Gizmodo's tweet of the story calls Israel an enemy of the US:

I would consider that pretty funny of it wasn't for the other things the article said.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Gaza camp (illustrative)

Much of the rhetoric against Palestinians being allowed to flee to Egypt is centered around the myth that Palestinians don't want to leave their homeland, and would refuse to cross over the border of "historic Palestine" to live outside it, as that would be tantamount to another "nakba."

But once upon a time, thousands of Palestinians from Gaza were relocated to the same Sinai desert that Egypt wants to ban them from today. Their leaders were silent and the world shrugged.

In the early 1970s, Israel tried to make Gaza into a livable and secure place. One of its major activities was to build, widen and pave roads inside crowded camps. This necessarily demolished housing where these roads were, so Israel built housing projects for Gazans to move to. (Yes, Israel built them houses.)

One of them was in the Sinai, an area Israel conquered during the Six Day War. In the space that used to be a barracks for Canadian peacekeepers in the Sinai, Israel refurbished the building and thousands of Gazans moved into what became known as the "Canada Camp."

While some Arab nations and UNRWA complained about Israel widening the roads and the demolition of buildings to make that work, I don't see any contemporaneous accounts of the moving of these Gazans to the Canada Camp warning about expelling them from "Palestine."

After Israel's Camp David peace treaty giving back the Sinai, Egypt did not want these Palestinians to live in their land. They agreed with Israel on a plan to move them back to Gaza. Egypt was supposed to pay for them to buy land in Gaza to build new houses, but it never ponied up most of the promised money. The residents lived in limbo, without any benefits from Egypt but also no benefits from UNRWA, until the 1990s when Canada itself (and Kuwait) decided to pay for their relocation back to Gaza.

The point is that the Gaza border was not considered sacred to Palestinians when Israel controlled both sides of the border. The borders of "Historic Palestine" were not considered a red line.

And Egypt, then as now, professed its unending support for Palestinians while doing everything it could to get rid of them from its lands.

Things haven't changed on that front.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/05 Links Pt2: Benny Morris: Response to Coates "The Message"; The other barbarians; Hamas is about pure bloodshed, not resisting oppression

From Ian:

Benny Morris: Response to Coates "The Message" is more propaganda than history

Coates never explicitly propounds Arafat’s message because he knows that Western scholarship, based on myriad archaeological findings and documentary evidence, buttresses the traditional take that, indeed, the Jews lived in and resided in the Land of Israel\Palestine between say 1200 BC and the 7th century AD. As to the Temple Mount, he fails to mention that archaeologists, Israeli and foreign, have never been allowed to dig beneath the Temple Mount esplanade, where they might find traces of Solomon’s First Temple and certainly would find remnants of the Herodian reconstruction of the Second Temple.

“What I was seeing here seemed about as credible as the history behind those Confederate memorials [in Columbia, South Carolina],” he writes confusingly, conflating ancient Jewish history and the story of the Confederate South.

Coates goes one further in this conflation. Indeed, he exploits his description of his tour of the City of David to vent his anti-Americanism, killing, as it were, two birds with one stone. He tells us of a plaque at the site bearing an American flag and the name of a formed US ambassador to Israel. The plaque reads: “The City of David brings Biblical Jerusalem to life at the very place where the kings and the prophets of the Bible walked. The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded, and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed.” And Alon Arad adds his two bits: “When you talk about white supremacy … this is why I think that the Evangelical church and the settlers [in the West Bank] found each other as a perfect match… Their mindset is the same.”

For Coates, “the settlers” are Israel – though most Israelis would dispute this - as the Evangelicals are America – though many, perhaps most, Americans would similarly contest this. It is perhaps worth recalling that the Afro-American campaign to achieve equal rights during the 1960s and 1970s would probably have gotten nowhere had it not been for massive support by northern whites, and some southern whites, including President Lyndon Johnson.

Near the end of the essay on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Coates unsurprisingly relates the story of Deir Yassin. But he doesn’t play it completely straight. He tells us that the assault on that Palestinian village, just west of West Jerusalem on 9 April 1948, almost midway in the 1948 War, “was led by the Irgun and …. [the] Lehi,” two dissident Jewish groups. The implication of the “led” is, perhaps, that the main Jewish militia, the Haganah, also participated. In fact, the assault was carried out by 130 Irgun (IZL) and Lehi troopers; the Haganah supplied only one or two squads in the middle of the battle, and they played only an insignificant role – they ferried in ammunition and extricated Irgun and Lehi wounded. Secondly, at Deir Yassin there was a battle: Four of the dissident troopers were killed and a dozen or more were wounded. About 100 Arabs died in or just after the battle, most of them civilians; some of these, according to Haganah intelligence reports, were executed. (In his retelling, Coates adds that the Lehi defined the Jews as a “master race” and the Arabs as a “slave race.” I am not familiar with these quotes and they do not express mainstream Lehi ideology. The Lehi, curiously, was composed of right-wing breakaways from the Irgun and left-wing anti-imperialists.

But Coates’s ropes in Deir Yassin for an ulterior purpose. The ruins of Deir Yassin, he points out, are “just a short drive from Yad Vashem [Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust]. The proximity of the two sites staggered me.” Coates’s message is clear: How could the Jews, who suffered six million dead at the hands of the Nazis, massacre Arabs? And he comments: “I knew that some Zionists invoked the Holocaust to justify their repression of the Palestinians” – and “a memorial to genocide was built within walking distance of a massacre that had made that memorial possible.” Implicit here is the absurd equation favored by Arab propagandists: Holocaust=Nakba. But in the Holocaust, the German state, for no reasonable reason, simply murdered six million unarmed Jews; in the second, Israel and the Palestinians fought a war over territory they both claimed and the Israeli militias won and crushed Palestinian society (and, along the way, here and there massacred Arabs as here and there during that war Arabs massacres Jews). The uninformed reader, as most of Coates’s American readers are, will, of course, be seduced into accepting the equation.

But I learned two things from “The Message.” One, surprisingly, was about Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s prophet and, in effect, founder. Coates quotes a long passage (which I had never encountered) in which Herzl bemoaned the “disaster” of Africa, “which remains unresolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold … Once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews … I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.”

The second, and I was previously unfamiliar with Coates’s writings, was his way with words. His homily is emblazoned with catchy phrases. But the end result is a curse. Shakespeare’s Caliban had it right. There, in the “Tempest,” the colonized African tells us he learnt language from his oppressors, the white Anglos, but all that he could do with it was to curse.

Why the Accusation of Settler Colonialism Is So Hollow

Indeed, as the American literary and cultural critic Adam Kirsch points out in his On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, a book published last August, no small amount of anti-Americanism lies behind the campus’s anti-Zionism: just as American support for Israel feeds anger at America, so anti-American attitudes feed anger at Israel, whose history is perceived to be like that which led to the near extermination of North America’s pre-Columbian peoples. No longer able to fight a real genocide that took place in the past, Israel’s violent critics can feel virtuous by fighting an imaginary one thought to be taking place in the present. “For many academics and activists,” Kirsch writes, “describing Israel as a settler-colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack.”

Kirsch’s response to this is to maintain that Zionism was not settler colonialist, and in this he reflects the thinking of most defenders of Israel, who, whatever their criticisms of some of its actions may be, find the extreme charges made against it outrageous. Their arguments are many. The Jews, it is claimed, are as indigenous to Palestine as are its Arabs; Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to replace its Arab population; every inch of Arab land acquired by them in Zionism’s formative stage, from 1882 to Israel’s establishment in 1948, was legally purchased from its owners; it was the Arabs who sought to eliminate Palestine’s Jews by starting the 1948 war, not the other way around; it is absurd to label as “colonists” the millions of Jews who settled in Israel as refugees from European anti-Semitism, from the Holocaust, from persecution in Arab lands, and from repression in the Soviet Union, etc. How can one compare an Israeli Jew to a French colon, a Boer farmer, or an American frontiersman?

Yet as true as these arguments may be, they miss the mark. It’s not only that they’re not inconsistent with Fayez Sayegh’s description of Zionism. It’s also that, from its inception, Zionism itself thought it was a colonizing movement and spoke of itself in such terms. The first Zionist farming settlements created in the 1880s and 90s called themselves “colonies” (kolonyot or moshavot in Hebrew) and their inhabitants were routinely referred to as “colonists.” When Baron Edmond de Rothschild took most of these settlements under his wing, they became known as moshavot ha-baron, “the baron’s colonies,” and when he eventually ceded control over them, the organization he ceded it to was the Jewish Colonization Association. Herzl, who was critical of Rothschild’s efforts, said of them in an address to the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, “Philanthropic colonization is a failure,” and then added, referring to his own plan, “National colonization will succeed.” Two years earlier, in addressing the Third Congress, he had said of the charter for Jewish settlement in Palestine that he hoped to obtain from the Turks: “Only when we shall be in possession of this charter, can we begin practical colonization on a large scale.”

Though Herzl’s plans fell through, Fayez Sayegh was right. Zionism was settler colonialism par excellence. It’s not wrong to think that it was. What is wrong is thinking that the type of colonialism that Sayegh ascribed to Zionism—that which has no “metropolitan home-base” but is “a home-base in its own right”—is automatically reprehensible.

Even more, it is wrong to think that such settler colonialism is a modern phenomenon when, on the contrary, it is one of the oldest in human history. It was such settler colonialism that brought the first homo sapiens out of Africa to Europe, where they gradually replaced the Neanderthals. It was such settler colonialism that led the speakers of proto-Indo-European, from which nearly all the languages of Europe and many of those of West Asia descend, to leave their ancient homeland north of the Black Sea and spread southward, eastward, and westward. It was such settler colonialism when the Aryans invaded India and created a Hindu civilization there; when the ancient Greeks founded their colonies all over the Mediterranean; when the Phoenicians built Carthage and the Arabs brought Islam to the Middle East and North Africa. Such and many similar developments took place over the ages because groups of people set out for new homes, sometimes killing those who lived there, sometime driving them out, sometimes conquering and dominating them, sometimes peacefully mingling with them and assimilating them.

As Wolfe accurately observed, a settler colonialist is not an emigrant. The emigrant leaves home in order to join a society and culture not his own and become part of it. The settler colonialist takes his society and culture with him and implants it in a new environment. Zionism’s message to the Jewish people was, “Let us stop being emigrants to the countries of the world and start being colonists in our own land!” That’s nothing to be ashamed of and we have already lost the intellectual battle when we think that it is. The question is not whether Zionism was settler colonialism; it’s what sort of settler colonialism it was. That’s what needs to be discussed and that’s where we need to take our stand.

The other barbarians

After the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how ordinary people can commit evil acts by “just following orders.” Her thesis was that evil can become banal when it’s systematic and unthinking—when ordinary people participate in it without care or choice.

Arendt was admonished for her book, and in my opinion, rightly so. One just has to look at the photos of well-dressed Germans savagely and gleefully beating Jews in the streets or the films shot by British and American soldiers upon liberating the camps to see the superficiality of her theory. The soldiers found corpses with eyes gouged out, bodies split open and remnants of barbaric experimentation. Even more telling, when soldiers took groups of “ordinary” Germans to see the camps for themselves, the expressions on their faces were often not of horror but of complacency.

Germans at the time considered themselves highly educated. But education doesn’t necessarily track with civilized behavior; Marxists also consider themselves highly educated. The fact is, the “good German” is a myth. The only good Germans were the ones who hid Jews and otherwise helped save Jews, not the ones “following orders.”

While this exhibition commemorates the worst genocide in history, it also helps to explain how contemporary “educated” leftists can refuse to understand what the word genocide means, even as they try to repeat it. And in Europe, there’s a good chance that the grandparents of today’s violent rioters were herding humans into gas chambers 80 years ago.

Some Germans took their own lives so they wouldn’t be forced to perform barbaric acts on innocents. Sadly, that’s one of the few civilized responses to evil. It’s a response we never hear about in the Islamic world. This set of enemies has been taught since birth to hate and kill Jews as they believe it’s religiously sanctioned.

Sophie Scholl, a student leader of the White Rose resistance group during the Holocaust, was also religiously motivated to do everything possible to alert the world to what the Nazis were doing. “Laws change,” she said. “Conscience doesn’t.”

Scholl faced the Nazi guillotine for telling the truth. She was only a few years older than Anne Frank. Anything that excuses barbarism in any of its forms merely mocks the righteousness of those who live their lives doing good deeds and bravely calling out evil. It’s not pleasant to think that gleeful savagery will no doubt return with every generation. But understanding this truth is the only way to move forward.

02/05 Links Pt1: The End of ‘Palestine’; Donald J. Nietzsche Solves the Gaza Crisis; Israel exits UNHRC; Netanyahu gifted Trump a golden pager

From Ian:

Lee Smith: The End of ‘Palestine’

The Arabs and Democrats are only the most vocal of the many opposed to Trump’s initiative. Left-wing governments from Europe to Australia are lining up to pledge their allegiance to the fantasy of a Palestinian state, in the hopes of propitiating Muslim and Arab constituencies at home—whose understanding of “peace” means eliminating Israel. But even leaving the patent bad faith of those professing “peace” aside, moving Gazans out of Gaza is the only sane option 14 months after they initiated a campaign of rape, murder, and hostage-taking that brought their own house down on their heads.

After all, what’s more fanciful, moving 1.7 million people out of Gaza, a large portion of whom would simply be required to board air-conditioned buses or walk across the nearby Egypt border, or compelling them to live in a giant rubble field booby-trapped by an Iran-backed terrorist group? Estimates vary as to how long it would take to clear Gaza of explosives—half a decade or more? 15 years? 20? Are the Gazans supposed to live quietly in tents for the next decade or two while their homes are rebuilt next door? Where? In “temporary cities” made of Dwell Magazine-like rehabbed shipping containers built by graduates of Birmingham University? In Hamas’ tunnels?

Regardless, should the Palestinians remain in Gaza, they would invariably return to war no matter how much munificence the Gulf Arab states, the European Union, and perhaps even the U.S. might shower on the toxic sand-castle built over the past two decades with billions of Western aid money. Proof the Palestinians can’t and won’t keep the peace is that even after they won a reprieve when Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff forced the Biden administration’s ceasefire on Jerusalem, Hamas and its NGO-supported human shields celebrated in the streets as if the Hamas space program had successfully landed Palestinians on Mars. Even as Israel released jailed murderers, the Gazans paraded Israeli hostages through the ruins of Gaza like trophies of war.

The Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and others who now rend their clothes while lamenting the likely fate of their ant-farm death cult might well have counseled: Quiet brothers, you have been spared. Don’t bring attention to yourselves. For the winds of Gaza shift on a whim and who knows if you are not next to be swept away by fate—or the American President.

Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.

Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.

Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American President, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.

Seth Mandel: Mr. Netanyahu’s Opus

Let’s rewind briefly to set the stage. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, had finally been defeated a dozen years into his second stint as premier, in 2021. Eighteen months later, Bibi found his way back into power, but in order to do so he had to assemble a coalition that was guaranteed to make trouble for him from Day One. His government proposed a radical democratizing of the Israeli judiciary that alienated half the country for a year, and failed anyway.

Then came Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s 9/11. Netanyahu, who had long (with good reason) branded himself as Mr. Security, had presided over the worst domestic security failure in 50 years. He was made to prosecute the ensuing war effort with Joe Biden tying one hand behind Israel’s back. The International Criminal Court put out a warrant for his arrest.

And then came a series of cinematic operations: the simultaneous detonation of thousands of pagers that Israel had tricked Hezbollah operatives into carrying, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a safe house in Tehran, the elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah deep underground, and the zapping of Iran’s air defenses, among others.

The rollercoaster ride continued: The electoral victory of Donald Trump—no doubt the Israeli government’s preferred candidate—was followed by a painful cease-fire deal that, by all accounts, Netanyahu had been strongarmed into by the new administration while Bibi was still recovering from prostate-removal surgery.

Which brings us to this week. Netanyahu’s stay at the Blair House in Washington, a guest house of sorts for foreign dignitaries, was his 14th—more than anyone else in the history of the house. He is the first foreign leader to meet with Trump since the new president took office.

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump had floated his Gaza-relocation idea, warned the Iranians to watch their step, and pulled U.S. funding from some of the United Nations’ atrocious anti-Israel committees. Trump then led Netanyahu into a packed room for the press briefing. “Congratulations,” the president said to the prime minister. “You bring them out, you really bring them out.”

And suddenly, Netanyahu once again appeared to have made the right bet. His willingness to sign the cease-fire deal and give Trump a big policy win to start his presidency seems to have won him barrels of goodwill. Trump acted as though the four-year Biden presidency was a rude interruption of a U.S.-Israel victory tour:

John Podhoretz: Donald J. Nietzsche Solves the Gaza Crisis

In his Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche proposes what he calls a “rule as a riddle.” It goes like this: “If the bond shan’t burst, bite upon it first.” If you can’t fix a problem with conventional means, go unconventional. If something is insoluble, do something radical. It’s the same idea as the Gordian Knot—no one could untie it, so Alexander the Great simply sliced it open. What you don’t get, in the end, is a single piece of rope that remains intact. But the knot no longer exists.

So it is with what Donald Trump did at the most dramatic presidential press conference of my adult lifetime by announcing his plan for Gaza. As my sister Ruthie Blum put it on X, “To all those who’ve been screaming for 16 months about the ‘day after’: TAKE THAT!” You want a way forward for the area that has been decimated as a result of the terrorist war launched against an unsuspecting Israel on October 7, 2023—a war Israel neither sought nor planned for nor expected to have to fight? You want to cry bitter tears over the uninhabitability of Gaza as a result of the consquences of the war that is entirely the moral, logistical, and geopolitical responsibility of the terrorist organization Hamas and its sponsor in Iran? Dry your tears, says Donald Trump. Here’s the plan.

Gazans will have to go elsewhere for a while. Gaza will be cleared. It’s a “demolition site.” Unexploded ordinance will have to be dealt with. Many existing structures will have to be torn down. It’s an area the size of Chicago, so it’s quite the job. Following the demo will come the rebuilding. All of this, Trump says, will be paid for by the very wealthy countries in the region, which will also be responsible for housing the displaced Gazans in one, two, four, seven, maybe even twelve comfortable sites. Gaza will be turned into the Riviera of the Middle East. At that point, the people once resident in Gaza can return…if they want to. Otherwise it will become an international city for world people.

Bam! A plan! The bond couldn’t be burst, so Trump bit upon it first. No solution, eh? OK, here’s the solution.

Oh, but President Trump, they won’t pay for it! And they won’t take in the Gazans. Oh, I think they will, Trump says airily.

What’s going on here? Simply the shifting of tectonic plates, not naturally, but through the force of will—the will to power, as Nietzsche might have put it. Yesterday, Trump asserted the will of the United States as the world’s most powerful, richest, most influential, and most dominant nation in saying something must be done about Gaza, here’s what needs to be done, here’s who’s going to pay for it, and here’s who’s going to manage it after. What must be done is it needs to be cleared and rebuilt. Who’s going to pay for it are the fellow Arabs who have been “supporting” the Palestinians in order to keep the Palestinians far away from them. Who’s going to manage it after is the United States, really more as a real-estate management company than a political entity.

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?