Tuesday, October 13, 2026

10/13 Links Pt2: One year ago today, the last 20 living hostages finally came home after 738 days in Hamas captivity; From Dreyfus to David Milstein: The enduring accusation of Jewish dual loyalty

From Ian:

Deborah Lipstadt: ‘It begins with words’ – the dangers of Holocaust denial
The historian and former US antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt spoke about the power and danger of words at an event on 20th-century German history, held at the Cliveden literary festival.

“Whether you’re talking about the Holocaust, Rwanda, the [propaganda] radio [broadcasts] from the Congo, no one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I’m going to get a machete and go kill people. I’m going to go build the gas chamber’. It begins with words.

“So if you hear something… even if it’s a little thing, you’re at the gym on the treadmill and someone makes a crack, say something.”

The event last weekend, titled From Weimar to Nuremberg, covered topics including the rise of Nazism, the lessons of the Holocaust, and the threats posed by artificial intelligence-fuelled Holocaust denial.

Among the speakers was the journalist Victor Sebestyen, author of several books on European history, who warned of the danger of “reading history backwards”.

He said: “I hate that word ‘inevitable’. Things [in Germany] were really booming in the Golden Twenties, and the Nazis and the far right were absolutely nowhere in the polls.” Had the former chancellor and moderate Gustav Stresemann, who helped to stabilise the German economy, not died in 1929, or had bullets fired by government forces that killed 16 of the Munich Putsch accomplices also struck Hitler, the course of history would have been very different, he said.

The historian and journalist James McAuley considered what the lessons of the Holocaust were. “Is it the failure of assimilation? Is it the imperative of Zionism? Is it the urgency to commit to and to protect human rights and human dignity? … I think we’re living in a moment when some of those lessons that we have had for so long are in increasing conflict.”

In a recent essay, The Death of History, the historian Niall Ferguson had charted the rise of Holocaust denial on social media, or as he put it the “algorithmic media”. The panel was challenged about whether the truth could survive into the 21st century.

Natalie Livingstone, author of The Nuremberg Women, an acclaimed account of the reporters, translators and lawyers who played a role in the trials, said it was “very unhelpful”, as Ferguson had done, to speak of a failure of history.

“What we’ve all got to do is to keep trying, to keep researching, to keep writing … and doing our best to fight for the truth,” Livingstone said.

“To throw in the towel and say that history’s failed is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” That was why it was so important to have forums such as the panel, and why books were so important. “That’s why it’s so important to delve into the past.”
The world’s distorted view of Israel is built on persistent myths
'Illusion of truth effect'
While the formulation is a paraphrase rather than a direct historical citation, psychologists study this concept as the “illusion of truth effect,” which shows that people are more likely to believe information is true simply because they have heard it before.

The fact is that Israel has urged every American president for the last 40-plus years to take the Iranian nuclear threat seriously and do something about it. No US president prior to the current one has ever chosen to authorize military action against Iran to neutralize their nuclear capability.

However, it was the current US president who chose to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House briefing room to hear his pitch, but it was US President Donald Trump who decided to launch military action against Iran.

Regardless of how it turns out, it is a canard to blame Israel for taking the US to war against Iran, even if the Netanyahu government was in favor of such action.

However, a canard can be manipulated for other purposes as well. Last week, a decision was made by the Nobel Prize Committee to award this year’s peace prize to South African Jurist Navanethem “Navi” Pillay. Among other anti-Israel positions in her history, she is famous for believing the canard that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

While she has done worthwhile work in helping advance a more comprehensive international legal order and, as the Committee noted, “played a central role in ensuring that issues such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are brought to justice,” her activities regarding the supposed genocide by Israel in Gaza dramatically tarnish her reputation.

Elisha Wiesel, in an op-ed in The Free Press, wrote: “My father, Elie Wiesel, received the Nobel Peace Prize for ensuring the Holocaust wouldn’t be forgotten. By honoring Navi Pillay, who accused Israel of genocide, the committee has betrayed his legacy.”

Yet the canard is that Israel, which vaccinated over one million residents of Gaza against polio, enabled millions of kilograms of food to enter the strip during the war (most of which was stolen by Hamas and then resold at inflated prices), put its own troops at risk by having them enter buildings to ensure only combatants were attacked, not civilians, and notified the Gazan population of every significant military operation to come with instructions for moving to safer zones, is somehow guilty of genocide.

A truthful look at the facts will show that it is actually Hamas that was engaged in genocide against Israel given their attack on October 7, intent on killing as many Jews as possible. This, in keeping with their original 1988 founding charter explicitly calling for the killing of Jews, which draws on religious texts to justify violence against Jewish people globally.

While a revised document released in 2017 removed this specific language, Hamas did not formally revoke or repudiate the original charter. Organizations like Genocide Watch and various genocide scholars have stated that Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks against Israeli civilians and statements by its leadership reflected genocidal intent and acts.

Yet the canard that Israel is guilty of genocide continues, with large portions of the world’s diplomatic corps agreeing with or remaining silent about this blatant misstatement of facts.

Former US president John F Kennedy said: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

When it comes to Israel, the world too easily accepts the myth rather than seek the truth. Our job, the job for all of us, is to shatter the prism that enables the myths to fester and do so at every opportunity. That is our obligation as a community.
Stephen Daisley: The Cult of Palestinianism Is Fundamentally Anti-British
Why has Britain been such a focal point for anti-Israel activism since Oct. 7, 2023?

Our open-borders immigration policy has played its part. As, too, has our insistent, suicidal tolerance of people and cultures inimical to our own.

But there is something else at work. Palestinianism is outwardly anti-Zionist, but inwardly it grows from a sense of grievance against the British, their empire, and London's historical sympathy for a Jewish state. They hate Israel, but they blame Britain.

To the Palestinianists, Britain means the Balfour Declaration, the original sin which enabled the entire Zionism project.

Britain would rather not face up to the enmity felt for it by the Palestinianists. We have more than enough mobs who hate our guts, thank you very much.

Our fatal mistake is listening to them in good faith and striving to strike a reasonable balance between their campaign and that of their Israeli enemies.

In doing so, we insist upon a false equivalence that treats these two causes as morally equal. This approach cannot survive honest scrutiny.

The cause of Zionism, the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish state in the ancient Land of Israel, has produced an advanced democracy, with a highly educated citizenry and burgeoning markets in technology, medical science, and military materiel.

By whichever metric you choose, the State of Israel is an objective good and has brought many benefits to Western civilization.


‘Hamas beat us day after day’: A survivor’s story of 738 days in captivity
Kupershtein kicked into action mode. As terrorists began cutting off exits to the festival, he convinced the police chief to open the emergency exit – a move that saved more than 2,000 festival goers.

“People were driving, running, panicking. Many were injured. One ambulance arrived at the festival to help but it got stuck, and the next ambulance we called never came. So I took matters into my own hands. I was a medic in the army, and I had an ATV [all-terrain vehicle]. I realised I could save these people myself.” Selflessness and duty are evidently Kupershtein family traits – his parents fell in love in the back of an ambulance during shifts as volunteer paramedics.

“I went back and forth to the exit a couple of times with injured people, but the last time I went back to the festival site, it was on fire. The terrorists had arrived. They shot RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and killed all the police officers in their cars. I started to run.”

With bullets raining down on him, Kupershtein crawled through brush at the side of the road. “The whole time I was thinking, ‘My army is going to win and everything will be OK.’ After 40 minutes, it quietened down and I figured the Israeli forces had arrived. But then I heard ‘Allahu Akbar’ and something inside me broke.

“I couldn’t understand how the terrorists could win. It was terrible. Then the shooting started again, and Hamas murdered more people. I remember the screaming, the sound of gunshots, then silence.”

Realising he would be next, he hid his security gear in the brush so Hamas wouldn’t shoot him on sight. When the terrorists finally found him, they threw him and another hostage into the back of a Toyota with Palestinian plates and crossed the border. It was the start of two years that would completely transform his life.

“For the first month we were in an apartment, and after the [first hostage release] deal we went down into a tunnel where we never saw daylight. The space was about 4.5m wide for six people.

Describing the deplorable conditions, he continues: “We slept on the floor on a thin mattress and dug a hole for a toilet beside it. We showered once a month. The drinking water wasn’t clean. We’d be given rice for lunch, and half a pitta each with cheese for dinner – sometimes there’d be maggots on it. I lost 65lb,” he says, pulling out his iPhone to show me a photo of himself from just two weeks before the attack. “A bit chubby,” he chuckles.

For the majority of 738 days, Kupershtein was held underground with five other hostages, only one of whom he had met, just a few days before the festival. He says the terrorists would update them on negotiations, but weren’t truthful: “They’d say, ‘Your government doesn’t want you. They want to kill you.’” The terrorists also made the hostages film propaganda videos, the aim being to for them to be picked up by Israeli broadcasters. Once, they demanded Kupershtein dig his own grave on camera – he refused. Other times, “they’d tell us to say things on camera like, ‘Thank you, Hamas, you’re actually OK.’ I said whatever they wanted me to so that my family could see I was alive.”

Kupershtein says he and his fellow hostages had an unexpected link to the outside world via a radio in the tunnels. “We’d feel hopeful when a release deal was proposed, then it would fall through. Our hopes were up and down all the time.”

When the second release deal fell through in early 2025, the situation became even more dire. “It was a really hard time for us. Hamas came day after day and beat us, until one day, they took Yosef [Chaim Ohana] and I to a room and blindfolded us. They hit me in the face, I fell down, and they pulled me to another room by my leg. I felt them tie my legs. I thought they were about to cut one of them off.” A half-hour beating ensued. Kupershtein couldn’t stand properly for a month.

Despite enduring what he calls “hell”, Kupershtein says the weekly kiddush [a ceremonial blessing over wine] he and the other hostages would do together kept their spirits alive. “We didn’t have wine, but we had salty water they’d give us. We dreamt about challah bread. This made us feel like we were home; the connection between us all was really nice, and we’d all sing prayers.”
From forensic evidence to global accountability: Families demand the world hear the truth of Oct. 7
Three years after the October 7 attacks, Hadassah Medical Center, the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem (MOTJ), bereaved families and forensic experts have come together for the First International Symposium: Lessons Learned from October 7. Their shared mission to document the atrocities, honor the victims, and ensure the world understands the scale and nature of the attempt to annihilate the Israeli people was the major theme of the confab. The symposium, which opened Tuesday at MOTJ, brought these forensic findings before an international audience, while families called for the evidence to be shared with the world.

The two-day conference was organized by Dr. Ira Titunik and Prof. Esi Sharon of Hadassah, in partnership with Granit Almog-Bareket, director of MOTJ’s Leadership Academy. International Symposium Lessons Learned from October 7

For MOTJ, the symposium builds on its work to preserve the memory of October 7 through its exhibition 06:29: From Darkness to Light, which tells the story of the day from the perspective of brave women who were on the ground. During the conference, participants visited the exhibit and were visibly moved by the experience.

Jonathan “Yoni” Riss, Managing Director at MOTJ, said. “As a museum that serves as a beacon for tolerance, peace, conflict resolution, and dialogue – we are committed to shedding light on the heavy toll of Hamas’ terrorism. The horrors that came out of the forensic findings, which will be exposed here today, some for the first time, obligate us to hold up a mirror to the entire world and reveal the atrocities that unfolded on that bloody day. We are here with a clear mission and a powerful message to the entire world – Never Again begins today.”

For Eyal Eshel, whose daughter Roni was killed at the Nahal Oz military base, the forensic evidence captures the horror of that day in details that are difficult to comprehend.

“I call from this stage on everyone involved in explaining Israel’s story and the atrocities of October 7 to the world: Take the difficult autopsy reports and share them with the rest of the world so people can understand what happened here and the magnitude of the atrocities committed by Hamas in Gaza,” Eshel said. “Sometimes all that remains is a single hair, sometimes the tip of a fingernail, and sometimes a lump of charcoal. The entire world needs to see and hear.”

Orly Cohen, whose son Amit was murdered at the Nova music festival alongside his partner, Norelle Mansouri, and her sister Roya, also addressed the conference, thanking forensic medicine and identification professionals for their work.

“The certainty you gave us was a gift beyond words. In a world that had fallen apart in an instant, it was the first anchor that allowed us to begin facing reality. Thank you for your dedication, professionalism, sensitivity, and for seeing the human being behind every task,” Cohen said.

Prof. Chen Kugel, director of Israel’s National Institute of Forensic Medicine, described how identification began without a definitive list of missing people. Some remains arrived so severely burned that bone fragments crumbled when touched. Kugel also described findings that he said indicated the deliberate use of flammable materials to intensify fires and destroy bodies.

“In some places, flammable materials were added to create a kind of crematorium,” Kugel said, echoing memories of the Holocaust.
StandWithUs: “We Saw Things That Human Eyes Should Never See” | Dean Elsdunne
In the latest StandWithUs podcast, Israel Police Spokesperson Lt. Dean Elsdunne discusses what he saw following October 7th, policing in Israel, how Israel is tackling "settler violence" and the challenges of keeping Israel safe.




‘Torn’ documentary on battle over Israeli hostage posters wins New York Emmy award
Israeli filmmaker Nim Shapira on Saturday was awarded with a best documentary award at the New York Emmy Awards for his film “Torn,” which centers on the battle over posters for Israeli hostages on the streets of New York City in the months after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

The film, which was initially released in 2024, focuses on “Kidnapped from Israel” posters that rapidly appeared around the city and across the globe in the days and weeks following Hamas’s attack, and how they became flashpoints in the culture war over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The “Kidnapped” posters appeared at innumerable venues across the city — subway stations, restaurants, politicians’ offices and much more. Just as quickly as they appeared, pro-Palestinian activists would tear them down.

The 75-minute film heavily features interviews with several New York-based hostage advocates, including the creators of the poster campaign, as well as family members of several of the 251 hostages taken by Hamas and other terror groups on October 7.

Unable to secure interviews with pro-Palestinian activists who led the poster-ripping campaign, the documentary instead relies on TV news footage and social media posts to hear from individuals who were opposed to the poster campaign.

The footage shows individuals ripping down or defacing hostage posters, who are then asked why they are doing it and if they would like to share their name. Responses vary from smiling and laughing to giving the middle finger and showing a variety of expletives. Those who engaged on video provided answers like, “Go colonize somewhere else,” “Your posters are propaganda,” or “Let’s put up the 3,000 kidnapped kids in Gaza.”

Its director, Shapira, said in an interview last year that the film asks for empathy from those who tore down the posters, as well as those angered by the pro-Palestinian activists doing so.

“I’m asking for the people who pulled down the posters to think about these victims and hostages who did nothing wrong,” he said. “And I’m also asking for understanding from, let’s say, my side, to understand that the number one reason why people tore down the posters is that the death toll in Gaza kept rising throughout this war.”

Shapira said his film “is not about Israel or Palestine. My film is about New York and America. I’m dying for the day that the film will be irrelevant, but we are more tribal and polarized than ever. We exist in different echo chambers and different silos. The poster war did not just tear down the posters, but also tore down the social fabric of the city.”


Netanyahu, Eisenkot blocs struggle to secure majority, raising fears of another election deadlock
With just two weeks to go before Israel’s election, the political chessboard is set, and there is little indication that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has found a winning move.

Israel’s voters do not elect the prime minister directly; instead, the prime minister must assemble a coalition commanding a majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats. That means Benjamin Netanyahu’s chances of retaining power depend in part on how well his smaller political allies perform at the polls.

There are 38 parties running in these elections, although no more than 15 will meet the 3.25% vote threshold - the percentage of the total vote that a party needs to clear to gain any seats in the Knesset. The parties that will be left standing after the Oct. 27 vote will likely include three or four on the right, led by Netanyahu’s Likud list; four or five on the center-left, with polling showing the new Yashar party led by Gadi Eizenkot, a former military chief of staff, leading them; two Haredi Orthodox parties; and two predominantly Arab parties.

Unfortunately for Netanyahu, several right-wing parties didn’t merge as he had hoped. Religious Zionism, the ultra-nationalist party led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, did not join forces with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit or Amcha Yisrael, led by retired Brig.-Gen. Ofer Winter.

As a result, both Smotrich’s party and Winter’s party remain close to Israel’s electoral threshold, raising the possibility that one or both could fail to win enough votes to enter the Knesset—meaning their votes, which could have strengthened Netanyahu’s bloc, would be wasted. With the 3.25% threshold, the equivalent of four Knesset seats, the wasted vote could be substantial.

Netanyahu's political magic faces test as right-wing parties remain divided
“Netanyahu has been considered Israel’s political magician for many years — the man who managed in 2022 to bring Ben-Gvir and Smotrich together on a joint list,” said Dr. Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ahead of that election, Netanyahu publicly urged the two parties to merge, warning that the right-wing bloc “can’t take the risk” of either party falling below the electoral threshold. Days later, the two leaders reached a deal following a meeting with Netanyahu, who had pressed for the merger.

“We haven’t seen that happen in this election,” Talshir continued. “Netanyahu is entering this election in the weakest position we have seen him in over the past decade in terms of the parties running.”

The right-wing parties’ decisions to run separately reflected a combination of personal animosity and ideological differences. Winter emphasized the need to bring new faces into politics, arguing that those tainted by the failures behind Hamas’ invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, should make way for new leadership. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, remained divided by personal tensions and the belief that each appeals to a somewhat different segment of Israel’s ultranationalist right.
The Free Press: Will Israel Ditch Netanyahu? With Haviv Rettig Gur
On the eve of October 7, many Israelis would have told you the greatest threat to their country came from within.

For nine months, hundreds of thousands of people had filled the streets every week to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to transform the judiciary. His critics said it would strip Israeli courts of their power to check the government, and some suspected it was designed to help Netanyahu escape his own corruption trial. It tore the country apart. Army reservists threatened to stop showing up for duty, and people talked openly about a “civil war.”

Then Hamas broke through the border, killed 1,200 people, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. The protests stopped. The war that followed spread across the region, and the fabric of the country changed forever.

Now, three years later, Israelis are finally getting their say. On October 27, in the first national vote since the massacre, they’ll decide whether Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, keeps his job. The polls are close, and neither side has a clear path to a majority.

A lot is riding on the outcome: accountability for the security failures that led to October 7, whether ultra-Orthodox men will be drafted into an army suffering a manpower crisis, and whether the plans for judicial overhaul that divided the country before the war will come back. The result of the vote will shape Israel’s relationship with Washington, the future of Gaza and the West Bank, and whether Israel’s international isolation becomes entrenched.

To make sense of all the issues at stake, I sat down with Haviv Rettig Gur, The Free Press’s Middle East analyst. Few people explain Israel better. We talked about why Netanyahu is still competitive, who his fiercest competition is, and what happens if nobody wins a majority.

Haviv places this moment in the longer arc of Israeli history and helps us see why Israelis and Arabs vote the way they do, what this election means for the country, and what voters are thinking about most when they go to the polls.


Gazans Out, Draft & Total Victory: Amcha Yisrael's Fleur Hassan-Nahoum joins the Israel Electioncast
Can Amcha Yisrael end the war by helping Gazans leave—and who will take them?

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum of Amcha Yisrael joins Eylon Levy to discuss the Israeli election. She chooses total victory, national service and public diplomacy; Eylon adds foreign relations.

Fleur defends facilitating voluntary emigration from Gaza and says she thinks departure should be permanent. Eylon presses her on host countries and civilians who stay; she says they must be separated from combatants. She backs deep buffer zones and annexing the Jordan Valley.

On service, she defends exemptions for serious Torah students and economic penalties for others who refuse to serve, including losing childcare subsidies and property-tax discounts. Eylon challenges the undefined exemption criteria. She argues for a Hasbara Ministry; he asks why another ministry is needed—and how tougher policies can retain allied support.

Israel Electioncast explores Israel’s first election after the October 7 massacre, for English-speaking Israelis and international viewers seeking to understand what Israelis are really arguing about before the critical 27 October elections.


The Brink: The end of Netanyahu? Everything you need to know about Israel's Biggest Election - Nadav Eyal
In this episode of The Brink, Andrew and Jake are joined by Israeli journalist and political analyst Nadav Eyal to explore what could be Israel’s most consequential election in a generation, and whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s time in power is finally coming to an end.

Nadav breaks down the battle between Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot, the growing influence of Israel’s far right, and why Arab parties could hold the key to the next government.

The conversation also examines the political fallout from October 7, conspiracy theories dividing Israeli society, the ultra-Orthodox military conscription debate, and why even an electoral defeat for Netanyahu might not be enough to remove him from power.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:52 What’s Really At Stake for Israel?
06:57 October 7th, Netanyahu & The Conspiracy Theories
14:30 Can Israel Repair Its Global Reputation?
21:11 How Israel’s Electoral System Works
25:19 Netanyahu, Eisenkot & The Three Political Blocs
30:14 Why Arab Parties Could Decide the Election
33:26 The Rise of Israel’s Far Right
39:03 Mansour Abbas & The Future of Arab Politics
47:18 The Ultra-Orthodox, Conscription & Netanyahu’s Path to Victory


Pa. Governor Shapiro Sides Against Netanyahu In Israeli Election
Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania—a likely 2028 Democratic presidential contender perceived in some circles as a pro-Israel moderate—used a recent debate in his own re-election campaign to call on Israeli voters to dump Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

During the debate, held on October 7, the anniversary of the terrorist attack on Israel, Shapiro said, "The people of Israel here in another couple weeks will determine who their leader should be. I hope it's not Benjamin Netanyahu. I think he has led Israel down a very dangerous and isolated path. I want America to have a strong relationship with Israel and with the Israeli government. That's not possible right now with the Netanyahu government in charge."

The national president of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein, a Pennsylvania resident who has known Shapiro for 30 years, told the Washington Free Beacon that Shapiro’s comments were "shameful" and "disgraceful," driven by Shapiro’s own personal political ambitions.

"What has Netanyahu done to deserve that comment?" Klein asked. "What is he talking about?"

"Shapiro is not a friend of Israel," Klein said. "He is nothing but a political animal. That’s all he cares about."

The comments mark at least the second time this year that Shapiro has made news by publicly distancing himself from Netanyahu. In an April interview on the All-In Podcast, Shapiro suggested that Netanyahu "bullied" President Trump into war with Iran.

"America should never be led around by any other nation. … We should never ever be bullied as maybe President Trump was by any other world leader," Shapiro said then.

"I’ve been supercritical of the Israeli government, the Netanyahu government, and I’m someone who loves Israel," Shapiro said then. The Pennsylvania governor faulted Netanyahu for having "fractured really what used to be a nonpartisan or bipartisan American support for Israel, and I think he has put Israel in a very dangerous place, and of course, he was the leader of Israel who wasn't minding the shop when October 7th happened. So I’ve been very critical of Netanyahu for years and years and years."

It’s an illuminating situation that casts some doubt about Shapiro’s claim that it’s Netanyahu, rather than Democratic voters and politicians, that have caused any weakening of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Shapiro went to Jewish day school, proposed marriage to his now-wife on a trip to Israel, was the target of an antisemitic firebombing in the governor’s residence on Passover, has a sukkah at the governor’s residence, and says that when he was being vetted as a possible vice presidential choice by Kamala Harris in 2024, a Harris campaign official asked him if he’d ever been an agent of the Israeli government.

Yet rather than maintain a judicious silence in advance of the Israeli elections scheduled for October 27, 2026, out of respect for Israeli democracy and the Jewish state’s longest-serving leader, Shapiro opened his mouth. It’s unlikely to sway any Israeli voters against Netanyahu. It might even stiffen the resolve of others who don’t want their national leadership chosen by Shapiro, a former "Jews for Obama" leader in a foreign country thousands of miles away. And if Netanyahu does win re-election and Shapiro by some miracle prevails in a Democratic primary against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other contenders, it will only complicate any future Shapiro-Netanyahu relationship. The audience seems less Israeli voters than American Democratic presidential primary voters, who hate Netanyahu almost as much as they hate President Trump.


Jonathan Sacerdoti: When anti-racism makes an exception for Jews: Izabella Tabarovsky exposes the truth behind the hate
She grew up in the Soviet Union. Now she hears its propaganda repeated in the West — by people who think they are fighting for justice.

Why does so much of today’s anti-Israel rhetoric sound familiar to someone raised behind the Iron Curtain? Izabella Tabarovsky argues that Soviet antizionism outlived the regime that promoted it — and that its language is shaping how a new generation thinks about Israel, Jews and the West.

Tabarovsky, a writer and researcher of Soviet antizionism and contemporary antisemitism, joins Jonathan Sacerdoti to discuss life under communism, the export of Soviet propaganda and the dangers of romanticising a system millions wanted to escape. Drawing on her own experience and her book, Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student Survival Guide, she explains how demonising Zionism affected ordinary Jews — and why she recognises disturbing echoes today.

👁‍🗨 Watch if you want to understand the Soviet roots of modern anti-Zionism — and why someone who lived under communism believes a free society can teach its citizens to silence themselves.

💬 We Discuss:
☭ Growing up in the USSR: shortages, censorship and stifled ambition
🛒 Socialism’s renewed appeal and the promises of Zohran Mamdani
✡️ How Soviet anti-Zionism put ordinary Jews under suspicion
🇮🇱 Why Israel’s victory in 1967 triggered a new propaganda offensive
🌍 How the USSR spread its message through political movements, diplomacy and the UN
🎓 Soviet influence and the changing language of the Western left
📚 Why young people learn about Nazism but know so little about communism
💔 “The left has left and it’s not coming back”
🤝 Do Jews have more allies than they realise
📱 Social media, foreign influence and the exploitation of division
💰 Antisemitism as a route to attention, followers and money
🤐 How social and professional pressure can silence dissent
👏 The fear of being the first person to stop applauding
🗣️ Compelled speech, online mobs and the demand to prove your virtue
✊ What Soviet Jewish refuseniks can teach a new generation
📖 How to preserve your independence of mind when the crowd demands conformity




From Dreyfus to David Milstein: The enduring accusation of Jewish dual loyalty
On October 7, as Jews around the world mourned the largest massacre of our people since the Holocaust, New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani could not bring himself to give us even that one day.

Mamdani, who has accused Israel of genocide and campaigned on arresting its prime minister, marked the anniversary with a statement reminding New Yorkers that the suffering neither began nor ended on October 7.

The word “Israel” did not appear in it. He attended a vigil, made some hollow statements, then went on to his next meeting. For parts of his own base, even that brief appearance at a memorial was too much, and they protested against his attendance.

The next morning, October 8, The New York Times published a long investigation into David Milstein, senior adviser to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. I have watched many hit jobs over the years, and this one is among the most disturbing.

The Times said it interviewed 15 American officials. Every one of them is anonymous. Nine former diplomats were consulted for context, also anonymous. The few people who speak on the record are a former ambassador and a Democratic senator, and neither describes anything he personally saw Milstein do.

In a government the size of ours, a reporter can always find unnamed people willing to say unflattering things about someone. Those sources might sit on the Left. They might sit on the Right. Anyone who has followed the strange alliance of people who loathe Israel knows they can be found on both sides.

The core accusation is that David reviewed and revised embassy reports before they went to Washington. The article itself admits that reviewing and amending those reports is part of his job, and that political advisers to previous ambassadors did the same. So the charge comes down to this: he did his job with a point of view the Times dislikes.

The charge of dual loyalty
The article mentions that he left Washington to study in a Jerusalem yeshiva. It mentions his family. It describes him as a familiar figure in circles that support Israel. The message is that this man is too Jewish, too devoted, too close to Israel to be trusted with American interests. We have a name for that accusation. It is the oldest charge against Jews in public life: dual loyalty.

Huckabee has said he has absolute confidence in David and calls him a man of impeccable integrity. In response to the Times, he categorically rejected the story. I know David’s reputation, and I agree with the ambassador.

Here is a young man who served on Capitol Hill, who served two administrations, who has given his career to strengthening the alliance between America and its closest friend in the Middle East. He is a proud American patriot. He was preparing for his wedding when the Times decided he would make a useful target.

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was convicted of treason on forged evidence. He was publicly stripped of his rank while crowds outside shouted for death to the Jews. His real crime, as all of France would eventually learn, was being a Jew in a position of trust.

A young journalist from Vienna named Theodor Herzl watched that spectacle. What he saw convinced him that Jews would remain vulnerable until they had a land of their own to defend them. Two years later, he published the book that launched modern Zionism.

The tactics have changed very little since then. Today the weapon is a newspaper story stitched together from unnamed accusers rather than a forged letter. The goal is the same: to push Jews out of positions of influence, and eventually out of public life altogether, by suggesting their loyalty lies elsewhere.

The difference is that now we have Israel. That fact infuriates those who would prefer we had nowhere to go. Israel is the answer Herzl found in Paris, and it remains the reason so much hatred is aimed at any Jew who stands with it openly.

This is a message for my fellow Jews in New York who believe they can keep their Judaism while holding Israel at arm’s length. I understand the instinct. History offers no example of it working.
Stephen Pollard: The chutzpah of Ed Miliband
The yiddish word chutzpah is often defined as when a man who has murdered both his parents pleads for clemency on the grounds that he is an orphan. But there’s now a better definition. On Monday, Ed Miliband posted this on social media: “Antisemitism has no place in our society. This morning, I hosted a crucial discussion with the J7 Global Task Force to discuss how we can work together across countries to stamp out the scourge of antisemitism.”

Give the man his due. Miliband is certainly not troubled by an excess of self-doubt, let alone shame. In the 85 days in which he has been Foreign Secretary, Miliband has done more to worsen the situation for British Jews than any other minister of any party in living memory. There is no other minister or ex-minister who is worse placed to opine on the scourge of antisemitism than the man who has done the bidding of Jew haters across the country by imposing sanctions on Israel. (And that’s without even considering his appalling legacy as Labour leader, which can be spelled out in two words: Jeremy Corbyn. It was Miliband’s change to Labour’s leadership election rules which handed the post to Corbyn.)

Until Labour came to power, Israel was one of our most reliable and loyal allies and strategic partners. First, Keir Starmer set about destroying that, culminating in his recognition of a Palestinian state in 2025, rewarding Hamas for the October 7, 2023 massacre. Then, Ed Miliband arrived this July, and since then Labour’s drive to appease the sectarian Muslim threat to its vote has been turbocharged with the introduction of sanctions. (Burnham seems uninterested in foreign affairs beyond rejoining the EU, and so Miliband has far more licence to pursue his own agenda than either of his two predecessors.)

But it’s not just the sanctions. When he speaks about Israel, Miliband mimics all the memes of the raging Jew haters. One wonders if his speechwriter was trained by Hamas, since Miliband uses most of their propaganda points. In his Labour conference speech last month, for example, he attacked “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes in Gaza”. He also derided the threat Israel faces, saying it “cannot justify the suffering the Netanyahu government has inflicted in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Miliband imposed sanctions yesterday on two Iranians, but as his grotesque obsequiousness to the Iranian foreign minister – handshake et al – at last month’s UN General Assembly showed, he appears to consider the real danger to be the Israeli government. Hence the sanctions and the rhetoric which buttress Labour’s overall policy of doing as much diplomatic and economic damage to Israel as possible without military action.

Miliband makes great play of being a “proud British Jew”, as he put it in his Commons statement singling out the world’s only Jewish state for a kicking. He is certainly aware of the rise of antisemitism, as his convening of the J7 Global Task Force (comprising Jewish communal organisations from seven diaspora nations) shows. But such a move is not merely chutzpadik; it is hypocrisy of galactic proportions.
UK announces public inquiry into Manchester synagogue deaths
British authorities will conduct a new inquiry into the slaying of two people last year during a jihadist attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, in which the assailant was also killed, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said on Monday.

“As requested by the coroner, I can today announce a public inquiry into the deaths of Mr. Cravitz and Mr. Daulby,” Mahmood said in a speech at the House of Commons, The Jewish News of London reported.

The assault was carried out on Oct. 2, 2025, which was Yom Kippur, by Jihad al-Shamie, 35, a Syrian-born British citizen. Melvin Cravitz died from multiple knife wounds, while Adrian Daulby was killed by a bullet fired by armed officers who had been scrambled to the scene, police had said.

“On that awful day in October of last year, as our Jewish community celebrated Yom Kippur, two brave men, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, lost their lives, and three others were seriously injured. What happened that day must be fully understood,” Mahmood said.

“This will ensure that all evidence can be heard, including any sensitive national security material that could not otherwise be fully heard in the coroner’s court,” she added.

Last month, Judge Alexia Durran, Chief Coroner of England and Wales, said she was writing to the Home Secretary to recommend that the inquests be converted into a public inquiry.

At a hearing earlier this month, Home Office lawyers applied to prevent some information from MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, from being made public at a future inquest, citing national security concerns, the Jewish News reported.

U.K. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp told MPs: ”It is more important than ever that we double our efforts to fight antisemitism and Islamist extremism.”
Call off Heaton Park concert by anti-Israel rock group Fontaines DC, Jewish leaders urge
Jewish leaders in Manchester have called for an Irish anti-Israel rock group to be banned from performing less than a mile from the synagogue where two men were killed in a terror attack last year.

Fontaines DC, which last July projected the words ‘Israel is committing genocide’, and ‘free Palestine’, to an audience of 45,000 in London, is set to play on Shabbat at Heaton Park next July.

In 2024, the band’s guitarist Carlos O’Connell used his acceptance speech at the Rolling Stones Awards for best album to say: “F*** Netanyahu. F*** Zionism. Free Palestine.”

Heaton Park Synagogue, a three-minute drive from the park, was the scene of October 2025’s Yom Kippur terrorist attack which left Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz dead.

Concerns have been raised over “the potential consequences of inflammatory rhetoric from the band”.

The Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester and Region (JRC of GM and Region) has urged the city council to stop the concert from going ahead.

It wrote: “The JRC has registered our profound concerns with Manchester Council regarding Fontaines DC’s forthcoming concert at Heaton Park and has called for it to be cancelled.

“Despite our representations, it appears the concert will be going ahead.

“We expect and will be working with the council to ensure robust and adequate safeguards are in place to protect the Jewish community.

“We have no objection to Heaton Park hosting concerts. Our concerns are not about legitimate political expression but the potential consequences of inflammatory rhetoric from the band.

“At a time of heightened antisemitism, the comments and chants associated with the band risks importing tensions from the Middle East into the UK, with Jewish people here becoming the targets. The safety of our community must be paramount.”
Zack Polanski is being swallowed by the Islamist crocodile
Never feed the crocodile. This is a lesson Zack Polanski is learning the hard way as the Islamists, Jew haters and deranged ‘anti-imperialists’ he has spent much of his leadership appeasing could be about to swallow him.

The Green Party leader’s humiliating defeat in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, coming after a Green conference in which a hardcore of activists managed to pass a flagrantly anti-Semitic motion, reveals a party that is captured by its most sinister elements and thus toxic in much of the country.

Taking Keir Starmer’s old seat was never going to be easy. Holborn and St Pancras has been Labour ever since the constituency was created. But a slashed majority at the General Election, and a Green wave in London at the local elections, put it firmly in play.

Polanski has blamed Andy Burnham’s ‘honeymoon’ for his defeat, but the Greens might as well have paid for his hotel suite. Burnham’s efforts to win back young, progressive voters has been aided no end by the squall of disarray and the stench of extremism that now emanates from Polanski’s Island of Misfit Toys.

Polanski’s personal approval ratings began to plunge in May, after he responded to that stabbing spree in Golders Green by chiding the police for roughing up the suspect. Meanwhile, the days when the Greens were polling at 20 per cent look like a mercifully brief fever dream, with the party’s support now slashed in half.

Depressingly, credible accusations of anti-Semitism are no longer a barrier to electoral success in many of England’s ‘diverse’ cities. Even so, the Greens have tested this to its absolute limit. Stories of Green Party candidates and activists calling Jews ‘cockroaches’ and ‘abominations’ have clearly, mercifully, cut through.

As has the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion, which sailed on to the Green policy books at the party’s Brighton conference. You didn’t need a degree in Middle Eastern history to realise that this motion, casting Jews as the only people on Earth undeserving of national self-determination, was, at the very least, sus.

The delegates then left us in no doubt when they rejected an amendment that would have protected Jewish members from ostracism if they attended a ‘Zionist’ synagogue. We’ve since learned the woman behind the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion was once a ‘close friend’ of an al-Qaeda terrorist, who she vouched for in US court documents.

It all makes Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party look like a masterclass in vetting by comparison. The Greens’ explosion in membership under Polanski has clearly been fuelled by an influx of Israelophobic leftists too mental for Labour and Islamist entryists who know a useful, basket-weaving idiot when they see one.

Even beyond its own membership, the Greens exist within a post-October 7 ecosystem in which Islamic sectarians are key players. An organisation called The Muslim Vote (TMV) has endorsed Green candidates up and down the country – and TMV is a far more dubious group than its lamely identitarian name would suggest.


British Jewish group demands follow-through after anti-Israel protesters arrests
The National Jewish Assembly in the United Kingdom is calling on authorities to investigate and bring charges against protesters, who were arrested at an anti-Israel march on Saturday, after the majority was released on bail.

Of 20 people arrested during the anti-Israel march organized by the Palestine Coalition in London on Saturday, 19 were released, the Metropolitan Police told JNS.

Pending investigation, 18 were released on bail. A 57-year-old man, who was arrested for breach of the peace, was released without bail and will not be investigated further, according to Met Police.

Among those arrested was a woman who performed a Nazi salute and others who vandalized the Battle of Britain memorial.

The Met Police told JNS that Jerome Ingham McKenna, 23, of Preston, Lancashire, who was released on bail, has been charged with assault on an emergency worker and is scheduled to appear in Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Nov. 23.

Steve Winston, managing director of the National Jewish Assembly, told JNS that his group “will judge the police response by what follows these arrests.”

“Release on bail while enquiries continue is not, in itself, evidence of leniency,” he said. “The real test is whether those enquiries are pursued promptly and charges brought wherever justified.”

“The Palestine Coalition’s organizers should be facing questions about how a Nazi salute and alleged attacks on police and a national memorial featured at their event,” Winston told JNS.

“Britain must not grow accustomed to such scenes, nor allow accountability to fade once the headlines move on,” he said.


Psychologists seek APA reforms to protect Jewish patients from ‘decolonial therapy’
The American Psychological Association had a “pretty disingenuous” response to a federal panel’s Jew-hatred concerns, but there are opportunities for progress via better training, according to Dean McKay, a psychology professor at Fordham University.

The APA, which says that it has more than 190,000 members, stated Oct. 2 that testimony about Jew-hatred did not justify suspending its authority to accredit psychology programs and warned that a suspension could cost programs federal funding.

“They’ve been hearing about this for quite a while,” McKay told JNS.

He and Miri Bar-Halpern, a psychology lecturer at Harvard Medical School, testified at a September hearing before the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the U.S. Department of Education on accreditation, among other topics.

McKay said the witnesses, represented by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, sought reforms but did not ask the committee to recommend a suspension.

On Sept. 24, the committee recommended suspending the APA commission on accreditation’s federal recognition for a year. The commission remains federally recognized while the department considers the recommendation.

In an Oct. 2 letter, Arthur Evans Jr. and Wendi Williams, the association’s CEO and president, respectively, said public commenters had identified two of the commission’s more than 1,300 accredited programs as problems and that the commission was already investigating the complaints before the hearing.

“The dramatic rise of antisemitism in all corners of our society requires serious, targeted and sustained action to stem its spread and to support Jewish communities,” the two wrote.

McKay’s and Bar-Halpern’s research on Jew-hatred in the psychology field focuses on “decolonial therapy,” an approach that examines how historical oppression affects mental health and which encourages activism as part of treatment.

That approach can assume patients share the political views of their therapists, and some practitioners treat attachment to Israel as a psychological problem, McKay said.

In a recent paper in the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, McKay, Bar-Halpern and colleagues refer to the “blind spot” of decolonial therapy.

“Mental health treatment must be client-centered and evidence-based, not driven by political agendas. Therapy should validate Jewish trauma, not erase it,” they write. “This would require a significant re‑orientation in the mental health professions that have fused a political ideology, without corresponding political knowledge, to become more inclusive of Jews.”
Somerville, Massachusetts city council moves to enact Israel divestment vote
The issue of divestment from Israel returns to the Somerville City Council in Massachusetts on Tuesday night as lawmakers plan to discuss how to implement a nonbinding ballot question on the matter that passed last year.

The divestment push has divided the city of more than 84,000 residents, which has a long-standing Jewish population. It is located between Cambridge, home to Harvard University, and Medford, a city with which it shares the Tufts University campus.

After ballot Question 3 on divesting from Israel passed with 55.7% of the residents’ vote in November 2025, the City Council that same month passed a resolution committing to work toward a binding ordinance within a year to enact the ballot’s goals.

An initial ordinance, introduced in June, would bar the city from investing in or procuring labor, services, or goods from companies that support entities identified by the ordinance as violating international law, including Israel.

Unlike the divestment proposal awaiting a November ballot vote in Providence or the binding human rights divestment ordinance passed by Medford’s city council in 2025, the Somerville ordinance specifically mentions Israel and Palestine.
Israel condemns Dutch ban on Hapoel Beersheva fans
Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday accused Dutch authorities of punishing the victims of antisemitic violence, after a city near Amsterdam banned Israeli soccer fans from a match.

“Two years after Israelis were hunted through the streets of Amsterdam, the Dutch answer is to ban the victims, not the attackers,” a ministry spokesperson wrote on X.

The statement was about the decision this week of local authorities in Alkmaar near Amsterdam to exclude Hapoel Beersheva fans from a match against AZ Alkmaar scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 15 at Alkmaar’s AFAS Stadium.

Mayor Anja Schouten said last month of the ban on Hapoel fans that “we must say that the tensions in society have not diminished over the past two years.” This was a reference to violence directed by dozens of Muslim men in November 2024 at fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam.

The violence, which some perpetrators described as a “Jew-hunt” on the social media they used to coordinate attacks, included beatings, a car ramming and several cases in which Israelis were thrown into canals.

“Alkmaar’s exclusion of fans rewards those who threaten and incite violence and runs counter to the very spirit of sport,” the ministry added. “This exclusion of Israelis comes amid a wave of antisemitic attacks in the Netherlands, fueled by anti-Israel incitement from Dutch politicians and public figures. Banning Israeli fans from attending the match, like boycotting Eurovision, is yet another stain on the Netherlands, as the country increasingly becomes one of the world’s leading hotspots for antisemitism.”
Harvard’s New Hires Will Headline ‘Jewish Anti-Zionism’ Event
In court documents and public statements amid Harvard’s multi-billion-dollar fight with the Trump administration over antisemitism, the university has pointed to new faculty hires as evidence of what Harvard calls its "commitment to combating antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias."

"Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has dedicated additional resources for the study of Hebrew and Judaic studies, including … an offer out for a chair in Jewish history and culture," the university said. Harvard Divinity School "hired for the position of the Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence."

Those two new professors are scheduled to appear next month at what is being billed as a "symposium and book launch" on "Jewish Anti-Zionism." To judge by the book and the speakers invited, the event seems less aimed at critically assessing the ideas and more at promoting them. The keynote speaker is the University of California, Berkeley’s Judith Butler, who has been backing a boycott of Israel since at least 2014 and who described October 7, 2023 as "not a terrorist attack, not an antisemitic attack" but rather "an act of armed resistance." Butler has called it, "an uprising born of a state of subjugation and directed against a violent state apparatus."

According to Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, which is hosting the event, Harvard’s Jessica Marglin, who is the newly installed Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization, will spend three hours there, moderating one hour-and-a-half-long panel on "Jewish Anti-Zionism in History" and participating in a second hour-and-a-half-long session on "Jewish Anti-Zionism Now."

The event is a book kickoff for Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology, edited by Shaul Magid and Zev Mishell. Magid is the Harvard Divinity School’s Professor of Modern Jewish Studies in Residence. Mishell is a 2025 graduate of Harvard Divinity School whose personal website describes him as "a graduate student at Harvard University’s Committee on the Study of Religion," though he is not listed as a student on the committee’s website.

The introduction of Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology, available from its publisher, Princeton University Press, makes it fairly transparent what the authors are up to. "For decades, Jewish Zionists have systematically marginalized Palestinian voices from Jewish schools, camps, and mainstream institutions while pushing a one-sided narrative of Jewish identity and Middle East history," they write. They complain about "a veritable cottage industry that has blossomed over the last half-century, where spurious accusations of antisemitism are unleashed on social justice activists, particularly those involved in pro-Palestine activism."

"For too long, Jewish anti-Zionists have been demonized as ‘self-hating,’ as traitors, and, more recently as ‘Un-Jews’ rejecting a supposedly monolithic Zionist Jewish consensus. This is more than just slander: it is a form of tacit dehumanization, even of internal antisemitism, that deliberately marginalizes non- and anti-Zionist Jews from any legitimate claim to Jewish identity and politics," they write. "It speaks to a wider supersession of Jewish identity to further a certain kind of right-wing politics, particularly through the adoption of IHRA’s working definition on antisemitism and its weaponization to attack free speech." Harvard adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as part of a legal settlement with Jewish students that federal courts have found Harvard failed, so it’s interesting to see the Harvard types now pushing a book that denounces the definition that their own discriminated-against-students demanded.


‘Have to be exterminated’: Series of violent plots take aim at AIPAC-linked targets in US
In late September, a man in Texas contacted law enforcement to report his friend, Benny Caldera, Jr., who told him they might not see each other again.

When asked what that meant, Caldera said to his friend that he was going to the Texas state capitol to “shoot it up.”

Caldera showed his friend information about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on his laptop, saying, “These people have to be exterminated,” according to a criminal complaint.

The following day, the friend recorded a conversation with Caldera in which he outlined his plan for invading the Texas capitol.

“The first demand we are going to make is eliminating anyone that supports AIPAC,” he said.

“The Israeli fucking AIPAC — they need to go,” he said “They can either, effective immediately, resign, or they can stay and they will be arrested and they will be tried by a jury of their peers for treason.”

Investigators searched Caldera’s home, finding a loaded revolver with its serial number filed off, a 12 gauge shotgun and ammunition for other weapons. He was charged with a firearms offense and faces five years in prison.

The case was the latest in a series of alleged plots targeting AIPAC in the US, as politicians and commentators on both the left and right assail the pro-Israel lobby group.

Caldera was charged with making a terroristic threat and faces up to 10 years in prison.

Uptick in protests after Oct. 7
In 1977, a bomb ripped a gash into the home of AIPAC’s then-director, Morris Amitay, while he and his family slept inside. The blast shattered windows in homes five blocks away and killed the Amitay family’s dog, but did not injure the rest of the family. There were no arrests or claims of responsibility.

After that attack, there were sporadic protests and politically-motivated hacks against AIPAC, but there did not appear to be any violence or violent plots for decades.

After the Hamas-led, October 2023 onslaught in southern Israel, rhetoric and protests against AIPAC escalated.

In November 2023, on Thanksgiving, protesters set off smoke bombs outside AIPAC president Michael Tuchin’s home and spilled red paint signifying blood on his driveway.

The protesters called Tuchin a “baby killer” and placed bunches of cloth splattered with red paint symbolizing dead babies outside his home, echoing the centuries-old anti-Jewish blood libel.

In August 2024, AIPAC’s headquarters in Washington, DC, was vandalized with red spray paint and the slogan “Fuck Israel.”

Months later, the office was vandalized again, resulting in five arrests.
NY man who said put ‘all Jews in gas chamber’ charged with threatening FBI agents who investigated him
Dylan Daniell, 33, of La Fargeville, N.Y., who is accused of calling a Jewish charity in Lakewood, N.J., and saying, “I would like to put all the Jews in a gas chamber and kill them,” was arraigned on Oct. 9 on a federal charge of threatening the FBI agents who investigated the calls.

He appeared before Mitchell Katz, a magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, and will be held pending an Oct. 15 detention hearing.

Daniell is charged with threatening a federal law enforcement officer with intent to impede, intimidate or interfere and faces up to 10 years in prison.

The criminal complaint, filed on Oct. 8, describes recorded calls that Daniell allegedly made on May 17 to an unnamed Jewish nonprofit in Lakewood.

“I would like to blow up Israel and kill all the Jews,” the caller said. In another call, the caller said that “I would like to kill Benjamin Netanyahu and all the Jews,” according to the FBI affidavit.

Investigators linked the phone number to Daniell through law enforcement databases and a Cash App account, according to the affidavit.

Two FBI agents went to his apartment on Oct. 7, but he wasn’t home, so they tried to call him. At about 12:30 p.m., Daniell parked outside the building and got out of his car “accompanied by an adult female, a dog and an infant child,” according to court documents.

After the agents identified themselves, Daniell allegedly made a lewd comment and said, “only good cop is a dead cop,” and “get the f*** out of here before I pull something out on you.”

The agents left. Later that day, one of the agents received a message from the same number used to call the charity. “You ever come to my house again, you will not like it,” the message stated, per court documents. “That’s not a threat. That’s a promise to all you tyrant, pedophile FBI agents.”

“Threatening law enforcement officers is not a joke,” stated John Sarcone III, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York. “It is not something that we will brush aside, and it will not be tolerated.”
Toronto man arrested for allegedly burning Israeli flags outside church on third Oct. 7 anniversary
Syed Raza, of Toronto, was charged with arson after he allegedly removed Israeli flags displayed outside a church and set them on fire last week on Oct. 7, the third anniversary of the Hamas-led terror attacks, the Toronto Police Service stated.

The 29-year-old allegedly removed the flags from outside Faith International Christian Centre near Sunrise Avenue and O’Connor Drive shortly after 1 a.m., set them on fire and fled, the police department said on Tuesday.

Investigators identified Raza at a demonstration near Yonge and Dundas Streets in downtown Toronto on Saturday afternoon and arrested him.

Raza faces charges of arson, mischief under $5,000, mischief interfering with the lawful enjoyment of property and disobeying a lawful court order.

He was scheduled to appear in court on Sunday.

The Toronto Police Service’s Hate Crime Unit investigated the incident. The department did not announce any hate-related charges.

Josh Landau, senior director of government relations for Ontario at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the advocacy arm of Jewish Federations of Canada-UIA, told JNS that “the swift arrest is an important reminder that hate-motivated acts must have consequences.”

“When Israeli flags were burned outside the Faith International Christian Centre on Oct. 7, the message was intended to intimidate not only the Jewish community but those who stand with us,” he said.

Jews were the targets of 82% of religion-based hate crimes in Toronto in 2025, according to city statistics. In May, B’nai Brith Canada warned that 2026 was on pace to become the most violent year for Canadian Jews.

Landau thanked the police department for “taking this incident seriously” and said that CIJA is “deeply grateful to the church and its congregation for refusing to be intimidated out of standing with their Jewish neighbors.”


The Nazi Collaborator at the Surrender of Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter in 1948
Mousa Abdullah al-Husseini, operating out of Berlin from 1941 to 1945, served as a vital aide, liaison, and researcher within the Arab Bureau of the Grand Mufti, an office attached to the German Foreign Ministry headed by his cousin, the notorious antisemitic Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

During the war, Mousa organized anti-British and antisemitic propaganda broadcasts designed to incite sabotage and violent rebellions across British Mandate Palestine, Iraq, and Egypt. These broadcasts included speeches by the Mufti calling for the total liquidation of the Jewish people.

At the war's end, Allied authorities tracked al-Husseini down in Central Europe and arrested him. Consequently, the British deported him to a prison camp in the Seychelles Islands in 1945. Yet by 1946, seeking to appease Arab leadership, the British government relented. At the urging of Harold Beeley - an influential anti-Zionist policy advisor to British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin - Mousa was freed and permitted to return to Jerusalem, where he immediately re-entered political life as the banished Mufti's chief agent.

In April 1948, Mousa joined the inner circle of Jordanian military commander Col. Abdullah el-Tell, serving as the official liaison for the Arab Higher Committee. He was in el-Tell's entourage during the assault on the Old City, and ultimately, at the table for the surrender of the Jewish Quarter. He was photographed single-handedly screening the Jews evacuating the Jewish Quarter, separating Jewish civilians from suspected combatants destined for the Transjordanian prison camps.

Yet, Mousa al-Husseini was never a true loyalist to the Hashemite King Abdullah I; his ultimate allegiance remained with the Mufti. This unresolved friction culminated in 1951, when Mousa masterminded the assassination of King Abdullah I on the steps of the al-Aqsa Mosque. Mousa was tried as the lead conspirator in the regicide and hanged in Jordan.
In first, Israel returns artifacts to Greece amid push to secure return of antiquities
Israel returned 22 ancient artifacts on Tuesday that had been illegally removed from Greece, as Athens steps up an international repatriation campaign ultimately aimed at securing the return of sculptures taken from the Acropolis.

Culture Minister Lina Mendoni received the objects from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Amir Ganor, director of its theft prevention division, at a ceremony held at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

“It is the first time that Israel has returned antiquities to Greece, marking the starting point of closer cooperation between the two countries for the protection of cultural heritage,” Mendoni said. “Every return of a cultural object to its place of origin has a broader symbolic and moral dimension.”

The collection includes a small bronze statuette of a woman and pottery comprising slender oil flasks, two-handled amphorae and drinking cups decorated with mythological scenes and geometric motifs. The objects are provisionally dated to between about 700 B.C. and 320 B.C.

Athens is broadening bilateral cultural ties as part of its campaign to secure the return of the Parthenon Marbles. The 2,500-year-old sculptures were removed from the Acropolis and are now displayed at the British Museum in London.

Greece, under its current conservative government, and Israel have strengthened energy and defense ties in recent years. In August, Israel signed a €3 billion (about $3.5 billion) deal to build an air defense system in Greece, dubbed “Achilles Shield,” in what was described as the largest defense deal between the two countries.

Greek and Israeli officials on Tuesday did not disclose how the artifacts were discovered in Israel or the circumstances of their illegal removal from Greece. In previous cases, antiquities returned from private collections abroad have often been traced to illicit excavations.

Pninat Yanay, the Israeli ambassador to Greece, said the items were recovered during an “investigation by the Israeli authorities into the illegal antiquities trade.”

“In both Greece and Israel, archaeology has a special place in national life,” Yanay added. “It helps us understand where we came from and who we are.”





 




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