Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 17, 2025

10/17 Links Pt2: Democrats’ Ugly War on AIPAC; What is happening in Birmingham is a sinister vision of Britain’s future; Emily Damari calls Maccabi ban a ‘disgusting decision’

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Democrats’ Ugly War on AIPAC

Winking at these conspiracy theorists is all the rage among Democratic officeholders with higher aspirations. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California progressive who mostly talks about Jeffrey Epstein when he’s not badmouthing AIPAC, is likely to run for president in the next cycle. Yet to Khanna’s credit, his hatred of AIPAC and his desire to capitalize on his base’s suspicions of the group haven’t stopped him from at least slapping down the claim that AIPAC should register as a foreign agent.

“They’re American citizens,” Khanna has said. “If you’re an American citizen and you’re articulating a point of view, that’s your right. … They’re American citizens. They’re lobbying for their interests. They’re lobbying for the Netanyahu government’s interests because they think that’s what benefits America.”

Unfortunately, Khanna made that statement in an interview with an anti-Zionist filmmaker for a video including anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists such as Ian Carroll. Khanna also repeats in the video the debunked lie about Israel’s supposed intentional starvation of civilians.

Khanna posted a clip of the video on his Twitter account. The video he posted begins with Carroll saying to the camera: “Ninety-three out of 100 U.S. senators were taking money from a group that represents a foreign government and foreign interests in order to operate our government on behalf of someone else,” as a Star of David in American flag colors appears on screen.

So the best Democrats can do is a congressman who says AIPAC isn’t a foreign agent but then posts on social media a video of a Holocaust distortionist explicitly saying that AIPAC is the agent of a foreign government?

As a dedicated progressive, Khanna can be expected to wade into these extremist waters. But Moulton, like Slotkin, was supposed to stand athwart the screeching Jew-baiters and conspiracist slop-artists. That he believes he needs them in order to win a Senate seat is an ominous sign for the direction of American politics.

Isabel Oakeshott: What is happening in Birmingham is a sinister vision of Britain’s future

Given the demographics, some such trouble in Birmingham did seem likely. Indeed, such is the hatred towards Jews among extreme elements of the Muslim population in this country that a number seem to want bloodshed. In the kind of language that would risk landing a Right-wing protestor in jail, one influential figure – Islamic scholar called Asrar Rashid – has gone so far as to publicly call for visiting fans to be shown “no mercy”.

Various pro-Palestinian politicians have lost no time in joining the charge. Among those who have been winding up Muslim voters is Ayoub Khan, an Independent MP whose Perry Barr constituency includes Aston Villa’s grounds. He has spent weeks demanding that the fixture be cancelled, on safety grounds. This is the same Ayoub Khan who, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 horrors in 2023, publicly questioned whether the massacre of innocent Jews by Hamas had been exaggerated.

At the time, he was a Liberal Democrat councillor and was offered “anti-Semitism training” by the party. Utterly unrepentant, he turned it down, claiming there was “simply no need” for him to undertake such a course.

Plenty of other political influencers have fuelled the fire, including a pro-Palestinian activist named Hussain “Hoz” Shafiei, who is one of the main characters promoting tomorrow’s march. His social media content is a projectile vomit of crackpot conspiracy theories and anti-Israeli propaganda (“Israel is the Devil”). He describes himself as a “Proud British Citizen, Iranian by blood, Arab by birth and English by upbringing”. Such a mix of identities might sound confusing, but is hardly unusual in Birmingham, a city in which many recent arrivals now seem unsure exactly who, or where, they are.

As the countdown to the match on November 6 begins, the authorities have become increasingly rattled. Their scandalous solution to what should simply be a policing challenge? To ban Israeli fans from watching the match. What a grotesque insult to all Jews – and what a craven response to what should be a total non-dilemma.

Of course there might be trouble – yet all the police need to do is their actual job. Isn’t maintaining order in all manner of settings their core offer? It is a role that West Midlands Police, and other forces, perform well enough, week in week out, including at countless pro-Palestinian marches. What exactly is different about this?

It is hard to avoid a horrible feeling that the answer to this question is the type of people who would have been coming to Birmingham for the match, namely Jews. As the Israel Solidarity Movement has pointed out, the decision is about far more than a sporting restriction. It is a deeply disturbing symbol of how Jews and Israelis are increasingly treated in our country, not only by countless faceless ignorami, but by far too many people in positions of authority, who should know better.

Brendan O'Neill: The ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans is a moral outrage

To witness a ‘Jew hunt’ like that and think to yourself ‘We can make sure it doesn’t happen here by keeping the Jews away’ – do people understand what a profound moral outrage this is? I can’t believe this needs to be said, but if there had been another ‘Jew hunt’ in Birmingham, the problem would not have been the Jews but their hunters. The pox on our society would not be the young Jews visiting from Israel for a day or two of footie and rowdiness but the elements within our society whose minds have been so addled by Israelophobia that they would have felt compelled to fume against those Jews. To ban Jews to try to calm those who hate them is a grotesque genuflection to the twisted logic of Jew hatred.

Here’s what I think: if it is not safe for Jews from Israel to attend a football match, then that match needs to be called off. There should be no event, no venue and no street in Britain where Jews, whether British or Israeli, are not safe from the hate and the blows of anti-Israel fanatics. Historically, you’ve been able to tell a lot about a society by how it treats its Jews. By whether it ghettoises them or lets them live freely. By whether it occasionally hunts them or leaves them alone. What we can tell about Britain from this nauseating decision is that we now prize the peace of Jew haters more highly than the rights of Jews – the sacrifice of Jewry at the altar of anti-Semitism.

Then there’s the despicable role played by certain MPs and the anti-Israel bigots of the left. They’ve been whipping up suspicion towards the visiting Maccabi fans for months. They’re thrilled by the ban. Ayoub Khan, a Birmingham MP, said he ‘welcomed the decision’. He wrote: ‘Sports entertainment should be enjoyed by all, regardless of their race, ethnicity and background. But….’ But! You don’t even need to know the rest of that sentence. There should never be a ‘but’ when it comes to the right of all people, whatever their ‘race’, to partake in the joy of sport. That there now is a ‘but’, and that it applies to one group alone, is proof of how thoroughly the Israelophobic mania has corrupted our country.

‘Kick racism out of football’ was the cry of Britain’s ‘progressives’ for years. Now it’s ‘Kick Jews out of football’. Now it’s ‘Kick Israelis out – for their own protection’. This cannot stand. Keir Starmer says the ban is ‘wrong’. ‘We will not tolerate anti-Semitism on our streets’, he says, and the police must ‘ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation’. Well, do something about it then. Put your money where your mouth is. Overturn this gross ban and deploy whatever forces are necessary to defend visiting Jews from racist violence. A nation where Jews from overseas cannot travel freely and securely is an anti-Semitic nation. Is that us?

10/17 Links Pt1: They Said Justice. They Meant Jihad; Mamdani’s anti-Israel obsession is key to his rise; Oct 7 Terrorist Charged With Entering the United States Illegally

From Ian:

New Poll Finds Soaring Approval for Trump's Handling of Israel-Hamas War

President Donald Trump's net approval rating on his handling of the Israel-Hamas war surged after his peace deal secured a ceasefire and the release of hostages, according to a poll released Friday.

"Following the Gaza ceasefire deal, 47% of voters approve of Trump's handling of the war between Israel and Hamas, while 34% disapprove," Emerson College Polling reported. "Public opinion has flipped since the Emerson 100-day poll [in April], when 30% approved and 46% disapproved of the president's handling of the war between Israel and Hamas."

Republican voters overwhelmingly support Trump's handling of the conflict, 80 percent to 7 percent, while Democrats disapprove by a 57-to-19 margin, according to Emerson Polling executive director Spencer Kimball. "The shift in overall approval comes from independents, who approve 43% to 38%; in April, independents disapproved 43% to 25%."

Trump's peace deal last week brought a ceasefire in the two-year war that began with Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel. The terror group has released all 20 living Israeli hostages but failed to make good on its promise to return the bodies of all 28 dead hostages. Israel, which has released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, responded to the hold-up by keeping a Gaza border crossing closed and restricting aid until Hamas returns all dead hostages.

They Said Justice. They Meant Jihad. By Abe Greenwald

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It would be fun to watch him take a shot at that. Those, such as father and son Mamdani, who’ve been intimately entangled with SJP surely know that it’s a straightforwardly pro-Hamas (and generally pro-jihad) organization. That’s why they got involved.

But the question will never be asked because it also exposes the media’s complicity in pretending that the Jew-hating zealots of the woke jihad were actually concerned for suffering Gazans. In May, for example, Sharon Otterman of the New York Times described SJP as “the most organized pro-Palestinian group on many college campuses.” A month after Hamas’s October 7 attack, the Times’ Alan Blinder characterized SJP as “perhaps the most popular and divisive campus organization championing the Palestinian cause.” What say you now, Otterman? Blinder?

Probably not much. While the committed Hamasniks are coming out of the closet, their liberal followers and enablers will likely make themselves scarce. They were conned. That’s the way leftist radicalism works. The true believers pitch well-meaning liberals a sweet-sounding story to get them on board. And, boy, did it work this time.

The war is over, and the part-time anti-Zionists have left the stage, most still thinking they were part of something noble. But the work of their groomers, the full-time terror propagandists, doesn’t end when the war stops. Groups like SJP will cheer so long as some jihadist, somewhere, is killing someone in the name of Palestine.

Jonathan Tobin: Mamdani’s anti-Israel obsession is key to his rise

Since foreign policy is not part of the responsibility of an American mayor, it’s fair to ask why this is so important to him. The answer is patently obvious.

It’s something he learned from his far-left parents—his father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a professor at Columbia University, and his mother is India-born filmmaker Mira Nair—and even shared by his wife, who publicly mourned the death this week of a pro-Hamas influencer who cheered for the Oct. 7 atrocities. He grew up around and became friends with hard-core scholastic ideologues like Edward Said, author of Orientalism, and Rashid Khalidi, who helped normalize hatred for Israel and the denial of Jewish rights. And so, such sentiments are at the core of his being.

Hatred and intolerance for Jews and their rights are not marginal to the 21st-century Marxist mindset that he exemplifies. The embrace of toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that brands Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors is at its heart. The key to understanding the impact of these ideas is that, as the Democratic Socialists of America’s condemnation of the ceasefire-hostage release deal that ended the post-Oct. 7 war showed, those who believe this consider Israel’s existence illegitimate under any circumstances and justify any actions, no matter how atrocious or inhuman, as justifiable “resistance.”

While such views were confined to the fever swamps of the far left not so long ago, they have gone mainstream in the wake of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the last decade, coupled with the surge of international antisemitism since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Mamdani is therefore the perfect illustration of the same attitudes that are causing much of the Democratic Party to oppose Israel, and to accept and spread blood libels about Jews committing genocide against the Palestinian people. The fact that The New York Times published a fawning paean this week to one of the world’s leading pro-Hamas antisemites, U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, is just another symptom of how a person like Mamdani could become the idol of the Democrats’ left-wing base.

A Mayor Mamdani will not have much power to harm the State of Israel. Nor will his adherents be rounding up Jews in the streets of New York. And whoever is governor—especially if, due in part to Hochul’s support of Mamdani, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a congressional scourge of antisemites, is elected governor in 2026—could make it difficult for him to do anything. Nevertheless, his command of the New York City Police Department will be a godsend to antisemitic mobs on college campuses or in the streets of the city, who will know that the man in charge will not only be reluctant to arrest them but actually be on their side. That will have a tangible impact on the security of the city’s Jewish population.

Just as important, Mamdani’s election will be a potential turning point in American Jewish history as antisemitism not only becomes endemic but part of mainstream political culture.

We’ve continued to see the knee-jerk reaction of the mainstream liberal media to any attempt to call Mamdani to account for his extremism and Jew-hatred by falsely labeling it “Islamophobia.” Along those lines, demonizing Mamdani’s critics as “Islamophobic” demonstrates how most such accusations are nothing more than an attempt to silence critiques of jihadist ideology and Muslim attacks on Jews.

Of course, this is still a minority view in the country as a whole. The overwhelming majority of Republicans reject the antisemitic views of the left and even those on the far-right, like political commentators and podcasters Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. That said, an America in which Mamdani isn’t just the mayor of New York but representative of the views of a large percentage of the Democratic Party and its media cheerleaders, like the Times, is a place where Jews can no longer think of themselves as entirely safe.

By Yehuda Teitelbaum

It was always strange that Hamas managed to convince so much of the world that Gaza was starving. Anyone who has studied or lived through real famine knows it looks nothing like what we were shown. Real famine is unmistakable. There is no ambiguity. It strips away everything. In Yemen, in Sudan, in Ethiopia, the evidence was everywhere. Children so emaciated they could not stand. Mothers too weak to carry them. Families dying in the streets because there was simply nothing left to eat. Those images were burned into the world’s memory because they could not be denied.

When you looked at Gaza, none of that existed. There were no pictures of groups of skeletal children sitting in rubble, no photos of neighborhoods reduced to wandering ghosts. What we saw instead were markets filled with produce, bakeries still open, and restaurants crowded late into the night. Countless videos came out of Gaza, not from Israeli sources or foreign reporters, but from Gazans themselves, showing normal commerce and daily life continuing amid the war. That did not mean life was easy. It was not. War creates chaos. Distribution networks break down. Prices rise. People go hungry. But that is not famine.

Famine is the collapse of an entire social fabric. It is starvation so deep that the weak simply disappear. It is the unraveling of families and the death of entire communities. It cannot be hidden or managed. When famine takes hold, the evidence becomes overwhelming and impossible to ignore. Gaza never looked like that, and the difference matters because words matter. When the word “famine” is used, it is not just describing a humanitarian crisis, it is triggering a political and legal framework. It transforms a tragic situation into an accusation of criminal intent.

The story itself was not new. Gaza had supposedly been starving since 2005. Each year the same claims returned under different slogans, siege, starvation, food insecurity, blockade. The language always shifted, but the accusation remained the same. In 2018, Oxfam declared that a million Gazans could not feed their families. Others echoed it without evidence, repeating it because it was convenient and effective.

Meanwhile, Israel became the only country in modern history to send food into the territory of an enemy it was fighting. Millions of pounds of supplies crossed the border even as rockets were launched at the crossing points. Over two million tons of humanitarian aid entered Gaza during the war, more than enough to feed its civilian population. Yet the United Nations still declared famine, because once you call it that, the entire framework shifts. A famine allows the narrative to move from a battlefield to a courtroom. It turns a war for survival into a moral trial. It lets international organizations accuse Israel of crimes rather than confront Hamas for creating the conditions of war in the first place.

That was always the purpose. The famine story was never meant to describe reality. Hamas understood that it could not win militarily. Its only chance was to win through narrative. Every image of destruction, every hungry child, every collapsed building could be repurposed into a weapon. And the international community played along. NGOs repeated the talking points as fact, journalists published them without verification, and politicians echoed them in speeches. The repetition was the point. Once said often enough, the lie began to sound like truth.

Inside Gaza, food was never truly the issue. Control was. Hamas controlled everything, the aid distribution, the warehouses, the access to supplies. Loyalists received food first. Fighters and their families were fed before anyone else. Ordinary people were kept desperate because desperation creates sympathy. The goal was to sustain the crisis long enough to turn public opinion against Israel.

And the world helped make that possible. The United Nations continued to fund UNRWA, an agency that has long since abandoned the idea of resettlement or reconciliation and instead exists to preserve refugee status indefinitely. Western governments poured billions into a system that guarantees permanent dependency. Human rights organizations repeated Hamas propaganda almost word for word, dressing it up as analysis. Major media outlets presented Hamas press releases as verified reporting. Western politicians followed along because it was easier than facing their own role in enabling a movement built on hate.

If the same claims had been made about Yemen or Sudan, the world would have demanded evidence. They would have sent photographers and researchers. But when it came to Gaza, the absence of evidence was treated as proof. The more the claim unraveled, the louder it was repeated. The famine narrative was never intended to help the people of Gaza. It was designed to weaponize their suffering against Israel.

Now that the war has seemingly ended, the truth is difficult to ignore. Gaza endured hardship and hunger. Lives were lost. But there was no famine. What there was, was manipulation, by Hamas, by NGOs, by journalists who knew better, and by international bodies that long ago abandoned integrity for politics. Yet the damage is done. The famine that never existed will live on in the archives of the United Nations, in the speeches of activists, and in the history books of the future.

That is how propaganda becomes history. The lie survives because it is useful, and the truth fades because it is inconvenient. The famine in Gaza was never real, but it achieved what it was meant to achieve. It turned the defense of a nation into a moral indictment, and it ensured that even in victory, Israel would stand accused.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Muslims would rather destroy Jerusalem than allow Jews to live there

The Lebanon-based Arab Foundation for Studies and Publishing just published a new edition of "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" by Dr. Ali Muhafaza. It praises the Hamas attack as a game-changer for Palestinian liberation.

But I want to examine the cover photo:

It depicts a tidal wave about to destroy Jerusalem, and specifically the Dome of the Rock.

If Jerusalem is so holy to Muslims, how can such an illustration even be considered, let alone for a cover of a book?

The violence is more important than the religion itself.

Or, perhaps, the violence is the religion itself, according to the Palestinians who write and read such books.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Healthy looking released terrorist tells Al Jazeera how Israeli prisons are worse than Auschwitz

Al Jazeera broadcast a ten minute interview with Mahmoud al-Arada, one of the most popular prisoners released in the ceasefire deal. He is best known for having briefly escaped Gilboa prison in 2021 before recapture, making him a folk hero. He was convicted in 1996 for his role as a senior Islamic Jihad operative and in murdering Israelis. He was released to Egypt, from where he did this interview.

Arada accused Israel of torturing prisoners mercilessly and claimed that Israel killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of Gaza prisoners. He says he was beaten and that the Israeli authorities tried to kill him multiple times while in prison. He even told Al Jazeera that the Nazis were more merciful to Jews than what the Jews are doing today to prisoners. (And, yes, he said Jews, not "Zionists" or "Israelis.")

Here is Arada during the interview.

He looks healthy. He looks younger than his age of 50. He doesn't look like he is emaciated, or has any broken bones, or was subject to merciless torture he described.

Yet the ridiculous accusations against Israel by this convicted murderer and top terrorist are being reported as unvarnished truth all over Arab media today. And a percentage of these incessant lies from murderers and terrorists end up being laundered into western news reports and NGO statements, where they become source material for academic papers, Wikipedia and AI.

This is how anti-Israel propaganda works. And it is extremely difficult to counter - even when the evidence that they are all lying is as plain as the nose on Mahmoud Al Arada's face.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

COGAT exposes the newest UN lies

Last week, COGAT published a takedown of UN lies about supposed Israeli restrictions on aid to Gaza that simply do not exist. It is worth reading to show how the UN prioritizes lying about Israel to actually helping Gazans.

Another week, another OCHA report filled with data manipulation, twisted facts and omitting important context, aiming to show a skewed and partial picture.

Let's break it down🧵🧵🧵
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1. OCHA mentions that cooked meal supply went down 70%, with 8 kitchen operating. What OCHA 'forgot' to mention is that over 80% of the Gaza city population moved south, and so new kitchens opened to feed the population who moved to the south.

2.OCHA says over one million people have access to less than 6 liters of water a day. THIS IS A BRAZEN LIE. A daily average of dozens of liters of water a day is available, based on water pipelines from Israel, a UAE waterline to the Mawasi, an Israeli electricity line supplying electricity to the desalination plant in Dier al Balah, another desalination plant and pumping facilities. The amount of water available in Gaza is well above the humanitarian minimum.

3.Coordination Games & UN Delays
Israel continues to facilitate large-scale humanitarian aid into Gaza with NO restrictions on food or essential supplies, prioritizing the UN. The real problem is the UN and its partners’ failure to collect and distribute the aid.
Israel has expanded capacity at the crossings, based on coordination of trucks, the UN is still coordinating a third of the amount of trucks entering. They can always coordinate more. Delays stem primarily from UN logistic failures, not Israeli limitations.

4. OCHA’s report also claims complex procedures, limited capacity, and unpredictable rejections by Israel are delaying operations.
The facts: Israel is not blocking aid to Gaza. In fact, hundreds of trucks from other organizations and private sector enter daily. The UN’s backlog at Kerem Shalom is entirely due to its own slow collection and handling of shipments. Aid moves as fast as organizations manage it; the bottleneck is the UN.

5. The UN continues to submit double coordination requests, including to areas that will knowingly get denied for the safety of the UN teams, just to inflate the denied coordination request numbers. Here are the real numbers for 24-30 September, unlike what OCHA claimed in its report.

124 UN coordination requests, 63% approved. The other 37% included and 20%(!) Of bogus and double requests, and 17% that were denied for the safety of humanitarian personnel. Oh, and 11% were canceled by the UN itself. This does not include dozens more coordinations not by the UN.

6. Here’s OCHA’s latest masterpiece of misinformation:
The UN’s own assessment says Gaza needs 103 food trucks a day. During the January–March ceasefire, 600 trucks entered daily, nearly six times the need. Today, over 300 trucks enter Gaza every day, yet OCHA claims "the amounts of food aid entering the Gaza Strip, including through UN coordination, remain inadequate and are far below the quantities that entered Gaza during the ceasefire between 19 January and 1 March 2025", just to paint a false picture of scarcity. The UN knows the numbers. it just chooses distortion over honesty.

The UN is worse than useless.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

10/16 Links Pt2: Enough is enough. We must clamp down on universities now; Maccabi Tel Aviv fans banned from Aston Villa match over ‘safety’

From Ian:

Warner Bros. Discovery Speaks Out Against Israeli Film Boycott: ‘Our Policies Prohibit Discrimination of Any Kind’

Warner Bros. Discovery has responded to a legal letter regarding calls for a boycott of Israeli film institutions, acknowledging such a pledge would likely violate its internal policies.

“Warner Bros. Discovery is committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful environment for its employees, collaborators, and other stakeholders,” a spokesperson for WBD told Variety.

“Our policies prohibit discrimination of any kind, including discrimination based on race, religion, national origin or ancestry. We believe a boycott of Israeli film institutions violates our policies. While we respect the rights of individuals and groups to express their views and advocate for causes, we will continue to align our business practices with the requirements of our policies and the law.”

Last month a plethora of industry figures including Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem signed a pledge organized by Film Workers for Palestine vowing to avoid working with Israeli film institutions “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” Examples of “complicity” suggested by Film Workers for Palestine include “whitewashing or justifying genocide and apartheid, and/or partnering with the government committing them.”

In its FAQ section, Film Workers for Palestine clarifies that Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage would not be subject to the same boycott as Israeli citizens of other heritage, with a different set of “context sensitive” guidelines applied instead.

However law associations on both sides of the Atlantic have warned the boycott is likely to violate equality laws. As Variety reported exclusively last week, the group U.K. Lawyers for Israel has warned studios, agencies and unions that the pledge breaches the Equality Act 2010 making it “highly likely to be a litigation risk.” This could also have a knock-on effect on insurance and film finance.

Brendan O'Neill: Get your hands off the Holocaust, Mehdi Hasan

The most striking part of Hasan’s tweet is where he says ‘One of the ways’ in which Gaza feels worse than the Holocaust…. So post-war jokes are not the only thing that make Gaza worse? What else does, Mehdi? It’s not the numbers, that’s for sure. The estimated death toll for the two-year war in Gaza is 70,000, a great many of which will be Hamas militants. That’s far lower than the toll for other recent wars – Yemen, Syria, Sudan – which are rarely called genocides.

But here’s the thing: at the height of their Jew-killing frenzy, in 1944, the Nazis were exterminating 6,000 human beings a day at Auschwitz II in Birkenau. Men, women, children, the elderly, the disabled: gassed, burnt, vaporised. More in 12 days than in two years of war in Gaza. It is a grotesque insult against memory, against truth itself, even to say the word Gaza in the same sentence as the word Holocaust. Hasan must know this? He went to Oxford FFS. Actually, maybe that explains it.

The numbers are only one part of the story. There’s intention, too. The wild clamour of the keffiyeh mob and their enablers in the NGO world to have the Gaza war branded a ‘genocide’ wilfully overlooks that Israel’s aim was not to destroy the Palestinian people but to destroy Hamas. There was a time when progressives would have considered it noble for a Jewish army to take the fight to a fascist militia that had raped and massacred its people. How do the ‘genocide’ nuts explain that the war is winding down – we hope – now that the hostages have been returned and there’s a peace deal that says Hamas must disarm? Do you know when the Holocaust would have ended had the Allied forces not intervened? When there was not one Jew left on Earth.

Hasan is back-pedalling. He says his tweet was ‘clumsily’ worded. He’s telling those who accuse him of Holocaust relativism to ‘go fuck yourself’. Defensive much? The fact is he gave voice to an untruth that has spread like a pox in educated circles – that Gaza is a genocide, not unlike that genocide. NGOs gleefully peddle this calumny. Pompous columnists rattle it off. You see it on every soulless march against Israel, with placards calling Israel the New Nazis and likening Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.

I can’t read Hasan’s mind. I have no idea why he parrots this myth. But I have my suspicions about why the broader ‘pro-Palestine’ movement does. Howard Jacobson says the reason Israel’s haters always reach for the Holocaust, despite there being ‘thousands of years of pitiless warfare’ they could reference instead, is ‘to wound Jews’, ‘to punish them with their own grief’. To my mind, it’s something worse than Holocaust relativism. It’s Holocaust inversion, where the Jews are reframed as the perpetrators rather than the victims of the greatest crime in history, all to the end of washing away the historic guilt of privileged woke Westerners. Now that the war in Gaza has stopped, please, can this war on truth stop, too?

Holocaust Museum director rebukes Gazans identifying as ‘holocaust survivors’

Those who say that Gazans are “holocaust survivors,” having endured Israel’s defensive war against the Hamas terror organization, are to be “widely condemned,” according to Sara Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Falsely comparing the Holocaust to Israel’s response to Hamas’s terrorist attack is an outrageous weaponization of the genocide of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, who systematically murdered six million Jews,” Bloomfield told JNS. “It’s antisemitic, inaccurate, highly offensive and must be widely condemned.”

One social media account has received 3.2 million views for a post claiming to be a “holocaust survivor” of war in Gaza. Another post from a “survivor of the Gaza holocaust” garnered 525,000 views, and a post from an artist wearing a keffiyeh, referring to “my survival from this holocaust,” received 40,000 views.

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who created a media company called Zeteo, wrote in a since-deleted social media post that “one of the ways in which the Gaza genocide is worse than a lot of previous genocides—Rwanda, even the Holocaust—is that you didn’t have Hutus or Nazis mocking the genocide after it was over. They were shunned, deradicalized, prosecuted.”

Deborah Camiel, senior vice president of communications at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told JNS that Hasan “based his outrageous comment comparing the Oct. 7 war to the Holocaust on the canard that Israel’s military response to Hamas atrocities was a genocide.”

That claim is a “tired inversion widely used by antisemites, who try at every opportunity, no matter how inexact or intellectually lazy the comparison is, to portray Jews as Nazis,” Camiel said. “Israel’s war of self-defense was not against the Palestinian people but the vicious terrorist group Hamas.”

“As Hasan well knows, Hamas, itself a group with a genocidal charter, embeds itself among Palestinian civilians, in private homes, mosques, schools and hospitals, purposefully exposing them to terrible harm,” the Wiesenthal Center spokeswoman told JNS. “It is clear today that most of the world agrees that it is this maniacal jihadist group that should be shunned, eradicated and prosecuted.”

10/16 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: It’s not over yet; The Marches Were Never about Peace. They Were about the Destruction of Israel

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: It’s not over yet

Those organizing the refocused Western hate fests are buoyed because, while war against Israel and the Jews has experienced a setback in the Middle East, it has had no pushback at all in the West.

On the contrary, liberal Western governments—the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia—have been enthusiastically joining in the diplomatic war to destroy Israel through demonization and delegitimization based on the script served up to them by Hamas, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the Palestinian Arab-Israeli online magazine +972, Ahmed Moor gloated this week: “Jewish supremacy in Palestine—the core tenet of Zionism—is increasingly regarded as illegitimate across the globe. It is far too early to declare that the Zionist era in Palestine is over, but October 2025 portends a different future. If the genocide has rendered Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians, it has also made the world newly inhospitable to Zionism.”

This is expressing itself in ever-more jaw-dropping Western moral sickness. Videos on social media show Gazans being brutally tortured and murdered by Hamas. Western “pro-Palestinians” have either been silent about this treatment of the people they claim to support or have even applauded their execution as “collaborators” with Israel.

They have not only been lionizing the terrorists released from Israeli prisons but calling them “hostages,” thus equating genocidal mass murderers with the victims of their regime.

CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour went one better when she claimed that the Israeli hostages were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan.” The subsequent outcry forced her to issue a mealy-mouthed apology.

In Britain, an Oxford University student was filmed whipping up a crowd into a chant of “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground!”

He has now been suspended from the university and arrested. But calls to destroy Israel and murder Jews have been tolerated at these hate marches for the past two years while the police and government ministers bleat about “free speech.”

The reason for this lunacy is that the Jews are at the very core of the crisis of Western identity. Liberal universalists hate Israel as a Western nation-state, and because they believe that the Jews are behind capitalism and its associated supposed oppression and colonialism. Isolationists on the American right hate Israel because they believe that it sucks the United States into foreign wars, thus demonstrating that the Jews are a global conspiracy to put others at risk for their own benefit.

In Tablet magazine, Michael Doran writes: “The antisemitism of left and right is not a noxious gas seeping out of the soil and wafting into politics. It is being weaponized—cleverly and deliberately—by organized forces for political warfare. Progressives festoon their bigotry with banners of diversity, equity, and inclusion, demanding Jews disown Israel. Meanwhile, [Tucker] Carlson updates the Protocols to paint Jews as the hidden hand behind the empire, insisting the covenant be cut so American patriots can smash unelected concentrations of global power.”

Doran writes that the obsessional argument over Israel is, at base, an argument over the identity of America, which was originally cast in Israel’s image.

This is no less true of Britain, whose constitutional monarchy was drawn up by its 18th-century Puritan evangelical creators explicitly using the template of the ancient kingdom of Israel—the same template used by the same people who became the founding fathers of America’s constitutional settlement. And Judaism also lies at the very foundation of the West’s moral codes.

That biblically based culture has been under relentless onslaught for decades by liberal universalist Western elites. The result has been the replacement of morality by ideologies based on the false division of the world into the powerful and powerless. This opened the way for Palestinianism, which casts the fictitious “Palestinians” falsely as the indigenous people of the land of Israel who were displaced by the alleged Jewish interlopers—the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom.

The Islamist Palestinian cause, which has taken the place of Vietnam as the acme of progressivism, has opened the way in turn for the Islamization of the West.

This is a movement, through Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, to replace the Jews and Christians with Islam—and it’s now got the wind in its sails. Does Trump realize this? Israel does. The West’s craven elites certainly don’t.

George F. Will: Primary Credit for the Gaza Ceasefire Goes to the IDF - and Netanyahu-

The stark lesson of Israel's achievement since Oct. 7, 2023, is: Often military might does, and often only it can, make room for diplomacy.

Primary credit for the ceasefire between Israel and those who still aspire to murder it goes to the Israel Defense Forces. Credit also goes to the prime minister who wielded the IDF with a properly austere regard for the opinions of mankind, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The diplomats' hour arrived after, and because of, the fighting by those who form the tip of Israel's spear against unprovoked and wanton violence - the mostly young men and women of the IDF. To the Trump administration's credit, the U.S. has enabled Israel's victory by not restraining its self-defense.

Israel's reality on Oct. 7 was that it was contiguous to an enclave under the thumb of organized sadists who sheltered behind a captive civilian population. The war that paused and perhaps ended last week reminded the world that Israel has never known a day of peace, properly understood.

Israel has always had U.S. support because it has earned it. It has never, however, been dependent on it. Centuries of hard experiences, culminating in Auschwitz, have taught the Jewish people the lethal risks of dependence on others.

For decades, U.S. officials belabored Israel with reasons why, in negotiations with bellicose enemies, it should "take a risk for peace." To one official, Netanyahu, referring to a tranquil Washington suburb, replied, "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."

Israel has refused to trim its sails to accommodate gusts of critical opinions from people living comfortably at a safe distance from violence.

Douglas Murray: After the Gaza cease-fire, what will these faux revolutionaries protest? Some ideas

3. But perhaps protestors feel that the education of the next generation of Americans doesn’t matter much to them. Or that the homelessness crisis doesn’t need to bother them. Perhaps some people really do think it´s better to address their energies to far-off conflicts. In which case I have a few terrific causes that they would do well to address.

Why not throw yourself into the Northern Cyprus question? Cyprus is an EU Member State, and yet the north of the country has been illegally occupied for over half a century. It is 51 years now since the Turkish army invaded the island, killing the locals and forcefully displacing tens of thousands of Greek Cypriots from their homes. Does anyone want to call for the return of these families?

If not then how about the plight of the Christians of Northern Nigeria? I have seen that conflict myself and the relentless massacres against Nigerian Christians by the Fulani militias, Boko Haram and others really does constitute a genocide. It is an effort to wipe out the native Christian population with Kalashnikovs, suicide-bombs and machetes.

Why are there no protests on the streets of New York about this? Is it because the victims are Christians? Or is it because the perpetrators of the violence are jihadists rather than Jews? In any case, if you believe that shouting on the streets of New York can stop a genocide, how about focusing on a real one?

4. But perhaps some of the real die-hard, would-be Che Guevaras, really do want to linger on the tiny bit of territory known as Gaza that nobody — Israel, nor Egypt — wants to govern. If you are one of those people who two years ago had to check exactly where this tiny speck of land is, and decided that it is your spiritual homeland as causes go, why not keep up your interest?

Since last weekend’s ceasefire came into effect, and the Israeli Defense Forces withdrew, Hamas and other jihadist militias have moved in to try to reassert control. Anyone who has spent recent years online passing around terrible videos of violence should not turn away now.

Look at the videos of Hamas members lining up families from clans they oppose, getting them to kneel on the ground and then shooting them all in the head.

If you are somebody who “cares” then these are all very good things to care about. But if you’d rather stay home now that the war has stopped, then do know that the rest of us can see who you were all along.

Stephen Daisley: The Marches Were Never about Peace. They Were about the Destruction of Israel

Since Oct. 7, the pro-Palestinian lobby has enjoyed unprecedented success in manipulating the media coverage of Israel's war to free its hostages from Gaza.

The world swallowed without question the claim that Israel was deliberately manufacturing a famine to wipe out Palestinian children.

Yet, the only massacres or atrocities to protest were those that had been conducted by Palestinians against Israelis, and Western sympathizers were certainly not demonstrating against those.

They were celebrating their victim-idols' daring slaughter of defenseless Israelis.

Saturday's demonstration in London must be the first recorded example of people protesting the end of a supposed genocide.

This is a movement more concerned with dismantling Israel than with building up Palestine.

There is a ceasefire. The killing has stopped. Aid is going in. Who in their right mind protests that? A movement that sees peace as an impediment to vilifying Israel.

Gaza Genocide Continues Unabated In Israel-Hater Imaginations (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Gaza City, October 16 - The systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian culture by Israeli forces has not let up, at least according to reports from the fever dreams of losers who despise the Jewish State and will both generate out of whole cloth and uncritically swallow accusations of atrocities by Jews.

Gaza ceasefire or no Gaza ceasefire, the systematic Israeli extermination of Palestinians continues without interruption in the imaginations of people predisposed to believe the worst about Israel and about Jews, without evidence, with only the argument that it has to be true because of [insert previous slander of Israel/Jews] has already established the credibility of such accusations.

"This must stop!" demanded former UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. "The suffering is intolerable, and the world's inaction will go down in history as a compounding of the worst crime in history!" She pointed to reports originating in the hateful fantasies of those who purport to support Palestinians, but who urge Palestinians not to yield to pressure to stop the war, to keep the genocide going.

The imaginary realm in which the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is taking place also features several conditions that do not obtain in the current reality, such as Jewish/Zionist control of the banking system - with the Rothschild family dominating in ways not possible or plausible in our world - and the 8.25 billion non-Jews of that other, fantastical, dimension remain too stupid, weak, and weak-minded to do anything about it.

Similarly, in the there's-a-genocide-of-Palestinians-happening universe, there exists a tangible, meaningful difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, with anti-Zionists taking pains to ensure that Jews, qua Jews, do not become targets for violence or verbal assaults, regardless of Israel's behavior, because non-antisemitic anti-Zionists steer the movement in that imaginary place, and they understand that attacks on Jews outside Israel actually strengthens the case for Israel as a homeland and refuge for Jews - as opposed to in this reality, where anti-Zionism functionally invites antisemites to incite and perpetrate violence against Jews, with the tiny-minority non-antisemitic anti-Zionists powerless to curtail the phenomenon or apathetic to it.

That genocide fantasy world appears to overlap in some imaginations with a cognitively-dissonant realm where Jews are fleeing Israel in response to noble Palestinian resistance, resistance that appears unable to prevent a genocide by Jews who manifestly are not fleeing, and who, in this same imaginary realm, continuously expel Palestinians, who cannot return to their homes despite the mass flight of Jews from the land.

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In today’s New York Times, E.J. Dionne writes a love letter to Zohran's Mamdani's supposed redemption.

He casts Mamdani as a once-fiery socialist who has matured into a pragmatic reformer - a politician who fixes sewers instead of preaching revolution. It’s a story tailor-made for the weary center-left: the radical who grows up without selling out.

He emphasizes that Mamdani is not the same firebrand he was before.

It’s worth noticing that Mr. Mamdani’s critics are focused largely on the past: the 33-year old’s most incendiary statements, and the most extreme components of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization to which he proudly belongs and that initially powered his political career.
Those on the moderate left who see Mr. Mamdani’s upside look instead to the present and the future. They notice how he’s distanced himself from his more controversial statements (particularly about the police and the Middle East), insisted that he’s not running on the D.S.A.’s national agenda, and painted himself as a realistic visionary trying to solve the city’s current problems.

In short, Dionne thinks that Mamdani has modified his values and grown.

I've been thinking a lot about values in recent months, and in the course of my writings I came up with a moral analysis method I call "Derechology." It looks at a person's values and how or if they change over time - their "derech," or moral path.

By that standard, Mamdani’s “growth” narrative doesn’t hold up.

In Jewish ethics, genuine change - teshuvah - requires renunciation, reordering, and repair. Mamdani has done none of these.

He hasn’t withdrawn his most divisive statements or broken with the ideologies that produced them. He hasn’t offered moral clarity or taken responsibility for harm. What’s changed is presentation, not principle.

In other words, his derech hasn't changed at all. His optics have.

“The good thing about my youth,” Mamdani told The New Yorker, “is that I grow older every day.”

It’s clever. It invites every listener to project what they want to hear - to progressives, perseverance; to moderates, moderation.

But growth without repentance is adaptation, not evolution. Jewish ethics judges deeds, not vibes.

If you look carefully at his statements, there is no regret for his "youthful" positions. He regrets how they might impact his chances for election, not his opinions themselves.

Judaism teaches dan l’chaf zechut - giving others the benefit of the doubt - but it never asks us to suspend judgment entirely.

When moral recalibration arrives only on the campaign trail, skepticism isn’t cynicism. It’s accountability.

Optics aren't ethics. As a public figure, Mamdani’s words shape the moral credibility of the movements he represents. A politician who markets “growth” without showing teshuvah risks more than hypocrisy. He cheapens the very idea of moral change.

Dionne sees (or chooses to see) a young idealist maturing into responsibility. Derechology sees a consistent derech of committed far-Left principles and ambition where Mamdani will say different things to different crowds, and who will happily repackage his image for a wider audience without changing his actual positions in the least.

Until we see renunciation, reordering, and repair, “growth” is only a slogan, not a virtue. Mamdani's only real growth is in how to present himself to be more palatable to the center-left voters he covets.

His childish, simplistic and ultimately immoral and antisemitic socialist ideals have not changed at all.

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Isaac Moses: A forgotten Jewish hero of the American Revolution

Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik wrote in the Washington Free Beacon:

It was one small meal for Jews, but a political leap forward for Jewish history. In 1788, Philadelphia hosted a parade celebrating Pennsylvania's ratification of the Constitution, and the procession was followed by a feast. An eyewitness reported that "there was a number of long tables loaded with all kinds of provisions, with a separate table for the Jews, who could not partake of the meals from the other tables." It is difficult to find a prior civic celebration in Jewish diaspora history that is its like. In a single setting, Jews were embraced as equals by their fellow Philadelphians, as full partners in the nascent constitutional republic, while at the same time feeling entirely able to observe the dietary habits that set them apart.

That single kosher table, prepared for observant Jews amid a patriotic feast, symbolized the new republic’s promise of inclusion. What most people don’t know is that the man behind that table, Isaac Moses, was far more than a caterer - he was one of the men who financed the Revolution that made such a celebration possible.

The full story of the kosher table is in a letter written by 95-year old Naphtali Phillips in 1868. He wrote:

The procession then proceeded from about Third Street near Spruce, northward towards Callowhill Street, then wheeled towards Bush Hill, where there was a number of long tables loaded with all kinds of provisions, with a separate table for the Jews, who could not partake of the meals from the other tables; but they had a fill supply of soused [pickled] salmon, bread and crackers, almonds, raisins, etc. This table was under the charge of an old cobbler named Isaac Moses, well known in Philadelphia at that time.

A 1975 article (really, a 150 page book about Jews and the American Revolution) from the American Jewish Archives tells us more about this "old cobbler:"

The fact that 100 or more American Jews may have served in the armed forces is of no great historic significance. Their commercial activities were far more important in an agrarian economy where industry and manufacturing were minimal and the coasts were blockaded by the powerful British fleet. The farmers and townspeople had to have yard goods and tea; it was imperative that the soldiers be supplied with uniforms, blankets, and shoes. One way to relieve the shortage was to arm merchant ships and send them out as privateers to prey on enemy commerce. This Jews did, arming small ships heavily and packing them with large, tough crews who scoured the seas for valuable British cargoes.

....After a fashion, privateering was a form of blockade-running. Many American ships got through the English naval barrier, for the enemy could not guard every cove and inlet of the long coast. Certainly one of the most daring of the blockade-runners was the firm of Isaac Moses & Co. Its three partners Isaac Moses, Samuel Myers, and Moses Myers had an Amsterdam buying office which shipped their goods to Dutch St. Eustatius in the Caribbean. From there the company's ships made the run to an American port, trusting to fate that they could slip past the cordon set up by the English cruisers. Isaac Moses and his associates were great Whigs. Shortly after the War broke out in 1775, when the Americans set out to conquer Canada, the three partners voluntarily offered the Congress $20,000 in hard currency in exchange for Continental paper which-as they might have foreseen-ultimately proved worthless. If it was any consolation, they received the grateful thanks of John Hancock for their generous gift.

Moses was the president of both New York's Shearith Israel synagogue and, after he moved when the British occupied New York, Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel.

Moses wrote a letter to the Continental Congress in 1779 asking for gunpowder to protect his ships as they attempted to evade the British blockade. His humility in this request is something to behold.

To the Honorable the Congress of the United States of North America:
The petition of Isaac Moses, now of the city of Philadelphia, merchant, most humbly sheweth:
That your petitioner, having loaded a schooner, letter of marque, and fitted her with every necessary but gun powder, in a warlike manner, has made all the search in his power for that article, but finding himself every where dissappointed, is now under the dissagreeable necessity of troubling Your Honours, and to pray that you would be pleased to spare him, out of the public stores, two or three hundred weight of powder.
He flatters himself his principals as a true Whig and friend to the liberties of this country are so well known to some of your members that it is needless to mention them here, or to remind your body of the assistance he has afforded these United States from time to time in the importation of divers articles which he spared them, but particularly when he and his partners spared these states upwards of twenty thousand dollars in specie, in exchange for Continental dollars...
Your petitioner submits to your honourable House to consider how unsafe it would be in him to risk his property at these times on the high seas without having proper means of defence with it, and pledges himself either immediately to pay for the powder, or to reemburse the public with an equal quantity of that article, and that either on the return of his vessel, or at the time that she ought to return. Your petitioner therefore flatters himself your honourable House will be pleased on these considerations to grant him his request;
And he, as in duty bound, will ever pray.

Isaac Moses July 27th, 1779

I don't know if he ever got that gunpowder, but it didn't affect Moses' patriotism. In fact his company went bankrupt after the war but he remained a staunch supporter of the new United States.

Wikipedia's page on Moses is just a stub, although it notes that Moses was one of the founders of the Bank of North America, which after a series of mergers and acquisitions is now part of Wells Fargo. He was also a major stockholder of the Bank of New York. His children continued in international trade, especially with China and Mexico.(I find this interesting because my impression was that Jews were successful in trade by having other Jews to trade with; I'm not sure that this was the case in those countries.)

No one seems to remember him outside this article. But Isaac Moses did more than most soldiers to help found the United States,

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Michael Oren writes in The Free Press about how a group of real-estate moguls and builders managed to bring a local modicum of peace to the Middle East. His answer is essentially dealmaking and personal relationships.

But the real story may be something deeper - and stranger. What Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Donald Trump stumbled into was not superior negotiation technique but a kind of accidental moral philosophy: an ethics of clarity that cut through half a century of false ideas about peace itself.

For decades, Western diplomacy treated “peace” as the supreme moral goal. The word sounded noble, but it concealed a category error. Peace is not a moral value—it is a moral byproduct.

A value, by definition, must transform reality for the good: it must preserve life, restore dignity, expose evil, or advance justice. “Peace,” on its own, performs none of these functions. It merely describes the absence of visible conflict, even when injustice festers quietly beneath. That’s why peace processes designed around “peace” keep failing: they mistake stillness for healing and silence for harmony.

The goal of genuine peace is to enable the higher moral work: protecting life, restraining evil, and cultivating human dignity. When peace becomes detached from those purposes, it becomes a kind of idol: something to be pursued for its own sake, even at the cost of truth and justice. Oslo ended up fetishizing the process, and ignoring the underlying moral reasons of why we want peace to begin with. These real-estate dealmakers, lacking the pretensions of philosophers or diplomats, simply ignored the idol and started building on firmer moral ground.

For decades, Western policy talked about the Middle East in the language of “rights”: the Palestinian rights of "return," "justice" and "dignity;" Israel’s right to security or even to exist altogether. The problem is that rights, when treated as absolute, collide. Everyone ends up righteous and immovable. The real estate moguls instinctively shifted the grammar from rights to obligations. Hamas must stop murdering and kidnapping and cannot profit from it. Qatar must stop funding terror. Israel must defend its citizens. The United States must stop enabling moral confusion. Each obligation could be tested in reality, whether fulfilled or violated.

This shift mirrors what I call the Obligation Principle: a moral claim is valid only if it binds the claimant to concrete responsibility. In that light, the Abraham Accords were less a diplomatic triumph than an ethical correction. Once obligations replaced abstractions, the fog cleared and progress followed.

Critics sneered that Trump spoke “the language of strength.” They missed that strength, properly ordered, is a moral language. In the Middle East, as in human life, evil rarely yields to polite conversation or diplomacy. Peace imposed by fear of justice is not perfect, but it is better than a false peace that is only a stage toward the next war. The builders’ willingness to back moral clarity with material power was not barbaric; it was coherent. They also used positive incentives to nudge the players towards the US position which supported this coherent vision. And coherence is the first test of moral truth.

The remarkable thing is that the “builder’s ethic” produced not chaos but alignment. Once the United States stopped rewarding contradiction - condemning terrorism in principle while rewarding it in practice - regional actors recalibrated. The same kings and presidents who had long mouthed anti-Zionist clichés suddenly saw advantage in stability. Reality, long suppressed by moral relativism, reasserted itself. Ethics turned out to be the shortest path to strategy.

This is the central lesson of the episode and the reason it matters beyond politics. Ethical clarity is not an ornament to policy; it is policy. A coherent moral framework functions like a blueprint: once you know which beams must bear weight, you can build anything upon them - whether cities, treaties, or even peace.

For too long Israel's enemies screamed about their dignity and how important it was, and they even use that word to justify murder and terror. The West has been cowed by this appeal to the legitimate value of dignity, and did not have the confidence to counter that Arab dignity is just one value among many that need to be balanced. It cannot override preservation of life, fairness, or the dignity of the other side.

Real ethics is all about that balance, but without a moral core, concepts like dignity or justice can morph into evil.

Whether Kushner and Witkoff understood this in ethical terms or they simply saw through the moral posturing as another negotiating position, they did not allow themselves to be bulldozed by false ethical concepts that have stymied Western diplomats for so long.

It may seem absurd to describe Donald Trump as an ethical actor. But history is full of flawed vessels who perform correct operations. Ethics is not about personal saintliness; it is about whether one’s actions align with moral structure. Just as people with Aristotelian virtues like wisdom or courage can be immoral, people without those virtues can do the right thing. In this case, they did. By accident or instinct, the builders behaved as if guided by a hierarchy of values long familiar to Jewish moral thought: life before peace, justice before diplomacy, truth before comfort.

The diplomats built process; the builders built structure. One collapses under pressure; the other stands.

If peace required rejecting the false philosophy that had dominated foreign policy, perhaps moral clarity can do the same for our other failing institutions. The same logic that produced the Abraham Accords can produce trustworthy systems anywhere: don't assume all claims have equal moral value, name evil accurately, replace sentiment with structure, and require obligations before rights.

Peace, properly understood, is not the goal of ethics: it is what ethics produces when values like life, justice, and truth are rightly aligned. The builders’ achievement, however imperfect, was to rediscover that order without ever naming it.

That’s the architecture of ethics, and, as it turns out, of peace.

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