October 2025 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Sunday, October 12, 2025

The Ceasefire That Protesters Aren't Celebrating (Daled Amos)

Everyone who has been talking about October 7 over the past two years is now talking about the ceasefire.

Well, almost everyone. Remember the mobs we saw in growing numbers, protesting, rioting, and disrupting traffic?

Many of them have now been silent on the actual ceasefire agreement that is set to take effect in a few days. But why is that?

Journalist and commentator Haviv Rettig Gur is one of those who has pointed this out. The silence does not make any sense. As Rettig Gur points out:

You don't have to be silent. Even if you don't like every aspect of the deal, even if the deal leaves the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to the second stage, even if you have critiques of the deal--the deal ends the war; it ends the genocide which you believe is underway.

With all the protests against the alleged genocide in Gaza, if these same people are not speaking out about the ceasefire to this war, then maybe there really wasn't a real genocide going on after all.

The Palestinian American activist and commentator, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, has also written about this phenomenon. He writes about The ‘Peace Protesters’ Who Won’t Give Peace a Chance:

The lack of support from self-styled peace activists in the West is unsurprising. A lack of clarity, consistency, or levelheaded thinking has been a staple of Western-based activism that purports to care about the Palestinian people in Gaza.

...The first step to freeing Palestinians from the horrors of war is to free them from the Free Palestine Movement in the diaspora and Western world. The unholy alliance between the far left, far right, and Islamist hooligans who normalize Hamas's narrative is harmful first and foremost to the Palestinian people.

Many of these voices have long called for a ceasefire that would merely freeze the conflict, as opposed to fundamentally altering the landscape in Gaza to effect real political transformation and deliver a lasting peace.

The protesters seemed intent on a ceasefire much like the previous one that kept Hamas in power until it picked a time of its own choosing to break it by invading Israel and slaughtering over 1,200, mostly civilians.

Of course, the response to the deal is not merely support or silence. There have been politicians who have taken advantage of the plan to attack Israel on the one hand, while recognizing it without giving any credit to the president under whose influence the deal was made.

Mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani refused to credit President Trump for helping broker a long-awaited truce deal in Gaza – and instead bashed Israel – as other New York Democrats offered tepid kudos to the commander-in-chief Thursday.

Other politicians in New York answered similarly when asked about the ceasefire, with US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo praising it as a positive step, while leaving Trump's name out of it.

In New York, the Democratic state Assemblyman Kalman Yeger did say that the president deserves “much” credit for the deal--and went much further, praising Israel and also Prime Minister Netanyahu as well:

The resilience of the Israeli people, the relentless focus of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his strong allies in the Knesset and the tremendous backing of a US President who recognized that no nation can survive if it gets on its knees to terror, combined for an unbreakable force that brought about the Hamas surrender and the hopeful quick return of the hostages.

Of course, being from Brooklyn would explain why Yeger was able, and even needed, to say the things that many Democratic politicians would not and could not.

The sudden silence of so many who once filled the streets, blocked traffic, and shouted about genocide is telling. If this ceasefire is not worth celebrating, if peace is not worth endorsing, then perhaps those demonstrations were never about saving lives at all. The truth is that Israel’s enemies—whether on the battlefield or in Western capitals—are invested less in Palestinian safety than in Israel’s destruction. That is why the same voices that cried for a ceasefire now fall mute when one has finally been achieved. Their hypocrisy has been laid bare: what they sought was not peace, but Israel’s defeat. The real test is not in shouting slogans when bombs fall, but in welcoming the chance for quiet when the guns fall silent. On that test, the self-styled champions of justice have failed.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The UN no longer reports on how Hamas steals nearly all the aid

Over the past few months, I and others have been using UNOPS data to show how most aid going into Gaza - and essentially all the food aid from the World Food Programme - have been stolen before reaching their intended destinations.

As the data mounted, while the WFP kept asking for more money without admitting that none of the food actually makes it to hungry Gazans without going through Hamas or other militants, something had to break.

And of course, it isn't the NGOs that have been providing the food to Hamas to resell.

No, instead, the UN rewrote its mechanism to report on aid delivery so that the stolen aid is no longer reported.

The previous reports were on the UN2720 "App" site. That site was updated daily. But it has not been updated since at least October 1.

Instead, it has been replaced with another dashboard, that emphasizes aid that Israel is rejecting - even though that is far less than the aid that is being stolen.

One has to read it carefully to see that Israel has approved over 82% of the requests for aid of all kinds throughout the war, which again contradicts the UN narrative that Israel is heavily restricting aid arbitrarily. (I'm not counting the aid still under review.)

Now, why would the UN change its dashboard from reporting the huge majority of aid that was stolen by Gazan militants and to emphasize the minority of aid rejected by Israel?

Apparently, the truth wasn't as aligned with the UN narrative as they wanted it to be.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui, Ph.D, is a "Professor of Sociology and Criminology, a researcher, and an independent consultant who provides expert analysis, training, and strategies on DEI+Justice, communications, public policy, organizational development, and public relations." She works at Rutgers University.

She's also an antisemite who cheers murdering Jews at synagogues on Yom Kippur - but only synagogues which are Zionist, which is merely 99.99% of them.

If a pro-Israel Zionist synagogue in the U.K was attacked because of the genocide in Palestine then we shouldn’t be surprised or horrified.

Firstly, synagogues have been found to not be some benign neutral places of worship. They are known to be used to not only indoctrinate Zionist ideology into young Jews who are radicalised into IOF recruitment, but they are also essentially used as corporate buildings with financial ties to Israel, where real estate events are routinely held for the illegal sales of illegal settlement properties in occupied Palestine.

Secondly, Zionist Jews have spent 2 years convincing us that “Zionism and Judaism are the same”. I mean literally every single time I have respectfully delineated between Zionism and Judaism, I have been corrected that “95% of Jews worldwide support Israel” so if I’m criticising a Zionist I’m criticising all Jews. I am also continuously told by Zionists that ethnic cleansing Palestinians is essential to Jewish religious doctrine, Palestine was “promised to them by God”, and their “divine right on that land” makes them the only rightful inhabitants.

I mean, if they want us to really believe in their “Jewish supremacy” and that 2 million indigenous people must be killed and starved for European Jews to feel more comfortable while they bathe on beaches that don’t belong to them, then I’m sorry, but any hate towards said Jews would be valid.

We should be expecting more of these kinds of incidences, tbh. The moral world’s patience pressure valve has burst.

See - she represents the "moral world!"

She goes on, repeating wild and absurd rumors about supposed Israeli atrocities that only exist in the minds of Jew-haters - something that she does regularly. (If Hamas says Israel is booby-trapping toys and canned food, that's enough evidence for her!)

Her little screed, sent to over 30,000 followers on October 2, has so far elicited no statements from Rutgers, no condemnations from Muslim groups that claim to be against antisemitism, no outrage from the very progressive and anti-violence Left, and as far as I can tell, no denunciations from any mosques.

Which means, by her own logic, every moral person can start attacking mosques since they all condone (at the very least) murdering Jews and ethically cleaning all Jews from the Middle East.

I mean, that is her logic, isn't it?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

10/11 Links: How Israel’s Strength Paved the Way to Peace; Burn towns, slaughter, broadcast: 2022 Sinwar memo said to detail Hamas plan for Oct. 7

From Ian:

How Israel’s Strength Paved the Way to Peace

Many Americans have wished the Zionists well, but those warm feelings did not immediately translate into a strategic partnership. Washington only embraced the diplomatic and strategic possibilities created by Israeli military power after Israel repeatedly defeated its enemies. The Americans do not value Israel because they have been manipulated, emotionally or otherwise. Jewish strength made the alliance strong.

Another biblical story, of King David and his mighty men, better captures why Israel matters so much to Americans. Some of these elite warriors were not Israelites, but they nevertheless worked with the Jews to defeat their common foes. At times they were too eager to do battle, and David refused a gift they brought to him after one especially risky mission. Without them, Israel would have been in much greater danger.

Modern Israel is a sovereign country, and the United States is not its king, but there are some important similarities: Just as Jerusalem and Washington share friends, Israel's enemies are America's too. The Israelis are remarkably effective at defeating those enemies, and many of the terrorist organizations Israel has counterattacked since October 7 have American blood on their hands. Like King David, the Americans sometimes can only accept these victories with reservations. The Biden administration in particular tried to slow or halt Israeli counteroffensives.

This story also contains an important warning: David did not always reward the mighty men for their faithful service, and his kingdom suffered for it. His reign began to decline when he betrayed one of them, Uriah the Hittite, and as the consequences cascaded, he spent the rest of his life fending off revolts and dissension.

After one of the worst moments in its history, Israel rallied to protect itself and many others. The hostages, their families, and their countrymen are the first to benefit from this great victory. The Americans are not far behind.

Israel’s war for survival is only just beginning

Over the past two years, anti-Zionism, coupled with an irrational, emotional attachment to Palestine, has become a prominent feature of youth culture. The keffiyeh has become a must-have for self-styled ‘progressives’. To be for Palestine is a way to affirm one’s virtuous anti-Western identity.

In many cases, anti-Zionism in the West has served as a medium for expressing anti-Jewish sentiments. Too often the explosion of these sentiments has been misleadingly blamed on Israel’s conduct in its war with Hamas. Yet the current wave of anti-Jewish hatred is rooted in trends that predate 7 October. The war has merely given anti-Semites a chance to publicly give vent to their prejudices. Indeed, in the form of anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism has even been endowed with respectability.

The very public surge in anti-Zionism has furthered the demonisation and isolation of Israel. Numerous Western governments have felt the need to show that they too are now on the ‘right side of history’ by distancing themselves from Israel. Various tactics have been deployed to this effect, from sanctions and boycotts to the recognition of a Palestinian state. Israel today is far more isolated diplomatically than at any time in its history.

The hostility directed at Israel by Western activists and their supporters among the cultural and political elites is not simply a response to Israel’s war conduct. With Israel treated as the embodiment of all that is rotten about the West, anti-Zionism expresses a sense of estrangement from Western civilisation itself. That is why some of Israel’s most zealous and ideologically committed enemies are to be found on the streets of the capital cities of Western Europe.

Looking back over the past two years, it becomes clear that Israel was always having to wage a war on two fronts: first, against Hamas, and second, against the Western self-loathing that now prevails in Europe and America. For those under the influence of this anti-Western zeitgeist, Palestine represents the moral antithesis of the West. History shows that this profound cultural self-loathing can easily lead to outbursts of frenzied irrationalism. That is why young people who know next to nothing about the Middle East can so spontaneously come under the spell of anti-Israeli hysteria.

Whatever the outcome of the current peace negotiations, the spirit of this anti-Western, anti-Zionist zeitgeist will continue to haunt the Western world. Its power and influence represent a threat to Israel and the West that is no less dangerous than that posed by Hamas and other Islamist groups. Long after this phase of the war is over, Israel will have to fight an existential, cultural and diplomatic war against its anti-Western detractors.

Israel now has no choice but to prepare for war on two fronts. The cultural battlefield in the West is no less important than the military battlefield of the Middle East.

We must tackle the poisonous lies about Israel to stop the rising tide of anti-Semitism

I welcome the Government’s long-overdue pledge to give the police greater powers to ban repeated anti-Israel protests, but, if we’re to have any chance of preventing more attacks like that which occurred last week, it needs a comprehensive approach which tackles the interrelated challenges of anti-Semitism, extremism and the Iranian threat of domestic radicalisation.

First, the Government should require all public bodies to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism in full and without amendment. This explicitly says that criticism of the Israeli government is not anti-Semitism – but it provides some critical guard rails to prevent grotesque comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany or denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.

This should be allied to the establishment of an independent reviewer of anti-Semitism in the public sector, who should be required to publish an annual report.

As recommended by the Board of Deputies’ Commission on Antisemitism, the Government should host a summit of NHS leaders to tackle anti-Semitism in the NHS. When Jews are removing Star of David jewellery before visiting the doctor, something has gone terribly wrong. The current medical regulatory system is, the Health Secretary has rightly argued, completely failing to protect patients and NHS staff.

A similarly robust stance must be taken towards the anti-Jewish racism on our campuses and at the BBC.

Second, the menace of “hateful extremism”, identified by the Commission for Countering Extremism in 2021, must be taken on. As the former counter-extremism commissioner, Sara Khan, has noted, successive governments have failed to address gaps in legislation which allows Islamist extremists (and a host of other repellent individuals and groups, such as neo-Nazis) to operate just beyond the terrorism threshold. “They are carefully steering around existing laws … openly glorifying terrorism, collecting and sharing some of the most violent extremist propaganda, or intentionally stirring up racial or religious hatred against others,” the commissioner of the Met Police, Sir Mark Rowley, who co-authored the 2021 report, argued at the time. This does not simply stoke violence and hatred, it also creates “an ever-bigger pool for terrorists to recruit from”.

Third, Iranian ideological centres in the UK, which operate through a network of community centres, charities and student organisations, are promoting Tehran’s violent and extremist ideology in the UK. They have even hosted talks by virulent anti-Semites in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. After years of inaction by the Tories, the Government has pledged to proscribe non-state threats, such as the IRGC. It needs to put the necessary legislation on the statute books as swiftly as possible.

But this needs to be just the first step. The Government should develop a cross-departmental task force to tackle the Iranian domestic threat, including through countering its support for radicalisation; declining extremists’ entry; and identifying and sanctioning Iranian regime oligarchs, elites and proxies in the UK. It should conduct a thorough review of links between Iran and the charitable and NGO sector akin to previous reviews of espionage and abuse in the sector carried out with regards to China.

Finally, the Government needs to actively and consistently challenge the effort to delegitimise Israel. It should speak out against the bigotry of the BDS movement – including the manner in which Jewish performers are being excluded from the arts – and make clearer that its disagreements are with the Israeli government, not the Israeli people: decisions such as that to suspend free trade agreement talks send the opposite message.

Ministers should also think carefully about some of the rhetoric they deploy given that Israel isn’t just the world’s only Jewish state, but a key western ally and the region’s only democracy. It’s time that – above all the hate and opprobrium – that message is heard loud and clear.

Hollywood hypocrites Why aren’t all the Israel-bashing celebrities celebrating cease-fire?

Last month, more than 2,000 artists signed a petition pledging to not work with Israeli filmmakers or “institutions that are complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses against the Palestinian people.”

Boldface signees included John Cusack, Joaquin Phoenix and director Ava DuVernay. This week, those three have simply shared videos criticizing Trump and the peace plan.

I expected a huge celebration from Stalter’s “Hacks” co-star Hannah Einbinder, who literally wore an “Artists4Ceasefire” pin to the Emmys and used her win to scream: “Free Palestine and f–k ICE.”

After this week’s news, she initially posted a video of her decrying Zionisim as a betrayal of Judaism and a sad meme about the Eagles losing to the Giants. By Friday night, two days after the fact, Einbinder found the right prepared post to share: “We are elated by the Gaza ceasefire news,” it reads in small type.

Larger are the words, “Now the world must hold Israel to account for 2 years of genocide.”

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. When Hamas murdered more than 1,200 innocent Israelis and kidnapped 251 hostages on October 7, 2023, there was relative silence from Hollywood’s hypocrites. And it eventually became much more fashionable to become a shameless Israel-basher.

Perhaps most shameless of all is Spanish actor Javier Bardem. He has posted a few videos of children celebrating in Gaza, but his happiness was tempered by whinging posts that the ceasefire does not address the real issue of a free Palestine.

Maybe he should take that up with boys from Hamas.

In 2014, Bardem and wife Penélope Cruz signed an open letter, published in a Spanish newspaper, accusing Israel of genocide.

When the actor received blowback, he issued a statement saying, “While I was critical of the Israeli military response, I have great respect for the people of Israel and deep compassion for their losses.”

Fast-forward to the Emmys, when he showed up in a keffiyeh and once again accused Israel of genocide.

When protesters in Madrid disrupted the La Vuelta bike race because Israel’s team was competing, Bardem praised the agitators, adding, “we can’t allow” them to compete.

Guess he never really had compassion for the people of Israel after all.

The goal posts are always moving with this crowd.

In their calls to “free Palestine,” it’s always about Israel — never about Hamas, who turned Gaza into a terror staging ground after Israel withdrew from there in 2005.

The silence today speaks volumes about what sure looks like their real and very sinister aim: wiping Israel off the map.

10/10 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The return of hope; Biased media fuels American Jewish opposition to Israel; Manchester and the Exodus From Britain

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The return of hope

For the past two years, they and others with a similar world-view — and all four of them desperately trying to appease a Muslim population that is threatening their own countries no less than Israel — have been essential to Hamas in its strategy of psychological and diplomatic war against the Jewish state. These four leaders have led their countries in gaslighting Israel and the Jews, shedding crocodile tears over the hostages and over the rampant Jew-hatred in their own countries, and disseminating wall-to-wall lies and falsehoods produced by Hamas that have been swallowed by the west to defame, demonise and delegitimise Israel as a means to its eventual destruction.

This victory over Hamas has been achieved despite Starmer, Macron, Carney and Albanese; achieved in the teeth of everything they have been so dishonorably doing to ensure that Israel lost this desperate war of survival; and against the background of the Jew-hatred convulsing their own population that they did absolutely nothing to stop and a great deal to foment. Any claim to any moral authority that these four leaders ever had has been shot. No-one should anyone view anything they say with respect ever again.

The war against the Jews is far from over. Iran is re-arming and regrouping. Israel will probably have to go to to war against it once again. Qatar remains an enemy not just of Israel but of the west, which it is assiduously subverting through the Muslim Brotherhood that it leads. And the war against the Jews being waged by the haters of Israel and the west within the west will not only continue but may become ever more frenzied as western countries fall apart through social and cultural division and the accelerating crumbling of their own identity.

In the coming days, the Jewish world will hopefully rejoice at the return of its people from their underground tomb where we all feared they would be lost forever; but it will also mourn.

It will mourn those who have been lost on October 7, in the hellish dungeons of Gaza and in this terrible war.

And it will also mourn what we have so shatteringly learned in the past two terrible years: that when the Jews were faced with a second Holocaust, openly declared by Iran and Hamas, the world either didn’t care or was actually cheering it on.

We learned that far too many in the west were determined to deny the Jews the status of victims. Deny they had been victims of anything; ever. Deny that they were victimised now, on October 7 and in the war of self-defence that followed.

Instead, these western “progressives” were determined to stick it to the Jews, to blame them for their own extermination, to accuse them of being the prime source of evil in the world. They appropriated the word “genocide”, the term invented to describe the unparalleled evil that happened to the Jews under the Nazis and was now being openly threatened against the Jews once again, and instead accused the Jewish state of committing that monstrous crime by waging its war of defence against it.

They have stolen the word “genocide” from the Jews just as the Palestinian Arabs try to steal from the Jews their own homeland and their own history in the land of Israel. The west has aided the genocidal “Palestinian” agenda by turning Israel into the Jew among nations.

For this the west will never be forgiven. The Jewish people owe Trump a debt of gratitude. The four horsemen of the anti-Jewish apocalpyse, Starmer, Macron, Carney and Albanese, deserve nothing but contempt.

Israel is hopefully now emerging from a long nightmare. Western nations are descending into theirs.

The end of ‘the West’

Countries cannot exist without people; economies depend on workers to maintain themselves and avoid collapse. Governments understand this; those suffering from a birth crisis have turned to welcoming migrants into their borders. What they’ve failed to understand is that countries cannot be merely a collection of individuals who live in proximity to each other and pay taxes to the same government. They also require an ethos, produced by a collective memory of a shared history that cannot be imported. When native populations are cut by a quarter—in some cases by half—with each generation and are replaced by a massive influx of people who do not carry with them this collective memory, the ethos fades away. A nation, a people, is turned simply into a population, and societal collapse is sure to follow.

That’s the thing about low fertility rates; both their cause and their effect signal troubled societies. The societal collapse in most of the Western world is already showing on the streets. Major protests in support of Islamic terrorism against not just Israel but these countries’ own governments are emblematic of this. The massive and violent protests in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States signal trouble for these countries first and foremost, less so for Israel.

While some politicians have tried pacifying these protesters (through, most recently, unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state), this has not helped since the root of this unrest is much deeper. In the United Kingdom, the murder of Jewish attendees at a Yom Kippur service in Manchester, England, took place after statehood was declared by Prime Minister Keir Starmer; in France, the government has collapsed for the fourth time in President Emmanuel Macron’s second term. A new parliamentary election could see his political camp fall apart, with calls for his resignation growing ever louder. His move to recognize “Palestine” did nothing to prevent or alleviate this.

For many of these countries, it’s too late to change course. Too much damage has been done; the current trajectory cannot be reversed. For some, recent events sound a dire warning; they have not yet fallen off the cliff, but are dangerously close to it. Major changes in policy are required. First and foremost, pro-natal ones are necessary to encourage those living in these countries to build new generations of natural-born citizens. Another requirement is for immigration policies to be centered on social and political assimilation, even if this draws cries from advocates of political correctness.

As for our ally Israel, what should it do? The first conclusion, which I’ve highlighted in previous pieces, is to adopt a policy of maximalist self-sufficiency. Jerusalem must realize that many of its traditional partners are no longer the reliable allies they once were. Those who still are, such as the United States, may unfortunately also change for the worse in the coming years, and Israel must be prepared for this.

With time, global trends will give rise to new powers, and with that to new alliances and partnerships. We’re already seeing this, for example, in Israel’s growing relationship with India. The end of the fossil-fuel age will also change global dynamics in Israel’s favor. While I have no doubt that opportunities will be abundant, a change of course and preparation for a tough interim period, spanning several decades, is a must.

Drew Pavlou: The World After October 7

Civilisational Conservatism
Witnessing all this, I personally decided that I opposed the concept of having my own head sawn off by Third Worldist jihadists in the name of race communism.

This is just the stand that I chose to make: opposing the idea that everybody I love should have their heads sawn off by raving jihadists in the name of ‘‘decolonisation.’’ I still supported universal public healthcare, but if my own personal reluctance to be beheaded by jihadists made me anathema to the left, I was fine with that.

Unlike drug-addled depressed communists like Gretchen, I loved life. So I didn’t yearn to bare my neck to the executioner’s blade as some kind of penance for having been born as a Westerner in a first world country.

After October 7, I realised that deep down I was a philosophical conservative, simply because I liked my country, my culture and my civilisation. I didn’t hate myself and crave my own oblivion and destruction. I didn’t hate my parents and my family members and my loved ones. So I rejected the radical left’s deep yearning for personal and collective suicide and self-destruction. And I rejected their blood libel.

October 7 taught me that all their decolonial talking points targeting countries like Australia as inherently ‘‘genocidal’’ settler colonies - it’s blood libel designed to prepare the road for terrorist violence in the West. It’s blood libel meant to justify terrorist violence to destroy liberalism and democracy and Western civilisation more broadly.

Our culture, our way of life, our loved ones - they would heap everything we love onto the bonfire and destroy it if they could. Because they don’t share our morality. Nothing we love has any value to them. We saw what their ‘‘decolonisation’’ looked like and it was demonic.

It’s ultimately as simple as this: if you spent the past 24 months cheering on jihadist pack rape and murder and mass killings while promising that your most ardent desire was to extend this bloodshed to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, all the ‘‘Western settler colonies’’ - we are fucking enemies. It’s as simple as that.

I refuse to go meekly to my grave and offer my neck to the executioner’s blade like Gretchen. I’m not going quietly. I choose Western civilisation over barbaric jihadism and suicidal Third Worldist race communism. And like the Israelis, I choose to fight rather than roll over and die.

10/10 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: Trump’s historic peace deal brings joy and relief — but it comes with a bitterly high cost; Why Trump’s Gaza peace plan infuriates the left

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: David Is Goliath, and That’s Great

The peace process that took off soon after would lock this framing into place. Put simply, it held that the Palestinians lived on their own land, so all Israel needed to do was release that land to them and the conflict would subside. No matter that the Palestinian Arabs had always rejected statehood alongside a Jewish state or that they had become a cat’s-paw of the Arab world, whose land and population dwarfed Israel’s. The Arab–Israeli conflict was transmuted into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In this new framing, Israel was big and strong, the Palestinians small and weak and dependent upon the patronage of others to survive. As if to drive this point home, Hamas named its most recent war strategy in Gaza “Stones of David.”

But is this fair to David? After all, he wasn’t weak—just underestimated. The actual David became king, united the Jews, and expanded his kingdom by winning wars of annihilation that were waged against his people. David Lauter was wrong—Goliath doesn’t win 99 percent of the time. We only know about Goliath because he lost. David beats Goliath every time, otherwise he isn’t David. The enemies of Israel are wishcasting when they claim that Israel has become Goliath. They should be so lucky, because, again, Goliath loses; mere size isn’t enough to vanquish canny innovation and strategic thinking. Instead, they’re stuck with David.

This explains why anti-Zionists needed to think up an entirely new backstory for the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, one in which the ongoing presence of Jews in the Holy Land from time immemorial is a myth and the idea of Israel is simply an outgrowth of 19th-century European nationalism that used stories from the Hebrew Bible to create a false history.

This is what Yasir Arafat told Bill Clinton at Camp David, a ludicrous piece of revisionism considering that the Tel Dan Stele, a piece of carved stone from the ninth century b.c.e discovered in 1993 (seven years before Arafat’s conversation with Clinton), literally mentions “the House of David” in the Aramaic language. Pretending that the Jews are foreign colonizers was and is intended to dissociate them from the Davidic legacy and raises the anti-Semites’ hope that perhaps Israel can be defeated.

Whatever the motivation for the big lie of Israel as a European colony, the implications are unambiguous: The Jewish state must be dismantled in the name of justice. Older generations of American liberals didn’t feel this way. They still liked the Ari Ben Canaan of Exodus, the strapping Jewish man of action who sought to break bread with neighboring Arabs and simply find a place on earth for his suffering people. To them, Israel’s post-1967 expansion was the problem, but Israel’s rebirth in 1948 was still right and just.

The formative domestic experience for those American liberals was the civil rights movement. And since the large majority of 20th-century American Jews became loyal Democrats, the world of left-of-center activism contained a lot of common ground; American Jews sought full rights for American blacks just as they sought full recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

Had that tradition of American liberalism persisted into the 21st century, the aftermath of October 7, 2023, inside the United States might have looked a lot different. In an earlier era, left-wing activist groups likely would have seen it as the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that they would leap to the defense of a Jewish victim just as quickly as they would for any other victim.

But that’s possible only in a world in which Jews could, under the right conditions, be victims. That’s not something the newer generations of progressive activists believe. They had long ago internalized the concept of the irredeemable Israeli. They subscribed to the dogma of decolonization, and October 7 affirmed their worldview. Hamas’s murderous and genocidal spree was, grotesquely, proof to them that the arc of history still bent toward justice.

American Jewish organizations were blindsided by this. Suddenly their calls to other minority-rights groups went straight to voicemail. The decades they had spent building relationships in good faith crumbled overnight.

Should they have expected this turn of events? Those who cast a critical eye on the “David and Goliath” framing certainly did. In 2014, Joshua Muravchik published his extraordinary book, Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. What begins as a chronicle of the well-known narrative ends with a bit of foreshadowing. Muravchik wrote of the new anti-Zionist realignment taking shape on the left: “As with the proletariat under classical Marxism, the favored groups—blacks, browns, former colonials—were not merely objects of sympathy; they were regarded as the vessels of universal redemption. Not only were Gandhi and Mandela seen in this light, but even, to some, Ayatollah Khomeini. The French social theorist Michel Foucault wrote rapturously of the Iranian revolution in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1978, seeing in it an ‘attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics,’ a ‘possibility we [Westerners] have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity.’”

Under the old regime, victimhood could be temporary. But “former colonials” are forever. One can never stop being a “former colonial,” no matter one’s current station. And the anti-colonialist takeover of American academia ensures there will always be an intellectual framework to prop up this Weltanschauung.

For American Jews, then, the days of apologizing for Israel’s strength should be over. And no matter one’s position on the settlements, the Jewish connection to the land should never be downplayed or denied. Finally, American Jews should remember the difference between criticizing Israeli government policies and painting the state or its government as illegitimate or inhuman. Today’s anti-Zionists are not arguing about what kind of state Israel should be. They want it gone entirely. The American Jewish community must adjust to this new reality and celebrate Israel as David—not the lowly shepherd, but David, the author of the Psalms, the father of a divinely inspired nation, Melech Israel.

Douglas Murray: Trump’s historic peace deal brings joy and relief — but it comes with a bitterly high cost

That deal was a bitter one for Israelis to swallow. But they did swallow it — in order to get their young man home.

Sinwar went back to Gaza and increased his control inside Hamas. His renown among his fellow jihadists was only increased through his time in prison. And then he launched October 7th, 2023.

How will this time be different? How will the Israeli public know that the hundreds of prisoners released in exchange for their hostages will not be the next Sinwar?

There is only person who can ensure that the last two years of bloody conflict and loss is not just the latest Gaza war but the last Gaza war. That man is President Trump.

It is the president who has managed to put together the remarkable regional coalition that appears to be bringing this war to an end. The relationships he has built over many years have often been the subject of criticism, but they will have proved invaluable if this peace deal passes and holds.

And it is that second bit that will matter most. That the deal holds.

Because it is crucial that whatever happens in the next few days, Hamas or similar jihadist groups can never again control Gaza. That they are never again in a position to invade and slaughter their neighbors.

For that to happen President Trump is going to need to remain engaged in the post-war aftermath.

He has already talked of the “Board of Peace” which he will chair and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be on. Blair has his critics, but he also has an unparalleled contact book for the region.

With the engagement of the Arab states it is possible that post-war Gaza could indeed be rebuilt. But it must be rebuilt in the knowledge that the citizens are preparing for a life of peace — not a future of war.

President Trump has brought the people of Israel and Gaza to the brink of peace. Now he has to make it hold.

Seth Mandel: Winning a Small War Is a Big Deal

Small wars are usually insurgencies, which means they are often directed against an occupying power that will pick up and leave if the cost gets too high. Israel’s small wars are the opposite, hence that Golda Meir quote: There is nowhere to go. The Jews have reconstituted their state on the same land where they have done so for thousands of years. There’s no place for the Land of Israel to go. So it either survives or is destroyed.

The indigenous nature of Jewish sovereignty in the land, and the sliver on which Jews can live freely surrounded by the gargantuan Arab world, forecloses every option except coexistence and slaughter. Hamas, as the government of Gaza, chose slaughter, which means someone has to lose.

Hamas chose the nature of the war: the kind for which democracies quickly lose their nerve. And indeed, many democracies did: Only the president of the United States and the chancellor of Germany seemed to understand the threat that would be unleashed if they surrendered to the most evil force the world has seen since the Nazis.

In this atmosphere, Israel’s refusal to back down should be a great point of pride. Even after thousands of years, the Jews are still told by the world that they have a place among the nations only as a subservient minority population. The pressure to conform was immense, the moral and psychological blackmail was taken to obscene levels, and still the Jewish state held to its demands.

There was no honest argument against Israel’s insistence on the return of the hostages, so insane arguments were invented. The “genocide” label was perhaps the most ridiculous of all if only because it was debunked before it was even applied. Israel said “return the hostages you took and concede the war, and we’ll end the operation in Gaza.” Genocidal intent cannot be construed from this even by the cleverest anti-Semite in the world.

And now Israel has kept its word to the letter. Hamas has been defeated and Hamas’s supporters abroad have been humiliated. But you can see why they thought they might not be left looking foolish: Most of the time you can accuse a democracy of committing genocide and that democracy will back out of a small war.

Winning a small war in this environment required incredible fortitude. Israelis were up to the task.

Hamas Cross-Dresser FINALLY Picked For Dress-As-Woman-To-Plant-IED Mission (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Gaza City, October 10 - After more than two years of waiting and frustration, an Islamist militant received orders to don feminine clothing for purposes of avoiding detection while setting up an explosive mine targeting Israeli soldiers, at long last giving him an opportunity to indulge his suppressed transvestite side, the man disclosed in a discreet setting today.

Jedgar Hufr, 28, gushed with excitement and relief this morning upon confiding that, finally, he could dress like a woman and not be judged or persecuted for it in this staunchly-conservative, Islamist society.

"I can't believe this day has come," he effused. "You have no idea what kind of torment it is to suppress this part of me. I need to feel who I really am, and who I really am is a woman named Fatima. Sometimes it's a woman named Aisha. The point is, I need to express my sexuality in ways that others find... unusual. I've been volunteering forever for these missions, but only now has the Resistance run out of experienced IED personnel, and now it actually is up to me. I'm so, so excited."

"I mean," he added, "I'm also thrilled to be doing my part to liberate Palestine and hurt the Jews. Of course. That goes without saying. Of course."

Hufr already has specific ideas for what to wear during the mission. "My sister has this maroon and navy number that's just..." he mimicked a chef's kiss. "I know the shoes don't matter for a getup like this, but I have just the pair in mind."

"You can tell I've been thinking about this for a long time," he acknowledged with a blush visible even on his swarthy face.

Hufr's skill set and training did not include planting IED's until last month, when IDF operations had so depleted Hamas's ranks that his unit commander ordered emergency measures to retrain men for multiple roles. His trainer fell to an IDF sniper after a mere two days of instruction - but Hufr feels confident he needs little to no help on the incognito aspects of the role, given his proclivity towards garments that conceal his sex - and even his face, if he chooses traditional sartorial modesty.

His first mission is scheduled for tomorrow night, prompting some nervous jitters, but mostly stemming from the undecided question of which lace undergarments to wear, and whether the ones he secretly wears already will suffice or should he find new ones for the occasion.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

There is no difference anymore between academic journals and antisemitic propaganda

Here is the beginning of a paper that is the introduction to the current issue of the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies:

Introduction to the Special Issue: Palestine—Perspectives on Decolonisation

Salim Vally (University of Johannesburg) and Haidar Eid (Al-Aqsa University, Gaza)

After 20 months of calculated and unrelenting horror aimed at the starving and terrorized population of Gaza, the Israeli/US/UK/EU genocide is being ratchetted-up. As we go to press the official casualty count — 60,000 deaths from traumatic injury — is an immense undercount. It excludes the thousands buried under the rubble and deaths resulting from preventable disease, manufactured famine, malnutrition, the lack of water, inadequate sanitation and the availability of chronic medication. Sadistically, the Israeli Occupation Force and the US have orchestrated ‘death traps’ using food as bait to lure hungry people to areas where scores are routinely and casually murdered, as if the hideous massacres over the past 650 days have not been enough — each new atrocity vying with the previous one in a macabre pattern of inhumanity and brutality.

There is zero relationship between the assertions here and reality.

The rest of the issue makes clear that this isn’t an isolated lapse but a systematic replacement of scholarship with ideology. Another article, by Haim Bresheeth-Žabner of SOAS, positions Zionism as inherently genocidal and Judaism as racist towards non-Jews.

Jewish historical sources are not just dialectical — they also include some racist examples, something difficult for most Jews to admit and accept. In this, Judaism acts like other monotheistic faiths, also adding a derogatory classification, somewhat reminiscent of the figure of the pagan in the other monotheisms: the Gentile — the non-Jew, or Goy in Hebrew. This is the topic of a monograph examining the historical uses and abuses of the term (Ophir and Rosen-Zvi 2018). The meaning of Goy changes substantially over time. This neutral concept in the Bible, meaning nation, becomes the linguistic marker for the non-Jewish other, the locus of much derogatory sentiments and expressions.
While Goy is used in the European diaspora, it finally flowers in Zionist readings of Jewish history, representing a deep-seated hatred of the non-Jewish other.

What follows is not scholarship but ritual defamation disguised as critical theory The idea that Zionist history books use the word "goy" as a term of hatred is absurd. (It is sometimes used in a derogatory tone in casual conversation but to assume that this is how it was used in history texts is simply antisemitism.)

My TAMAR AI propaganda analyzer, which was created to be non-partisan, describes the first paper: "It masquerades as academic inquiry but is constructed almost entirely of premise-smuggled moral certainty, rhetorical escalation, and selective epistemology. The use of violent metaphors, emotionally manipulative imagery, and dogmatic framing of settler colonialism amounts to advocacy journalism disguised as scholarship." It's analysis of the Bresheeth-Zabner article concludes "Its structure is more consistent with ideological advocacy than with any norm of academic neutrality, rigor, or pluralistic engagement."

Remember when the truth mattered?

Even the University of Johannesburg, where one of the authors of the introductory article teach, claims "Honesty, transparency, accountability, openness, fairness, social justice, and a commitment to truth, underpin all our endeavours. We earn trust through integrity." Yet they call the IDF the "Israeli Occupation Forces" as if that is their official title - and layers of editors and peer reviewers felt that this was perfectly OK!

The intellectual sources of anti-Israel and antisemitic polemic are universities and academic papers. And all of the supposed controls - peer review, theoretical scholarly pushback - are meaningless when entire fields have been hijacked by ideological haters of Israel, Zionism and - increasingly - Judaism.

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

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University of Sydney staffer goes on antisemitic rant against Jews at a Sukkah (video)

From the Daily Mail:

A staff member at one of Australia's most prestigious universities has been suspended after allegedly attacking a group of students celebrating a Jewish holiday.

In the video, the woman approaches several students and asks if they are 'Zionists,' before harassing them as they repeatedly ask her to move on.

The students, who were celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, explained that they were not making any political statements or staging a protest, and simply wanted to be left alone.

However, the woman continued her tirade, getting right up in the face of one young woman and telling her: 'A Zionist is the lowest form of rubbish.'

'Zionists are the most disgusting thing that has ever walked this earth,' she yelled.

She described herself as an 'Indigenous Palestinian' before calling the group 'baby killers' and telling one member she was a 'f***ing filthy Zionist.'

A security guard attempted to intervene, but the woman ignored him and continued her rant against the students, who did not appear to be bothering anyone.

'Look at this rubbish, look at these parasites,' the woman told them.

The group repeatedly asked the woman to leave and walk away before she walked off and yelled: 'Go f**k yourself you disgusting Zionist. A Zionist is the lowest form of humanity.'

I can't find the name of the staffer yet, or what her position is. But she definitely deserves to become famous.

I can't help but wonder if the university would have suspended her if the students had built a Sukkah with an Israeli flag. Because it would not make her any less disgusting.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

10/09 Links Pt2: America's Debt to Israel; From 7/7 to Manchester 2025 – the story they refuse to tell; The Hamas death cult has taken over campus

From Ian:

America's Debt to Israel

Two years after Hamas's Oct. 7 atrocities, the U.S. should be grateful to Israel. The Jewish state has begun to degrade America's enemies one by one. Hamas, an Iran-allied Islamist outfit dedicated to killing Jews, no longer exists as a military force. The Israel Defense Forces and Mossad took apart Hizbullah, the most lethal of Iran's terrorist proxies, which has killed many Americans including 241 in the 1983 Beirut bombings.

The Sunni-slaughtering, drug-running Assad dynasty in Damascus - robbed of Hizbullah's help as well as Iranian and Russian troops - collapsed. And in a stunning 12-day aerial duel, Israel badly damaged the Islamic Republic's nuclear program, killing scores of its generals and atomic scientists. Israel's success convinced President Trump to send the B-2 bombers that ensured that Iran's most deeply buried uranium-enrichment site went offline.

Will Washington have the understanding and intestinal fortitude to stand by an ally that has repeatedly enhanced America's influence throughout the Middle East and beyond?

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

How Disgraceful Anti-Israel NGOs Set UN Agenda

A full-page ad in the Sept. 27 issue of the Globe and Mail, sponsored by the NGO Medecins sans Frontieres/Doctors without Borders (MSF), tots up the many calamities Gazans have endured in the two-year Hamas-Israel war. The ad speaks of civilian hunger, but not of plentiful aid stolen by Hamas. It does not mention Hamas at all - or the hostages taken, or any other cause of the war.

And hanging overall the false accusation that it is Israel that is committing genocide. Genocide requires intent, demonstrably not the case in Israel's defensive war, but which perfectly describes the motivation behind Hamas's rabid pogrom on October 7. Those reading the ad won't register the absence of objectivity of today's MSF as a politicized, biased and untrustworthy source of information.

MSF has not only lied about proven Hamas entrenchment in Gaza hospitals ("we have seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base") but admitted - following Oct. 7, mind - giving funding to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.

"Non-governmental organizations" are supposed to be made up of altruistic civic-minded groups that provide expertise independent of the narrow self-interest of political bodies. It is on that ground that they are invited to participate in UN activities. But now retired, anti-democratic Marxist activists have executed the equivalent of a corporate hostile takeover of now corrupted NGOs like MSF, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty.

The superpower NGOs are accountable to nobody, yet in large part they are setting the UN's agenda on Israel. Then, when the UN executes the agenda they have promoted, they endorse it as if it were a coincidence.

The Hamas death cult has taken over campus

Ever keen to remind us of their moral bankruptcy, the keffiyeh cult’s student wing was out en masse yesterday. In the UK and beyond, hundreds of thousands of ‘pro-Palestine’ students walked out of lecture halls and flooded the streets, marking the two-year anniversary of the 7 October pogrom. Not to mourn it, of course, but to demand more death and destruction, by calling for the annihilation of Israel.

Around a dozen British universities held Palestine rallies to coincide with 7 October – often despite the pleas of university administrators to reschedule. Several of London’s top institutions, including King’s College London, LSE, UCL and SOAS, marched through the city centre with flags and placards. Further north, students in Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde were also on the march. In Glasgow, protesters cosplayed as jihadists. Outside Edinburgh’s student library, the crowds yelled ‘shame’ – a quality painfully lacking among their own ranks. The supposed aim of these demos, as organisers for the Manchester University protest explained on Instagram, was to protest two years of ‘genocide, forced starvation, murder, ethnic cleansing, imprisonment, torture and settler colonialism’.

It is impossible to underestimate the cruelty of staging this spectacle on 7 October. Two years ago yesterday, a tsunami of armed men surged over Israel’s southern border to enact an hours-long campaign of slaughter, sexual violence and ritualistic humiliation. There are 365 days in a year, yet the pro-Palestine sect deliberately chose to beat their drums on this particular day, the day most painful to Jews. Worse, these students have made clear, they see this genocidal pogrom not as a tragedy, but as a valiant act of resistance. ‘Honour our resistance. Honour our martyrs’, read an Instagram post from the Glasgow University Justice for Palestine Society. It invited students to ‘celebrate the glorious Al-Aqsa flood’ – the name given by Hamas to the 7 October massacre. To dismiss this as well-meaning ignorance would be far too generous now.

‘I think freedom will be achieved when the Israelis go back to where they were born’, said a Muslim student in London in an interview on LBC, sounding almost nonchalant. When asked if she understood ‘why Jewish students might feel uncomfortable’ with that view, she was nonplussed. ‘I mean, I understand… but I don’t think that their feelings are valid.’

How emboldened must a young person be to say these things on camera, with her university lanyard hanging around her neck? What does it say about the climate on our campuses? These are the same students who are told constantly to watch their words, that campus is a safe space for minorities and the marginalised. Every minority, it seems, except Jews.

Haya Adam, the president of the SOAS’s Palestine Society (who was expelled back in August following a harassment claim), said she thought yesterday’s actions ‘went brilliantly’, and that ‘anyone with any ounce of humanity’ should have joined in. One wonders if Adam saw the same displays of ugliness that the rest of us did. Her appeal to ‘humanity’ is particularly baffling, given that these rallies not only took place on 7 October, but less than a week after two British Jews were killed during an Islamist terror attack.

10/09 Links Pt1: Fighting for Peace in the Middle East; Hamas Still Wants to Win the War; The Mob Can’t Survive Peace; Lawful Protest Is Not a Permit to Menace

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Fighting for Peace in the Middle East

The European leaders’ approach to “peace” was, essentially: Please stop fighting for a few minutes so I can get reelected. The shame of France’s Emmanuel Macron, of the UK’s Keir Starmer, of Spain’s Pedro Sanchez and others cannot be understated.

But that is not all of Europe. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has walked a difficult diplomatic tightrope but has done it well, never throwing Israel’s existence under the bus of European populism. He is surrounded by European leaders with little regard for freedom and democracy, however, and those leaders need to see Israeli victory.

Starmer, Macron, and others who fetishize weakness insisted that “peace” meant giving in to terrorists’ demands. Their version of peace was to recognize a state of Palestine that doesn’t yet exist and half of which is in the hands of Hamas. They believe that peace comes through laziness, through empty declarations, through magical thinking, through kissing the feet of one’s pursuer.

In fact, peace requires hard work. In this case, it required an Israeli and American military alliance willing to neutralize threats emanating from Iran. It required American support for Israeli actions in Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria. And it required the mobilization of U.S. military assets in the Gulf region.

Peace is possible at this point only because the president of the United States ignored the isolationists chirping in his ear that the days of American strength were over. Whatever happens now, we are at least closer to ending the conflict than we have been, and that was made possible by military action.

Canada joined the Europeans who weren’t willing to work for peace. But the United States resisted the pull of laziness, of managed decline, of wishful thinking and decadent weakness. And so there is a chance for peace.

Will this lesson be learned? Not as widely as it should be. But the lesson has been demonstrated, and that is what is most important.

Seth Mandel: To Hell and Back

The efforts to bring home captives are part of Israel’s social compact. As I wrote for the March 2024 issue of COMMENTARY:

“There is also a pragmatic reason for Israel’s commitment to redeeming captives. It is a source of legitimacy for the IDF. As a nation with full conscription, the basic deal Israelis make with their government is this: We give you our sons and daughters, and then you give them back. The common expression in Israel is that its soldiers are ‘everyone’s children.’ This is more than a mere sentimental point; it is a crucial source of military and social cohesion.”

The world has gotten more than a glimpse of this phenomenon over the past two years, unfortunately. But this has also perhaps opened the world’s eyes to how deeply wounding it is for Israelis to be locked in conflict with terrorist groups who have molded their entire forever-war strategy around hostage-taking.

Even Israelis, however, have been forced into new territory by the scale of Hamas’s atrocities. In April, the New York Times wrote a story titled: “A New Medical Discipline in Israel: How to Receive Hostages.” It is, as the headline suggests, a new frontier in physical and mental health: “There were few precedents to learn from, officials said, especially as the captives ranged in age from infants to octogenarians.”

Indeed, in his memoir of his time in Hamas captivity, Eli Sharabi recounts a brief conversation he had with a Hamas official, nicknamed Tippy, overseeing Sharabi’s release. The conversation took place after Tippy showed Sharabi a laptop screen with the faces of dozens of hostages:

“I look at their faces. It’s an emotionally charged moment. There are young women I don’t recognize, some very elderly people, a young woman with a little ginger toddler and a little ginger baby girl. I think it’s a girl. I point at the baby immediately and ask Tippy: ‘What’s that? Did you kidnap a baby?’

“‘No,’ he says. ‘The baby was born in captivity.’

“I stare at him. ‘You kidnapped a pregnant woman?’

“I get no answer.”

They did, in fact, kidnap a baby. Surely Sharabi was seeing a picture of Kfir Bibas, along with his slightly older brother and mother. All three were murdered in captivity. Hamas’s atrocities on and after October 7 stretched the bounds of worldly evil. Even the Hamas commander wouldn’t admit it to Sharabi’s face. No one wanted to believe an entity this evil existed—even, at times, the entity itself.

And the survivors of that unimaginable evil are returning to earth from hell. Once again Israelis’ resilience and recovery will pave a path for the rest of the world, all because of the unique hatred to which they are subjected. As one Welfare Ministry official told the Times in April, “We are now writing the theory.”

The Challenges of the Trump Plan

In his approach to negotiating the release of all hostages held in Gaza, President Trump has thwarted French diplomacy and inflicted a severe snub on President Macron, who wanted to precipitate events by first offering a state to the Palestinians, without obtaining any concessions.

Unlike Macron's plan, the 20 points of the Trump plan were written in concert with Israel. The American plan was carefully and skillfully developed by seasoned experts and diplomats, with the aim of isolating Hamas from the outset and gaining the approval of the Arab-Muslim world. While only a first draft, it is a noble work for future relations between Israel and all the countries of the Middle East.

The plan outlines a roadmap, a framework agreement that sets solid milestones to enable stakeholders to clearly monitor the plan's progress. It has the great merit of being able to achieve those Israeli demands that we have been seeking since the end of the Six-Day War in 1967. For the first time, an American president is boldly proposing a different vision for resolving the Palestinian question.

He is taking seriously all the factors supported by the overwhelming majority of Israelis: the historical rights of the Jewish people to their land, no withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines, secure and defensible borders, Jerusalem indivisible under Israeli sovereignty, the Golan Heights under Israeli sovereignty, Hamas and all "resistance" movements against the Jewish state are now terrorist organizations, no to recognition of a Palestinian state before final status negotiations.

Amb. Michael Oren: Hamas Still Wants to Win the War

President Trump's peace plan did indeed promise to achieve all of Israel's goals: the release of the hostages and the end of Hamas's rule in Gaza. The president declared that Hamas had accepted the plan and was prepared for peace. He ordered the IDF to stop firing in Gaza City to facilitate the safe release of the hostages.

Once relieved of Israeli military pressure, Hamas will try to drag the U.S. into protracted negotiations and obtain approval to remain in Gaza and keep its "defensive weapons." In short, in exchange for the release of the hostages, Hamas wants to win the war.

Our goal, therefore, must be to uphold Trump's original plan and not allow Hamas to water it down. We must secure the unconditional release of all the hostages, without allowing Hamas to keep its weapons or take part in a postwar Gaza government.

Gaza Deal Is Not a Total Victory

It may well be that the deal Israel is preparing to sign with Hamas is unavoidable. But it is far from a "total victory." Israel is to release from prison 250 terrorists convicted of multiple murders. Israel rightly sanctifies the lives of its hostages, but at the same time mortgages the lives of its citizens. More than 85% of terrorists released in past decades have returned to terrorism, to attack or kill Israelis again. We are releasing ticking time bombs.

Israel has achieved significant accomplishments: large parts of Gaza have been flattened; we've established a perimeter, eliminated tens of thousands of terrorists, destroyed miles of underground infrastructure, and taken control of the Philadelphi Route along the border with Egypt. But we've also sent a clear message that the way to secure the release of killers is through more abductions.

Our commitment to redeeming captives and to mutual responsibility has now proven to be our weakness, leading to the emptying of our prisons of those who murdered, and who are almost certain to murder again or orchestrate more killings.

The terrorists freed in the 1985 Jibril deal became the backbone of the First Intifada, in which 165 Israelis were murdered. Half of the terrorists released under the Oslo Accords joined the Palestinian terror apparatus, with many playing key roles in the Second Intifada, which killed 1,178 Israelis. Those released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal went on to bring about the Oct. 7 massacre.

The Sorites Paradox Isn't a Paradox—It's a Category Error Wrapped in Hubris

The Sorites paradox goes like this: If you have a heap of sand and remove one grain, you still have a heap. Remove another grain - still a heap. But keep going and eventually you're left with a single grain, which clearly isn't a heap. So when exactly did it stop being a heap? Which single grain made the difference?

Philosophers have proposed elaborate solutions for thousands of years: fuzzy logic, contextualism, epistemicism (the view that there is a precise boundary but we can't know it). They've written thousands of pages analyzing vagueness, tolerance principles, and semantic indeterminacy.

But I think they're all solving the wrong problem.

The idea of a "heap" was never a precise concept to begin with.

It's not that "heap" is a vague version of something precise. It's not that we lack the tools to determine the exact boundary. It's that "heap" is a man-made linguistic convenience that was never meant to have sharp boundaries. It's a casual descriptor, like "nearby" or "tallish" or "a bunch."

Even God doesn't know the answer to when a pile becomes a heap - not because God lacks knowledge, but because there's no fact of the matter to know. The question is malformed. It's like asking "What is the exact wavelength of the color 'reddish'?" The imprecision is intrinsic to the concept itself.

The Sorites paradox commits a category error: it treats "heap" as if it belongs to the same category as "52 centimeters high" or "exactly 1,000 grains." One is a measurement; the other is a rough descriptor. They're not the same kind of thing, and demanding that "heap" have the precision of a measurement is simply confused.

This got me thinking about what seems like a similar question in Jewish law: When does nightfall occur? When is Shabbat over?

The traditional criterion is "when you can see three medium stars." But this isn't well-formed either—different people have different eyesight, humidity affects visibility, light pollution interferes. So isn't this just another Sorites paradox, where a continuous function must be defined with precision?

No. And the difference is profound.

The rabbis using the "three stars" criterion aren't claiming that to be the definition of nightfall. They know there is a precise moment when day becomes night - a split second where one side is day and the other is night. God knows that moment exactly. The rabbis are simply trying to approximate it with the best human tools available, erring on the side of caution. (Nowadays, when we have clocks, they say "X number of minutes after sunset," but the idea is the same.)

They're not saying "nightfall is when we see three stars." They're saying "we use three stars as our best human estimate for something God knows with absolute precision."

The "three stars" criterion openly acknowledges its own status as an approximation. It's epistemically humble.

And this, I believe, reveals something fundamental about the difference between Greek and Jewish philosophical traditions.

Greek philosophy often assumes humans can achieve perfect knowledge through reason. When faced with "heap," instead of saying "this is a casual descriptor that doesn't need precision," Greek philosophy assumes there must be a precise answer and tortures itself trying to find it.

This is hubris disguised as intellectual rigor.

Jewish philosophy, by contrast, has humility baked into its architecture. Concepts like safek (doubt), teiku (leaving questions unresolved until Messianic times), and lo bashamayim hee (it's up to fallible humans to apply Torah rules) all encode the assumption that human knowledge is always incomplete.

The Talmud is filled with stories of great rabbis learning wisdom from their wives, children, slaves, and non-Jews. Pirkei Avot asks: "Who is wise? One who learns from all people." Moses was the greatest prophet precisely because he was the most humble.

As I've written before, rabbinic humility isn't about low self-esteem - it's about accurate self-location in a world inhabited by infinite divine intelligence. The rabbis were humble because they had constant awareness that compared to God, the difference between their own intelligence and that of a shoemaker is infinitesimal.

Secular philosophers, on the other hand, keep thinking that reason will answer everything and that they are on the cusp of finally understanding the world fully. They have been on this cusp for centuries, and new riddles keep arising. Yet their misplaced confidence remains.

The very act of treating "heap" as something that should have a precise definition reflects intellectual hubris. It assumes that:

Human language should map perfectly onto reality
Precision is always achievable and desirable
We can and should resolve all ambiguity
Every concept must have sharp boundaries

But why? Who said "heap" needs to be precise? It serves its communicative purpose perfectly well as a fuzzy descriptor. The only reason it becomes problematic is when philosophers insist it must mean something precise, then tie themselves in knots when they can't make it work.

The paradox is self-inflicted.

Some of history's worst moral wrongs came not from ethical confusion, but from ethical certainty without humility. Communism is confident that it had figured out the laws of history. Eugenics is certain about human improvement. Each assumed it had achieved complete understanding when in fact it had made fundamental errors.

Without humility, theory and practice are identical. If you believe you have certain knowledge of definitions and categories, you can simply apply them mechanically.

With humility, theory and practice diverge dramatically. When you acknowledge you're working with approximations, you must constantly test, adapt, remain open to being wrong, and build in safeguards for uncertainty. This is the essence of practice.

Greek philosophy is often about achieving theoretical perfection. Jewish philosophy is about navigating practical reality while acknowledging our profound limitations.

The Sorites paradox reveals philosophers who have mislocated themselves -assuming they have the capacity and obligation to make every concept precise, when sometimes the appropriate response is simply: "This word serves its purpose without precision, and that's fine."

Philosophy has spent two millennia on the Sorites paradox because it refuses to accept that some of our words are just... casual descriptors. That not everything needs to be made precise. That sometimes "close enough" isn't a philosophical failure -it's the appropriate level of specification.

Jewish ethics has this humility built in. Don't throw out an answer with absolute confidence -there can always be additional factors we're unaware of. The architecture of Jewish reasoning includes epistemic humility as a load-bearing beam, not decorative trim.

The assumption that human reason should be able to make all concepts precise is itself a kind of hubris. And recognizing its limits isn't intellectual defeat.

It's wisdom.

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

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