Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, July 04, 2025

07/04 Links Pt2: Despite the surge of antisemitism, America is worth fighting for; Murray: Will NYC fall for the selfie-entitled Zohran Mamdani?; The Case of Dr. Benjamin Bross

From Ian:

Jonathan S. Tobin: Despite the surge of antisemitism, America is worth fighting for

President Donald Trump’s campaign to punish the universities that have tolerated and even encouraged antisemitism since Oct. 7 is evidence that Jews have powerful allies, even if some in the Jewish community are so immersed in the hyper-partisan spirit of the times that they refuse to recognize it. Indeed, in much of the country outside of the deep blue coastal enclaves where most Jews continue to live, the reaction to the uptick of hated and rise of radicals like Mamdani is the sort of disgust and outrage that should reassure the Jewish community that talk of giving up on America is as wrongheaded as it is counterproductive.

If nothing else, the U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities that posed an existential threat of another Holocaust are evidence that America is not a lost cause.

So, as much as it may seem tempting or even rational to talk of abandoning America, that would be a terrible mistake. Though Israel and Zionism still represent the Jewish future in a way that America cannot, Jews cannot give up on this country and certainly shouldn’t even think of doing so without a fight.

We must do so not merely out of a desire to defend our lives here but because a strong America that has not abandoned the best of Western civilization and values is essential to the worldwide struggle against the forces of tyranny—both Marxist and Islamist—that threaten Israel and Jews everywhere.

If Jewish life is unsafe in America, then it will be unsafe everywhere. That’s why it is essential that, rather than giving up or giving in to hysterical talk about the end of liberty and even the end of Jewry in the States, we must recommit to the fight to roll back the woke tide and defeat it.

This may be a generational struggle in much the same way that leftist efforts to impose these false beliefs on America were. Yet it is a battle that is necessary not just to save American Jewry, but to save the canon of Western civilization on which our freedoms rest.

The quintessential American response
A year from now, this nation will attempt to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its independence, and the battle over how to commemorate it has already begun. The contempt for traditional patriotism and belief in the truth that the American republic, flawed though it might be, is a force for good in the world has already been made clear by left-wing elites. As discouraging as this discourse may be, it is a reminder that the stigmatizing and targeting of Jews is part and parcel of the same struggle other citizens are engaging in. The American republic is and has always been exceptional. But it will only remain that way so long as a broad cross-section of Americans—Jews and non-Jews, liberals and conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans—are willing to stand up against the woke forces seeking to traduce its founding values.

The appropriate answer to attacks on Jews is not flight or a call to shelter in place. The appropriate response is for Jews to speak up and not abandon the streets to antisemites and woke mobs. The rejoinder to anti-Jewish violence is for Jews to act in the most quintessential American way possible: to arm themselves (verbally, legally and literally) and make it clear that they will not be intimidated or silenced.

Those who hate the founding principles of the United States are wrong about the end of American greatness or the need to transform it into some pale reflection of Marxist or Islamist concepts. And so, on this Independence Day, rather than writing off America, we should be embracing it all the more enthusiastically—and pledging to defend it against those who wish to tear it down.

Cary Nelson and Richard Ross: The Case of Dr. Benjamin Bross

Ever since some faculty members exulted over Hamas’s October 7, 2023, murder spree in Israel and then campus encampments began chanting for Zionists to be cast out of the community, we have worried that we would also soon see a quiet, determined campaign to deny tenure to qualified Zionist faculty. The encampments were notable for their noise. The determined assault on pro-Israel faculty would be barely audible, carried out by confidential committees and cloaked in self-righteous if deeply compromised professionalism. We have faced exactly that in our own community, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

As members of the executive committee of Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism, we offer this essay as a warning that it will spread worldwide.

The problem arises when radical anti-Zionists serve on tenure committees that are reviewing expressly Zionist candidates for tenure. When the faculty in both categories are known to hold those opposing beliefs, there is an obvious suggestion of bias and a clear appearance of a conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter how fair and impartial the compromised committee members may be. In the principle that governs both legal and academic professions, among others, the appearance of a conflict of interest must be “managed” by recusal. There is no accusation involved, just the recognizable fact—the appearance of a conflict. There may of course be serious conflicts of interest involved, but managing them by dealing with the appearance of conflicts solves the problem without triggering investigations and hostile confrontations.

At the core of the issue is the academy’s most intractable antisemitic problem: academic disciplines and their local departments that have embraced radical anti-Zionism as part of their core identity. Radical anti-Zionism is an ideology devoted to eliminating the Jewish state. Not to reforming it, not to changing Israeli policies, but rather to erasing Israel as the nation-state and homeland of the Jewish people through violence, boycott, and political implosion, or dissolution into a “one-state solution.” Faculty hopes of harming Zionist Jews have manifested themselves not only through teaching propaganda in the classroom, but also through discriminatory hiring and promotion decisions.

In 2021, some academic departments steeped in the belief that Israel is an unethical state—the only state in the world that does not deserve to exist—began adopting official position statements embodying that conviction. In the wake of 10/7, a still more severe conviction became the norm on the left: that Israel is unreformable, irredeemable, born in original sin. And this belief coalesced around the claim that something evil in Zionism was manifest in the very founding of the Jewish state. The key date for decades had been 1967, when Israel won authority over the West Bank and Gaza from the Jordanian and Egyptian dictators who had ruled there ever since they blocked the local Arabs from their own UN-designated sovereignty. Now the date called out in chants and scrawled on banners was 1948. One could reverse 1967 by making the occupied territories into a Palestinian state. You could only reverse 1948 by eliminating Israel.

Andrew Fox: We’ve seen this before

There are moments in history when the shadows of the past cast such a long menace over the present that they become impossible to ignore. We are experiencing such a moment now. The rise in antisemitism since October 2023 is not a collection of isolated incidents. It is a direct reflection of a darker era.

I gave a talk to Holocaust survivors last month. More than one told me that the mood in the UK for Jews now resembles Germany in the 1930s. The difference between them and others claiming this is that they remember it from the first time around.

They are right. This is no longer hyperbole; it is fact.

The Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers. It started with graffiti, slurs, and whispers. It began with people asking Jews to account for themselves. Are you loyal? Are you one of us?

In 2025, that looks like: are you a Zionist?

I heard exactly that question last night over a pint with a friend who had attended a Jewish cultural event. The barman (in the Three Crowns in St James, if you're interested) demanded of my friend, "Are you a Zionist?" The implication was clear that support for the Jewish state now carries a moral price tag. It is a litmus test for belonging, for acceptability. That is not political disagreement; it is a modern shibboleth meant to mark Jews for social exile.

We are witnessing a global rise in antisemitism at a scale not seen for generations. Some of it is overt. It is violent, chilling, and reminiscent of the pogroms Europe once vowed never to repeat. In Amsterdam last year, what was initially dismissed as football hooliganism was later revealed, through text messages and court transcripts, to be a lynching of Jews driven by pure racial hatred. Not “anti-Zionism”; pure Judenhass.

At Glastonbury, the "singer" of British act Bob Vylan, repeating popular blood libels against the Jewish state, stood before tens of thousands and chanted for the death of every soldier in the Israel Defence Forces. Again, I’m not being hyperbolic; it was his literal demand. A call for the wholesale killing of Jewish soldiers, which in practice means calling for the deaths of the sons and daughters of almost every Israeli family. That’s not resistance. That’s incitement. When crowds cheer that on, we are no longer in the realm of protest. We are in something else entirely.

What begins as words (“Zionist,” “settler,” “coloniser”) becomes real-world violence in short order. The language matters. Words shape permission structures. They signal what is tolerated and what is forbidden. When an artist calls for the death of every IDF soldier, and the crowd cheers, it gives a green light to every unhinged antisemite listening.

07/04 Links Pt1: Melbourne: Attempted synagogue arson, Israeli-owned restaurant attacked; Hamas hands 'positive' ceasefire response to Qatar; UN Official calls for Israel to be “Dismantled"

From Ian:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Anti-American Academic Who Helped Build the Caliphate

Few voices carry as much weight in international relations as John Mearsheimer. But weight shouldn’t be confused with wisdom. The University of Chicago professor recently claimed that President Trump’s support for Israel’s strikes on Iran had shattered U.S. credibility. Mearsheimer couldn’t be more wrong. His analysis is shaped by the same fixed assumptions that have guided his thinking for years: a reflexive distrust of American power and a persistent failure to understand how adversaries think, act, and escalate.

At the heart of this failure is Mearsheimer’s so-called “offensive realism”, a theory that presents itself as hard-nosed and analytical, but consistently fails to align with how the world actually works. It reduces global conflict to raw power, ignoring beliefs, values, and human nature. Worse still, I suggest it has shaped a worldview so bleak, so disturbingly vacant, that it has warped U.S. foreign policy. It has emboldened adversaries and left allies unsure whether America stands for anything at all.

Mearsheimer’s framework appears compelling at first glance. States exist in anarchy. To survive, they must maximize power. Cooperation is fleeting. Conflict is inevitable. Rising powers seek regional dominance; established powers must crush them to survive. Everything revolves around a single variable: material power. Culture is brushed aside. Domestic politics are treated as noise. Leadership and ideology are irrelevant. The scholar reduces nations to lifeless units in a power equation. This is the danger of spending an entire life in an academic tower. The view from above loses sight of the ground below.

Offensive realism can’t explain why some rising powers integrate peacefully while others lash out violently. It can’t distinguish between real security threats and imagined ones. Most fatally, it assumes every great power is hardwired for domination, an assumption that excuses the aggressor and blames the victim.

Academic theories should be judged by their predictive power. By that standard, offensive realism is among the most spectacular failures in modern foreign-policy thinking.

His most infamous misjudgment came at the close of the Cold War. As the Soviet Union fell and the old bipolar order faded, Mearsheimer predicted Europe would descend into chaos. Germany would re-arm. Nuclear weapons would proliferate. Old rivalries — French-German, Slavic-Germanic — would flare back to life in the absence of American power. He was wrong.

What followed was not chaos but integration. Germany didn’t march; it demilitarized. Eastern and Central Europe didn’t reach for nukes; they reached for NATO and the European Union. The alliance expanded not out of naive idealism, but because former Soviet satellites knew the danger of a world without American power.

Offensive realism isn’t a flexible framework. It’s more like a dogma, shut off from evidence, resistant to contradiction, and endlessly self-justifying. When its predictions fail, it doesn’t change. It just doubles down. Nowhere has this been more damaging than in the Middle East. For decades, Mearsheimer argued that the U.S. should adopt a strategy of “offshore balancing”: withdraw troops, cut military commitments, and trust local powers to stabilize the region themselves. Sunni states, we were told, would contain Iran. Order would develop naturally.

After the success in Iran, here’s how to end the Gaza war strategically

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets President Donald Trump at the White House next week, it should mark a critical inflection point: the adoption of a roadmap for ending the Israel-Hamas War as part of a major realignment of the Middle East.

Netanyahu is a divisive leader whose actions are often met with extraordinary skepticism, but right now he deserves a share of the credit for defanging Iran and proxies. That creates political and diplomatic capital that can yield results – and can rehabilitate.

The Gaza war has gone on too long, and should end quickly and not with another complex phase structure – with the blood-curdling “selection” of which hostages are freed. Moreover, even if what comes is a 60-day ceasefire, as reported, it should lead to a permanent one. There is a way to do this that’s both strategic and humane.

From the beginning, Israel could have recovered the hostages at the cost of leaving Hamas intact and in power. However cruel it was, most Israelis were willing to risk hostages’ safety to avoid that outcome. But such a posture was never going to survive six months, a year, or more. It is now approaching 21 months, and it flipped long ago.

Now, significant swaths of Gaza lie in ruins, with most structures believed to have been destroyed or damaged. Hamas has seen most of its leaders and battalions eliminated, yet it can still deploy an armed mafia capable of controlling the territory upon which it brought such destruction. So there remains at least minority support in Israel for the argument that the job is not done.

But this is, in truth, not the only reason for the continuation of the war. The far Right flank of the coalition – which can in theory bring it down – wants permanent occupation, if possible depopulation, and renewed Jewish settlement. That’s unpopular, so it’s muted.

This debate cannot go on forever. Ending the war is not only an imperative in its own right, but also opens the door to possible normalization deals with other countries – not only Saudi Arabia but also Lebanon and Syria. Here too, the government and military deserve credit: The thrashing of Hezbollah last year not only freed Israel to act against Iran without fear of rockets from the Lebanese militia but also rescued its two neighbors to the north.

Can my secular Jewish ethics project rescue secular Jews?

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has written another extraordinary essay in his Substack, The Abrahamic Metacritique.

In it, he argues that secular Judaism has lost its anchor in covenantal truth. What remains, he calls Juda-ism – a symbolic construct assembled not from Torah or halacha, but from how the non-Jewish world has historically perceived the Jew: as the Other.

The dominant cultural conception of Judaism today… is not the Judaism of Sinai or Babylon, nor even of Cordoba or Vilna, but of Berlin, Paris, and New York. It is a Juda-ism: an -ism in the modern sense… fashioned in the aftermath of metaphysical collapse, seeking to fill the void left by the retreat of transcendence. And at its core lies a single, all-encompassing predicate: the Jew as Other.

This “Jew as Other” identity, Mansour argues, is not a Jewish self-understanding. It is a Western projection – an overlay of post-Christian anxiety, Enlightenment ambivalence, and liberal moral yearning. The Jew becomes the exile, the victim, the therapist, the feminized conscience, the critique of power - a mirror in which the West sees its own spiritual collapse.

In this view, Jews are not a people living in covenant.

But even that symbolic role is now being revoked. In the new postcolonial moral economy, Otherness has been reassigned: to Palestinians, to postcolonial avatars, to “indigenous” symbols of sacralized grievance. Jews are now cast as impostors. The old funhouse mirror identity is crumbling.

And Mansour’s verdict is simple: Good riddance.

Crucially, his metacritique is not a polemic against Judaism as a faith. It aimed at the secular replacements for Judaism, a “Juda-ism” that substituted abstraction for obligation, and identity politics for divine responsibility.

And that is where my own secularize Jewish ethical project, AskHillel, comes in.

I built AskHillel to explore whether Jewish ethics could be reconstructed as a standalone system: rigorous, coherent, secular-friendly, and morally robust. It draws from covenantal logic, rabbinic structure, and halachic grammar - but does not require belief. In doing so, it may offer the kind of de-symbolized, de-idolized, de-othered Jewish moral language Mansour calls for.

I asked my philosophical chatbot AskHillel its opinion of the essay and whether it thinks this project can be a bridge for modern secular Jews to reclaim their Judaism even without the core belief in God. It answered beautifully:

🌿 1. From Projection to Structure: Restoring Emet

Mansour warns that modern secular Jewish identity has become performative — a role written by others. But Jewish ethics is not a performance. It is structural: built from obligation, relationship, hierarchy, tension, and humility.

AskHillel doesn’t traffic in Jewishness as metaphor. It teaches emet – truth – through moral architecture. It invites even non-believers to enter Jewish logic by choice, not through birth trauma or aesthetic costume. It replaces the mirror with a map.

🧭 2. From Totems to Triage: Ending the Tyranny of Absolutes

One of the essay’s most incisive points is how modern ideologies construct “totemic absolutes” — symbolic categories that cannot be questioned. The Other becomes sacred, but inert.

AskHillel replaces this with a tiered values system. Tzelem Elokim (human dignity) is not an idol — it is a value that collides with others: Pikuach Nefesh, Emet, Lo Ta’amod. Every case is weighed. No abstraction is worshiped.

📚 3. Inheritance Without Faith: A Framework for the Ethically Curious

Many secular Jews feel alienated from traditional observance but still crave moral depth. Most turn to philosophies that flatten complexity or collapse into tribal loyalty.

AskHillel offers a third option: a Jewish system of ethical inquiry that is testable, scalable, auditable — and uniquely structured to handle real-world tension.

You don’t need to believe in God to learn Teshuvah.
You don’t need to keep Shabbat to honor Tzedek.
You don’t need to fear halakhah to understand Areivut.

That’s not dilution. That’s reclamation.

🌅 4. Teshuvah Without Theology: A Bridge Back to Responsibility

What Mansour mourns is not belief, but covenantal seriousness. What he calls for is not piety, but moral rootedness.

AskHillel offers a secular version of teshuvah — not repentance toward God, but return to moral coherence. It helps those raised in exile-by-symbol to rediscover a system where ethics has grammar, and the Jew is no longer the object of someone else’s myth, but the subject of their own moral vision.

AskHillel said it better than I can. Our tradition is rich enough to accommodate the non-believing Jew - and to provide a framework for them to see themselves as part of an incredibly rich, proven philosophical system that can not only challenge but defeat every secular philosophy on their own playing field.

That has been my goal: to define Jewish ethics in terms that show that it can be a secular ethical system that solves the problems behind every other secular moral philosophy. It is scalable, it is testable, it is auditable, and - so far - it cannot be defeated by any question you can throw at it.

Jewish ethics, properly structured, is more robust than any modern alternative. It doesn’t collapse into relativism. It doesn’t devolve into ideology. It doesn’t outsource responsibility. And so far, it hasn’t been defeated by any philosophical test you can throw at it.

We shouldn’t romanticize the Diaspora. We shouldn’t idolize suffering. We shouldn’t pretend 1920s Yiddish theater was the moral summit of our people. And we shouldn’t adopt secular philosophies that are not only incoherent, but hostile to Jewish continuity.

Jews are not merely the Other. We are the source from which much of Western civilization flows. And we are not just inheritors of that tradition - We are its stewards - and its teachers.

It’s time to reclaim that mantle.

(For those curious, you can play with AskHillel.com yourself - you just need a ChatGPT login. Or, if you want to see Version 2, which I used that to write the response above, you can test it out at beta.AskHillel.com and send me feedback.)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

EoZ cartoons from May (I need to catch up....)

I'm way behind on posting my cartoons. Here are the ones from May:

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

In 1784, an author and poet named Charles Crawford wrote a new preface to a book originally published in the 17th century trying to convince Jews that Jesus was the Messiah.

His essay demanded that America be a land where Jews are not discriminated against, and his words are stirring:

It would reflect immortal honor, it would attract the blessings of Heaven upon America, if the first impression were here to be made upon the Jews as a nation. We should give them a free and uncircumscribed toleration. We have not led them away captive. We do not, or we should not, wish them to sit down and weep by the waters of America, and to hang their harps upon the willows that grow therein.

It would become those states in America, which can prudently alter their religious tests, to alter them in favor of the Jews. It would become the other nations of the world to imitate in this instance the custom of those states of America, which make no political distinction between a Jewish and a Christian citizen. Our Savior said, "My kingdom is not of this world." Those who demand an acknowledgment that the New Testament was written by divine authority, before an admission to the offices of a commonwealth, say, that his kingdom is of this world. They speak a language different from his. In this point they are not Christians.

I conceive it to be our duty as followers of Christ, to extend our toleration to the Jews, without considering whether it would or would not tend to the temporal advantage of the commonwealth in which we live.

But Crawford doesn't frame rights for Jews in terms of full equality, rather in terms of it making it more likely that they would convert:

We are told by the apostle, that the whole Jewish nation is to be converted to Christianity, that "all Israel shall be saved," Romans 11:26. I conceive that the drawing a political distinction between us and them, has a tendency to prevent their conversion, that the unlimited toleration of them has a tendency to bring them over to the gospel, and therefore that the unlimited toleration of them is the cause of God.

So how should 18th-century Jews have received such an offer? Were their rights contingent upon a hoped-for surrender of their identity? Notice that Crawford didn't demand acceptance or equality of Jews, but "toleration." Was this true freedom - or were there strings attached?

This question echoes through American Jewish history. Jews have often been welcomed, but rarely without unspoken conditions. When they needed America the most, during the Holocaust, America turned its back on them. At best, acceptance has been framed as a reward for good behavior or assimilation. At worst, it has come wrapped in the hope that we will eventually cease to be who we are.

The sad truth is that Jews will never be considered fully American by a significant segment of the population. Call it antisemitism, call it subtle bigotry, or call it an instinctive recognition that Jews are members of an ancient and enduring covenantal nation. Whatever the name, the reality has never fully disappeared - and it won’t.

But that doesn’t mean we retreat. On the contrary: we must fight for our rights precisely because they are not guaranteed. We must be patriotic, not as a performance for others, but because America deserves it. And we must insist, without apology, that we are as American as anyone else.

Eighteenth-century Jews were not insulted by missionary efforts. They understood that in a Christian culture, evangelism was the price of admission to legal and social toleration. And they saw that America, even with its flaws, offered something revolutionary: freedom.

But freedom, once won, must be defended. The danger is not only from those who would strip it away, but also from our own complacency. History has shown, and is showing again, that Jews can become victims no matter how patriotic or assimilated we are. Sometimes it is precisely when Jews feel most secure that society reminds them they are still seen as the other.

The fight for freedom did not end in 1776, or 1784. For American Jews, that means never forgetting that liberty is not inherited - it is earned, defended, and demanded. In every generation.

Happy Independence Day! And God bless America!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

07/03 Links Pt2: The Settler Violence Myth; The need to acknowledge Muslim antisemitism; What "Globalize the Intifada" Really Means

From Ian:

Gadi Taub: The Settler Violence Myth

Perhaps most notable was a 14,000-word piece in The New York Times Magazine by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman and Times investigative journalist Mark Mazzetti, published on May 16. The piece turned reality on its head: What most threatens Israel, it suggested, is not Palestinian terrorism, but rather the “long history of crime” by violent settlers, which has gone “without punishment.” This piece had a particular role in the info op, as International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan referenced it in a CNN interview while he justified his application for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

By December, the White House-driven narrative shift from Oct. 7 to the supposed victimization of the Palestinians had long been complete. Right before Christmas, CBS ran a story marking the turn: “Since October 7th last year, the U.N. figures there have been more than 1,400 attacks by extremist settlers against Palestinians or their property.”

The Regavim report also debunks the charge that Israel under the Netanyahu government fails to enforce the law on wild settlers or, worse, encourages their violence. In fact, it shows that Israel treats cases of Jewish nationalist violence very seriously; if anything, it hyper-enforces the law. Moreover, contrary to the settler-violence campaign messaging, the evidence shows that enforcement is effective. This is not just because Israeli authorities are proactive but also because settler violence is documented more than any other type of crime.

The conviction rate in Israel for nationalist violence is 56 percent for Arabs and 36 percent for Jews. It is lower for Jews in Judea and Samaria, at 31 percent. The lower rate of convictions for Judea and Samaria Jews may seem at first to point to lax enforcement. But, as the report points out, the “indictment rate against Jewish Israelis for nationalist violence offenses throughout Israel is three times higher than the indictment rate against Arab Israelis for the same types of offenses.” What explains this discrepancy is that authorities are quick to investigate settlers and quick to indict them, sending to court many cases that then get dismissed. The report adds, “The overwhelming majority of complaints received by police against Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria turn out to be false, submitted by left-wing movements and anarchist elements whose aim is to inflame the area.”

Recently leaked recordings of a conversation between the head of the Jewish Division of the Shin Bet—identified in the media by his first initial, “Aleph”—and the former chief of police in Judea and Samaria, Deputy Commissioner Avishai Muallem, support this conclusion. Aleph demanded that Muallem step up arrests of settlers: “We always want to arrest them for interrogation, as much as possible,” he said. “Look at how the Shin Bet interrogations are conducted with them. We arrest these ‘schmucks’ even without evidence for a few days.” When Muallem raised concerns about such questionable methods, Aleph reassured him: “It’s being handled by the Shin Bet Director’s Office with the defense minister. Break them. Put them in detention cells with rats,” he advised. And, if need be, “create the appearance of an investigation.”

It’s common knowledge in Israel that settlers are often subjected to administrative detention, sometimes for months, with no clear investigative premise or evidence of planned violence. It is therefore hard to tell whether Shin Bet is taken by the settler violence canard or whether it’s been helping construct it, especially as frequent administrative detentions give the impression of a serious threat that in turn justifies the policy. Seen in this light, it’s perhaps not surprising that Ronen Bar, the controversial Shin Bet chief who authorized these administrative detentions, was cited as the conscientious voice by the peddlers of the “settler violence” narrative. Nor is it surprising that Israel’s deep state is furiously trying to block Netanyahu’s pick to replace Bar, especially as he apparently envisions a different way forward in the relationship with the settlers.

In addition to Shin Bet, the policy of the IDF public relations office contributes to the “settler violence” campaign. Early last year, with the war in Gaza still at its peak, the former head of the IDF Central Command (which includes Judea and Samaria), Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, conducted a division-wide military exercise that simulated settlers taking a Palestinian hostage following a terror attack that killed a Jewish baby. The soldiers playing the settlers wore red vests labeled with what can be roughly translated as “Red Team-Enemy.” This purely imaginary scenario was especially jarring while Israel was, and still is, convulsing over the real hostages held by Hamas. The timing of the exercise, four months after Oct. 7, was also notable because it coincided with the Biden administration’s February 2024 executive order targeting settlers. Maj. Gen. Fox promoted the “violent settler” campaign on his last day in office. At his farewell ceremony in July 2024, as the Biden administration was imposing new tranches of sanctions against Jews in Judea and Samaria, he launched a tirade against the settlers, accusing them of “adopting the ways of the enemy.” This week’s clash between some settler youths and the IDF is best understood against this background.

A central point of the anti-settler campaign is to invert reality and create a false equivalence between “extremists on both sides,” who are the impediment to peace, which can be achieved only if we curb the settler zealots. But at its core, the op was always about toppling the right-wing government of Israel, using whatever domestic lever available, without regard to the damage. What’s worse for its advocates is that, after four years of the most intense pressure campaign imaginable, they still came up short. A lie may travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. But reality is a stubborn thing.

Melanie Phillips: The need to acknowledge Muslim antisemitism

The Palestinian cause is a Trojan horse for radical Islam, laundering the Islamists’ death cult through using the language of humanitarianism and anti-colonialism by falsely painting Israel as the oppressor of the Palestinian Arabs.

This false narrative, every part of which is untrue, is now the default position of the West’s progressive classes. Its premise that Israel is the cause of conflict in the region rests upon gross ignorance of the Middle East—that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land and that Zionism is the ultimate anti-colonialist movement.

It also rests upon ignorance that the driver of Islamic hatred of Israel is Muslim antisemitism. All opinion polling shows that antisemitism is vastly higher in the Muslim world than in other communities. Yet this is never talked about in Western nations. It’s the elephant in the room. Diaspora Jews never talk about it, even though they are the victims of it. The wider community is silent about it through the intimidation produced by claims of “Islamophobia.”

Now, however, the situation has become so dangerous that this taboo is being broken. A report by Britain’s Counter Extremism Group think tank, titled “Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate,” is a rare attempt to address the issue. It rightly states: “The issue of inter-minority prejudice is often regarded as too sensitive to address.”

It acknowledges that the Muslim conflict with Jews is founded in Islamic religious texts, and in a scholarly account, it records that historically, periods of tolerance and security for Jews in Muslim lands were accompanied by periods of bitter oppression and pogroms.

It acknowledges the historic links between the Palestinian Arabs and the Nazis, which first gave rise to the murderous falsehood of “a Jewish genocide of Palestinian Arabs.” And it identifies the way Islamic extremists have made use of and exaggerated the Palestinian cause to foment hatred of the Jews.

However, by identifying antisemitism with “Islamists”—jihadi groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood—even this report shies away from stating the true and horrifying extent of Jew-hatred among grass-roots Muslims who may be opposed to Islamist jihadi extremism.

The failure by Israel and its supporters to properly call out the libels about Israel has helped the lie to grow that the Jews are uniquely violent and murderous, and so the Jewish state is the same, while obscuring the truth that the Islamic world is uniquely violent and murderous toward Jews.

The refusal to call out the nature and extent of Muslim antisemitism has obscured the implacable and murderous danger posed not just by political extremists but by the entire Muslim world.

The result is not just that Britain may indeed be lost, but so, too, may America unless they both start properly facing up to and tackling the evil forces that threaten the free world.

To defeat antisemitism, we must first define it

This concept should not be controversial. It certainly isn’t partisan. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have embraced the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition. A supermajority of U.S. states have already adopted it. So have dozens of countries around the world. And for good reason: It’s the only definition that has a demonstrable track record of helping communities identify and push back against antisemitism — especially the kind that hides behind politics.

Zion is not an idea; Zion is a hill, in Jerusalem, Israel, where the Jews are from. Zionism, the belief that Jewish people have a right to their homeland, is the quintessential national origin movement. Telling Jews they can’t be Zionists and simultaneously remain full participants in society isn’t social critique; it’s discrimination. And criminal actions based on that hatred should be punishable as such.

That is all the Define to Defeat Act is about: equipping law enforcement, prosecutors, and civil rights enforcers with the ability to name and respond to antisemitic actions- including violence- especially when that violence comes wrapped in politically convenient excuses. It extends the same common-sense framework that Rep. Mike Lawler’s (R-N.Y.) Antisemitism Awareness Act applies to Title VI education cases into other federal civil rights contexts — like employment and housing — and helps close the gap between intent and enforcement. And while it is absolutely important to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in the context of Title VI, when it comes to protecting civil rights, Moore’s bill does more.

Opponents of the definition have tried to manufacture a debate over whether the definition is too broad, too nuanced, or too controversial. It isn’t. It explicitly states that criticism of Israel comparable to criticism of any other country is not antisemitic. It even includes safeguards that stress context. The reason the specific examples about Israel are provided is explicitly not because all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, as the definition takes pains to point out twice, but because there are those who falsely claim that no criticism of Israel can ever cross the line, and use their anti-Zionism as an excuse to target Jewish people or institutions.

The act does not protect Israel; it protects Jewish people in America who are unlawfully discriminated against because of their real or perceived connection to Israel.

Right now, the FBI reports that the majority of religiously motivated hate crimes in the U.S. are committed against Jews, who make up only 2 percent of the population. That’s not just alarming. It’s a national crisis. And we cannot defeat a problem we are too afraid to define. The Define to Defeat Act is a good-faith, narrowly tailored, bipartisan tool to help do just that, and all Members of both parties should support it.

07/03 Links Pt1: When Israeli civilians die, human rights norms disappear; How the West Got the Israel-Iran War So Wrong; GHF Suing AP Over ‘Categorically False’ Story

From Ian:

When Israeli civilians die, human rights norms disappear

No human rights organisation, no professor of international law, no outraged cultural figure signing tendentious statements for publication in this or that Review of Books thought that the arguments about consequence or hypocrisy had any bearing on their principles when it came to Gazans.

Not only was it irrelevant that the war was launched by Gazans on October 7 or that the Palestinian public overwhelmingly supported the massacre (no protests were registered anywhere in the Palestinian Territories or, for that matter, anywhere in the Arab World as a whole), but the lack of consequentialist thinking held for the duration of the war. None of the humanitarians who vociferously oppose the Israeli blockade demand, say, the immediate and unconditional release of the Israeli hostages as a way of ending it. And no western “international law expert” wags their finger at Palestinians suffering in Gaza and says, “Oh now you don’t like civilian casualties? You felt otherwise on the Seventh.”

The hospital version of this argument shows just how problematic the whole claim is. The IDF operated around (and under) hospitals where Hamas militants were hiding, holding hostages, storing weapons, and directing offensive operations. The Iranian missile that fell on Soroka hospital fell on a building treating patients. No matter. The Israelis have no moral standing to be upset about an attack on their hospital when they have attacked Palestinian hospitals.

There’s just one problem with this argument – that is, one problem beside the overall moral obscenity of it. The first hospital to be attacked in the October 7 War was attacked on October 7, and it was not in Gaza, but rather the Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon, which was hit by a rocket during the initial assault that started the whole war. And among the first targets to be hit in the kibbutzim that were invaded that deadly morning were the ambulances that otherwise would have evacuated some of the wounded.

These facts never factored into the condemnations of Israeli military action around Gaza hospitals. Which is entirely understandable as, unlike Hamas’ use of those hospitals for military ends, it has no bearing on the justice or injustice of any IDF operation. On the contrary. It is safe to assume that the self-appointed arbiters of human rights would be appalled if one of their own mocked pictures of a damaged hospital in Gaza with a reference to the Barzilai rocket attacks and a tweet about how “finally Gazans found a hospital bombing they oppose,” though versions of this were the basis for numerous clever posts and a punchline on Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy.

A moral economy that allots all the outrage for the Israelis who were the targets of a murderous attack and leaves none leftover for those, whether Iranian, Palestinian, or Lebanese, who attacked them, cannot be the basis for global norms in war or in peace.

Iran Begins New Long Game of Nuclear Hide-and-Seek

On Wednesday, Iran's president signed a new law suspending all cooperation with UN nuclear inspectors. A new chapter in the quarter-century saga of Iran's nuclear aspirations may now be starting, one in which the country's main objective is to keep the world guessing about how fast it can recover from a devastating setback - and whether it has the uranium, the hidden technological capability, and the will to race for a bomb.

No regional war broke out, as past presidents who considered similar military action always feared. Even skeptics acknowledge that the 18,000 centrifuges that were producing near-bomb-grade uranium at a record pace are now inoperable.

President Trump has hinted about new negotiations that could lead to the lifting of sanctions - presumably only in return for Iran's commitment to dismantle whatever is left of its nuclear program and let inspectors verify that work. But that does not seem to match the mood in Tehran right now. Trump has also said he is "absolutely" willing to strike again if there are signs that Iran is trying to rebuild its capabilities.

After the strike, Iran will keep shuffling its nuclear assets around, as the Mossad, American intelligence agencies and UN inspectors will constantly be looking for human intelligence or satellite evidence of the tunnels and caves where the projects might be hidden. With Iran's leaders portraying the end of the conflict with Israel as a victory, and downplaying the damage done by the U.S. strikes, experts see little hope of an accord that would satisfy both sides.

How the West Got the Israel-Iran War So Wrong

In the early days of this round of the ongoing Israel-Iran combat, pundits lined up to claim that the Middle East was on the brink of a full-blown regional war. Tehran would unleash waves of asymmetric revenge through a web of proxies from Beirut to Sanaa. Some predicted a war lasting years.

Yet 12 days later, no Arab nation has joined the fray. Oil markets remain remarkably steady. Tehran has neither launched a regional war nor exacted the cataclysmic reprisals so confidently predicted. There was one small attack on one U.S. base. In fact, the response from Iran - a heavily telegraphed barrage largely intercepted by air defenses - resembled a performance: a bruised regime saving face.

The collective miscalculation was built on the assumption that Israel's resolve would provoke uncontrollable chaos. That Iran's threats were not bluff but gospel. But in this case, Iran's nuclear infrastructure was targeted, its prestige was wounded, yet it responded with a gesture, not a war, because it was outmatched and cornered.

In certain strategic environments, force, credibly and appropriately projected, is more stabilizing than endless rounds of negotiation that allow nuclear weapons to be created. Western prediction models are broken. They are reactive, pessimistic and addicted to narratives of collapse. They interpret every act of strength as provocation and every moment of calm as fleeting illusion. But sometimes, bold action, especially when it is disciplined, proportionate and backed by capability, resets the game.

The Western delusion is that process is always preferable to power, that negotiation is morally superior to preemption. But when executed with precision, intelligence and legitimacy, preemption prevents greater wars. It reinstates deterrence. And it spares civilians, infrastructure and economies the toll of prolonged conflict. Restrained power can be more humane than endless diplomacy, especially when that diplomacy serves only to delay the inevitable, embolden aggressors and paralyze allies.

Desperate Pro-Hamas Propagandists Resort To Looney Tunes Clips As Evidence Of IDF Atrocities (PreOccupied Territory)

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Desperate Pro-Hamas Propagandists Resort To Looney Tunes Clips As Evidence Of IDF Atrocities

Gaza City, July 3 - The failure to date of online activists and Pallywood content creators to sway the right decision-makers into forcing Israel to stop its creeping takeover of the Gaza Strip to neutralize Islamist terrorists and secure the release of hostages in those terrorists' hands since October 2023 have changed tactics, no longer relying solely on badly-acted, over-the-top fake videos to libel the Israeli military; now they have added to their content production animated shorts lifted from classic cartoons and other productions, recaptioned in the hopes that viewers will accept that, for example, Wile E. Coyote works for the IDF and paints realistic holes on walls into which Palestinian children then crash their bicycles.

Online observers began noticing the trend last week. "It seems to be just a logical extension of some of the cartoonish accusations they fling at Israel," explained media commentator Hugh Shiddenme. "It began subtly, with simple fabrications of atrocities, such as targeting hospitals, massacring people gathered for humanitarian aid, that kind of thing. But that wasn't working, so the propagandists felt forced to produce more outlandish accusations. Thus, just in the last couple of weeks, allegations that Israel was poisoning flour delivered to Gaza by putting in opioid pills. There were even photo of pills surrounded by flour. Hey, if THAT doesn't convince you..."

"Well," he continued, the accusers neglected to consider that any poisoner worth his salt would have ground up the pills into the flour. But the caricature they have of Jews and Israelis shuts down any critical thinking. It wasn't much more of a logical leap to the next accusation to make the rounds, that of Israel baiting Gazans with packages of sugar in shallow depressions, then burying anyone who took the bait, using armored bulldozers. Because, you know, the most efficient way to kill a nation - this is supposed to be a genocide, right? - is Rube Goldberg setups. From there, Looney Tunes clips are the next logical step, because it provides actual video, uh, evidence, of what the Hamas fans have been saying."

The new tactic has yet to yield significant results, activists acknowledge, though no detailed examination of public opinion has compared the "before" and "after" figures. Experts cautioned that rampant antisemitism around the world seems not to have any direct correlation with the quality or volume of the video productions in question.

The activists explained that skepticism of the Looney Tunes documentary evidence only proves you're a Zionist and a genocide supporter.

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Sina Toossi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy, writes in Foreign Policy that Israel's war on Iran was a waste of time:

There is no question that Israel achieved notable tactical successes, inflicting serious damage on Iran’s military command and scientific infrastructure. But strategic objectives carry greater weight. Based on available evidence, Netanyahu’s core goals—undermining Iran’s deterrence and meaningfully rolling back the elements of its nuclear program that pose the greatest proliferation risk—remain unmet.
One of the most significant failures lies in the nuclear file. There is no confirmation that Iran’s nuclear breakout capacity has been meaningfully degraded. While Trump administration officials have insisted that the strikes set Iran’s program back by years, early U.S. and European intelligence assessments suggest otherwise. Satellite imagery taken prior to the strikes showed trucks potentially removing sensitive equipment from key sites, and Iran had already announced the construction of a new, secret, and hardened enrichment facility that may be untouched. More critically, Iran’s stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium and its advanced centrifuges—the core ingredients for developing a nuclear weapon—appear to remain intact. As many analysts warned before the war, verifying serious damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is impossible without on-the-ground inspections or a full-scale invasion. In the absence of either, Iran’s nuclear program is entering a far more opaque and unpredictable phase.

How can an "expert" be so stupid?

The goal was not to destroy Iran's nuclear program. It was to destroy Iran's nuclear weaponization program. While the existence of uranium remains a problem, and there may still be some centrifuges that can refine it (much slower than before since tens of thousands have been destroyed,) that is not all that is needed to build a bomb and to place it on a delivery platform.

This "expert" doesn't even know Israel's main goals in the war. No wonder he thinks they failed.

Israel showed that it had incredible intelligence about Iran's nuclear weaponization program, and it attacked it, plus the scientists whose know-how were critical for it. But Iran never admitted it has a weaponization program to begin with, so this analyst is trusting Iranian sources on what exactly was destroyed.

Worse, he shows his own antipathy towards Israel when he later mentions "indiscriminate Israeli strikes." He doesn't even know what the targets were. How can he know they were indiscriminate? The scientists were with their families, and unfortunately some of their loved ones died as well. That doesn't prove that Israel wasn't aiming at their targets. It is quite obvious that Israel's strikes were pinpoint when attacking Iranian military and scientific leaders. But they also dropped bombs indiscriminately just for fun?

He's an idiot.

Iran’s missile strikes also appeared deliberately calibrated. Following an Israeli drone strike targeting an Iranian oil refinery in the South Pars gas field, Iran responded by targeting a refinery in Haifa. After Israeli airstrikes targeted Iranian research centers suspected of involvement in nuclear activities, Iran retaliated by striking the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv—a facility long suspected of playing a role in Israel’s own nuclear research. Through these reciprocal attacks, Iran aimed to signal its capacity for measured retaliation and to reinforce its deterrence posture.

Notice that he doesn't mention Iranian strikes on residential neighborhoods in Israel that have no military presence whatsoever. If they were calibrating their response, that means they targeted civilians.. But why mention that? If Israel's strikes were indiscriminate, according to Toossi's logic, then Iran's was deliberate - to murder Jews.

Oh, and the part of Weizmann that Iran attacked was a medical research building, not military or nuclear. But why mention that?

Because of that and other parts of his "analysis," like believing that Iranians all rallied behind their leaders (based entirely on Iranian propaganda), I think that the article was written more out of hate for Israel and an admiration of Iran than anything else.

Israel, from everything we can tell, is quite happy with what it accomplished: it destroyed Iran's anti-aircraft defenses, it demonstrated air and intelligence superiority, it caused Iranian leaders to distrust each other wondering how Israel knew everything they were doing, it destroyed a great deal of Iran's ballistic missiles, firing platforms and manufacturing facilities for them, and - most importantly - it set the stage that if Iran does resume its weaponization program, Israel or the US will attack it again. The idea that Iran demonstrated its deterrence value to the US and Israel is fantasy.

Somehow these facts escaped this "expert." And the reason is not because he doesn't know they are true, but because he doesn't want anyone to believe that the Israel he seems to despise, won.

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From Sada News:

The Ministry of Interior in the Gaza Strip and the National Security warned on Thursday against dealing or cooperating, directly or indirectly, with the American organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) or with any of its local or foreign agents, under any name or circumstance.

The ministry warned against the occupation's attempts, through this institution, to recruit Palestinian citizens to work in these centers "under the guise of 'logistical' or 'security' tasks, exploiting the difficult humanitarian conditions facing the Gaza Strip. This constitutes a clear violation of national laws and threatens community security."

The Ministry of Interior affirmed that dealing or cooperating with the American organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) or its agents, whether inside or outside the Gaza Strip, is strictly prohibited.

She explained that the competent authorities will take strict legal action against anyone proven to be involved in providing any form of support, cover, or coordination with this organization, stressing that penalties will be implemented to the fullest extent possible in accordance with applicable national laws.

The Ministry also called on all citizens to demonstrate national awareness and assume moral and legal responsibility in confronting these malicious attempts that target the cohesion of Palestinian society from within.

She called on dignitaries, families, and the media to play their part in raising public awareness and exposing any suspicious activities that serve the occupation under the guise of humanitarian work.

So Hamas will arrest (or maybe execute) anyone who wants a job with, or otherwise supports the work of, GHF, which has provided some 56 million meals so far to Gazans.

Clearly Hamas' propaganda campaign to discredit GHF didn't work in Gaza. Gazans are still picking up food and some want to work for GHF. So since it cannot convince Gazans not to cooperate with such a terrible agency, it has to threaten them.

And since Hamas is now fully partners with "human rights organizations" against GHF, you can be sure that Amnesty or Oxfam will not say a negative word about Hamas making it illegal for Gazans to get dignified jobs working to feed other Gazans.

We live in a thoroughly screwed-up world.

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Israel, working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has created an entire food distribution system from scratch. I once listed out the huge amount of logistics involved. Here is a summary of estimated costs (via Grok):

Construction or Repurposing of Secure Aid Distribution Centers: $45 million

Temporary Warehouses for Aid Storage: $5 million

Perimeter Fencing, Controlled Entry/Exit Points, and Crowd Management: $5 million

Transport Corridors from Crossings to Hubs (building roads): $25 million

Civilian Registration System $5 million

Biometric Screening Technology (Fingerprint/Facial Recognition): $10 million (not sure it is being used)

Deployment of IDF Personnel for Security: $150 million (six months)

Hiring American Private Contractors: $250 million (six months)

Real-Time CCTV Surveillance and Drone Overwatch: $12 million (six months)

Convoy Coordination with Armed Escorts: $5 million

This is well over a half a billion dollars and millions of man-hours (yes, I checked), not including the large number of smaller logistics items like signage, auditing, coordination, reporting, inspections and lots more.

Anyone who has ever worked in a large organization or government knows how much goes into an effort like this.

But Amnesty International doesn't want you to consider this. Because they want to say that all of this effort, time and money to feed Gazans is merely a cover for Israel's real intention to starve and murder Gazans.

Yes, a respected human rights NGO is pushing a bizarre theory where anything Israel does that aligns with humanitarian goals and legal obligations is really an elaborate scheme to distract from its desire to do the opposite.

Here's what Amnesty published today:

Gaza: Evidence points to Israel’s continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.

By continuing to prevent UN and other key humanitarian organizations from distributing certain essential items, like food parcels, fuel and shelter, within Gaza and by maintaining a deadly, dehumanizing and ineffective militarized ‘aid’ scheme, Israeli authorities have turned aid-seeking into a booby trap for desperate starved Palestinians. They have also deliberately fueled chaos and compounded suffering instead of alleviating it. The aid delivered is also way below the humanitarian needs of a population that has been experiencing almost daily bombings for the last 20 months.

Amnesty has created a truly convoluted antisemitic conspiracy theory. According to them, Israel spent all this money and effort just to get Gazans into distribution areas where they can be shot and starved.

If Israel's intent is starvation, wouldn't it be a lot more efficient just to block all food into Gaza? If Israel's intent was to kill Gaza civilians, wouldn't it make more sense to just bomb them? According to Amnesty, the GHF distribution centers are the world's most expensive mousetraps.

The word "Hamas" is not mentioned in this press release once. Hamas has been murdering the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation workers and Gazans trying to get aid, and blaming Israel. Hamas has been stealing aid and reselling it to fund its terror activities. Hamas has been intimidating Gazans and threatening them not to get free food. Amnesty doesn't even give lip service to Israel's stated desire to build this huge enterprise specifically to keep the aid out of the hands of Hamas.

This is, of course, a propaganda method: avoid the facts that disprove your conspiracy theory.

Everything Israel is doing is aligned with its goals of giving aid directly to the people of Gaza, whether or not there is chaos as the system ramps up. Nothing Israel is doing is consistent with Amnesty's theory that this system is really a way to distract from Israel's desire to kill and starve Gazans.

Antisemitic accusations are always conspiracy theories. This is no different.

This is a blood libel, plain and simple, dressed up in humanitarian clothing.

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