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Wednesday, October 07, 2026

10/06 Links Pt1: Gaza: the most lied about war in history; Bret Stephens: Israel regained deterrence. The US lost it; October 7: Hamas’s profit-and-loss statement

From Ian:

Howard Jacobson: The Big Lie
In truth, to aficionados of the new, revisionist colonial history of Israel, Jews haven’t been the good guys for a long time. If the genocide is the icing on the cake of lies, the cake itself is Zionism, that fragile hope for liberation, rescue, and reaffirmation that had lived long in the breasts of Jews over time and across the world and which, when realized, against all odds, seemed nothing short of a miracle.

That hope has since been ruthlessly and cynically disfigured by its enemies to the point where the very word itself hisses with sinister intent. Bad luck for Zionism that the word begins with a Z, a letter suggestive of the same unfathomable necromantic malice that medieval Jews brought to the killing of Gentile children.

It has, of course, taken more than a Z to make Zionism the hated thing it is today for millions of people who have, and want to have, no understanding of its meaning, its ambitions, its history. Of all attempts to vandalize an ideal—allowing that ideals have a way of maiming themselves over time—few can have been so dishonest or, sad to say, so successful. Dishonest, above all, because most of those who have made the discrediting of Zionism and Zionists their life’s work are historians who cannot fail to know how much more vexed and varied the story always was, how very different from one another in their ambitions and philosophy the first Zionists were. That historians sin against their own profession is a matter for them, their consciences, and the institutions they discredit.

The damage their persistent falsehoods and omissions do is less easily put aside. Paint Zionists as foreign invaders, and it’s plain sailing thereafter to remove them from civilized society, deplatform them, censor them, and at last silence them. Ignore the reality that the majority of Israelis trace at least some of their direct ancestry to the countries of the Middle East, including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, where they lived for centuries and millennia and which are all now effectively Judenrein—while millions of Arabs today live as Israeli citizens with full legal and civil rights. The goal of this academic campaign is clearly not to combat genocide and ethnic cleansing, but rather to rid the world of Zionists, and to rid the world of supporters of Zionism, too. For what we are witnessing is a purge not only of the guilty, but also of those guilty by their shared history, guilty by hearsay, guilty—remembering the foetor judaicus—by virtue of foul smell.

And it isn’t as though the false reading of Zionism’s history requires expert skills to unearth. The settler-colonialist smear gives its own game away to anyone who has spent 10 minutes in the company of an academic postcolonialist and heard the hackneyed accusation drop from his lips as slogans such as “Enemies from within” and “Card-carrying communists” once littered the speeches of McCarthyites. But only ask how a people can colonize their own aboriginal homeland, or in the name of which European colonial power bruised refugees effected a takeover of someone else’s country, and you are an apologist for genocide.

I recently came across a passionate anti-Zionist recruiting Einstein and Stefan Zweig to his cause, as though Jews who were to the slightest degree equivocal about Zionism in its early days would surely think as any extremist thinks about it today. In fact, though Einstein had his doubts, he changed his mind as the world changed in front of his eyes and went so far, in letters to his family, as to declare himself, happily, a Zionist. As for Zweig’s early opposition from the safety of Vienna, one cannot imagine many hate-marchers sharing his love for the Diaspora Jew, buzzing brashly about the world, a citizen of everywhere. Zweig’s is a tragic story of a gifted Jew imagining himself proof against Jew-hating in whatever form, having to run from his bright, beloved Vienna, fleeing the Nazis who banned and burned his books, and ending up taking his life in Rio de Janeiro, an exile from everywhere, a victim of that fanciful Diaspora that kept many from embracing Zionism and some wishing at the last that they had better understood what Zionism was for.

It’s not in any spirit of I told you so that I write the above words. No Jew was obliged to embrace Zionism. And it can hardly be said to have solved for all Jews the problem of existence in a hostile world. But the witness of such Jews as Einstein and Zweig cannot be adduced as evidence of Zionism’s monolithic evil. What they show, rather, is that Zionism was never an undifferentiated mass of ill intent with only theft and conquest on its mind. It was an idea, a longing, a necessity to some, and a wild fancy to others, and it probably never struck two Jews or sympathetic non-Jews the same way. To argue otherwise is bad faith and twisted history and, like all political falsehoods, serves no purpose but to awaken an old abhorrence.

The great lie that all Jews, except for those who noisily forswear Jewishness, think and act as one Jew has fueled the pogroms and inquisitions of the past. We fancied we’d seen the last of it, but here it is again: a universally resonating slander that aims at nothing less than the wholesale vilification of a people, and the denial of their right to either live separately as a nation or live peacefully among other nations. They are hell-bent—the liars and defamers—on resurrecting the concept of genocide, but ask yourself why genocide is once again on their minds.
Brendan O'Neill: Gaza: the most lied about war in history
The famine lie likewise teeters on a growing pile of facts. A survey from August this year found that Gaza had quite low levels of acute child malnutrition. Child malnutrition as measured by WHZ (weight for height) in children under five years of age was less bad in Gaza than it was in other parts of the world. It was 0.5 per cent in Gaza, which is roughly the same as Germany’s. In Iran it was 4.3 per cent. In Sudan, 16.3 per cent. But we don’t talk about Sudan. We don’t talk about the real famine that ravages Sudan, because it’s not the fault of Jews. Pretty much no one denies that Israel closed the borders of Gaza too harshly to aid in early 2025, banking, in Amit Segal’s words, that there was ‘enough food to prevent mass starvation’. But the idea that this was an act of forced starvation is ridiculous. Independent studies have found that, outside of that window of border closure, Israel’s vast importing of aid led to a situation where the mean energy available at certain periods of time was 3,163 calories per person, per day.

It’s actually quite simple. If you wanted to ‘genocide’ a people, would you send them tens of millions of meals and assist in the vaccination of a million of their children from polio? Israel did that in Gaza. It spearheaded the importing of millions of tonnes of food. It worked with the World Health Organisation to vaccinate more than a million Gazan kids. Not only is this ‘unlike’ what the Nazis did to the Jews – it’s the polar, stirring, complete opposite. The Nazis starved the Jews, and gassed them, and left them in ditches to die from hunger and disease, including polio. Israel, in contrast, helped to feed Gazans and inoculate them from disease. To call the Jewish State a Nazi entity is the great, terrible lie of our times. It is a libel without compare. It is utterly without foundation.

Other falsehoods are starting to tremble in the harsh light of inconvenient truth. Like the demented claim that Israel intentionally ‘murders’ journalists. In at least 53 cases, the BBC described as ‘journalists’ men who were later claimed as terrorists by Hamas and other anti-Semitic armies. The people that those Beeb fools wept over as ‘innocent reporters’ were in truth members of racist militias. Then there’s the broader civilian death toll. It’s hotly contested. Some say the death ratio, terrorist to civilian, is 1:4. Others, including Israel, say it’s better – more like 1:2. Here’s the thing, though: either of those would be seen as normal and in fact good in the sphere of modern warfare.

Those of us who challenge the ‘genocide’ and ‘famine’ narratives are accused of downplaying the horrors of Gaza. Not a bit of it. They say ‘war is hell’ for a reason. Gazans suffered enormously these past three years. The famine claim might be untrue, but they were not eating hearty meals or wandering around happily and freely. Too much innocent life was lost, as in all wars. Some of us loathe Hamas not only for its genocidal hatred of the Jewish nation but also for its inhuman willingness to sacrifice Palestinian life at the altar of its cosmic Jew-hate. The 7 October pogrom was most immediately a tragedy for the Jews, and then a tragedy for Gazans, who were treated as disposable bodies in Hamas’s apocalyptic war against the homeland of the Jewish people.

Yet the truth needs to come out. Gaza is the most lied about war in history. Nothing else comes close. The branding of a war as a ‘genocide’, and normal war suffering as ‘famine’, is a flagrant crime against truth. The branding of the Jews’ fightback against anti-Semitic barbarism as ‘genocidal mania’ is unforgivable. The left’s likening of the armies of the Jewish homeland to the armies of Nazi Germany, and the Jews’ war of resistance against Islamofascists to the Nazis’ vaporisation of the Jews, is a sickening act of moral inversion. It projects on to the Jews Europe’s own historic crimes of genocidal mania. Our present moment might celebrate such despicable Jew-baiting – posterity, I suspect, will not.

It’s three years since 7 October. Since the most savage assault on the Jewish people in the post-Nazi era. That so many ‘progressives’ in the West sided with the rapists and murderers of Jews still horrifies me. That they then demonised the Jewish fightback against that racist barbarism as itself racist, as itself barbarism, will surely be seen by future generations as the most dreadful betrayal of Jews in the early 21st century. Anti-Semitism always comes dressed in the rags of ‘virtue’. Today, too. Tear those rags off and you’ll see something ugly beyond belief – Jews being accused of genocide for resisting genocide.
United Pulls Hamas-Praising Pilot From Service After Report Of Reinstatement
United Airlines has removed from service a pilot who called Hamas terrorists behind the October 7 massacre “brave,” pending a review, The Daily Wire can first report.

Capt. Ibrahim R. Mossallam was first suspended with pay in November 2023, but Israel’s Channel 14 reported on Monday that United quietly allowed him to return to the cockpit just six months later. United told The Daily Wire on Tuesday that it has pulled the pilot from the skies.

“We have withheld this pilot from service pending an ongoing review,” an airline spokesman said.

The airline did not confirm whether Mossallam had resumed flying after it began investigating in late 2023. The Daily Wire asked United for clarification on the “ongoing review.”

In posts on October 7, 2023, Mossallam cheered as Hamas terrorists slaughtered Israelis, calling the attack “resistance” by people who had endured “occupation, oppression, humiliation, apartheid, and straight up murder.” He referred to the terrorists as “brave people” and blamed the “Zionist regime” for the massacre.

After the posts surfaced, Jewish organizations and Jewish communities in the United States called on United to fire the pilot. United initially removed Mossallam from service and investigated, but continued paying him. Channel 14 reported that higher-ups at United wanted to fire Mossallam but that his union intervened to protect him. Mossallam returned to the cockpit six months after his suspension, according to Channel 14.

In the years since, Mossallam has continued his anti-Israel rants on social media, including one which stated, “Their plan [Israel’s] was never to stop the theft of land. Were it not for the Palestinian resistance and the awakening of the world, all of Palestine would already have been taken.”

Mossallam is listed on the New York chapter for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) board of directors.

The renewed scrutiny of United follows the September 30 attempted terrorist hijacking of Flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv, in which the Omani co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and tried to crash the plane with 174 people on board. Israeli passengers and crew, after the pilot managed to open the door, got into the cockpit and subdued the co-pilot, and off-duty pilots traveling aboard landed the jet safely in Saudi Arabia.

Before the attempted hijacking, the Omani terrorist pilot had published antisemitic posts on social media, along with posts advocating for violence against women


The Times of Israel: A Mandatory Listen - Bret Stephens: Israel regained deterrence. The US lost it
Welcome to "A Mandatory Listen," a new weekly podcast in which The Times of Israel deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan asks the big questions facing Israel and the Jewish people.

For this third episode in the new series, we speak with The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens -- also the editor of the SAPIR Journal -- who was in the country for a lightning reporting trip ahead of the Israeli election on October 27.

Stephens, who both supports and criticizes Israel, is increasingly the minority voice at the Gray Lady, where the Jewish state has decidedly lost the battle for public opinion.

But he thinks Israel shouldn't really care what others think about it.

"Let me put it this way: Would you rather have won the battle for public opinion and lost the war -- or vice versa? If that's the choice, I would say that Israel was better off losing the battle for public opinion," Stephens says.

Find out why he believes Israel couldn't have won both wars.

We discuss why the United States, until now, has been judged on its wartime operations through a different lens.

But has the Iran war changed all that?

A Mandatory Listen podcast episodes are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by Yitzchak Ledee.


Satellite photos show ‘significant’ renewed activity at Iranian nuclear site bombed by IDF — report
New satellite images show “significant renewed activity” at the underground Minzadehei nuclear facility near Tehran, which the IDF bombed during the war with Iran this year, according to a report published Tuesday by the Institute for Science and International Security.

“Recent satellite imagery indicates a return to regular vehicle activity around the site post extensive cleanup operation that included the clearing of rubble and debris and repair of damage on the hillside,” the Washington-based think tank said.

“Significant vehicle presence can be seen throughout the site between early September and early October 2026,” the think tank added. “Cars are parked outside the security perimeter in the parking lot, and many passenger vehicles and trucks can be seen inside the perimeter.”

The Institute for Science and International Security has published multiple studies in recent months, based on satellite imagery, which show that Iran is making efforts to rebuild its bombed nuclear infrastructure.

“Given what is known about this compound, this activity may be indicative of an effort by Iran to reestablish a nuclear weapons development capability and to reconstitute what was lost in the attack on the compound,” the institute said in its Tuesday report.

The Israel Defense Forces had announced in early March that it destroyed the secret site at Minzadehei, where the military said that Iranian nuclear scientists were working to help develop nuclear weapons.

According to the IDF, Minzadehei was where Iran had moved much of its nuclear program after the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June 2025, during which the US also bombed key Iranian nuclear sites.

Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the IDF spokesman, said after the March strike that a group of nuclear scientists had “worked secretly” at Minzadehei to develop capabilities required for nuclear weapons.

The IDF tracked the scientists to “their new place of operation,” enabling the strike on the compound, Defrin said at the time.


October 7: Hamas’s profit-and-loss statement
On August 3, Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, sat across from Piers Morgan for a half-hour interview. Most viewers remember the denial. Hamad said he was “100%” confident that Hamas never committed crimes against civilians, and that whatever happened at the Nova music festival, in the kibbutzim, and in the homes set on fire was, at most, a “mistake” by individuals.

The denial was shocking, and rightly so. It was also the predictable part of the interview. The important part came some 15 minutes later, when Morgan asked whether October 7 had been a strategic failure, given what it brought down on Gaza.

Hamad conceded that “we paid a big price” and moved straight to the profit column. Israel is isolated. Its prime minister is wanted by the International Criminal Court. And, in his words, “All the world now, they put the Palestinian cause on the table.”

Before October 7, he said, there were only Security Council meetings and Arab statements that changed nothing on the ground. Now there are “strategic achievements.” He closed the answer by saying Hamas had not changed.

This was a profit-and-loss statement, delivered by one of the people who signed off on the investment.

The massacre dividend
For Hamas, the massacre was an investment. The killing, the rape, and the abductions were meant to provoke a harsh Israeli response, the images from Gaza that followed, and the international pressure those images would generate. Call it the massacre dividend: the political return a terrorist organization extracts from its own atrocity once the world translates it into urgency to “solve the issue.”

Gazans paid the price. Hamad himself left the Gaza Strip before October 7 and never went back, as he acknowledged in the same interview. The dividend is being collected in European capitals, and Washington may be next.

Whoever rewards a massacre with statehood is inviting the next one, and not only in Israel. Paris and London are within range as well.

The Israeli wall
On the Israeli side, the picture is the reverse. The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs has measured public opinion seven consecutive times over 30 months. Opposition to a Palestinian state has held steady at 64% to 68% of the public, and at 75% among Jewish respondents in the latest wave. Total support, including conditional support tied to recognition and demilitarization, has not exceeded 25% in any survey.

One figure is rising sharply. Concern about an October 7-style attack from Judea and Samaria climbed from 62% in February 2025 to 77% in September 2026. Even among left-wing respondents, a majority now shares that concern.

A poll captures attitudes at a given moment and cannot predict how the public will respond to sustained pressure. But three years on, this is no longer post-traumatic shock. Israelis understood Hamad’s sentence better than most of the West: a state established now would be credited to the massacre.


Ask Haviv Anything: 151: Could the hostages have come home sooner? With Brett McGurk
We have merch! Find our awesome new mug and hat at https://shop.askhavivanything.com .

What actually brought hostages home, and why did it take so long? Brett McGurk, who led Biden’s efforts to free the October 7 hostages, joins Haviv to discuss his new book, Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages. From secret Saudi talks to the showdown over Rafah, he describes the decisions, failures and breakthroughs behind the negotiations -- and why he concluded that a deal would remain out of reach while Yahya Sinwar was alive.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction of Brett McGurk and his background
01:54 Why Brett McGurk wrote 'Brink' and the book's focus
05:55 US-Saudi relations and regional diplomacy in 2021-2022
12:04 The deterioration and potential repair of US-Saudi ties
19:46 The regional impact of US foreign policy decisions
24:58 The outbreak of the October 7th attack and initial US response
29:56 Israeli and American perspectives during the crisis
35:03 The debate over Israeli military actions in Gaza
40:00 Hostage negotiations and the role of Sinwar and Hamas
45:06 The influence of regional actors like Iran and Hezbollah
50:09 The cultural differences in military planning between Israel and the US
54:55 The importance of timing and deadlines in negotiations
01:00:11 The final stages of hostage negotiations and deal-making
01:05:13 Reflections on the ongoing conflict and future prospects




Joshua Namm: Loving Your Fellow Jew: If It Was Always Easy, It Wouldn’t Be A Mitzvah!
Most secular Jews are taught by their liberal leaders that leftism is Judaism. They are taught that whatever thing du jour that the Democratic Party thinks, is what Jews ought to think. I’m not trying to be partisan here, but most secular Jews are Democrats. Their leaders are uniformly Democrats.

They are told week after week in their “Temples” that the only thing that they really need to know about Judaism is “tikkun olam.” And “tikkun olam” just “happens to” mirror whatever is en vogue on the left at the moment.

Tikkun olam is a real concept in Jewish thought. But the way it has been applied in America for more than a century is a complete lie. A lie that is convenient because it is so amorphous – it can be applied to literally any cause.

Similarly, I STILL hear people translate the word “mitzvah” into a “good deed.” I’ve got news for those people: everyone should do “good deeds,” Jews are required to do mitzvahs.

How can you blame someone who is essentially Jewishly illiterate for not behaving Jewishly? It’s the same reason you don’t punch a child in the face because he spilled his milk.

Therefore blindness to Jewish reality and truth, and lack of Jewish pride - is the fault of despicably cowardly and ideological leaders, poor education, and ignorance - not the average member of the community.

You can be the community’s most successful doctor, lawyer, businessman, whatever - with an Ivy League education - and still, Jewishly, have the knowledge of a five year old.

Rectifying that is the responsibility of each of us.

We, as a community, failed to educate generations of Jews in what being Jewish actually means. So, what right do we have to even be upset with behavior with which we disagree – no matter how heinous that behavior appears to be?

And while some behave in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us, calling them “kapos” is just as bad as ANY comparisons of Jews to Nazis (G-d forbid).

As is calling people the “erev rav” (the “mixed multitudes” – the people who worshipped the golden calf).

Jewish tradition in fact teaches that the “erev rav” were not Jews at all, but non-Jews who left Egypt with us because they witnessed G-d’s miracles during our redemption from Egypt and wanted to be part it. Which makes sense because the Torah calls them the “mixed multitude,” not “Jews.” So again, no Jew is like the erev rav.

The despicable term “JINO” (Jew in name only) is similarly heinous. Would you like to be termed a “JINO” because you aren’t meticulous enough about keeping ANY of the mitzvot? Just as we shouldn’t be embarrassing or making our brothers and sisters feel “less than” because they aren’t tzaddikim (completely righteous) 24 hours a day about every single detail (I am certainly one of those people), we shouldn’t be (G-d forbid) judging the Jewishness of people with which we disagree with politically, even if their actions are truly wrong.

No matter what they believe, or what they do: a Jew is a Jew is a Jew.

As I have said for decades: you can put on the world’s biggest cross, eat a ham and cheese sandwich on Yom Kippur, in a church: and you are still just as Jewish as anyone else. It is our responsibility to steer that person in the right Jewish direction, and put him/her on the right path.

Because we know better, and anyone who behaves that heinously obviously does not.

And chastising, demeaning, and humiliating that person - are the last things that will accomplish that.

Jewishness at its core is innate, and any outward behavioral deviation from that does not change that fact. No matter the reason - in their soul, even at the deepest levels, that person knows the truth, It is our job to uncover it for them.

Even if that job seems monumental, frustrating, or pointless (there is no such thing).

Recently, in reaction to “NAZA,” I saw a Facebook post in which someone said that they would prefer that the filmmakers makers would leave the Jewish people and…”convert to Islam.”

That’s logical. You’d rather add two names to the two billion who already want to murder us, rather than teach them, no matter how much patience it takes, how awesome being Jewish really is?

I’ll always choose the two Jews, no matter how disconnected they may be from Jewish reality, over anyone joining our enemies.

But, that’s just me.

Never give in. Never give up.

Am Yisrael Chai!


State of Tel Aviv: Gaza “Journalists”: Legit Media or Terrorists?
From the earliest moments of the October 7 attack, there were questions about “journalists” who happened to be present when Israeli soldiers were being lynched; when civilians were being kidnapped, and more. So many journalists – many working for major western media outlets were suspect. Well, turns out that is because at least 170 “journalists” were in fact Hamas and PIJ operatives. The IDF has put together the Press Files – a dossier documenting 170 terrorists masquerading as members of the press, with evidence culled from open source material as well as interrogations and other information to which they have access. The project was published on Friday, October 2. And the international media barely noticed. They ignored it, in large part. Except for Piers Morgan – an independent media personality (who cut his teeth in the UK tabloid industry) and has close to ten-million social media followers. Morgan was targeted in an IDF social media post. He lashed back, saying that he finds it difficult to believe anything that the IDF says. And so on.

Well, Morgan and others may not like it but facts do not lie. And the IDF has amassed an impressive dossier of facts. In this podcast we speak with former IDF Spokesperson and FDD Senior Fellow, Jonathan Conricus, as well as IDF Deputy Spokesperson, Ben Cohen. We get into the deeply entrenched media bias against Israel and discuss certain issues and events in detail – like the October 17, 2023 incident in which a PIJ rocket backfired. Hamas and PIJ told the world that Israel had dropped an ordinance on a hospital killing 500. No one questioned that libel – which fueled orgiastic antisemitic riots the world over. But in this podcast, the PIJ political spokesperson himself explains the anatomy of the lie that night and every day since, and before. He confirms that hospitals and ambulances and schools and all civilian infrastructure used by PIJ and Hamas as a matter of course. It’s all in here. And it should be sending shock waves through western newsrooms.









 


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