06/12 Links Pt1: US-Iran deal to include dismantling of Iranian nuclear program; UNRWA fires 70 staffers over terrorist ties; Pal football chief denied US visa

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Trump’s civilizational moment

This lethal blindness is not just endangering the West in foreign wars, but is doing so at home in the refusal to face the reality of Islamization.

Britain refuses to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, jail or deport jihadi preachers, ban sharia courts or stop immigration from countries posing an Islamist threat.

In America, although Trump has taken measures against extremism, an Islamist beachhead has been created in New York with its sectarian Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and with sharia enclaves expanding in Texas and elsewhere.

The reason all of this has been allowed to grow is wider and deeper than the promotion of multiculturalism and the intersectional dogma that holds the West is innately bad because it is white. At the core of these secular ideologies is a loss of belief in the biblical norms that underpin Western culture, and the replacement of what is held to be irrational Christian and Jewish mumbo-jumbo by the superior power of the Western mind.

The West has told itself that it is the acme of reason—by which it means that its core principle is the pursuit of individual happiness, prosperity and self-realization.

Accordingly, war is always totally dumb because people get killed; ranking different cultures in any kind of hierarchy is a form of bigotry that is not only evil but proof of imbecility; and everyone in the world is assumed only to want to have a nice life.

Believing that only universal values are moral and rational, such Westerners can’t see the catastrophic results of failing to fight for their own. They refuse to acknowledge that there is no brotherhood of man; there are instead people who believe in civilization, and other people who intend to destroy it.

The paradox is that in making a fetish of reason and self-interest, the West repudiates reason by inventing its own reality.

Meanwhile, the Islamists have grasped all this. They understand that without a religious scaffolding, a society eventually collapses. They have watched the West steadily destroying that religious core and, in the vacuum that’s been created, giving them the opportunity to strike.

This is why Britain, which has led the retreat from Christianity in the West, is ground zero for the Islamist onslaught. Islamization has penetrated throughout Britain’s political and civic architecture, with British leaders absolutely refusing to push back.

Now there’s a rapidly rising sectarian Islamic bloc, aided by the left, increasingly focusing British politics on the jihadi agenda of destroying Israel and the Jews as an essential precursor to conquering the West.

We are currently, and rightly, transfixed by Iran. If America doesn’t neutralize the Islamic revolutionary regime and instead allows it to regenerate, this will be catastrophic for America and the West.

It all depends on one mercurial and imperfect man in the White House. But whether he succeeds or fails, he is leading a free world, much of which no longer understands what it needs to do to survive.

Ruthie Blum: Translating Trump in Tehran

Listening to U.S. President Donald Trump’s June 3 Oval Office press conference, one couldn’t help worrying about how his words sounded in Farsi—not only to the mullahs and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but to the masses who believed that “help was on the way.”

Now it’s true that every statement made by Trump, whether in response to journalists’ questions or as a post on Truth Social, is aimed at multiple audiences at home and abroad. The trouble is that he often makes off-the-cuff remarks that lately have been music to the ears of the powers-that-be in Tehran.

Though he’s said about Iran that “it’s never won a war, but never lost a negotiation,” Trump has been behaving as if the joint American-Israeli military victories against the now-fractured regime were simply a precursor to engaging in dialogue with it.

On one hand, he seems to be aware that the ayatollahs and their henchmen have spent nearly half a century perfecting the art of exploiting Western assumptions about war and peace. On the other, he continues to view talks with regime representatives—mediated by Pakistan, no less—through the transactional lens of a real-estate developer.

The Islamic Republic, in contrast, sees everything through a revolutionary religious prism. The result is a clash of perceptions that’s not beneficial to the United States.

Take Trump’s explanation for Iran’s latest violations of the so-called “ceasefire,” for example. Asked by a reporter about Tehran’s attacks in the Gulf, the president replied, “Some people would say they were slightly provoked,” since the United States had struck first, and hard, the previous night.

This wasn’t merely a false depiction of what’s been going on; it was rightly interpreted by Tehran to provide an explanation, if not an excuse, to Iranian belligerence. You don’t have to be a Mideast expert to figure that out.

Nor do you require a degree in international relations to grasp that when Washington rationalizes Iranian aggression, rather than treating it as an immediate casus belli—in this case, the imperative to resume the unfinished war—Tehran concludes that its actions are paying off.

Ditto in relation to Trump’s saying, “I hear the negotiation itself is going very well, actually. Very well.”

The Last Superpower Test By Abe Greenwald

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If the U.S. wins, we will live in a safer world. Bad actors will be made to understand that American power remains the ultimate block on their ambitions. If the U.S. loses, extremist and predatory regimes will be free to do as they please. They all know that America is the only guarantor of sovereignty for the countries of the free world. No other power can underwrite the stability of the global order.

At this moment, that stability hangs in the balance. If the U.S. reaches a deal with Iran’s leaders that leaves the regime intact and fundamentally unchanged, it will be rightly regarded as an American instrument of surrender. The U.S. will have bombarded the regime from the skies, killed multiple tiers of leadership, destroyed its nuclear program, and degraded its missile stocks only to accept defeat. World leaders will understand this as America’s last, failed attempt to project military power on a large scale. For decades, Donald Trump has insisted that Iran must be stopped. If he decides that the job is too big to finish, no future president will try again.

My hope is that Trump’s seeming eagerness for a deal isn’t the spectacle of desperation that it appears to be. This isn’t unfounded. Although the president has been lured into negotiating with Iran again and again, he has never failed to reject the regime’s dangerous demands. He even did so this morning. It could be that Trump simply hasn’t yet grasped that this regime is incapable of making peace on terms that are acceptable to the U.S. Perhaps this is becoming clearer to him with every scrapped diplomatic “framework.” And maybe he will come to understand that there’s only one path to American victory—and it’s not negotiation.

This war will decide more than the future of Iran or the Middle East. It will define America’s ongoing role in the world that it shaped, and it will either set free or rein in those who wish to tear that world down.

The ups and downs that really matter: Why Israel, the US are not fighting the same war

This striking, grimly satirical political cartoon expresses what is being said in diplomatic circles this week, capturing the strategic vertigo gripping both Jerusalem and Washington. It depicts an elevator labeled “Lobby of Hell.”

The newest Iranian cleric and his partner, the Hezbollah operative, stand hand-in-hand, staring out as an elevator car descends into an abyss watched over by a welcoming devil. On either side of the shaft stand US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, their fingers pressed firmly on the elevator call buttons.

Above Trump, floating in an idealized cloud, is Uncle Sam; above Netanyahu floats Theodor Herzl. Both leaders look grimly determined, convinced their fingers are guided from above by foundational visions of American greatness and a safe, iron-clad Jewish state. Netanyahu, wanting to guarantee the future of the Jewish state, and Trump, who is out of options looking for an agreement and a way out of the quagmire, keep pushing the hold call button.

But look closer at the cartoon, and the unsettling truth reveals itself: we are all staring intently at the elevator buttons, but we have completely lost track of the shaft itself. We are trapped in a dangerous collective delusion, focusing on political theater while completely missing the structural architecture of the war we are supposedly fighting.

The shaft symbolizes that the Iranians are happy to pull us all down to hell with them in a jihad-like suicidal moment. Worse still, it is no longer clear whether Uncle Sam or Theodor Herzl possess the same binding relevance or moral authority in modern America or contemporary Israel that they once did.

We are executing policies based on outdated paradigms, and in doing so, we run the risk of fulfilling the grim punchline of the old medical joke: the operation was a spectacular success, but the patient died on the table.

Uncle Sam was created for the American public and reinforced by political cartoonists who wanted a symbol that represented the strength, authority, and government of the nation itself, rather than just its abstract ideals. The lack of American support for the war with Iran is evident in that the American people are not looking at Uncle Sam in the same way as they did before.

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200 years ago, newspapers were mocking the business of converting Jews. The business is still open.

A Vermont newspaper, the National Standard, published this on June 13, 1826 — two hundred years ago this month:

A late London paper says: The society for the conversion of the Jews annually spend about $14,000. Many knowing Israelites, however, contrive to turn the pious zeal of the society to good account, by obtaining sums of money for their expenses whilst under a course of conversion, which having gained they relapse into their former heresies.

The Jews—The conversion of a Jew costs the society in London an average sum of about one thousand pounds; and about one half of the converted return to the "error of their ways" as soon as converting-money is no longer to be had. The makeing of a half Christian out of a full Jew would render twenty poor and honest Christian families comfortable for a whole year. How is it that persons can thus abuse the charities of society by so wasting money which the merciful contribute?

The two figures contradict each other — $14,000 a year in one item, a thousand pounds per convert in the next — because these were polemical numbers passed from paper to paper rather than anything audited. The arithmetic behind the mockery, however, was sound, as the society's own published reports would confirm over the following decades.

Throughout the 19th century there was a concerted effort by many Christians to "save" the Jews. The most famous example was the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, founded in 1809 with backing from evangelical luminaries including William Wilberforce. Its driving force was Joseph Frey, a Jewish convert from Germany who tirelessly tried to find other Jews to join him.

The Jewish community fought against these efforts fiercely and ostracized any converts, which meant that conversion carried enormous real costs — expulsion from family, community and livelihood. The London Society's answer was financial: it offered converts stipends, housing and training to overcome community pressure. The predictable result was a class of professional converts, who pretended to convert for the money, left when the money ran dry, and in some cases traveled to other cities in Europe to repeat the process with the next missionary society. The society was paying Jews to become Christians, and some Jews concluded that Christian charity of that sort was a business opportunity. By 1826 the relapse rate was a standing joke in the London press, and the joke crossed the Atlantic through the exchange papers into venues as remote as Middlebury, Vermont.

Frey crossed the Atlantic too. He arrived in New York in 1816, after a scandal pushed him out of London, and set about building an American version of the enterprise. The result was the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, chartered in 1820 — the founders wanted to call it a society for evangelizing the Jews, but the New York legislature balked at incorporating an openly proselytizing body, so the name was softened to "meliorating." Its first president was Elias Boudinot, the former president of the Continental Congress, and its donor rolls drew on the Protestant establishment of the entire eastern seaboard. Frey  must have been very charismatic to raise such large sums of money both sides of the ocean but that charisma never translated to his intended Jewish audience.

The American incentive structure was different from London's: instead of stipends, they tried land. The ASMCJ bought a large tract in Westchester County, New York, to serve as a farm colony for converted European Jews who had been expelled from their communities. The farm was a spectacular failure — it consumed enormous sums while attracting almost nobody, and the few converted Jews placed on it refused to follow the society's regulations and soon abandoned it. And it was reported in the media in the same month of June 1826, in the same newspaper.

On June 6, 1826, the National Standard reprinted a New York account of the ASMCJ's fourth anniversary meeting, and the report reads like a corporate collapse in miniature. The society had spent "seven or eight thousand dollars" in a single year on what its own annual report called a "Utopian scheme of colonization"; the few Jews placed on the farm "refused to conform to the regulations, and soon abandoned it." A member rose to declare the annual report "a spurious document." A faction had exploited a constitutional loophole — pay five dollars, become a voting director — to pack the meeting, and after hours of parliamentary warfare the society rejected its own annual report and elected a board "decidedly hostile to the colonizing project." The suspicion in the room was that money was being misused, and this time the suspects were members of the society rather than the Jews.

So within a single week in June 1826, American newspaper readers learned that the cash-incentive model in London produced mercenaries and that the land-incentive model in New York produced an empty farm and an internal revolt. Both versions of the scheme, built by the same man, were public jokes simultaneously — which might lead a reasonable observer to expect the donors to stop donating.

They did the opposite. The London Society remained lavishly funded for the rest of the century; newspaper accounts of its meetings, anniversaries and appeals appear continuously through the 1800s. By 1900 its annual income was £46,338 — roughly thirty times the budget the 1826 satirists found scandalous — supporting 199 workers at 52 mission stations around the world, including clergy, physicians, teachers and apothecaries. Against that century of expenditure, the society's own cumulative count stood at about 5,000 baptisms, about 50 a year, of whom an unknown number were Jews taking advantage of the system. The donors had read the same mockery we see in the Vermont newspaper, kept giving for another seventy-five years, and the conversion arithmetic never improved.

It never stopped, either. The London Society survives today as the Church's Ministry Among Jewish People (CMJ), one of the Church of England's official mission agencies, with branches in England, the United States and Israel — where it owns Christ Church inside Jerusalem's Old City and runs a school in its former mission hospital. The organization's entry in the UK Charity Commission register, number 1153457, still lists "The London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews" as its previous name, and still records its charitable object in language Frey would recognize: "the advancement of Christianity amongst Jewish people."

The "knowing Israelites" of 1826 took the blame for gaming an incentive they had no part in designing, and the societies that designed it took two more centuries of donations. The merciful, as the National Standard termed them, are still contributing to the goal of converting Jews.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/11 Links Pt2: The Paris Conference, the peace industry, and the illusion of representation; Alan Baker: The OSLO ACCORDS Were NEVER About a Two-State Solution!?; When America First Meets Iran

From Ian:

David Collier: Baghdad to London: An Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory Implodes

Terrorist stabbings, firebombings, threats against synagogues, guards at school gates, and conversations in Jewish homes about whether it is still wise to wear visible Jewish symbols in public.

British Jews are living under growing pressure in an increasingly hostile environment.

And yet there is no stampede at Heathrow.

Communities rarely uproot themselves quickly. People adapt. History shows Jewish communities often fail to recognise the precise moment danger becomes irreversible.

And that matters, because what is unfolding in Britain today offers a living example of how Jewish communities historically responded to mounting hostility – and helps expose the conspiracy theory surrounding the exodus of Jews from Arab lands.

A Million Refugees
During the 20th century, around a million Jews were expelled or driven out of more than a dozen Muslim-majority countries. Communities that had existed for thousands of years were uprooted within a single generation.

Antisemitic violence – often rooted in historical systems of Islamic supremacy and discrimination – spread throughout the region. It was fuelled by the rise of Arab nationalism, and when the dust settled, almost every ancient Jewish community across the Arab world had been destroyed or emptied.

Nearly a million Jews became refugees, most of whom found refuge in the newly established Jewish state.

The Anti-Zionist Narrative Problem
The destruction of Jewish communities across the Arab world created a major problem for anti-Zionist narratives. Europe’s antisemitism was undeniable after the Holocaust, so a counter-story emerged: while Christian Europe persecuted Jews, the Muslim world supposedly sheltered them in tolerance and coexistence.

But there was an obvious problem. The Jewish communities of the Arab world had collapsed.

Explaining away that disappearance became essential.

What followed was large-scale historical revisionism.

Centuries of discrimination, periodic massacres, forced conversions, expulsions, and legal systems that relegated Jews to subordinate status were softened, minimised, or erased altogether. The dhimmi system was recast as benign protection rather than institutional inequality. Violence against Jews was blamed not on Islamic supremacy, but on Zionism, or the creation of Israel itself:

Why hasn’t the New York Times corrected its ‘dog rape’ lie?

‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’

This saying, popularised by American astronomer Carl Sagan, was clearly unknown to the New York Times and journalist Nicholas Kristof when they recently accused Israel of a systemic policy of sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. In a 3,750-word piece, published last month, Kristof alleges that a ‘Gaza journalist’ was raped by a dog that had been ‘coached’ for that purpose. He writes that a dog was summoned and, with encouragement from a handler, ‘mounted’ a prisoner. The prisoner ‘tried to dislodge the dog… but it penetrated him, while guards laughed and took photographs’.

This is the journalistic equivalent of a five-alarm fire – and all the alarm bells should have sounded for the New York Times’ editors. This is where extraordinary evidence is required – yet not a shred was provided.

For a claim to merit publication, extraordinary evidence has to meet two thresholds. First, is the claim plausible? Second, is the claim provable? If the claim is not plausible, it is not automatically untrue, but it should only be published if accompanied by absolute proof. No one would believe the moon is made of green cheese, and that should end the question – unless someone brings back an indisputable sample of green cheese from the moon’s surface. That’s proof of the implausible. But the case of the ‘rape dogs’ goes beyond even the ‘green cheese’ standard.

There is no evidence that dogs can be trained to rape men and no credible, documentable accounts exist of dogs being trained this way. Alan Howe of the Australian asked a dog expert of 34 years, who explained that it failed the plausibility test. ‘Canine erection is a reflexive neuroendocrine response to female reproductive pheromones – it is not a voluntary behaviour and cannot be trained or reliably triggered on command’, the expert said. ‘The specific act alleged is not biologically plausible.’

Did no one at the New York Times wonder about this? This should be the first question any editor would ask – and who knows how many editors Kristof’s column passed through. We do know that, in a separate statement, the editors, still offering no evidence, doubled down on their support for the column – essentially stating that including the alleged rape dogs in the piece was neither an oversight nor a mistake on their part. Was this incurious behaviour deliberate? We have to ask, because for now neither Kristof nor his editors have tried to establish that dogs can be taught this unnatural behaviour.

After flunking the plausibility test, the opinion piece failed the probability test as well. Badly, in fact: no names, dates, locations, photographs or any tangible evidence that dog-rape ever happened. The only accounts are hearsay from anonymous prisoners – who have an obvious agenda – and no response from Israeli prison authorities, former guards or others who might offer conflicting views. Kristof’s only independent corroboration was a nebulous quote from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who said pointedly after publication, ‘I did not validate these claims’. There are also subtle errors, including a claim that after the abuse, Israel Defence Forces (IDF) guards took cigarette breaks – even though smoking is strictly forbidden in these compounds.

Slovenia lifts ban on arms trade with Israel; Sa’ar lauds ‘just decision’ by new PM

Slovenia’s new conservative-led government on Thursday lifted an arms embargo on Israel and entry bans on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and two of his ministers.

Last year, Slovenia, then under liberal prime minister Robert Golob, imposed a series of measures against Israel over the war with Hamas in Gaza.

Several other EU members have done the same.

But the government of Prime Minister Janez Jansa, which took office last week, overturned the bans against Netanyahu and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

“This will restore the conditions for a normal political dialogue with Israel,” it said in a statement, adding the move would help “strengthen the role of the Republic of Slovenia in the efforts to achieve a lasting peace in the Middle East.”

The country is also letting the arms embargo expire, considering the decree “unnecessary” given existing national defense laws and EU arms export criteria, it said.

The government of Jansa — an admirer of US President Donald Trump — also lifted a ban on imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar welcomed Jansa’s “swift and just decision to lift the distorted anti-Israeli measures taken by Slovenia’s previous government,” calling him a “bold leader and a true friend of Israel.”

Last week, Israel announced it would open an embassy in Slovenia, marking what it hopes will be a new chapter in relations with the European country. The country’s embassy in the Austrian capital Vienna has previously covered Israeli diplomatic interests in neighboring Slovenia. Screen capture from video of the Palestinian flag flying over the Slovenian Presidential Palace, June 5, 2026. (Nataša Pirc Musar/X)

Since taking office, Jansa’s government has also removed a Palestinian flag symbolically displayed on the government building since Slovenia recognized Palestinian statehood in 2024.

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06/11 Links Pt1: Trump says agreement with Iran approved by all parties; What Does America Get for $3.8 Billion in Israel? And the Way Ahead; 300 Nova festival massacre survivors remain in a ‘very bad condition’

From Ian:

John Spencer: What Does America Get for $3.8 Billion in Israel? And the Way Ahead

The value of the relationship becomes even clearer when compared with other recipients of American military assistance. Egypt contributes to regional stability and maintains peace with Israel. Jordan remains an important security partner and counterterrorism ally. Both relationships advance legitimate American interests. Neither generates the same intelligence cooperation, defense technology innovation, industrial integration, or battlefield lessons that flow from the U.S.-Israel partnership. The United States does not gain access to hundreds of defense technology startups through Egypt. It does not field combat-proven active protection systems developed through Jordan. It does not receive the same volume of battlefield lessons on missile defense, drones, tunnels, artificial intelligence, and urban warfare from either country. Israel's value derives not only from its location but from the capabilities it continually produces.

There is also a political dimension to the alliance. The United States and Israel are democracies. Neither is perfect. Both experience fierce political disagreements, contentious elections, and intense public debate. Both operate under the rule of law and maintain independent institutions. Shared values alone do not determine foreign policy, but alliances tend to endure when interests and political traditions reinforce one another. That reality has helped sustain the relationship across administrations of both parties.

Reasonable people can debate aid levels. They can debate specific policies pursued by either government. They can argue about how the relationship should evolve over time. Those are legitimate discussions. What is far more difficult to sustain is the argument that America receives little in return. The United States gains access to intelligence that helps prevent attacks against Americans and American interests. It gains military technologies refined through combat experience. It gains battlefield lessons that would otherwise cost billions to acquire independently. It gains access to one of the most dynamic defense innovation ecosystems on the planet. It gains a capable ally operating in a strategically important region against many of the same adversaries confronting the United States.

The future of the relationship may itself demonstrate the success of the investment. In recent interviews, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that Israel should gradually reduce its reliance on American military financing as its economy and defense industry continue to expand. He has spoken about eventually transitioning from traditional assistance toward deeper cooperation in areas such as cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, missile defense, directed energy, and other emerging technologies.

Whether that transition occurs in the next Memorandum of Understanding or further in the future remains uncertain. Israel continues to face significant security threats and remains engaged in multiple conflicts. The broader point is that the relationship has evolved. American assistance helped support Israel during periods when its economy was smaller, its defense industry less developed, and its security challenges no less severe. Today Israel possesses one of the world's most advanced defense sectors, a thriving technology economy, and military capabilities that generate value not only for its own security but for the United States as well.

If future agreements place less emphasis on direct financing and greater emphasis on joint research, co-development, and technological collaboration, that would not signal a weakening partnership. It would reflect a mature partnership built on decades of successful investment. American assistance helped Israel build capabilities that now generate value for both countries. If Israel eventually requires less direct assistance while contributing more technology, innovation, intelligence, and operational expertise, that would not represent the failure of the partnership. It would represent one measure of its success.

So the next time someone asks what the United States gets for $3.8 billion in Israel, the answer is straightforward:
Jobs: American jobs and manufacturing supported through purchases of U.S.-made military equipment.
Industry: A stronger U.S. defense industrial base through joint production, co-development, and missile defense cooperation.
Intelligence: Intelligence that helps prevent attacks against Americans, American forces, and American interests.
Technology: Military technologies refined in combat, from active protection systems and missile defense to counter-drone capabilities and artificial intelligence.
Laboratory: Access to one of the world's most active laboratories for modern warfare, generating operational data, experimentation, innovation, and combat experience that would be difficult, expensive, and in some cases impossible to reproduce independently.
Lessons: Battlefield lessons in urban warfare, tunnel warfare, missile defense, drones, and modern combat without having to learn them first through American casualties, American mistakes, or American wars.
Innovation: A defense innovation ecosystem producing technologies and ideas that benefit both countries.
Ally: A capable ally helping deter common adversaries and maintain stability in one of the world's most strategically important regions and, if necessary, willing and able to fight alongside the United States.
Strategy: Greater freedom for the United States to focus military and economic resources on long-term competition with China in the Indo-Pacific while helping preserve a favorable balance of power in the Middle East.

That is what America gets in return.

Iran’s fanatical regime would rather embrace death than peace

Trump’s belief that he could pull off a ground-breaking agreement, one that guarantees freedom of passage through the Strait of Hormuz and neutralises Iran’s nuclear programme, led in recent weeks to tensions with Israel, with the American president highly critical of Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu and his military strikes against Iran and Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon.

The real threat, though, to Trump’s hopes of achieving a breakthrough never came from Israeli aggression, or the maintenance of Washington’s naval blockade in the Gulf. It has come from the hardline clique that controls Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an organisation whose sole raison d’être is to defend and propagate the uncompromising ideology that underpins the pillars of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

While Washington may feel comfortable engaging with the smooth-talking sophisticates of Iran’s foreign policy establishment, the real challenge is to engage directly with the hard men of the IRGC, whose authority derives directly from the country’s divinely appointed Supreme Leader.

The IRGC – which the Starmer Government still has not proscribed as a terrorist entity – is the Islamic Republic’s Praetorian Guard, and is meant to take orders directly from the Supreme Leader.

Apart from his divinely appointed status, the Supreme Leader’s authority over all the instruments of the Iranian state originates from an obscure Islamic concept, the velayat-e faqih (roughly translated as the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist), which gives the ruling Shia clergy absolute control over the Iranian people and their destiny.

Losing Hizbullah Is a Major Source of Stress for Iran

Dr. Menahem Merhavy, an expert on Iran at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said the latest Iranian missile attack on Israel "appears to be an attempt to save face....Iran has been unsuccessful in leveraging what it believes was victory over the U.S. and Israel."

"Iran is on the verge of catastrophe, and losing Hizbullah is a major source of stress for it. The 'ring of fire' [surrounding Israel] is currently stuttering, but Iran won't give up the idea and will not abandon Hizbullah." Yet, "Iran's latest attack, and its quick signal that it finished retaliating, signals its unwillingness to enter another prolonged conflict because they cannot afford it."

"Hizbullah can be pounded all over Lebanon, but Beirut and Iran can do absolutely nothing about it. Israel has been able to act freely in Lebanon for months....There is a lot of frustration with both Hizbullah and Iran among the Shiite community in Lebanon. Iran has yet to provide funds to rebuild homes that were destroyed by the Israeli military in the past two years. Hizbullah terrorists are also unable to move freely in Lebanon for constant fear of being targeted by Israel."

Amatzia Baram, professor emeritus at the University of Haifa and an expert in Middle Eastern politics, said, "Hizbullah has been weakened to about half of its previous abilities, but still, they have significant ability to fight. Hizbullah is busy rebuilding itself," and Iran "is still helping Hizbullah - financially, militarily, and strategically - by positioning itself as its defender and savior."

"Israel didn't attack Hizbullah between 2006 to 2023 for one reason - it was afraid that the massive missile and rocket arsenal would cause major damage to Israel. Now, Israel isn't afraid of attacking Hizbullah because of its potential to cause damage, but rather Israel is concerned that Iran will get involved and the U.S. will not support Israel if it chooses to respond."

"Attacks against Hizbullah targets in southern Lebanon are small, tactical, and have little significance to Hizbullah's standing in Lebanon. Attacks against command headquarters, weapons depots, and assembly factories in Beirut and north of Beirut are at an almost strategic level that can weaken Hizbullah, and that needs to be Israel's target for the future." Hizbullah, once the centerpiece of Tehran's regional deterrence strategy, is increasingly busy preserving its own survival.

Is Shi'ite Support for Hizbullah Weakening?

On May 31, a Hizbullah-affiliated group called on supporters to gather in downtown Beirut to protest the Lebanese government's support for diplomacy with Israel. Only a few dozen people showed up, a striking contrast to past years when Hizbullah could mobilize tens of thousands with ease. Days later, residents of Bayssarieh clashed with Hizbullah members who were reportedly moving military equipment into the southern Lebanese town. Meanwhile, activists in Nabatieh and Tyre are increasingly voicing demands for stronger state authority in the southern towns, long dominated by Hizbullah, reflecting growing unease among the Shia over conditions in southern Lebanon. However, any effort to loosen Hizbullah's grip on the Shia community will depend on a broader realization among its constituents that supporting Hizbullah is a losing strategy.

Lebanese political writer Mona Fayad said that while more Shia appear willing to criticize Hizbullah, this should not be mistaken for a structured opposition capable of competing for power, which would need to overcome the social and psychological legacy of Hizbullah's decades-long dominance. "We are talking about forty years of conditioning and entrenchment," she said.

"The biggest indicator that Hizbullah lost the narrative of resistance is the military defeat happening in the south," Fayad said. "Hizbullah's supporters are today displaced, and many of them are living in the streets because of Hizbullah. Today, many are in shock or denial."

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Man Replaces Trash Bag In Support Of Global Zionist Agenda (PreOccupied Territory)

 Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Ashdod, June 11 - A resident of this coastal city put a new liner in his kitchen garbage can this morning, witnesses report, thus furthering the interests of the international Jewish cabal that seeks to control the world.

Avi Shmuelov, 44, removed a full trash bag from the receptable under the sink and placed it by the door for later transfer to the dumpster in front of his family's apartment, according to observers, and then took out a new bag from the same cabinet to replace the previous one - in the process effecting the incremental progress of Jewish supremacy over billions of innocents.

Experts noted that the removal of the previous, full bag as well, contributed to the advancement of the Zionist global agenda, in more subtle fashion.

"It looks harmless enough," warned Zionist-watcher Taqauta Mayanus. "But it's supposed to look harmless. That's how they get you. You won't see how sinister it is until it's too late and you're enslaved to the Jews. Every properly lined garbage can is one less obstacle in their path to total domination."

Mayanus declined to elaborate on the mechanism by which replacing the trash bag, Mr. Shmuelov - a father of 5 who works in human resource management for an import-export company - brought Zionist control of the world closer to fruition. "You're stupid if you don't understand - it's obvious to anyone with a brain," he insisted. "More likely, you're pretending not to understand because you're being paid. Or blackmailed. The Jews have dirt on you, I'd bet."

Neighbors confirmed that Shmuelov performed the task while humming an Israeli pop tune, pausing only to scold one of his children for leaving crumbs on the counter. "He even wiped the inside of the bin with a paper towel before inserting the new liner," said activist Nurit al-Khalidi, based on human rights NGO reports. "That's not normal household maintenance. That's preparation — for the smooth, frictionless control they plan to exert over global resources, economies, and media institutions."

According to Mayanus, the new bag's crisp blue color and reinforced seams represent yet another layer in the conspiracy. "Plastic waste management is Zionist-coded," he explained. "True solidarity with Palestinians means living in squalor and neglecting basic hygiene. Certainly the university campus activists in the west have grasped that."

Shmuelov himself appeared unaware of the geopolitical weight of his actions. After depositing the full bag in the building's dumpster, he returned upstairs, washed his hands for exactly twenty seconds, and resumed preparing tomorrow's school lunches for his family. Sources close to the household say he later complained only about the price of trash bags at the local supermarket, calling it "another week of inflation." Analysts predict Shmuelov will repeat the ritual in three to four days, further tightening the Zionist grip unless concerned citizens intervene through boycotts of anything that seems Israeli.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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It Isn't True Until Hamas Admits It: The UN's Standard of Evidence for Hospitals in Gaza

Throughout the Gaza war, UN officials treated Israeli charges that Hamas operates in hospitals as accusations to be rebuffed rather than investigated. In December 2023, the WHO representative for the Palestinian territories, Richard Peeperkorn, told reporters that "we on our missions have not seen anything of this on the ground" and that WHO was "not in a position to assert how any hospital is being used." When Israel's ambassador told the WHO executive board in January 2024 that the IDF had found evidence of Hamas military use in every hospital it searched, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus dismissed the charges as "false claims" that "can endanger our staff," while UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths, as Israeli forces entered Al-Shifa, posted that "hospitals are not battlegrounds" — a rebuke with only one intended address.

The UN was "not in a position to assert how any hospital is being used" only by ignoring its own files. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on the 2008–2009 Gaza War — the Goldstone Report —  found that Hamas targeted Fatah affiliates and supporters, using hospitals as sites for questioning, executions and body dumps. The UN commission of inquiry into the 2014 war found that Hamas forces tortured victims in Al-Shifa Hospital. The question of how Gaza's hospitals were being used had been asserted, twice, by the UN's own investigators — and every UN official who professed skepticism during the war had those findings available the entire time.

Western doctors who traveled to Gaza became the war's most quoted witnesses, and they held the line as well. Asked directly on PBS NewsHour in January 2024 whether she saw any evidence of militant activity in or around the hospitals, the International Rescue Committee's Dr. Seema Jilani answered: "I did not see any evidence to suggest that. And the IRC would never work in a hospital that would be used for those purposes." When 60 Minutes asked Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, an American physician who had just left the Nasser Medical Complex, whether she saw Hamas hiding or operating in the hospitals, she replied: "I can really just talk about what I know. And what I know is that the health care catastrophe in these hospitals, that's what I saw." The formulation deserves admiration for its craftsmanship — an answer engineered to sound like a denial while asserting nothing that could later be falsified.

Israel, meanwhile, kept producing evidence. It published video of weapons caches recovered inside Al-Shifa, and at Nasser its forces reported coming under rocket fire from the hospital premises and detaining hundreds of operatives, some dressed as medical staff, including participants in the October 7 massacre. Released hostages testified to being held captive inside Nasser, where troops also found mortars, grenades and Israeli vehicles stolen on October 7. Declassified American intelligence independently assessed that Hamas and Islamic Jihad used Al-Shifa to command forces and hold hostages. The media response to this accumulating record was a Washington Post investigation concluding that the evidence was insufficient, alongside a genre of coverage that treated each Israeli disclosure as the latest unverified claim in an information war.

Israel's position was considered, by the UN, media and NGOs, to be presumed falsehood. Hamas denials, despite Hamas's documented history of using hospitals, were considered by the same sources to be presumed truth. 

What would it take for the UN to admit that Hamas used hospitals in this war? The evidentiary bar is very, very high - Hamas has to publicly admit it. Mountains of evidence are worthless next to a single Hamas denial. I'm not exaggerating - this is the consistent pattern throughout the war in the media and NGOs.

However, Hamas has more recently been publishing videos of them enthusiastically torturing and executing suspected "collaborators," as a warning to others. Which means the UN can no longer deny what everyone knew and no one was willing to admit.

The result is the newest report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (A/HRC/62/22) — the same standing commission that last year accused Israel of genocide. On September 21, 2025, it finds, militants from the Qassam Brigades and Hamas's Rad'a Force publicly executed three men "in front of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City," blindfolded and bound, while a masked gunman announced to the crowd that "the death penalty has been decided against these traitors," after which the victims were "knocked to the ground and shot multiple times in the head and upper body" (para. 50). At Nasser Hospital, the Commission documents Hamas's plainclothes Sahm Unit conducting torture on the hospital grounds throughout 2024 and 2025: a man "tied up in a stress position (shabeh) and being forced to confess to illegally selling tobacco and severely beaten on his wrists, chest and arms with a metal pipe, while he screamed in pain" (para. 55); another pinned to the ground on the premises "while one militant repeatedly smashed a large cement brick on his legs and another hit his ankle with a metal pipe, likely fracturing it, amid his screams" (para. 56); a bound man kneecapped with three rifle shots "in an open area in front of the Nasser Medical Complex, in front of a crowd including at least three children" (para. 57). A witness described Hamas members beating victims inside the hospital and shooting a man in the cafeteria tent, an incident that "escalated into an attack by the victim's family on the emergency department, which was met by Hamas counterfire from inside the hospital"; on seven or eight occasions the witness "heard screams coming from the building" before masked Sahm-linked men exited it (para. 58). Hamas channels, the Commission adds, "instructed medical practitioners to withhold medical care from the victims" (para. 39).

The witnesses most celebrated by Western media were present for much of this. Doctors rotated through Nasser continuously, and MSF operated there continuously until suspending non-essential work on January 20, 2026 — yet the first public statement from an international medical organization about armed men in the hospital came on February 14, 2026, after the ceasefire, when MSF acknowledged that "its staff had observed armed and masked men in parts of the hospital complex, incidents of intimidations, arbitrary patient arrests and suspected movement of weapons within the hospital" (para. 59). Men were tortured in front of crowds on the hospital grounds, and the international medical presence found its voice only when the testimony could no longer complicate the wartime narrative.

Having been forced into these findings by Hamas's own publicity, the UN did everything possible to minimize them.

The Commission placed its Hamas findings second in the report, after twenty-seven paragraphs on settler violence in the West Bank — though by the report's own figures, settlers allegedly killed 26 Palestinians over three years while Hamas-affiliated forces killed at least 108 in eighteen months. The Hamas section opens by reasserting the Commission's genocide finding against Israel and explaining that "lawlessness, killings, looting, theft and social chaos were the direct results of that vacuum and Israeli attacks" (para. 46), and the Commission's chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar, completed the framing in the official press release: "Hamas-affiliated forces have exploited the vacuum created by relentless Israeli attacks and widespread destruction of Gaza... While their origins and motivations differ, both operate within environments engineered by Israel." His own report refutes him a few paragraphs in, recording that "summary and extrajudicial executions and torture were also carried out by Hamas when there was no active Israeli military operation or attack, including in 2015, 2016 and 2017" (para. 44). Hamas tortured people in Al-Shifa in 2014 and executed collaborators in peacetime, and the UN's explanation for its conduct in 2025 is an environment "engineered by Israel."

One passage shows exactly how desperately the UN wants to exonerate Hamas even in the face of so much evidence. Having concluded "on reasonable grounds that the Sahm Unit of Hamas has interrogated and mistreated Palestinian civilians in the Nasser Medical Complex," the Commission immediately adds: "It notes, however, that such conduct does not amount to 'acts harmful to the enemy', namely Israel. Therefore, the hospital would not have lost its protection under international humanitarian law and would not constitute a legitimate target for attacks" (para. 61) — a point it considered important enough to repeat in its legal conclusions (para. 87). 

In other words, the UN is saying that even though Hamas admits to using the hospitals, there is no evidence that Hamas used them to attack Israel — the very thing Israel spent two years documenting. Therefore, Israel still had no reason to shoot back. Hamas hadn't released any videos of their fighters  shooting with patriotic music, so it cannot possibly have happened, and the Jews are lying, as usual.

It is true that the evidence the UN uncovered doesn't mean Israel had the right to attack. But that is because the UN only uncovered the evidence Hamas handed them on its social media channels. Anything beyond that cannot be proven, and on the contrary, if Israel provided the video evidence, that is itself probably evidence that Israel fakes videos. 

Whether Nasser was a legitimate Israeli target sits outside the Commission's mandate, and nobody asked the Commission to decide it. The Commission volunteered the ruling anyway, categorically, on a record that excludes the rocket fire from the premises, the weapons caches, the hostages and the October 7 operatives in scrubs — every piece of evidence that actually bears on the question. A verdict was rendered after excluding the entire case file, on a charge nobody brought in this proceeding, because the one implication the Commission needed to foreclose was the one that might vindicate two years of Israeli warnings.

A UN commission has now confirmed that Hamas used Gaza's two most famous hospitals for torture, executions and armed combat across eighteen years, and the confirmation arrived only because Hamas filmed it. It sandwiched these findings between complaints about settlers, wrapped in a causal theory the report's own text disproves, and accompanied by an unsolicited ruling that Israel still had no right to act on any of it. The officials who spent the war assuring the world there was nothing to see have issued no corrections, and on the UN's demonstrated standard of evidence, none should be expected until Hamas publicly brags about its war crimes. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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06/10 Links Pt2: Why is Zack Polanski championing a convicted terrorist?; Trump welcomes freed Hamas hostage Rom Braslavski to WH; Gwyneth Paltrow receives online hate for Israel commercial

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Why is Zack Polanski championing a convicted terrorist?

Defiant to the last, Barghouti twisted the emotional knife by informing the court that he stood for peace and liberty and describing himself as a freedom fighter. The judge sternly pointed out: ‘A soldier does not kill civilians with bombs and kill children.’

To compare the Palestinian killer to Nelson Mandela, in other words, is a grave disservice to the South African leader. Nevertheless, Barghouti is undoubtedly an interesting character. He was never a raving jihadi like the late Yahya Sinwar or Mohammed Deif of Hamas. He is a nationalist rather than an Islamist. He began his political life in the 1990s as a relatively pragmatic Palestinian leader who supported peace in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank.

However, that had changed by the time of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, when 140 suicide bombs killed more than 1,000 Israelis – some of them schoolchildren on buses. Barghouti was often spotted on street corners in Ramallah during disturbances, issuing orders by phone, earning him the nickname ‘Little Napoleon’. Then came the evidence connecting him to murders.

Barghouti knows how to play a Western audience. Even in 2002, while directing savagery against innocent civilians, he struck a relatively moderate tone in English. In a column for the Washington Post, he wrote: ‘while I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbour, I reserve the right to protect myself… and to fight for my freedom.’

What to make of all this? Here’s my take. Like other performative Palestinian firebrands, Barghouti knows that doe-eyed Western activists and journalists want to believe that he is a saint. So deep-rooted is hatred of Israel that liberals will lap up the most blatant lies and false comparisons, just to confect a Palestinian hero where they are otherwise lacking. Barghouti knows this; I know this; chances are, reader, that you know this. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the gullible left. Which brings us back to Zack Polanski.

Look, I get it. It must be frustrating to support a cause that has nothing to show for itself in terms of democracy, human rights, respect for women and minorities, the protection of homosexuals and the rejection of terror. To take as your tribune a people who spit upon all your values is a tricky position to maintain. But don’t expect the rest of us to join you in your circle jerk. Wishful thinking, in other words, does not a freedom-fighter make.

Harry LaForme: I stood on my ancestral land and said what Carney would not

On June 6, I stood before Toronto’s Jewish community on the treaty lands of my ancestors. Days earlier, Prime Minister Mark Carney had stood at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple and acknowledged a painful truth: Canada is failing its Jewish citizens. He recognized that antisemitism has reached levels unseen in generations. He acknowledged that Jewish Canadians are disproportionately targeted by hate. He acknowledged the fear felt by families whose schools, synagogues, businesses and communities have become targets. He named the statistics. He named the suffering. But he did not name the ideology driving it.

So, I will. I stand before you on the land of my ancestors to say what the prime minister should have said: “Anti-Zionism is a libel-driven hate movement that incites violence and the targeting, exclusion, and marginalization of Jews in the diaspora and has as its ultimate goal wiping Israel off the face of Mother Earth and the death of all beings within it.”

There. That is what should have been said, and now it has.

For Indigenous peoples, this moment feels painfully familiar. We know what happens when governments speak of reconciliation while avoiding uncomfortable truths. We know what happens when institutions choose carefully crafted language instead of moral courage.

Canada’s Jewish community does not need another expression of concern. It needs honesty. And honesty begins by confronting the lie at the centre of this moment: the claim that Israel is a colonial project and Zionism is a movement of oppression.

As an Anishinaabe man, a member of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and someone who spent almost 25 years as a judge interpreting the laws of this country, let me be clear — Canada is a colonial country. Israel is not.

Indigenous peoples know colonialism because we lived it. Colonialism means language suppression. It means forced religious conversion. It means population displacement, foreign governance, economic exploitation, imposed legal hierarchies and cultural erasure. Canada’s Indigenous peoples experienced these things. The Jewish people experienced these things. They do not describe Israel.

For thousands of years, Jewish identity has been tied to the land of Israel through language, culture, law, religion, traditions and collective memory. The Jewish connection to Jerusalem did not begin in 1948. It survived despite conquest, exile, persecution and genocide.

Why pro-Israel educators should teach the Nakba

In the charged classrooms where young Zionists form their understanding of Israel, one question now demands courage: Should we teach the Nakba?

The answer is yes. Not because the Palestinian narrative is true, but precisely because it is not. When we confront the events of 1948 with honesty, acknowledging real pain while refusing to distort the moral record, we strengthen the next generation rather than shield it.

The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to the displacement of roughly 700,000 Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence. Anti-Israel voices present this as the inevitable result of Zionist aggression: a premeditated ethnic cleansing that stains Israel’s birth. That version is false. The truth is more complex, more human, and far more defensible.

In 1947, the Jewish leadership accepted the UN Partition Plan, despite its painful compromises. Arab leaders rejected it outright and launched a war of annihilation. If there had been no war, there would have been no displacement.

Once the fighting began, Arabs fled for three primary reasons. The majority left out of fear, as battle lines shifted; many departed on the explicit advice or orders of local Arab leaders, who cleared villages so their armies could operate freely; and in a smaller number of cases, Israeli forces expelled populations from strategic areas during active combat.

These were wartime decisions, not a systematic policy of expulsion. Historians who have examined the records closely, including Benny Morris in his early work, confirm that the overwhelming majority of departures occurred before major Israeli offensives, and often preceded them.

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06/10 Links Pt1: Israel reclaims its right to self-defense; Victor Davis Hanson: ‘Democrats are Islamists now’; Fetterman: Outlook for Jews in Democratic Party is ‘bleak’;

From Ian:

Israel reclaims its right to self-defense

Despite what was widely perceived as Trump’s opposition to escalation, Netanyahu ordered Israeli fighter jets to strike targets inside Iran, including missile launchers and petrochemical facilities.

This is where the deeper challenge begins.

Trump has made clear that he wants negotiations with Iran to continue. His message to both sides has essentially been: enough. One side attacked, the other responded; now stop.

Iran agreed—but with a condition that effectively leaves Lebanon hostage to Tehran’s interests.

Israel, Iran declared, must refrain from attacking Hezbollah—conveniently referred to by Tehran as “Lebanon”—or else “far heavier measures than those already undertaken” would follow. In other words, the war would continue.

That is hardly an outcome Trump welcomes.

Yet almost immediately after the Iranian statement was issued, Hezbollah—which had remained conspicuously quiet for some 30 hours during Iran’s operation and rarely acts without guidance from Tehran—resumed firing at Kiryat Shmona, Metula and other northern communities.

Northern Israel was once again under terrorist attack.

Israel, therefore, appears to face a dilemma while Washington watches closely.

But is it really a dilemma?

The relationship between Jerusalem and Washington is too close, too strategic and too deeply integrated for either side to imagine that Hezbollah’s aggression should go unanswered. U.S. Central Command and the various coordination mechanisms linking the two countries operate continuously. There have been no reports of serious disputes or breakdowns in communication.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee strongly condemned Iran’s attacks. Likewise, Israeli officials explaining the operation against Iran emphasized both Israel’s commitment to its alliance with the United States and its determination to retain the freedom to punish those who attack it.

Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Yechiel Leiter, underscored both the necessity of Israel’s actions and Jerusalem’s commitment to maintaining close coordination with Washington. Explaining the operation against Iran, Leiter emphasized that Israel’s objective was not escalation for its own sake, but the defense of its citizens against an existential threat.

His message reflected Israel’s determination to preserve its strategic partnership with the United States while retaining the freedom—and the obligation—to strike those who attack it.

With precision and determination, Israel’s course appears to be the only realistic one in the dangerous region it inhabits.

There is little chance that Netanyahu will allow Iran to posture through Hezbollah’s Lebanese front while Israel absorbs the consequences.

This is the Middle East.

It is also logical that Israel’s decisive response has once again given the Gulf states and the broader Sunni Arab world a reason to revisit the prospect of a useful anti-Iranian alignment—one that could reshape the region.

That is an outcome Trump may well find attractive.

Michael Oren: Israel has no choice but to risk open conflict with Trump

In May 2021, on the eighth day of “Operation Guardian of the Walls” against Hamas, I received a phone call from a senior adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden, who asked me to convey an urgent message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel must end the operation tonight, or risk losing American support.” Netanyahu was furious. He wanted to keep fighting for at least three more days. But he immediately complied. The operation ended that evening.

The only difference between U.S. President Donald Trump and previous presidents is his tendency to treat us publicly as vassals who must obey his every order. This is humiliating and demoralizing for Israel and, unfortunately, it strengthens our enemies. But that raises the question: Must Israel obey the White House’s demands under all circumstances and at any price?

Historically, the answer has been “no.” U.S. presidents not only ordered Israel to stop fighting; they also opposed its decision to go to war in the first place. That was the case in every war from the establishment of the state until “Operation Rising Lion” last year. Yet Israel’s leaders, despite the risk of a rift with Washington, determined that our basic security was at stake and decided to act.

Ironically, every time Israel defied the White House and went to war—in 1948, for example, in 1967 and in the 1981 strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor—we earned America’s respect. Every time we surrendered to pressure and showed restraint—in 1973 and in the 1991 Gulf War—we earned America’s contempt.

This record is especially relevant today, when Hezbollah will undoubtedly violate any ceasefire and continue attacking us. Israel needs to defend and save the north, but in doing so, it risks not only war with Iran but also an open confrontation with President Trump. As in the past, Israel will have no choice but to act.

With its eyes wide open to the potential cost, Israel must show that it is neither a U.S. vassal nor its 51st state, but a sovereign country with an unshakable duty to defend its territory and its citizens. In the end, if history is our guide, Trump will respect us for it.

Who Is To Blame for Israel’s Sagging US Poll Numbers? Not Netanyahu or the Gaza War.

The investigative reporting geniuses who were so keen to see the hand of Russia, Russia, Russia in Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory seem remarkably incurious about the roles Turkey, Qatar, Iran, China, and the Palestine Liberation Organization have played in shaping U.S. domestic opinion, notwithstanding a 2024 press release from President Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, that "Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza."

In other words, Netanyahu and the Gaza war aren’t the only variables. America is also a variable. The information environment is a variable. The Iran war is another variable. It is not over yet. If it concludes with a joyously free Iran allied with Israel and America and pumping plentiful and cheap oil and gas that gets paid for in U.S. dollars, Israel’s poll numbers—and Trump’s—will climb. A White House signing ceremony for Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Iran and Lebanon joining the Abraham Accords would also help Israel’s popularity—and Trump’s. That won’t happen so long as a hostile Iranian regime armed with missiles, drones, and proxies and the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz remains in power in Tehran.

The Gallup data are misleading because they omit respondents who say their sympathies are with both Israel and the Palestinians, with neither, or who have no opinion. Gallup itself concedes that the 5-percentage-point difference by which American sympathies are with the Palestinians over Israel in the latest poll "is not statistically significant." As recently as September 2025, Pew found Americans viewed the Israeli government more favorably than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, and also viewed the Israeli people slightly more favorably than the Palestinian people.

Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel on and off since 1996. The decline in Americans’ sympathy for Israel predated the Gaza war, as evidenced by a former editor of the The New Republic, Peter Beinart, publicly abandoning Zionism in July of 2020, by the Harvard Crimson in 2022 editorially endorsing a boycott of Israel (while Naftali Bennett was prime minister in a coalition government that included Arab parties and Mansour Abbas as a minister), by the Harvard student organizations that came out with their letter on October 7, 2023, stating, "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence" and "the apartheid regime is the only one to blame."

My own bet is that the U.S. will eventually get back on track—Trump’s election has already set some of this in motion, including some changes to immigration policy and the forced sale of TikTok, if not yet a thorough cleanup of the feeds emanating from there or other platforms. The eventual end of the wars and of the pandemic will make it easier for young Americans to go to Israel and to see the reality of the situation for themselves. If the travelers so choose, they can fly there via the United Arab Emirates, which sees Israel as a promising partner. The hunger for meaning, purpose, and community may fuel a return to Christianity and Judaism, to churches and synagogues. Eventually people will figure out that the real dictators aren’t Trump and Netanyahu but Erdogan, Xi, and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar. Netanyahu will eventually die or retire or lose an election, and his successors will demonstrate the reality that Netanyahu wasn’t to blame for all the world’s Israel-hate. Until then, treat monocausal explanations—whether they come from former ABC anchor Moran or from the Brookings Institution's Bill Galston—with extreme skepticism.

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Why won't the "pro-Palestinian" crowd be protesting the Lebanese Festival?

This weekend a church in New Jersey will celebrate its 40th annual Lebanese festival, where they will celebrate Lebanese culture. The fair will include "traditional Lebanese foods such as falafel, shawarma (gyro), hummus, spinach pies, tabouhli, stuffed grape leaves and pastries."

Now, every time there is a Jewish or Israeli centered event, it requires lots of extra security, and protesters are pretty much guaranteed to be there to try to ruin the experience. The ostensible reason? Because the protesters are "pro-Palestinian."

But no one will protest this festival.

Palestinians are discriminated against, by law, in Lebanon. They cannot build or expand their houses, they are not allowed to live outside the overcrowded camps, they are restricted from many jobs and higher education, and of course they can never become citizens even if they want to and even after five generations of living there. 

Anti-Palestinian bigotry is rife in Lebanon, as the Lebanese still resent the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s that the Palestinians were a major part of. Comment sections of Lebanese newspapers show lots of hate for Palestinians. 

Palestinians protest when Israelis and Jews serve falafel, hummus and shawarma, claiming that they are guilty of cultural appropriation of Palestinian foods. But those same foods will be served here, and no one bats an eye. 

By every reasonable metric, Palestinians are treated worse in Lebanon than under Israeli rule.  Any one of them would prefer to live under "oppressive Israeli occupation" than as "guests" under a supposedly benevolent Lebanese government.

So why aren't there any protests? Why are Lebanese families not nervous to go out in public for fear of harassment or terrorist attacks against them in New Jersey? Why is there no organization, no campus encampments, and virtually no op-eds about Palestinian human rights in Lebanon they way there is such obsessive hate towards anything Israeli? What is the secret difference between how "pro-Palestinian"  activists  view Lebanon and how they view Israel?

Do you really have to ask?

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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