Tuesday, May 19, 2026

05/18 Links Pt1: The Perversion of Martyrdom; Israeli Navy seizes Gaza-bound flotilla; Israeli attacked by group of men in Golders Green after speaking Hebrew

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Unknown Messenger
‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” These words conclude George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch and are considered by many to comprise one of the finest conclusions to any work of literature. Eliot’s point is that while many dream of being linked to important achievements (as do the characters in Middlemarch), it is often the good deed done out of duty that truly lends moral significance to one’s life.

With this in mind, we may examine one story of an unhistoric act of kindness. Indeed, one might say that this act is so unhistoric, we do not know to this day the name of the person who performed it. Yet that act is also, in a sense, profoundly linked to a newsworthy event of the last month.

In the 1940s, George Deek, a member of a large Christian Arab family, worked at an electricity company in Jaffa, where his family had lived for generations. He was friendly with his Jewish co-workers and even learned how to speak Yiddish from them. Then, in 1948, as the Jewish state came into being, he was informed by Arab leaders that his family should flee. He was told that if they remained, they would be massacred by the Jews, and that only several days would be needed to crush the nascent state. George and many of his siblings fled to Lebanon, and from there throughout the world. Today, there are descendants of George’s siblings who are still considered refugees by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and who, like other Palestinians, are denied the rights of citizenship in Arab countries in which they have been living for generations.

In 2014, a young Israeli diplomat, speaking in Norway, where he was posted, delivered a speech in accented but eloquent English about how Palestinians were persecuted—in Arab countries. Whereas the descendants of refugees in any Western country would long ago have acquired citizenship, “in the Arab world, the Palestinian refugees—including their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren—are still not settled.” They are “aggressively discriminated against, and in most cases denied citizenship and basic human rights…. The collaborators in this crime are no other than the international community and the United Nations.” In contrast to the way other refugees were treated, he argued, Palestinians were clearly being forced to suffer in these Arab countries in order to weaponize their situation against Israel:
Rather than doing its job and help the refugees build a life, the international community is feeding the narrative of the victimhood. While there is one U.N. agency in charge of all refugees in the world—the UNHCR, another agency was established to deal only with the Palestinian ones—UNRWA. This is no coincidence—while the goal of the UNHCR is to help refugees establish a new home, establish a future and end their status as refugees, the goal of UNRWA is opposite: to preserve their status as refugees, and prevent them from being able to start new lives.… In fact, Israel was one of the few countries that automatically gave full citizenship and equality for all Palestinians in it after ’48. And we see the results: despite all the challenges, the Arab citizens of Israel built a future. Israeli Arabs are the most educated Arabs in the world, with the best living standards and opportunities in the region.

This speech is posted to YouTube under the title “The best speech an Israeli diplomat ever held” and has hundreds of thousands of views. The name of the ambassador who delivered it is…George Deek, grandson of the aforementioned George Deek, who has made a career as an Israeli diplomat and recently served as Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, the first Arab Christian to hold such a position.
The Perversion of Martyrdom
Modern Islamist movements have learned to operate inside this framework. They present themselves as the powerless while pursuing a theology entirely about power: the establishment of the ummah, the recovery of historic Islamic sovereignty. They engage in martial martyrdom while being coded by the Western host as passive victims. The host’s immune system extends its protection to a force that does not believe in weakness as a permanent condition, only as a temporary embarrassment on the road to victory.

This is why so many on the Western left find themselves sympathizing with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime. By any progressive criterion—women’s rights, pluralism, freedom of conscience—these movements are reactionary to the marrow. But they are the victims of Western power. And in the secularized Christian martyrology that now dominates elite culture, that is sufficient.

Yehuda Halevi would have named this instantly. In the Kuzari, he distinguishes between suffering that purifies and suffering that merely accumulates bitterness—resentment without refinement. A truth claim that depends entirely on who is suffering, with no reference to what is being suffered for, is not a theology. It is resentment in vestments.

The early Christian martyrs died rather than worship the Roman emperor. They died for the proposition that there is an authority above Caesar. That proposition is the theological root of every liberal freedom the West currently enjoys. Now the secular heirs of this tradition are carrying placards for movements that execute people for apostasy—movements that would reinstate the very condition against which the martyrs died. The formal structure of the martyrology survives. The content has been discarded. When you remove the content from a martyrology, you do not get neutrality. You get a form available for any content. And the content that has filled it is not liberation. It is the oldest thing in the world: the strong man who claims to speak for the weak.

Pikuach nefesh—the near-absolute sanctity of human life—means that the Talmud suspends virtually every commandment to save a life. The martyrdom principle is the exception, not the rule. The Jew is not supposed to want to die. He is supposed to want to live: ve-chai bahem—and you shall live by them, not die by them.

When death becomes necessary, the martyr does not kill others, does not romanticize his death, and does not expect to win. Maimonides is explicit: One who could have found a legal workaround and chose martyrdom instead is not praiseworthy but irresponsible.

Perpetua walked into the arena in 203 C.E. She did not take anyone with her. The structure of her death—the vertical death, the death that preserved something rather than destroyed something, the death between herself and God—is still legible.

The Islamic martyr dies to conquer.

The Western campus radical taking the form of Christian submissiveness without the content performs his suffering to accumulate moral capital.

The Jewish martyr dies to preserve the integrity of a law he believes is worth more than his life, while refusing, structurally and legally, to impose that cost on anyone else.
Alan Baker: ‘Settler violence’: A buzzword used to single out Israel
Violence by hooligan groups, religious factions, political mobs, or any other group is illegal, cannot be excused, and must be condemned and punished under the law. That is a basic norm of any civilized society. It applies whether the perpetrators are politically motivated youth, religious extremists, sports hooligans, or demonstrators.

Yet when violence is linked to Israel, there is a troubling tendency to generalize isolated incidents and recast them as proof of an official, state-sanctioned policy. In that context, the phrase “settler violence” has gained currency. It is often used not simply to describe criminal acts by individuals but to suggest that Israel as a state encourages or condones violence against Palestinians. That is a misleading claim.

There is no Israeli policy that authorizes or promotes violence against Arabs. Such conduct is illegal in Israel, just as it is elsewhere, and law-enforcement authorities are expected to act against it. If enforcement is weak or inconsistent, that may justify criticism of the authorities. But lax enforcement is not the same thing as an official policy of sanctioning violence. To use the term “settler violence” as though it describes an Israeli government practice is therefore inaccurate and unfair.

Discussing violence in Israel
A wider problem is the readiness to attach loaded buzzwords to Israel in ways that amplify hostility and misrepresent facts. Terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid,” “colonialism,” “illegal occupation,” “mass starvation,” and “indiscriminate violence” are often repeated as if they were settled descriptions, even when the legal and factual basis is contested. Such language can be effective rhetorically, but it also distorts public understanding by imposing inflammatory labels on complex realities.

This pattern is especially visible when comparing how violence is discussed in relation to Israel versus other societies. Around the world, football hooliganism causes assault, property damage, riots, injuries, and deaths. It has occurred in countries across Europe, South America, North America, Africa, and elsewhere.

Major political demonstrations and marches in Western capitals also sometimes turn violent, with attacks on police, damage to public property, and assaults on symbols or institutions. Yet these incidents are not typically used to brand entire countries as officially sponsoring “sports violence” or “demonstration violence.”

That contrast matters. The problem is not that violence elsewhere is ignored; it is condemned, as it should be. The problem is the double standard applied to Israel, where sporadic criminal acts by fringe groups are presented as though they reflect a national doctrine. That framing is not only misleading; it also suggests a selective moral outrage that is directed at Israel in a way not applied to others.


‘Are you Jewish?’ Israeli attacked by group of men in Golders Green after speaking Hebrew
An Israeli man was attacked in London’s Golders Green neighborhood on Monday, sustaining severe cuts and bruises to his face and body, after he was heard speaking Hebrew by a group of Arabic-speaking men, in what police are treating as an antisemitic hate crime.

Police were searching for the attackers of 22-year-old Shalev Ben Yakar in the northwest London neighborhood, which has a large Jewish community. Last month, two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green in an antisemitic terror attack.

Ben Yakar, who often comes to London to visit family, was reported to have stepped outside his apartment to make a phone call around 2 a.m., so as not to disturb his roommates.

According to Ben Yakar, who spoke with Ynet, five or six men approached after hearing him speak Hebrew, and asked if he was Jewish. After Ben Yakar replied in the affirmative, he said, the men began “punching me, kicking me,” and screaming “Jew, Jew” in Arabic.

Ben Yakar said he was dragged across the road where the men tore at his clothes.

As someone who visits often, he said he sees London becoming more and more dangerous to the Jews who live there.

“It’ll get worse. For sure. Something needs to be done here,” he said.

Police reportedly told him that some of the assailants are known to them.

UK lawmaker for Golders Green Sarah Sackman called the attack “intolerable” and said she spoke with Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley.

“The recent spate of antisemitic attacks and terror have struck fear into the heart of our community and I am pushing for more action at every level,” she added.

The Jewish Leadership Council posted online that “this is yet another appalling attack in the heart of the Jewish community in Golders Green. Our thoughts are with the victim and his family. There must be a robust response from law enforcement which demonstrates that those who violently attack Jews will face the full force of the law.”


The Nova Festival exhibition opens in London this week. Here’s what I saw
The first thing that hits you when you enter the Nova Festival exhibition in London is a sound-scape of anguished cries, as the people targeted by Hamas terrorists run for their lives.

You don’t need to speak Hebrew to get a sense of what was happening. You are pitched from a film of warm and fuzzy, peace and love, trance music, early on the morning of 7 October 2023, as the golden sun rises, when suddenly the music stops and the organisers tell the disbelieving crowd: “Red Alert!”

And pandemonium ensues. All around the exhibit are screens, some of which feature testimony from the survivors, which you watch in shocked disbelief, as you walk on sanded floors, circling around shot-up cars rescued from the Nova Festival site. Three hundred and seventy eight people were murdered at Nova and many more wounded.

There are cubicles which represent the concrete shelters on Route 232 away from the festival site by Kibbutz Re-em, into which dozens of festival-goers crammed themselves in a desperate attempt to escape the terrorists. In one of these, Aner Shapira, a British-Israeli soldier aged just 22, tried to stave off the Hamas attackers by throwing out the grenades they were lobbing into the shelter. A wall poster tells us: “There were 40 of us in there and only seven came out alive. We couldn’t move. We were all covered by corpses.” A view of destroyed vehicles near the grounds of the Tribe of Nova music festival after Saturday’s deadly attack by Hamas (Ilia Yefimovich/picture alliance via Getty Images) via JTA

It is truly heartbreaking to read comments from survivors, such as this from Adir Ben Zikri: “I realised that they were shooting at every vehicle that approached and then they burned it. I ran between burnt bodies, body parts strewn all over the road and rivers of blood. We reached a rescue point. The guy next to me was mumbling: ‘They shot at us in the car. They turned my brother into a sieve, they left nothing of him. I have nothing to bury… nothing to bury…”

Another annexe room holds a screen with an interview with one of the Zaka volunteers, Shneor Gol, who speaks of the unspeakable, of the mutilated bodies and bags of heads, He smiles and says that Zaka volunteers are “thought of as the tough guys, the people who didn’t cry. But I cry every day.”

He is not alone. It is almost impossible to view this exhibition without shedding tears, and indeed dozens of hardened journalists at the press preview were doing just that.


Jewish, Arab Israeli activists launch 'Hasbara' flotilla opposing Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla
One day before Israeli naval forces began seizing boats participating in the latest Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla on Monday morning, Israeli Jewish and Arab activists launched their own smaller, counter flotilla in a message that Israelis could respond in kind and would safeguard their territorial sovereignty.

“We did our own flotilla,” said Arab-Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad, the organizer of the flotilla. Speaking on board one of the three ships in the Israeli “Hasbara” flotilla as it sailed in the waters outside of Herzliya, he asserted that the Gaza-bound flotilla would not reach its intended destination.

“We send a clear message to all the ‘terror flotilla’ activists,” he continued, addressing the participants in the GSF. “You are not welcome here. You will not be able to enter Gaza.”

He went on to assert that, despite the GSF’s claims, it was not bringing in any aid and that the activists on board were Hamas supporters.

Haddad went on to call on everyone around the world who wanted to support the Palestinians in Gaza to “free Gaza from the terrorist organization Hamas.”

The participants in the Israeli flotilla included a group of prominent pro-Israel figures, including Golda Daphna, Hallel Abramowitz-Silverman, Cindy Seni, Marwan Jaber, Ashley Waxman Bakshi, and 12-year-old activist Ben Carasso.

Noting that it had no intention to violate the sovereignty of other countries, but rather to make a symbolic statement, the “Hasbara” flotilla remained in Israeli waters, not far from where it set sail from the Herzliya Marina. It remained out for several hours before returning to port.

On board, the activists waved signs mocking the GSF, which, in previous runs, had been unsuccessful in reaching Gaza and carried little aid.

One sign read, “Is Gaza free yet?” Another stated, “I was promised a sandwich,” a reference to the online trope that Israelis, and in some usages, Jews as a whole, assert they were promised something 3,000 years ago whenever they want it.

It also referred to the sandwiches Israeli forces distributed to the participants in the last Gaza flotilla when it was intercepted.
Israeli Navy seizes Gaza-bound flotilla as commandos board boats at sea
Israeli naval forces, led by the elite Shayetet 13 commando unit, moved on the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) on Monday, boarding vessels and detaining activists in an operation that was still unfolding as footage emerged from the scene.

The video, captured on the activists' own cameras and shared in their posts, showed Israeli forces stepping onto the decks as detainees were transferred to a larger Israeli Navy vessel and routed toward the port of Ashdod on Israel's coast.

The interception followed a public demand earlier that day from Israel's Foreign Ministry calling on the convoy to change course and turn back immediately. The flotilla did not turn back. The Navy went in.

What makes this story bigger than the boarding itself is the case Israel began building before a single commando hit the water.

The Foreign Ministry framed the convoy not as a humanitarian mission but as a "provocation for the sake of provocation," naming two Turkish groups behind it, Mavi Marmara and IHH, and noting that IHH has been designated as a terrorist organization. The ministry's accusations went further still, tying the flotilla directly to two of the most contested issues currently on the table: Hamas's refusal to disarm, and President Trump's peace plan.

According to Israel, the boats were sent to divert attention from the disarmament question and to obstruct progress on that specific diplomatic effort.


Trump says ‘very good chance’ of Iran deal after postponing planned US strike
Hours after US President Donald Trump postponed a planned military attack on Iran on Monday, he told reporters that there was a "very good chance" the United States could reach an agreement with Iran to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

"There seems to be a very good chance that they can work something out. If we can do that without bombing the hell out of them, I would be very happy," he stated.

He added, regarding the possible agreement, “It’s a very positive development, but we’ll see whether it amounts to anything.” Trump also pointed out that there have been prior times when US officials thought a deal was imminent, but he reiterated that this time is "a little bit different."

Earlier on Monday, Trump mentioned in a Truth Social post that leaders of Gulf states had requested that he hold off on striking Iran.

Trump was originally planning to carry out the strikes on Tuesday, he wrote.

The leaders mentioned in the post were Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and UAE President Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

"Based on my respect for the above-mentioned leaders, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, and the United States Military that we will NOT be doing the scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow," Trump said.

"Serious negotiations are now taking place, and that, in their opinion, as Great Leaders and Allies, a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America, as well as all Countries in the Middle East, and beyond," he wrote.


Nearly 80% of Gazans open to emigrating from Strip, COGAT survey finds
Nearly 80% of Gazans are interested in emigrating from the Gaza Strip, according to a recent survey the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) shared with senior Israeli officials.

The findings, seen by The Jerusalem Post, underscore growing frustration among Gaza’s civilian population as Hamas continues to refuse to disarm - a key condition in the plan presented by US President Donald Trump and a central element in efforts toward postwar reconstruction.

As part of the survey conducted by COGAT, respondents were asked which issues they would like “additional information about for the Palestinian public.”

Nearly 80% said they were interested in receiving information about mechanisms for relocating to a third country through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings. Another 17.5% sought additional information about food supplies and humanitarian aid, while only around 2.5% expressed interest in medical humanitarian issues.

Israeli officials viewed the findings as evidence that a substantial portion of Gaza’s population is focused primarily on opportunities to leave the territory, as prospects for reconstruction and long-term change remain remote.

Since the war began following the October 7 massacre, more than 44,000 Gazans - including medical patients and individuals holding visas for third countries - have exited the Strip through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings. Approximately 2,500 departed through Rafah after the crossing reopened in February under the ceasefire arrangement.

Some Israeli officials believe the true number of Gazans interested in leaving may be significantly higher.

“It is possible that some respondents did not fully understand the question or may have been reluctant to express their views openly,” an Israeli security official said during the discussion.
Israel kills Islamic Jihad commander for Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley
Israel eliminated a top Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist in Lebanon overnight Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces said on Monday.

Wael Mahmoud Abd al-Halim served as the PIJ commander for the Beqaa region, according to the IDF, which said that he was targeted in a “precise strike in Baalbek.”

“Al-Halim led the integration of Islamic Jihad terrorists into combat operations alongside Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and operated to advance terrorist attacks against IDF soldiers in recent weeks,” the military said.





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