Book Review of EoZ's "Reclaiming the Covenant" by Daled Amos

By Daled Amos

As America turns 250 this July 4th, our thoughts turn to celebration. Eldad Tzioni, writing under his website name, Elder of Ziyon, argues that the day calls for something else: rededication and renewal. That requires understanding the Jewish roots beneath the Founding Fathers' vision of government. In his new book, Reclaiming the Covenant: America's Remarkable 250 Years and Assuring It Continues, Tzioni argues that the anniversary means nothing unless Americans grasp what the founding of America is all about—and that requires a Jewish lens. What sets America apart, he argues, is that it's not a nation defined by blood, soil, or religion, but by covenant: by what you accept, not what you are. That idea, he writes, traces back not to Locke or Montesquieu, but to Mount Sinai.

In the Preface to the book, Tzioni states three goals: to understand what makes America great, to identify what threatens that greatness today, and to lay out what faithfulness to the Founding Fathers' vision demands of us today.

What Makes America Great

The book's central argument rests on one concept: covenant.

Covenant is the specific kind of agreement that defines membership by what you accept rather than what you are. [p. 4]

America was the first nation to make acceptance of the covenant itself the explicit basis of national membership—open to anyone willing to accept its terms, regardless of race, religion, or origin. Other 18th-century nations worked differently: in France, emancipation was granted by the majority; in England, Jews held civil liberties but not full citizenship and could not hold public office); across Europe generally, the "Jewish Question" consumed public debate.

This makes accepting the covenant of US citizenship comparable to the covenant at Mount Sinai, which created Jewish identity. In both cases, identity flows from acceptance — meaning that leaving the covenant means losing the identity that was gained by joining it. Tellingly, when the Founders used the word "federal" to describe the new system of government, they drew it from the Latin foedus—covenant.

Tzioni is careful to note that this doesn't mean the Founders simply transplanted a Hebrew political model. They drew from many sources, including classical republicanism, common-law constitutionalism, and Lockean liberalism. The Hebrew political tradition contributed something more specific:

[T]he Hebrew political tradition gives you the structure by which a diverse people becomes something together that none of them was individually—bound not by shared identity but by shared obligation... [p. 24]

These shared obligations are embodied in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the subsequent amendments.

What Threatens America's Greatness Today

Like the covenant at Mount Sinai, America's covenant immediately raises a difficult question: 

How much uniformity does a covenant require, and how much difference can it tolerate?" [p. 17] 

One measure of a society's health is how it handles its inevitable disputes—and not all disputes are alike. Tzioni introduces the Jewish legal tradition that distinguishes between machloket l'shem shamayim—argument for the sake of heaven—and sinat chinam—baseless hatred. In the former, the dispute is in pursuit of truth, with each side recognizing the other's legitimacy. In the latter, the opponent isn't someone you're arguing with—he is unworthy of participation. Healthy disputes, Tzioni writes, "treat disagreement as disagreement rather than as evidence of bad faith or malign intent." [p. 22]

Participants in an honest disagreement are willing to revise their views when the evidence contradicts them. They recognize that even settled certainties are provisional — and that you can't claim the covenant's protections, such as free speech, for yourself, while denying them to others.

Today, Tzioni argues, a clear example of sinat chinam is the refusal to accept being wrong—something especially prevalent in identity-based politics, where a position is rooted in who you are rather than what you think. Under those conditions, political defeat is perceived as an existential threat. The resulting hatred and divisiveness are visible throughout social media and public life.

This polarization extends to disputes over the covenant itself when it fails to deliver on its promises. A classic case arose in the 1960s:

The civil rights movement did not say America's founding was a lie and must be replaced. It said America's founding was real, its terms are binding and you are in breach of them. That is the most powerful form of moral argument available within a covenantal framework—and it is only available if the covenant is real. [p. 11]

Done properly, civil disobedience within the covenantal framework doesn't reject legal authority altogether — it breaks one specific law to challenge one specific injustice, then accepts the legal consequences. That act of acceptance itself acknowledges the framework's authority, even as it challenges it. It appeals to the covenant's terms and holds it to its own standards.

Tzioni contrasts this with today, where civil disobedience has deteriorated into outright defection, with claims of exemption from the process itself. Instead of arguing that a law violates the Constitution's own standards, we hear that the system itself is corrupt and is undeserving of allegiance.

On the other hand, the correct approach has a recurring precedent in Jewish history:

The Temple was rebuilt after the return from exile, and the covenant was renewed—at Moab before the entry into the land, at Shechem under Joshua, under Josiah when the forgotten Torah scroll was rediscovered, under Ezra and Nehemiah after the return from exile. Each renewal acknowledged breach. Each renewal restored rather than dissolved. [p. 21]

Violation of the covenant is inevitable. But that doesn't void it—it calls to renew it.

What Faithfulness to the Founders' Vision Demands of Us Today

To survive, a covenant must be transmitted to the next generation. Jews do this through study and ritual, but the clearest example is the Passover seder. The seder is more than a celebration or commemoration; it is an active renewal of the covenant: "In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt."

America has no comparable rededication. There was a time when public readings of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 were common; not anymore. Today, the Fourth of July celebrates the past rather than renewing the obligations of the covenant.

Tzioni points out a key difference between America and Europe.  In Europe, citizens participated in the state through their representatives, paying taxes and, in return, receiving protections and services. --whose relationship to the state was largely mediated through government-- There, citizens participated in the state through their representatives, paying taxes and receiving protections and services in return. In the US, Lincoln's phrase "of the people, by the people, for the people" was taken literally. Americans took on social problems themselves—through churches, civic organizations, businesses,charities, and local communities, rather than waiting for government action.

The French philosopher and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville noted this in 1835, in his two-volume Democracy in America. In France, he observed, citizens looked to the government when they had a problem; in England, to a lord; in America, to their neighbors. Americans formed associations and voluntary groups to build roads, found schools, run hospitals, and organize charities — solving problems collectively rather than waiting on government to act. That instinct still shows up in the numbers. A 2023 AmeriCorps survey found that 28% of Americans — more than 75 million people — volunteered through formal organizations to help their communities, while 54% helped their neighbors informally. The harder question is whether Americans will extend that same care to fellow citizens whom they will never meet, scattered across the country. That's where dedication to the covenant has broken down.

Rededication doesn't have to be complicated — it can be as simple as reading the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, or getting involved in your community.

As Americans mark the nation's 250th birthday, Tzioni argues that fireworks and parades are not enough. Anniversaries matter only if they renew the commitments that made the occasion worth celebrating in the first place. America's covenant, like the covenant at Sinai, cannot survive on inherited sentiment alone. Each generation must consciously choose to accept it anew.

Whether or not readers accept every aspect of Tzioni's argument about the Jewish roots of the American experiment, Reclaiming the Covenant offers a fresh and thought-provoking way to understand both America's extraordinary success and its current divisions. At a time when many see only reasons to abandon the American project, Tzioni makes the case that the nation's founding principles are not exhausted, but neglected. The task before Americans is not to replace the covenant, but to recover it, renew it, and once again make it their own.

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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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How the War with Iran Is Redefining the Laws of War (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

 

“Victory smiles on those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur.” 

Italian Air Marshall Giulio Douhet, quoted by David Micah Stark in The Modern Character of War: A Reexamination of the Law of Armed Conflict

Those changes are in the process of happening now, right before our eyes.

Trump has described the ongoing American campaign as a “combat operation” rather than a formal war. Yet whatever you call it, this conflict is already raising questions about the modern laws of war as we know them: What does proportionality mean when a state targets civilians in countries that want to stay on the sidelines? When is a threat truly “imminent” in the age of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles? And how should democratic states respond to enemies who deliberately wage war through terrorism?

Iran Redefines Proportionality

The current Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, apparently apologized for the missile and drone attacks against its Arab neighbors--including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman--and Cyprus, which is associated with Europe.

But he soon backtracked in a post on X, claiming Iran only targets US bases:

But that is not true.

Civilian targets have also been hit: Dubai's main airport in the UAE, liquefied natural gas facilities in Qatar, the Ras Tanura refinery in Saudi Arabia, the Bapco Energies refinery in Bahrain, and assorted ports and hotels in the Gulf. This is no accident. The attacks reflect a broader Iranian strategy that Iran threatened last month, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

Ahead of the last round of nuclear talks in February, national security council chief Ali Larijani passed a letter to the U.S. via Oman saying Iran would no longer respond proportionally and would react aggressively to any attack, they said. “The Americans must be aware that if they wage a war this time, it will be a regional war.”

Proportionality, a term regularly brought up to accuse Israel of violating international law whenever it responds to attacks, has so far been absent from discussion about the current conflict. But Iran is in fact attacking Arab countries that are not actively involved in the attack, and is firing at civilian targets as well.

How long will the international community sit back and accept this?

(It is important to distinguish between two very different uses of the word “proportionality.” In international law governing the conduct of hostilities, proportionality refers to the requirement that commanders avoid attacks in which expected civilian harm would be excessive relative to the concrete military advantage anticipated. Nothing about Israel’s evolving strategy changes that legal obligation. The shift being discussed here concerns a different concept: the older assumption that military responses should mirror the scale of the initial attack rather than aim to remove the broader threat.  -EoZ)

The US Redefines "Imminent Threat"

Trump's initiation of this attack raises another issue under the law of war: imminent threat. Critics have claimed that there is none, but Trump has been adamant from the start: 

Earlier Saturday, Trump said that the United States had faced “imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” Tehran was continuing to work toward producing a nuclear weapon and development of “long-range missiles that … could soon reach the American homeland.”

This debate is part of a deeper problem. Traditionally, threats developed slowly and were visible well in advance. But today, nuclear programs, ballistic missile technology, and proxy terrorist networks operate on a very different timeline.

Israel’s experience illustrates the dilemma. Israel cannot afford to wait for Iran to attack first. Reuel Marc Gerech and Ray Takeyh write in the Wall Street Journal:

An Israeli consensus has developed: The Jewish state will have a continuous need to degrade the clerical regime’s proxies and home defenses, which could shield revitalized nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Threats no longer have to be imminent to be countered. [emphasis added]

Israel does have to wait for an Iranian leader to have his finger on the button before reacting to the threat of a nuclear Iran. And the long history of Iranian hostility to the US, including the 1979 hostage crisis, the 1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing, the 1996 Khobar Towers Bombing in Saudi Arabia, and the hundreds of US soldiers killed by Iranian EFPs and IEDs in Iraq, shows that the US is in a similar situation. Barton Swain rebuts the claim that Iran does not pose an imminent threat:

As for [Sen. Tim Kaine's] denial that the threat was “imminent,” I wonder what the word could mean: Iran has attempted to assassinate assorted American dignitaries, including the president. It funds terror groups across the Middle East and slaughtered 30,000 demonstrators a few weeks ago. Its rulers express Nazi-like ambitions of annihilating its enemies, even as they don’t bother to hide a mad hunger for long-range missiles and nuclear technology.

Waiting until the danger is literally moments away may no longer be a defensible strategy. 

Israel Redefines Proportionality 

Israel, meanwhile, is redefining proportionality in a different way. 

Unlike Iran, Israel is not holding its neighbors hostage in an attempt to blackmail the US into a draw. Amit Segal writes about what he calls The New Israeli Rules of Engagement, pointing out that "Proportionate’ responses are a thing of the past. Now we understand we can’t live with terrorists." Terrorism is a form of warfare that has yet to be adequately addressed by international law. It is a form of warfare that exploits the protections of international law while violating them. Before October 7, Israel limited itself to carefully calibrated strikes against Hamas that would avoid escalation. Instead, the strategy produced the opposite effect: attacks against Israeli civilians became a regular occurrence.

 Israel came to the conclusion that you don't mow the grass; you remove it:

When you respond, overwhelm your foe. For years, the enemy fired rockets and Israel replied with “proportional” force. This normalized the firing on civilians, kidnapping and invasion. But this changed after Oct. 7. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah thought he was still playing by the old rules, launching a few rockets daily. It ended with his elimination, the decapitation of his organization, and the destruction of 80% of their missile stockpile.

This new approach does not only apply to proxies like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. This policy also applies to their sponsor. Iran established and backed these threats and will have to be dealt with the same way:

The Jewish state can’t accept the existence in Iran of production facilities and thousands of ballistic missiles, with every launch sending half of Israel into shelters and threatening mass casualties. It can’t tolerate a regime that continues, even today, to fund its greatest enemies with more than a billion dollars annually.

The actions Iran is now taking against its neighbors, attacking airports, hotels, and refineries, demonstrate just how right Israel is. 

Historically, war has always forced nations to revise the rules that govern it. Over the past week, we have seen Tehran demonstrate its own interpretation of “proportionality” by targeting civilian infrastructure and threatening to widen the war across the region. Israel, facing terrorists who don't even abide by international law, has found that the old doctrine of proportional responses only guarantees perpetual attack. Meanwhile, the US is confronting a similar dilemma of whether the concept of “imminent threat” can still apply in an era of nuclear proliferation, ballistic missiles, and terrorist proxies.

Let's face it. The character of war has changed. States confronting regimes that openly seek their destruction cannot wait for the perfect legal threshold before acting. It is time for international law to account for this new strategic reality where deterrence, preemption, and decisive force may be the only way to avoid catastrophe.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Operation Epic Fury: How Long Will the World Stand With America? (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

The anticipated attack on Iran has begun. The general consensus was not so much focused on whether Trump was going to authorize the US attack as when. That question is no longer on the table. But even for those who considered the war a certainty, there are some surprises.

For one thing, there has been a surprising level of support for the attack among the international community. On the one hand, last month, a Quinnipiac poll found that 70% of American voters didn't want the US to take military action against Iran in response to the murder of Iranian protesters by the regime. The same amount insisted that Trump needed Congressional support first. If Americans opposed the idea in the abstract, imagine the response of other countries, especially considering the low opinion Europeans apparently have of Trump.

Yet Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in an interview (19:40) that there has been surprising support for Trump's decision. He noted relatively strong statements from EU officials and from the Canadian and Australian prime ministers. He also pointed to the Saudi statement condemning Iranian strikes on the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

But how long will that goodwill last?

The world's reaction to the terrorist massacre on October 7, siding with Israel, was extremely short-lived. It quickly locked onto Israel's response, using Hamas numbers and the often questionable reporting and pictures coming out of Gaza. How patient will the West be if casualties mount among the Arab states Iran is now targeting?

Andrew Fox, a former British Army officer, current research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, and lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, pointed out Iran's continued ability to fire missiles at surrounding Arab states hosting the US military:

A broader, uncomfortable lesson emerges for everyone observing the air defence situation. It is concerning that Iran has scored successful strikes around the Gulf on targets that have had weeks to prepare their defences. Even well-equipped defence networks have vulnerabilities when faced with high volume, complexity, geography, and limited reaction time.

Iran is not picky about its targets and is likely aiming to convince Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and others to withdraw their support for the US and Israel. And if Iran can inflict enough civilian casualties, it may replicate the world condemnation that Hamas generated. That condemnation could revolve around international law, but also could focus locally on claims of Trump's abuse of power. Fox notes:

Under international law, the justification for using force will be debated endlessly: self-defence, immediacy, proportionality, and sovereignty. Most of the world will not share Washington’s or Jerusalem’s assumptions. Domestically in the United States, the issue of authorisation is also significant: major hostilities launched without explicit congressional approval are always politically and constitutionally damaging, especially if the conflict drags on.

In his State of the Union Address, Trump pointed out Iran's nuclear threat as well as the danger of its ballistic missiles. Legal Expert Eugene Kontorovich has  weighed in on the issue, noting legal precedent and justification based on Iran's long history of animosity against the US, including assassination attempts and support for terrorism in the region:

A lot may depend on the actual length of the war. Last year, Trump declared both the start and the end of the war. Can he do that again?

The Atlantic has a piece reporting that Trump has told them that Iran is already reaching out to resume negotiations:

One day after launching strikes on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and embroiled the region in war, President Trump told me this morning that the country’s new leadership wants to talk with him and that he plans to do so.

“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long,” Trump told me in a phone call from his Mar-a-Lago resort shortly before 9:30 a.m.

We don't know how serious Iran is about talking at this point, nor can we tell how that will affect the goal of replacing the current Islamist, terrorism-supporting regime. But the situation is a tinderbox. So far, 3 US servicemen have been killed and 5 have been seriously wounded. This is more than the number of US casualties in the 12-day war last year. That has to be a consideration, too.

The same Western governments giving support may change their mind if civilian casualties increase or if the opposition against the US and Israel gains control of the narrative. Iran could win through the erosion of support. It just needs the conflict to drag out long enough for fatigue to set in. The real question is whether the US can maintain long enough to achieve its objectives. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Rabbi Pesach Wolicki From Inside The MAGA Movement: A New Approach To Israel Advocacy (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Rabbi Pesach Wolicki is Executive Director, Israel365.com, an Orthodox Jewish institution that fosters better relations between Jews and Christians. He is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room, providing commentary on U.S.-Israel relations, Middle East policy, and the biblical foundations of Zionism.

Anyone who still thought the conservative movement was unified and the place of the Jews inside the movement was secure was disabused of that notion at AmFest. What is your take on what is going on?

Rabbi Wolicki: Well, look, the American right has its antisemitic wing. Just as the American left has its antisemitic wing. I don't think anyone ever thought that the American right was unified, especially the MAGA movement, which is really the dominant and ascendant political force in American politics over the last decade. It is actually a loose coalition of different factions that agree on certain things. They agree on a kind of hatred of the left-wing establishment.

Rabbi Pesach Wolicki. Source: Screen Cap

But beyond that, there are many points of departure between these various factions. You have libertarians, traditional Catholics, evangelicals, and in terms of geopolitics, you have people who are more isolationist and more traditionally Republican -- all pulling in different directions within that movement. Now, in terms of attitudes about Israel and the Jewish people, there are definitely antisemites. Israel and the Jews have really become one issue.

“Israel and the Jews have really become one issue.”

According to the polling of the 50,000 participants at AmFest, 83% of them see Israel as a friend and ally of the United States. So the perception one gets of anti-Israel sentiment on the right is not exactly correct. I personally found that the people I interacted with were, by and large, very friendly. There was a lot of pro-Israel sentiment there.

That said, among the younger generation, let's say under the age of 25 or 30, what you find there is a perception that Israel has an outsized influence on American politics and foreign policy. There is a resentment of that, especially among the younger generations who feel shut out of the economic system and the opportunities for prosperity that their parents and grandparents' generation had. These are all legitimate gripes. They look at the money going overseas. I've made the argument about why it's all in the best interest of the United States. It just doesn't resonate because, as far as they're concerned, they don't want the US involved in these things.

They see the combination of the aid and the fact that they're fighting a cultural war against wokeness and the progressive forces in society that they feel, correctly, have destroyed traditional American life. And unfortunately, the vast majority of Jews in America identify with the progressive left. This younger generation is fighting these cultural wars, and the people on the other side are so often Jews.

Pick an issue, and the Jewish community is advocating for the progressive left, woke agenda. And if you put that together with the fact that Israel is "officially" the largest recipient of foreign aid--and it's a witch's brew that makes it easy for the antisemites in the influencer community on the right to capture a lot of young people. That said, they're not as successful as we would think from watching social media.

You mentioned Steve Bannon, who has been accused of antisemitism. But your organization, Israel 365, honored him this year as a "Warrior for Israel."

Rabbi Wolicki: We didn't honor him. We were honoring other people that evening. Steve Bannon spoke that evening. I think it was misrepresented in the media. He was the keynote speaker at an event where we honored a bunch of pro-Israel activists.

Other than the few months after the 12-day war with Iran, where he was very much opposed to American involvement, and his interpretation that Prime Minister Netanyahu had manipulated American politics and lied in order to drag America into a conflict—which he greatly resented—other than that, Steve Bannon has been an adamantly pro-Israel voice.

Steve Bannon. Source: Screen Cap

From October 7th until the Iran war, he actually stood out from the crowd in that part of MAGA as being extremely pro-Israel. Most Jews don't listen to his podcast, and they don't know, but when everyone else was buying into the genocide claims and all these things, Steve was not buying it. He was advocating for Israel to finish off Hamas and not to hold back. He's been a very pro-Israel voice.

There is an interesting story I heard from Steve, and corroborated with Ambassador David Friedman. When he was Trump's chief strategist and in charge of the plans for inauguration day during the transition, Steve was pushing that the very first thing the president would do, after taking the oath of office and giving the speech, would be to go straight to the Oval Office and sign an executive order recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the embassy there. He wanted that to be the opening act of Trump's presidency. The State Department people got wind of it, and they pressured President Trump to hold off.

Steve gets lumped in with the anti-Israel crowd because he's critical of Israel. He doesn't like Prime Minister Netanyahu, and that's fine. A good 40% of Israelis don't like Prime Minister Netanyahu either, but I don't know of anything antisemitic Steve has ever said. Steve is not an apologist for Qatar and the Islamists. He doesn't talk about Jewish conspiracies and things like that. This is not where he's coming from.

There are also broader issues. I believe that populist nationalism is a wonderful political ideology. Israel is basically a populist nationalist country, more and more so with every passing year. That's why Israel hasn't had a left-wing government in decades, and that's why the younger population in Israel is more religious and more politically conservative than its parents. I believe in a lot of the same political principles that Steve believes in, and he's also a big advocate for Judea and Samaria—he refuses to use the term "West Bank"; he only calls it Judea and Samaria. Steve is a very pro-Israel guy. You can be pro-Israel and also hate Bibi. So the perception that Steve Bannon is an antisemite is really coming from an ignorance of the man. He's a complicated person; he's not a Hasid. He's not a choir boy, but he's certainly not an antisemite. It's an absurd claim.

Ben Shapiro argued at AmFest for boundaries in the conservative movement. He said that not every voice belonged under the same tent. When it comes to antisemitism or being anti-Israel more generally, shouldn't there be boundaries in terms of who's inside and outside the tent?

Rabbi Wolicki: Ben Shapiro’s speech has been taken out of context by people on our side and people on the other side as well.

For example, he did not advocate for boundaries. If you listen to the speech, he never says anything about canceling a voice or not platforming someone. Instead of talking about canceling people, he talked about the responsibility of those who speak in public for a living, and he laid out 5 responsibilities that he believes they have to their audiences. He called out Candace Owens. He called out Tucker Carlson. He called out Megyn Kelly by name. He called them out for violating these principles of integrity to their audience. He never called for anyone to be deplatformed.

Ben Shapiro. Source: Screen Cap

It was interpreted by everyone as a call to deplatform people. Let's assume that Ben Shapiro did call for people to be deplatformed. Let's assume that we should have boundaries. Here's the problem, as I diagnose it—and I say this as someone who is intimately involved in this political movement, and I see it as my responsibility on behalf of Am Yisrael to be there. There is a difference between what is correct on principle and what is effective, and that's a difficult choice that we have to make. We're sometimes faced with a situation where what is correct on principle, because of the political environment and the playing field that we're in, will backfire. Now, one of the animating ideas of the America First / MAGA movement is a revulsion for anything that sounds like cancel culture. They don't believe in canceling any voice. I'm not saying this to defend them; I'm saying this to explain them.

“There is a difference between what is correct on principle and what is effective—and that’s a difficult choice we have to make.”

Charlie Kirk was a pro-Israel person. He used to have Candace Owens speak at his events before she really went off the rails. And when she started going off the rails with the antisemitic conspiracy stuff, there was a lot of pressure on Charlie to stop having Candace Owens speak at Turning Point USA events, and he did; he stopped having her speak. But from Charlie Kirk's perspective, everything should be allowed in the open marketplace of ideas. Personally, I think he took it too far, but he thought every voice should be heard. The answer is never to say that certain voices shouldn't speak because they say bad things; we should platform everybody and let the open marketplace of ideas do its job. This idea, which to a certain extent sounds noble in theory, is taken way too far in the MAGA movement because it's a backlash against what the left was doing, especially around the time of COVID, where there was active work by social media companies to silence voices.

In our current environment, if we stand up and say we have to have guardrails, that we can't have certain voices speak, that stand may very well be--and probably is--correct on principle. But the way it resonates, the way it triggers the younger part of the MAGA movement, is that it sounds like cancellation. Even if they don't necessarily agree with the voice being canceled, they don't want any part of silencing voices, because it triggers them as part of one of the major political points that the movement was founded on, which is an abhorrence for these limitations on freedom of speech and on the cancel culture that the left put into place. It's not normal conservatism, it has its own culture to it—within the MAGA movement, and we have to be very, very careful as Jews about advocating for the cancellation of voices, even if we are correct in principle.

We need to change the way we advocate and change what exactly we're advocating for. In the lead-up to America Fest in the months before Charlie Kirk was killed, we were talking about his planning to have Tucker Carlson speak. A number of us were upset about that, because we really felt he was going to spew more lies, and it was going to hurt, including Turning Point itself. But we never said "cancel him," because we knew that would not work with the way he thinks. What we were arguing for was to give equal time and equal prominence to people to make Israel's case. Now, I have to say the organizers of America Fest failed in that regard. There was no such speaker. They did not have any session at the conference that really laid out and defended Israel properly. I think they failed.

You have described the current anti-Israel atmosphere as an "organized operation." You have also mentioned that pro-Israel voices are "up against a machine we can't compete with." So what do we do?

Rabbi Wolicki: I think we need to make the Israel issue not about Israel. One of the fastest growing issues in America and in the West right now is the threat of jihadist Islam and what it's doing to Western culture. You see what's going on in Minnesota, with the Somali Muslim community, and you see the various Muslim terror attacks, and what happens in Australia.

What Israel and the pro-Israel community have failed to do effectively is frame our war as a war against these same forces. We need to do that because then, rather than trying to get people to be on our side of our conflict, we are instead framing our conflict in a way that we are on the same side as them in a conflict that they are concerned with.

How do you go about doing that? So there's a number of things that Israel can do differently. Charlie Kirk wrote a 7-page letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu back in April, laying out what he thought Israel should do to tell its story differently. One of the main things that Charlie pointed out is that we need more first-person voices from Israel—young people telling Israel's story, talking about their own lives on social media instead of having the IDF spokesman or Prime Minister Netanyahu being the spokespersons for Israel. We need more young, first-person voices.

In terms of fighting against the machine, the Qatari information machine, we need to keep plugging away. The Jewish people have always been outnumbered. We've always been outgunned; that's the case with this also. We have to hope that, eventually, the truth is going to win out. But I really believe that we need to look at the issues that are of concern to Americans—to young Americans, especially—and tether the Israel issue to the issues they are concerned about.

Let me give you some food for thought. If you look around the world at the political winds and the political changes that have been happening around the world over the last few years, one of the things that we're seeing is an ascendancy of right-wing populist nationalism, right-wing Christian populist nationalism in countries all over the world. To a large extent, this is a backlash to the left and to unfettered immigration—not only in America but everywhere—South America, Europe, and also a reaction to the destruction of Western civilization and the decline of the family.

All of these things have led to this right-wing upsurge among the younger generations in these many, many countries. So you see Victor Orban in power in Hungary, the ascendancy of Wilders' party in the Netherlands, the Vox party in Spain, Bolsonaro--the evangelical Christian leader--in Brazil, and Javier Milei in Argentina, and I can go on and on and on. There are many examples of this—of these populist nationalist, Christian conservatives, or even Le Pen's party in France and Tommy Robinson and his followers in England. As Jews, we have to not romanticize our relationships with people politically. The fact that the parents and grandparents of the people in the Le Pen party were antisemites doesn't mean that the people in that party today are antisemites.

Source: Screen Cap

Young Christian conservative nationalists in all of the places I've mentioned, the Christian conservative populist nationalists on the right everywhere in the world--except the United States--are almost entirely pro-Israel. If you Google pictures of pro-Bolsonaro anti-socialist protests in Brazil that have nothing to do with Israel and look at the crowd shots and zoom in, you will see that one of the things they bring to their demonstrations are Israeli flags. They wave Israeli flags at Brazilian anti-socialist demonstrations because they see Israel as representative of democracy, Judeo-Christian Western civilization, and conservatism. Israelis and Jews need more self-awareness about Israel—the way the rest of the world sees us. We're a very right-wing country, increasingly right-wing, with every year. We're an increasingly religious country—we're an ethnic nationalist, religious state. That's the way the rest of the world sees us, and they're all pro-Israel.

By contrast, the only populist nationalist, Christian conservatives in the world who are not overwhelmingly pro-Israel are in the United States of America. And I believe it's for the reasons I said before: the combination of a powerful, pervasive Jewish progressive left in America, which doesn't exist in these other countries, and the fact that the United States gives billions of dollars in aid to Israel, which is also not the case with these other countries. Add in that the Qataris and the other bad actors have no interest in investing billions of dollars to change the way young Argentinians or young Brazilians think—there's not as much skin in the game there—but changing the way young Americans think, that can pay off for them because America is so powerful.

So if you put all these things together, we have this poisonous mix that predisposes a lot of young Americans to not be pro-Israel because of the other associations. I think that we need to break all of that. Jews need to be very open about advocating for an end to USA aid to Israel. It's actually bad for Israel strategically.

“Jews need to be very open about advocating for an end to U.S. aid to Israel. It’s actually bad for Israel strategically.”

Israel has sold $10 billion of air defenses to Greece and Germany in the last month. We just signed a $35 billion natural gas deal with Egypt. We don't need $3.8 billion from the United States every year, with all the strings attached and all of the leverage it gives the US in our strategic decision-making. We need to openly advocate for an end to the aid. It's bad for Israel. The only reason there is aid is that every time America has wanted to force us to make a security concession, they would compensate us by giving aid. The aid to Israel began when Carter used it as an incentive to get Begin to pull out of the Sinai desert. Then Clinton ramped it up again at Camp David with Ehud Barak to get him to agree to make more concessions to Arafat. Every time the aid goes up, it's a concession, because Israel is willing to swallow some compromise on our national security and make us more beholden to the United States. It's actually bad for Israel. So we have to start being open about advocating against USA aid to Israel, and that will help us politically on the right in America as well.

And Jews have to be more open about the fact that we want nothing to do with these progressive left Jews, because that's who these young conservative Americans are—and I feel for them—they want to have good Christian lives. They want to live in a traditional country that isn't under attack by wokeness. And the Jews are constantly fighting against them. I think it's bad that they lump us all together and don't realize that orthodox Jews are with them. We should start saying openly, "We want nothing to do with the Jewish establishment. We want nothing to do with those people; they're destructive. They're our enemies." I think we should say it plainly, and I think that these are things that will help us win back those parts of the American right who have slid into anti-Israel and antisemitic ways of thinking.

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Strategic Blindness and Moral Clarity: David Firester on Intelligence Failures, Israel’s October 7 Reckoning, and the Path to Adaptation (Daled Amos)

In his new book, Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception, former U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Dr. David Firester—Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC—dissects the recurring patterns that left America vulnerable on 9/11, Israel stunned on Yom Kippur in 1973, and—more recently—allowed Hamas to breach the Gaza border on October 7, 2023. In this written exchange, Firester warns that democracies, especially Israel, cannot survive if moral reflexes eclipse strategic judgment, and he offers a blueprint for the intellectual humility and moral adaptation required to confront enemies who weaponize empathy itself. Please note, in his responses, Dr. Firester uses quotation marks around the word Palestinian to highlight how politics and history have shaped that label.

What first led you to see intelligence and military failures as symptoms of a deeper strategic blindness and not just isolated mistakes?

The idea first began to take shape after 9/11. I was in New York that day, and the experience left a lasting imprint. It wasn’t only the shock of the attack—it was the realization that so many signals had been visible beforehand, yet went unheeded. It made me question how intelligent, capable institutions could possess so much information and still fail to adapt in time. Later, during my deployment to Iraq, those questions only deepened.

Whether the setting was Pearl Harbor, the Yom Kippur War, or the intelligence breakdowns before 9/11, the fingerprints were strikingly similar. Failure to Adapt is an attempt to explain why even societies that are technically advanced and morally motivated can misread the world so consistently and how those same habits can be unlearned.

You argue that intelligence failures rarely result from a lack of information. If the problem is not the data or analysis, what drives these breakdowns in judgment?

That became clear to me during my graduate research, when I examined how organizations fail less from ignorance than from misperception. Because bureaucracies suppress dissent, intelligence officers are under pressure to produce quick, certain answers that resolve ambiguity and reinforce pre-existing beliefs. Intelligence systems reward consensus and predictability, becoming resistant to change and failing to adapt to newer threats.

The challenge, then, is not just to collect data more efficiently but to build institutions that can question themselves as effectively as they analyze others.

What changes—structural or cultural—could make the intelligence community more adaptive? And does the military’s command hierarchy help or hinder that process?

True adaptation begins with intellectual humility. Intelligence organizations need to reward dissent rather than making analysts afraid to challenge assumptions.

The military’s hierarchy, while vital for discipline, can both enable and inhibit that independence. Hierarchies excel at execution but often struggle with reflection. In Iraq, I saw leaders empower local commanders to interpret intelligence in real time and act on their interpretations. However, when information had to travel upward for approval, this agility disappeared—sometimes for the pettiest of reasons, such as restrictions on the language that analysts could use to describe the enemy.

Adaptation depends on questioning our own assumptions, even as technology accelerates the speed of information.

In the age of cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence, is the U.S. finally learning to adapt faster—or are we still repeating old strategic patterns?

Technology has certainly accelerated our ability to gather and process information, but speed is not the same as understanding. The deeper challenge remains human and organizational: how do we interpret the processed information once produced? Algorithms can expose patterns, but they can’t tell us which ones matter—or what they mean in human terms.

Artificial intelligence learns from historical data, but that means it inherits the same biases and blind spots that shaped those histories. If our institutions don’t evolve conceptually, AI simply becomes a faster mirror of our own assumptions.

That said, there are encouraging signs. Combining cyber capabilities within traditional military commands, testing plans from the adversary's perspective, and sharing data across agencies all reflect an awareness that adaptability must be built in, not added on.

However, true adaptation will come from leaders and analysts willing to challenge the machine’s conclusions and ask why an algorithm sees what it does. Technology may expand perception, but only critical thought can turn perception into strategy.

You write that non-state actors have a natural edge in adaptability. Is that due in part because they create the threat and force others to react—or is something else at work?

That’s certainly part of it—initiative is power. I saw this dynamic firsthand in Iraq, where insurgent networks could alter tactics overnight. When non-state actors create the threat, they control the tempo of events and dictate how others respond. But their advantage runs deeper. They operate outside the legal and institutional constraints that bind states. They are not signatories to the conventions that gave rise to the laws of war, and jihadist movements in particular violate those laws regularly.

What further complicates matters is that deception itself functions as a strategy. Concepts such as taqiyya (religious concealment) and hudna (temporary truce) are used not as theological footnotes but as operational tools—enabling non-state actors to deceive, delay, and regroup. These actors exploit the openness and moral restraint of democracies precisely because they know that restraint limits how we can respond.

That moral self-restraint is what separates civilization from barbarism—but it also exposes a new vulnerability: the tendency to let moral judgment override strategic judgment. That dilemma led me to explore what I call moral adaptation—the theme at the heart of my book.

You introduce the concept of moral adaptation and also warn of a moral reflex that distorts analysis. How do morality and moral judgment shape intelligence and policy—for better or worse?

Morality is indispensable in democratic strategy—but only when it is self-aware. Moral adaptation means aligning ethical principles with the realities of conflict without abandoning either. It recognizes that moral clarity and strategic clarity are not opposites.

On the other hand, there is the moral reflex: the impulse to interpret events through narratives about innocence and guilt rather than cause and consequence. Democracies, especially those founded on humanitarian ideals, are prone to this because they seek moral reassurance as much as strategic success.

In intelligence, that reflex can produce selective empathy—seeing some actors only as victims and others only as villains—blinding analysts to motives, intentions, and opportunities for deterrence. In policy, it manifests as performative morality: decisions made to appear just, rather than to achieve just outcomes.

Moral adaptation, however, is different. It demands the discipline to see adversaries as they are, not as we wish them to be, while preserving moral integrity without surrendering realism. The task of democratic intelligence is to remain humane without becoming naïve—a balance as difficult as it is essential.

Moral adaptation demands the discipline to see adversaries as they are, not as we wish them to be, and to preserve moral integrity without surrendering realism.

In your book, you note that democracies often crave moral narratives—the innocent underdog, the oppressive hegemon. This is evident not only among leaders and analysts, but in society itself. How can this be addressed?

Moral narratives are comforting because they simplify complexity. They turn geopolitics into morality plays, giving people the illusion of certainty in an uncertain world. Democracies are especially prone to this because their citizens participate emotionally as well as politically. The desire to see one side as purely righteous and the other as inherently guilty satisfies a deep human need for moral coherence—but when applied to strategy, it distorts perception.

Correcting this requires education that prizes evidence over emotion, media literacy that resists emotional framing, and what I call epistemic humility—the courage to question one’s own moral instincts. Democracies don’t need less morality; they need morality informed by truth rather than narrative convenience.

After World War II, the Allies succeeded in de-radicalizing Germany and Japan. What made that transformation possible—and could a similar process ever take hold in Palestinian Arab society?

The moral reconstruction of Germany and Japan after 1945 succeeded because defeat was total, leadership was delegitimized, and ideology was discredited from within. The Allies didn’t simply impose new institutions; they reshaped the moral vocabulary through which those societies understood themselves. Education was rebuilt around accountability, civic responsibility, and empirical truth. Reconstruction was both economic and psychological/ethical.

Democracies don’t need less morality; they need morality informed by truth rather than narrative convenience.

The Middle East, by contrast, has rarely experienced either in unison. Many "Palestinian" institutions still derive their legitimacy from resistance rather than governance; the political culture rewards grievance as part of "Palestinian" identity. Where post-war Germans said “never again” and meant it, much of the region still says “not yet.”

De-radicalization begins when a society confronts the moral bankruptcy of its ideology. In Germany and Japan, that reckoning was undeniable because the devastation was existential and the evidence overwhelming. In "Palestinian" society, no comparable moral reckoning has yet occurred. Instead, anti-Jewish and anti-Western narratives remain woven into educational curricula, political rhetoric, and even religious discourse.

Transformation isn’t impossible, but it would require leaders and educators willing to replace myth with memory, victimhood with responsibility, and resentment with moral agency. External actors can help create the conditions, but only internal reform can make them endure.

The lesson of 1945 is that reconstruction is not merely about rebuilding cities—it’s about rebuilding conscience.

You write that “democracies cannot afford even the perception of moral erosion.” Does this describe Israel’s current dilemma, where civilian casualties are seen as proof of wrongdoing regardless of intent? How can a democracy preserve moral clarity when its enemies exploit that perception?

It does describe Israel’s dilemma—and more broadly, the dilemma of all democracies confronting adversaries unbound by moral restraint. The tragedy of modern asymmetric warfare is that the more a democracy adheres to the laws of war, the more it risks being condemned for them. Adversaries who embed themselves among civilians exploit that very morality as a tactical weapon. The result is an inversion of ethics: restraint becomes weakness, and self-defense is recast as aggression.

Adversaries who embed themselves among civilians exploit that very morality as a tactical weapon. The result is an inversion of ethics: restraint becomes weakness, and self-defense is recast as aggression.

Israel faces this more acutely than any other state because its enemies understand that Western perception can achieve what battlefield force cannot. Hamas and similar movements deliberately manufacture civilian suffering, knowing that global media will conflate consequence with intent. This is the weaponization of empathy. It exploits precisely the moral reflex I warned about—the tendency to judge outcomes emotionally rather than analytically.

Yet Israel’s moral challenge is also its moral strength. Democracies cannot abandon their ethical standards without forfeiting the very legitimacy that distinguishes them from their enemies. The task, then, is not to mute moral concern but to anchor it in context—to explain, relentlessly, the nature of the enemy’s strategy and the moral calculus it imposes. The harder challenge is teaching the world to see that moral clarity is not measured by emotion, but by integrity under fire.

You note that “doctrine shifts only after humiliation.” Did Israel fail to recall the lessons of 1973—or was October 7 a fundamentally different kind of shock?

October 7 bore eerie echoes of 1973, not only in the surprise itself but in the psychology surrounding it. In both cases, early warning signs were present yet filtered through assumptions about enemy capability and intent. Hamas’s preparations may have been noticed, but their potential effect was probably judged as limited—an operation expected to produce shock, not systemic trauma.

But there is another, subtler similarity: the constraint of perceived legitimacy. Before the Yom Kippur War, Israel was influenced by a sense of what the international community—especially Washington—would tolerate in terms of preemptive or decisive action. The same dynamic almost certainly shaped Israeli assumptions before October 7. In an era of instant moral judgment and politicized media, Israel must constantly calculate not only military risk but reputational cost. Under the Biden Administration, Jerusalem likely assumed there were narrow limits to how forcefully it could act without jeopardizing diplomatic support. The forms of surprise evolved, but the assumptions that enabled it did not.

The lesson is not simply to anticipate the next attack, but to reclaim confidence in the legitimacy of decisive self-defense, even when the world hesitates to grant it. A sovereign nation should never require anyone’s permission to protect its citizens, least of all when confronting a genocidal enemy sworn to its destruction.

You first developed your argument 14 years ago. Looking at today’s strategic environment, has anything changed for the better? Do you see any reason for optimism?

Some things have changed for the better, though often in painful ways. Fourteen years ago, I was focused primarily on how institutions fail to learn. Today, I see more signs that they at least recognize the cost of that failure. Both Israel and the United States have been forced to confront the limits of technological deterrence—the realization that no amount of precision or surveillance can replace adaptability, judgment, or moral clarity.

So yes, there is room for optimism—not because the world has grown safer, but because the cost of blindness has become impossible to ignore. Adaptation is slow, but it’s happening.

Any final thoughts?

If there’s one point I would add, it’s that the greatest threat to democracies is not external—it’s the erosion of strategic and moral confidence from within. Adversaries can attack our systems, but only we can dismantle our own conviction. The challenge of the twenty-first century is not just military or technological; it’s cognitive. We are drowning in information but starving for understanding, and that imbalance makes us vulnerable to every actor who manipulates perception faster than we can correct it.

Where post-war Germans said “never again” and meant it, much of the region still says “not yet.”

Israel’s story captures this tension perfectly. Its extraordinary innovation has stemmed largely from necessity—an extremely small country in a very bad neighborhood, surrounded at times by genocidal enemies. Nothing sharpens ingenuity like survival. Yet even nations defined by creativity can misjudge their adversaries.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Trump’s Barghouti Gambit: A Dangerous Play for Peace (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Maybe it was inevitable.

Maybe it was only a matter of time before Trump decided to push Israel in the direction he wanted. After all, he wouldn't be the first US president to pressure Israel. On the other hand, he may be the first president to be so blunt about it.

TIME Magazine did an interview with the US president on October 15 and published it on Thursday. One of the questions was whether he thought Israel should release terrorist leader Marwan Barghouti:

TIME: Well, Marwan Barghouti is seen by many as the one figure who could unite Palestinians behind a two-state solution. He tops most polls amongst Palestinians for whom they would vote for in a presidential election. But he’s in prison, and Israel has refused to let him out. He was arrested in 2002. Ron Lauder, a big support of yours, recently encouraged Israel to let him out. Do you think Israel should release him from prison?

Trump: I am literally being confronted with that question about 15 minutes before you called. That was the question. That was my question of the day. So I’ll be making a decision.

I'll be making a decision...?

Besides the fact that this is not his decision to make, there is an implication that the US president is willing to apply pressure on Netanyahu to release a convicted terrorist to further his own personal plans for peace...and for a potential Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump is already getting plenty of cover from Ronald Lauder for pressuring Israel. Lauder is the president of the World Jewish Congress, besides being a Trump ally. He was very clear on his support for Barghouti's release:

I think that the fact that he's thinking about it is a great step in the right direction. A two-state solution is only possible if you have a good leader and Marwan Barghouti will be the right leader for it. Now it doesn't have to happen in one or two years–it could be three, four or five years, whatever time it takes. But once you start having peace between Israel and the Palestinian people, you have the future of a peaceful Middle East.

Perhaps Trump views Barghouti the way Reuters does. The headline of the Reuters report on Trump's comment was Trump mulls whether Israel should free jailed Palestinian political figure. But Barghouti is not some jailed politician, and Lauder should know better than to publicly challenge Israel's security interests.

Barghouti is currently serving multiple life sentences for his 2004 conviction in connection with attacks in Israel that killed five people. He is a senior member of Fatah and former chief of its Tanzim militant faction, playing a key role in the Second Intifada.There are security issues at stake that are for Israel, and only for Israel, to decide.

In addition to Lauder, Barghouti's wife urged Trump to push for his release after hearing that he is ready to make a decision. 

This follows the push in Israel for the annexation of the West Bank. In that same TIME interview, Trump said:

[The annexation] won't happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.

The US president believes he has a say in Israel's plans for annexation since it directly impacts both the peace process that the US is invested in and the agreements that he has made with various Arab leaders. But insisting on freeing a terrorist leader is an entirely different story. We all know that Trump is not a polished impromtu speaker. It is unilikely he would force Israel's hand on such a release. That may explain why there has not been an outpouring of indignation from Israel in response to Trump's comment.

But Barghouti is not a “political figure.” He’s a convicted murderer who orchestrated the killing of innocent Israelis. To even entertain the idea of his release is to erase the line between diplomacy and delusion.

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The Ceasefire That Protesters Aren't Celebrating (Daled Amos)

Everyone who has been talking about October 7 over the past two years is now talking about the ceasefire.

Well, almost everyone. Remember the mobs we saw in growing numbers, protesting, rioting, and disrupting traffic?

Many of them have now been silent on the actual ceasefire agreement that is set to take effect in a few days. But why is that?

Journalist and commentator Haviv Rettig Gur is one of those who has pointed this out. The silence does not make any sense. As Rettig Gur points out:

You don't have to be silent. Even if you don't like every aspect of the deal, even if the deal leaves the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to the second stage, even if you have critiques of the deal--the deal ends the war; it ends the genocide which you believe is underway.

With all the protests against the alleged genocide in Gaza, if these same people are not speaking out about the ceasefire to this war, then maybe there really wasn't a real genocide going on after all. 

The Palestinian American activist and commentator, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, has also written about this phenomenon. He writes about The ‘Peace Protesters’ Who Won’t Give Peace a Chance:

The lack of support from self-styled peace activists in the West is unsurprising. A lack of clarity, consistency, or levelheaded thinking has been a staple of Western-based activism that purports to care about the Palestinian people in Gaza.

...The first step to freeing Palestinians from the horrors of war is to free them from the Free Palestine Movement in the diaspora and Western world. The unholy alliance between the far left, far right, and Islamist hooligans who normalize Hamas's narrative is harmful first and foremost to the Palestinian people.

Many of these voices have long called for a ceasefire that would merely freeze the conflict, as opposed to fundamentally altering the landscape in Gaza to effect real political transformation and deliver a lasting peace.

The protesters seemed intent on a ceasefire much like the previous one that kept Hamas in power until it picked a time of its own choosing to break it by invading Israel and slaughtering over 1,200, mostly civilians.

Of course, the response to the deal is not merely support or silence. There have been politicians who have taken advantage of the plan to attack Israel on the one hand, while recognizing it without giving any credit to the president under whose influence the deal was made.

Mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani refused to credit President Trump for helping broker a long-awaited truce deal in Gaza – and instead bashed Israel – as other New York Democrats offered tepid kudos to the commander-in-chief Thursday.

Other politicians in New York answered similarly when asked about the ceasefire, with US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo praising it as a positive step, while leaving Trump's name out of it. 

In New York, the Democratic state Assemblyman Kalman Yeger did say that the president deserves “much” credit for the deal--and went much further, praising Israel and also Prime Minister Netanyahu as well:

The resilience of the Israeli people, the relentless focus of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his strong allies in the Knesset and the tremendous backing of a US President who recognized that no nation can survive if it gets on its knees to terror, combined for an unbreakable force that brought about the Hamas surrender and the hopeful quick return of the hostages.

Of course, being from Brooklyn would explain why Yeger was able, and even needed, to say the things that many Democratic politicians would not and could not.

The sudden silence of so many who once filled the streets, blocked traffic, and shouted about genocide is telling. If this ceasefire is not worth celebrating, if peace is not worth endorsing, then perhaps those demonstrations were never about saving lives at all. The truth is that Israel’s enemies—whether on the battlefield or in Western capitals—are invested less in Palestinian safety than in Israel’s destruction. That is why the same voices that cried for a ceasefire now fall mute when one has finally been achieved. Their hypocrisy has been laid bare: what they sought was not peace, but Israel’s defeat. The real test is not in shouting slogans when bombs fall, but in welcoming the chance for quiet when the guns fall silent. On that test, the self-styled champions of justice have failed.

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